According to former American Conservative editor Helen Andrews, wokism is “simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” It “appeared out of nowhere” in the 2010s because that’s when female representation at elite institutions passed the 50% mark. Cancel culture—which she sees as a central component of wokism—is “simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” Women such as herself may be exceptions, able to live up to male standards. But groups of women inevitably go woke because that is their nature.

Andrews defended this theory at the National Conservatism Conference last September, and her talk is one of the most watched videos on NatCon’s YouTube channel (270,000 views as of today). In October, she published a viral article on the same topic. Many people appear to agree with her own assessment that “the explanatory power of this simple thesis [is] incredible.”

Concern about the Woman Question has been percolating on the right for several years. Noah Carl argues that it is “plausible that the influx of women into academia...contributed to...the rise of woke activism.” Cory Clark and Bo Winegard propose the similarly cautious thesis that “many emerging trends in academia can be attributed, at least in part, to the feminization of academic priorities.” Richard Hanania worries about our inability to stand up to “women’s tears.” Amy Wax complains that women have elevated “the values of the nursery and the kindergarten” over reason, evidence, and objectivity. According to Arnold Kling, “we have made institutions harder for warriors [i.e., people with stereotypical male psychology] to navigate.” Andrews goes further than anyone else, claiming that wokism just is (by definition?) women being women.

Her argument is as follows:

1. The fact that wokism is female nature applied to institutions explains why “everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.”

2. Wokism began when the demographics at previously male-dominated institutions and professions tipped to majority female. In the US, women demographically surpassed men at law schools in 2016, the New York Times staff room in 2018, medical schools in 2019, and law firms in 2023. They became the majority of college-educated workers in 2019, and the majority of college instructors in 2023. “So the timing fits.” As soon as women achieved sufficient representation to impose their “patterns of behavior” on the rest of society, we got wokism.

3. The feminization of our culture (and therefore wokism) is the result of artificial social engineering. Judges and government bureaucrats force institutions to hire unqualified women, and “anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized.” If a workplace does not cater to their gender-specific preferences, women can sue and get large payoffs, but men have to suck it up.

4. The solution to wokism is to repeal anti-discrimination laws.

During the George W. Bush years, Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to refer to ideas that feel true even if they are not supported by evidence. Andrews’s argument is, I suggest, a case study in truthiness. The idea that women cause wokism seems to jibe with lived experience. If you say something politically incorrect at work or school, you’ll probably be hauled into a woman’s office. (HR departments are 74% female.) Woke academic fields such as English, sociology, and Grievance Studies are estuaries of estrogen. The blue-haired female college student is a classic woke stereotype. But there is a big leap from that, which is true, to Andrews’s conclusion.

On my account, wokism is a coherent ideology. It is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of egalitarian morality. The equality thesis, which says that all groups have the same innate distribution of socially relevant traits, has been a tenet of Western liberalism for more than a century. Virtually everything you think of as wokism is a rational, moral response to persistent inequality of outcome, given the false belief that race is skin deep and the sexes are interchangeable. Over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries, wokesters made increasingly desperate attempts to fix the environment and bring about equality of outcome among groups. But, to the extent that race and sex disparities reflect natural differences that cannot be fixed, the woke project failed. Wokesters were forced to resort to magical thinking about microaggressions and systemic racism to explain why the gaps won’t go away.

I will address each of the four steps of Andrews’s argument in turn. They are all wrong, except for step (3), which is half wrong.

As women gain cultural influence, norms inevitably change to reflect their preferences. Whether female dominance in our institutions is a “threat to civilization,” as Andrews claims, is a question that I will leave aside. But the Great Feminization did not precipitate wokism or cancel culture. Feminization and wokism are separate issues.

Woke = Women?

According to Andrews, women are biologically adapted to ostracize (i.e., cancel) rivals and defend group cohesion at all costs. Thus, putting women in charge will inevitably lead to cancel culture and the privileging of inclusion over free speech—what she considers the hallmarks of wokism.

In fact, cancel culture is the normal condition of human society, not something specifically woke or female. Due to greater risk aversion, women are on average less supportive of free speech, but they are more likely than men to be against all controversial speech, including woke speech.

Cancel Culture Cattiness

Andrews declares that “all cancellations are feminine....Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” The implication is that men—or at least masculine men—don’t cancel each other. She says that “one of the first times that a cancellation happened” was the Larry Summers affair in 2005. A female-led mob attacked Summers for speculating that women may be underrepresented at the highest levels of mathematical talent. He was ultimately forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard. For Andrews, cancel culture became a society-wide problem in the 2010s because that’s when women achieved >50% representation in various institutions and professions.

This argument does not hold up to even a moment of critical thinking. Every moral/political system that has ever existed has had red lines for thought, speech, and action. What people are cancelled for and the ferocity of moral vengeance differ across time and place, but not the fact that there are cancellable offenses. In terms of the range of allowable opinions and the toleration of dissent, our feminized culture is, by historical standards, exceptionally free.

Since 2019, Harvard has required job applicants to submit loyalty oaths to wokism. (These “diversity statements” were recently rebranded as “service statements,” which are effectively the same thing.) There are virtually—possibly literally—zero conservatives at the assistant professor level. Does that mean Harvard was committed to impartial truth and justice before it became overrun by women with a biological urge to spread cancel culture?

Let’s see what Harvard looked like before the “Great Feminization” of the 2010s—or, even better, before women participated in public life at all.

According to the “Laws of Harvard College” in 1767, people who violate moral norms must be publicly shamed. (Public shaming existed before social media.) If a Scholar does not “carefully apply himself to the Duties of Religion” on the Sabbath and does not reform after private admonition,

he shall receive a public Admonition, or be punished by Degradation or Rustication.

A man can literally be guilty by association. If you’re too friendly with a cancelled person, you yourself will be cancelled:

If any Scholar shall associate with any Person of an ill Character, or with one that is rusticated or expelled, within three Years after such Expulsion or Rustication, unless the rusticated Person shall be restored within that Space, he shall be fined not exceeding five shillings, for the first Offence; And if any Undergraduate shall persist therein, he shall be further liable to Admonition, Degradation, or Rustication, according to the Circumstances of the Offence.

So-called “atrocious crime[s]” that can result in expulsion include triggering people with language that challenges their religious beliefs (“blasphemy”):

If any Scholar shall be convicted of Blasphemy, Fornication, Robbery, Forgery, or of any other atrocious Crime, he shall be rusticated or expelled, as the Nature and Aggravation of the Offence may require.

A student can be denied his degree on the basis of morally objectionable behavior, which includes disagreeing about religion:

If any Bachelor of Arts, whether residing at the College or not, shall be guilty of any heinous Insult towards any in the Government of the College, or any scandalous Immorality, he shall be accountable therefor, whenever he comes to ask for his second Degree.

You can’t be admitted to Harvard College in the first place unless you are sufficiently morally pure (“of an unblemished life”), meaning you subscribe to the institution’s special brand of New England Protestantism:

Every Scholar who is able to translate the Original of the Old & New Testament into the Latin Tongue, & has a good Acquaintance with the Classics, is well instructed in the Principles of the Mathematics, of natural & moral Philosophy, of Logic & Rhetoric, & is of an unblemished Life; & at a public Exercise shall have the Approbation of the President & Fellows, with the Consent of the Overseers, may be admitted to a first Degree viz. Bachelor of Arts.

Every element of cancel culture was written into the 1767 “Laws of Harvard College” so shamelessly even Claudine Gay would be embarrassed to plagiarize it.

The history of religion, politics, and academia is largely the story of men cancelling each other. In traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, disagreeing with the catechism often meant excommunication or execution. The liberal French Revolution culminated in the guillotining of “counter-revolutionaries” who had slightly dissident interpretations of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” The communist experiments of the 20th century ended with people mass reporting each other for thought crimes. More than 100 years before I was expelled from Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge for challenging DEI, Bertrand Russell was subject to an even more vicious cancellation campaign and fired from Trinity College for advocating pacifism during WWI. All of this and much more was done entirely or primarily by men.

In the US, racism has been one of the main reasons people are cancelled since the 1960s. In 1999, Donald Trump tried to take down his rival for the Reform Party presidential nomination Pat Buchanan by calling him a “Hitler lover” and an “anti-Semite.” “He doesn’t like the blacks, he doesn’t like the gays,” said Trump. This sort of talk (justified or not) was common decades before the Great Feminization.

Again, Andrews says that “all cancellations are feminine.” But what was feminine about everything I just described? If she has an answer to this question, she doesn’t say what it is.

As institutions become more female, the targets and methods of cancellation may change to reflect female preferences and dispositions. For example, women are more likely than men to consider “unwanted advances” (i.e., a man pursuing a woman who doesn’t find him attractive) to be a heinous crime that deserves to be punished. Women but not men can get people fired by pointing and crying. MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins said that she had to leave Larry Summers’s talk because otherwise she would have “either blacked out or thrown up”—something a man wouldn’t have done. But cancellation per se is not specifically feminine. And there’s no evidence that women are inherently more prone than men to want to cancel people for woke reasons.

Women vs. Free Speech

Andrews claims that women favor cohesion over free speech. The only empirical evidence she cites to support this is a 2019 Knight Foundation survey in which 71% of college men vs. 41% of college women said that “protecting free speech” is more important than “promoting an inclusive society.” Incidentally, this survey failed to replicate in a follow-up by the Knight Foundation and Ipsos in 2022. The 2022 study found that “female students are more likely than male students to say that free speech rights are extremely important.” But most survey data suggest that women are in fact less committed to civil liberties than men.

Andrews cites Clark and Winegard, who mention a 2017 YouGov survey of current or former American college students. Subjects were given a list of 13 hypothetical speakers with controversial views, and asked who should be allowed on campus. A majority of men supported the free speech rights of 12/13 speakers (every speaker except one who “advocates violent protests”). A majority of women were opposed to the free speech of 13/13 speakers (including one case where 50% of women said the speaker should not be allowed to talk vs. 48% who said he should be).

So there you have it, women are genetically programmed to be woke. Case closed, right?

Actually, the data point to a different conclusion: women are less supportive of free speech for both right- and left-wing views. A solid majority of women (60%) want to ban a right-wing speaker who says that “police are justified stopping African Americans at higher rates” or “whites and Asians have higher IQ.” But almost the same percentage of women (61%) want to ban a woke speaker who “criticizes the police” or says that “all white people are racist.” In other words, the majority of women don’t want to defend or criticize the police. The majority don’t want to hear that whites and Asians have a higher IQ (a non-conspiratorial explanation for white and Asian overrepresentation vis-à-vis blacks) or that all whites are implicated in racism (a woke idea).

A 2025 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) got similar results. When presented with a list of controversial speakers, college men were over 3.5 times more likely than women to advocate free speech for all. Men often supported the free speech of their political opponents more than women supported the free speech of their allies.

Men support free speech for their enemies as much as women do for their friends. From FIRE.

Consider Cory Clark’s observation that “Women are more supportive of illegalizing insults of immigrants, homosexual individuals, transgender individuals, the police, African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Jewish people, and Christians, and are more supportive of banning sexually explicit public statements and flag burning.” Once again, this is not wokism. Woke logic inexorably leads to the conclusion that the police are bad (they disproportionately target members of certain groups) and America is a racist country (because of racial disparities). From a woke perspective, Christianity is potentially suspect because it is associated with Europe and white people. But women are more likely than men to want to criminalize insults against the police, flag, or religion of the oppressors.

One of the most profound sex differences is in the desire for safety. A woman can have at most a dozen or so children in her life, whereas a man can have hundreds. From an evolutionary perspective, it pays for men to take big risks for power, status, and resources that might result in a fitness boon. Women are better off playing it safe to protect the small number of children they have or may have in the future. Therefore, men evolved a taste for danger that is alien to most women. This is why 89% of Darwin Award winners (people who remove themselves from the gene pool through reckless behavior) are men. It is also probably part of the reason why men are more likely to welcome intellectual combat, and not feel as threatened by speakers with controversial views.

The best way to discover truth is usually to have a debate between advocates of different ideas. It is a problem that the majority of women want to shut this down. However, that does not make women inherently woke. Most women want to be protected from controversy coming from both the woke left and anti-woke right. Their lodestar is safety, not race communism per se.

Wokism Is More than 100 Years Old

The linchpin of Andrews’s argument is timing. Wokism “appeared out of nowhere” when female representation reached a tipping point around the Great Awokening, ergo the latter caused the former.

In fact, what we now call “wokism” has been the ideology of Western liberals for more than a century. Women were mass recruited into institutions largely because the white male elites were already woke. For reasons I explain below, the influx of women may have reinforced trends that already existed, but causality was primarily woke → women, not women → woke.

As I discuss elsewhere, John Locke, the “Father of Liberalism,” first defended the equality thesis in 1690. He claimed that if an Englishman had been raised as a Hottentot in Africa, he would be no different from an African. If a Native American were educated in England, he would be “as good a mathematician as any in it.” For whatever reason, Locke didn’t seriously think through the moral implications of racial blank slatism, so he himself never became woke. But the ingredients of wokism were there in 1690.

Many liberal luminaries such as John Stuart Mill, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Alexander von Humboldt believed the same thing as Locke. By the late 19th century, race denial was arguably the orthodoxy among Western liberals. It became a foundational principle of behaviorism—an influential movement in psychology founded by John B. Watson in the early 20th century.

When you combine the equality thesis with Christian moral sensibilities (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” and “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me”) you get wokism.

Wokism in the United States reached its first crescendo in the 1860s when the Union Army permanently cancelled 258,000 white Confederate soldiers in order to free the black slaves. The goal of ending slavery in America was a noble one. Defenders of the system claimed that all Africans—and only Africans—are by nature suited to slavery, which was empirically false. However, many abolitionists in America and Europe argued that, beneath the skin, Africans are on average biologically the same as Europeans, and that under just conditions there would be equality of outcome. Prominent abolitionist race deniers included Charles Sumner (US Senator), Thomas Clarkson (Cofounder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain), and Henri Grégoire (French revolutionary leader and Catholic priest).

The original goal of the Civil Rights movement was legal equality. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this was a fait accompli. People almost immediately realized, however, that legal equality would not bring about equal results. The next frontier of civil rights was affirmative action. That, too, had limited success. Believers in the equality thesis began a futile hunt for the mysterious forces that were holding back certain historically persecuted groups, particularly blacks.

The tipping point for the Great Awokening wasn’t female representation passing 50%. It was when people realized that another generation of affirmative action and Black History Months were not going to bring about equality of outcome. Perhaps catalyzed by social media, the moral panic began around 2012. People started using the word “woke” to describe what was happening, but the ideology came long before the word. Previously it was called “political correctness,” and before that it went by other names.

The empirical premise of wokism is that all groups—including the sexes—are innately the same, at least with respect to socially relevant psychological traits. Therefore, in a just world men and women would have equal outcomes.

As it turns out, men and women are roughly equal in terms of average general intelligence. However, men have slightly greater variance (they are overrepresented at the very high and very low ends). The sexes also have different styles of cognition. On average, men are more interested in analyzing and constructing rule-based systems. Women are more comfortable in the realm of feelings. Men gravitate to fields that involve systemization (e.g., computer programming), whereas women are drawn to people-facing professions where they can express empathy (e.g., nursing, HR). On average, men are also more fiercely ambitious and less concerned with work/life balance.

Once upon a time, women were discriminated against and most disparities between men and women could be attributed to sexism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race and sex. Within a few years, this was interpreted to mean that there is a de facto obligation to discriminate in favor of underrepresented groups, including women.

Many women do not require affirmative action to succeed at a high level. However, in the absence of intervention, fields such as math, engineering, philosophy, and finance will skew heavily male due to differences in cognition and ambition.

In the past several years, elite institutions have doubled down on affirmative action to bring female representation up to a level that wokesters find acceptable. To meet de facto quotas, employers have had to reach deeper into the pool of less qualified female candidates. For obvious reasons, affirmative action hires often have a chip on their shoulder. Many of them turn to social justice activism to distract from the fact that they aren’t as good at their job as the straight white men who earned their position based on merit, or weren’t hired at all. But we wouldn’t have this level of affirmative action for women in the first place unless the (mostly male) elites had already been woke.

The Great Feminization may also have reinforced wokism because female influence will reinforce any orthodoxy. Women seek safety in what is culturally familiar, which, in our society, is social justice and race denial. In other times and places, women have been equally enthusiastic about protecting non-woke orthodoxies. They are naturally conservative, not woke.

Thou Must Be Feminine

Andrews blames the Great Feminization on anti-discrimination laws that force institutions to hire women and potentially create workplaces that feel “like a Montessori kindergarten.”

The Damoclean sword of civil rights law has been hanging over our heads since the 1960s. However, as I explain elsewhere, contemporary civil rights law is a consequence, not the cause, of wokism. Civil rights laws were originally intended to apply to everyone equally, but judges and bureaucrats interpreted them as demanding special treatment for women and minorities. The law did not make people woke. It was because the elites were already woke that they made and enforced woke interpretations of the law.

The moral panic that began in the 2010s led institutions to adopt even more draconian measures to achieve diversity. As Jacob Savage has documented, ten years ago elite institutions were (and to a large extent still are) run by boomer and gen X white men. These senior white men decided to achieve diversity by blackballing the next generation of white males from junior positions. To take a representative example from Savage, Yale’s history department currently has 10 white male professors in their 70s or 80s. But among 16 tenured or tenure-track millennials, only one is a white man. At the New York Times Magazine, the editor-in-chief and editorial director are both gen X white men. But out of nine millennial senior editors and story editors, only one is a white man, and he was hired in 2012—right before DEI went off the rails.

No one made a law in 2014 that said only 1/16 young professors at Yale can be a white man. In fact, from a legal perspective, there was no real difference between the 2010s and the 1990s or even the 1970s. The culture was evolving organically according to woke logic. After two to three generations of affirmative action failed to bring about equality of results, it was time to take it up a notch. Boomer and gen X white men glutted the institutions with women and minorities in large part because they were committed to taking the equality thesis seriously.

Beating Woke

Andrews’s proposed solution is to repeal civil rights laws and thereby purge the institutions of their excess women. In her view, because women are the problem, when their influence is sufficiently reduced, wokism will go away.

This gets everything backwards. Women are more averse to controversy, but not innately woke. Race communism has been the ideology of liberal elites (male and female) for at least a century, long before the Great Feminization.

The solution to wokism is simple: refute the empirical premise that generates it. Show that the equality thesis is wrong, and wokism will be impossible. I am aware of objections to this strategy, but have made the case that a Hereditarian Revolution is feasible and desirable.

It is ironic that Helen Andrews was the one to popularize the theory that women cause wokism because they don’t care enough about the truth, and that she did so at the National Conservatism Conference. As editor of the American Conservative, Andrews was one of the chief gatekeepers preventing people like me from telling the truth about race on mainstream conservative platforms. Yoram Hazony—the Pope of National Conservatism—explicitly says that he doesn’t want to hear the truth about controversial topics. For example, in 2020, I published a paper advocating for free inquiry into all causes of race differences in intelligence, including genes. When wokesters started a petition to get the paper retracted, Hazony tweeted the following:

You can’t get to viewpoint diversity in academia by defending the “study of race differences in intelligence.” Such studies are potentially interesting to political racialists and white identitarians. But most conservatives don’t see much value in them.

Later the same day, Hazony referred to “defending race science and Nazi philosophers” and said that “none of that is conservative.” Isn’t this exactly the behavior that Andrews says is feminine, i.e., backbiting and ostracism to suppress controversial facts that threaten group cohesion? It is doubly ironic that Andrews and her fellow National Conservatives believe in cancel culture specifically for people who express the one idea that has the power to defeat wokism, which is hereditarianism.

Enlightenment Liberals vs. the Medieval Peasant Right

The theory that women caused wokism is rooted in a profoundly mistaken view about the role of ideas in politics. (By “ideas” I mean claims that meet some minimum standard of rationality. Candace Owens’s declaration that the moon landing was “fake and gay,” for example, is not an idea in this honorific sense.)

The stupidification of the Republican Party began in earnest under George W. Bush. Before that time, college graduates in America leaned slightly Republican. After 25 years of alienating smart people, we have now reached the point where it is common for prominent conservatives to invoke literal demons as an explanation for social phenomena. Even Andrews’s former colleague at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher, seriously believes that Tucker Carlson was scratched by a demon while he slept in a bed with four dogs. In 2024 I tweeted that many American conservatives have the same worldview as medieval peasants and that, left to themselves, there is a chance that they might start burning witches. I was inundated with replies saying that medieval peasants were right and of course we should execute witches. Conservative discourse revolves around celebrities, interpersonal beefs, conspiracy theories, imaginary grievances, science denial, and proclamations of loyalty to Donald Trump.

For people who have been marinating in the online right for the past decade, it is easy to forget that a large and influential segment of the left is not like this. Liberal elites have a good track record of responding to facts and logic on many issues including evolution, religion, and economics. In regard to wokism, it is liberals, not mainstream conservatives, who display intellectual consistency. Both the mainstream left and right claim to believe in the equality thesis, but only the leftists are smart and moral enough to recognize that wokism follows from that.

MAGA conservatives think they can defeat the left through the exercise of naked power, with no attempt to win over ideologues on the other side. They will not be successful. Intelligent, morally sensitive people remain overwhelmingly woke Democrats who are increasingly disgusted by the freakshow that is the American right. Trump’s third-worldist style of government will make life worse for the majority of people not directly participating in his many grifts. Sooner or later, Democrats are going to retake the White House and seize the dictatorial powers that Trump has created for the president. Whatever the right has gained by thuggery will disappear in an instant.

Permanent victory will only be achieved when a critical mass of cognitive elites accepts that the equality thesis is false, thereby making wokism impossible. Scapegoating women provides conservatives with yet another excuse to shirk from the battlefield of ideas where the fate of this ideology will be decided.

Wokism is based on the following logic:

Empirical premise (equality thesis): All races and sexes have on average the same innate distribution of socially relevant traits.

Moral premise (moral equality): All people have an equal right to achieve their potential.

Conclusion (wokism): The persistence of massive group disparities presents us with a moral emergency to fix the environment and bring about equality of outcome.

In reality, the empirical premise—the equality thesis—is wrong. Many disparities are rooted in natural differences that are beyond our power to correct. Wokism inevitably spirals into a desperate, futile crusade against the environmental forces (white racism or sexism) blamed for unequal outcomes. I claim that the only way to defeat it is through a hereditarian revolution. Show that the equality thesis is wrong, and wokism will be impossible.

Critics say I’m naïve about how ideology works, for at least two reasons.

First, ideologues don’t change their minds in response to “facts and logic.” If you present wokesters with information about race and IQ, they will put their fingers in their ears and call you “racist.”

Second, even if, hypothetically, you could persuade wokesters of the truth of hereditarianism, it would make no practical difference. They would come up with a new, ad hoc justification for doing exactly what they were doing before. Wokesters are committed to their conclusion (race communism), not their argument (there’s a moral emergency to correct for the effects of racism). In other words, the outcome of a hereditarian revolution would be hereditarian race communism—an ideology that says we should do everything we did under wokism, but for the sake of correcting for nature’s unfairness rather than white wickedness.

According to the critics, the nerds need to step aside so MAGA can seize power, drag wokesters out of the institutions by force, and change the incentive structure so that being woke is punished instead of rewarded.

Christopher Rufo recently wrote:

The crux of Cofnas’s argument is that abstract argument and scientific rationality govern, or, at least, should govern, the world. This is as much of a fantasy as the blank slate thesis. “Win the battle of ideas” is the political equivalent of “show them you have the best Pokémon cards”—while your enemies show up with tanks. Politics is not a debating society; institutions do not survive on facts and logic alone....[T]he implicit logic is something like this: brave truth-tellers will show existing elites a series of race and IQ graphs, and then, poof!, the institutions will suddenly self-dismantle and adopt new ideologies wholesale; departments of critical race theory will acknowledge the extraordinary prowess of their arguments and resign en masse.

To some extent, the right’s new emphasis on power is a welcome corrective to the previous generation of effete conservative intellectuals who prattled on about “principles” while the left steamrolled over them. But the idea that making rational arguments is the equivalent of bringing Pokémon cards to a tank fight also misunderstands how politics works. More specifically, it confuses the proximate cause of victory, which is tanks shelling their enemies, with the ultimate cause, which is the goals of the people operating and controlling the tanks. Wokism didn’t win because it was backed by power. It was backed by power because it became the ideology of the elites who wield power. Ideas first, tanks second.

Compare Rufo’s straw man that “truth-tellers will show existing elites a series of race and IQ graphs, and then, poof!, the institutions will suddenly self-dismantle” with what I wrote in “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”:

Cultural change doesn’t happen automatically in response to an individual stating a radical idea, even if it’s a true idea backed up with lots of evidence. You can’t just publish a book or a tweet and say, “there was no revolution, I guess we have to give up.” For an idea to spread, millions of people have to argue it out over Thanksgiving dinner tables, water coolers, and dorm room hookahs. Prominent figures have to take a stand in favor of the idea, and show that they are willing to pay a price for their conviction. The good news is that millions of people—including many academics—already know the truth about race. They need recognize what is at stake and start making their case.

To win a tank war, you need to be concerned with both the mechanics of tank fighting and the mental state of the people in the tanks. If you can get enemy tank commanders to defect to your side, that’s preferable to blowing them up.

More important, when it comes to the war on woke, we can’t (metaphorically) just blow up our “enemies.” The scientists, writers, business leaders, scholars, artists, lawyers, and bureaucrats who keep the gears of modern society turning are overwhelmingly on the woke left. We need some of them to join us or we won’t have the human capital to retake the institutions and govern effectively.

Winning the battle of ideas will not by itself defeat wokism. As I said in the Guide, “Rufo’s siege of the institutions and Hanania’s proposed legal reforms are necessary for success.” Our institutions are teeming with woke fanatics who will never listen to reason and should be purged. Civil rights law has been a powerful weapon in the hands of wokesters, and we need to snatch it away from them. But without winning in the realm of ideas, too, our victories won’t last more than a couple of election cycles.

In the light of how people form beliefs, I explain how a strategic information campaign about race and IQ can be successful. Liberal elites have a good track record of changing their minds in response to reason and evidence. A critical mass of smart people—at least in the young generation—can be persuaded to give up their false belief in the equality thesis, making wokism impossible. Hereditarian race communism—which demands the same policies as wokism in the name of compensating groups for inequality that exists on a genetic level—will not be a viable ideology.

Before I get to the main point, it’s important to recognize that, without hereditarianism, the anti-woke movement is speeding toward a brick wall.

The Illusion of Victory

Owning the libs by getting Harvard President Claudine Gay fired or shutting down cancer research might feel good. But the idea that we have achieved victory over wokism is an illusion. Cognitive elites remain overwhelmingly on the side of DEI.

Rufo says that “Conservatives...should begin educating and organizing a counter-elite of their own.” To this end, he created the Logos Fellowship at the Manhattan Institute to train young right-wing journalists. One of the Logos Fellows decided to become an anti-Semitic “groyper” (a follower of the Christian/white nationalist Nick Fuentes who praises Hitler and denies the Holocaust). He went on a public crusade against Rufo and the Manhattan Institute, accusing them of being under the control of Zionists. After shutting down the Logos program, Rufo hired some people who appear to be gender-critical former(?) leftists who reputedly may not have even voted Republican. Rufo concluded that “the idea that there are ‘thousands of rw [right-wing] bros’ and undiscovered geniuses who would thrive in an institutional environment is simply not the case.”

If Rufo himself struggles to find people with right-wing bona fides to fill two positions at the Manhattan Institute, or to hire a dozen young conservatives without at least one becoming a deranged anti-Semite, where does he think we are going to find millions of competent right wingers to staff universities, government bureaucracies, and other important institutions?

The right simply does not have the human capital to retake the institutions and run them effectively. The vast majority of intelligent, psychologically stable, and public-spirited Americans remain left and woke. The Trump administration’s war on universities, science, and data has only reinforced smart people’s identity as leftists.

Let’s examine the record of MAGA’s “counter-elites.” Trump’s head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) didn’t know that America has a hurricane season, despite the fact that dealing with hurricane damage is the main thing FEMA does. During a national debate about habeas corpus, the Secretary of Homeland Security defined habeas corpus as “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.” The Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) is an anti-vaxxer and raw-milk enthusiast. After being infected by a parasite that ate a chunk of his brain, he still did not learn his lesson about the importance of hygiene and recently went swimming with his grandchildren in a creek contaminated with raw sewage. HHS used ChatGPT to help write a major report full of citations to nonexistent studies. The economy is in the hands of crackpots who probably used ChatGPT to come up with a tariff policy based on an insane economic theory and false data. These aren’t cherry-picked examples of MAGA’s incompetence. I could go on all day.

When it comes to scientific institutions, the right isn’t even trying to take them over, and is settling for destroying them. If the right can’t do science, it will defund science.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. eating what may be a dog. Since the animal (whatever it is) has been cooked, it is probably not the source of Kennedy’s brain parasite.

Rufo believes he is leading a revolution for classical liberalism. Meanwhile, his conservative allies dream of turning America into a Christian version of Turkey. The latest analysis of the World Values Survey shows that, when it comes to supporting self-expression over security, favoring international cooperation, or desiring “a strong leader who doesn’t need to bother with elections,” the American right now aligns with backwards autocracies led by Erdogan and Putin.

Rufo’s allies are not classical liberals. From the FT.

The Mechanics of Belief

The MAGA mob of low-IQ third worldists is not going to be successful. We will only defeat wokism and replace it with something better when we persuade a critical mass of cognitive elites to give it up. But is this feasible? I’ve argued that, to win the elites, we need an “information campaign” about hereditarianism. Will race communists really change their beliefs in response to information?

A belief is a representation of how the world is. Natural selection favors beliefs that are adaptive, not necessarily true. For example, the belief that “God hates birth control and commands us to be fruitful and multiply” is false but strongly favored by selection. In many cases, true beliefs are adaptive. It’s adaptive to believe that death cap mushrooms are poisonous. If you see four lions go behind a rock and three come out, it’s adaptive to believe that there is at least one lion behind the rock.

Natural selection endowed us with cognitive mechanisms that tended to lead to adaptive (again, not necessarily true) beliefs in the ancestral environment. We also have psychological quirks that distort our reasoning in ways that may be neither adaptive nor truth tracking.

The human mind is not a logic machine. However, a clear-eyed review of the evidence shows that, under certain circumstances, many people (especially smart people) can be persuaded by reason.

Given the nature of belief formation, I’ll explain where the taboo on hereditarianism came from and why it can be defeated by an information campaign.

Beliefs Aren’t Genetically Determined

Should we execute murderers? Raise taxes on the rich? Believe in God? How you answer these questions can be predicted with unsettling accuracy based on your genes. Some people draw the conclusion that beliefs are therefore genetically determined and there’s nothing we can do to change them. You can’t argue someone out of being woke any more than you can argue someone out of having blue eyes or sickle cell anemia. But this is a mistake.

High hereditability does not mean genetically determined. Heritability is relative to a population and an environment: within a particular environment, the heritability of a trait in a population is the proportion of the variance associated with genetic differences. If you change the environment, the genes “for” X might lead to Y. Genes that “coded for” girls being a tomboy in the 1990s now code for cutting their breasts off and getting hormone therapy. Genes “for” hanging witches in Salem in the 1690s drove social media mobs in the 2010s. In an informational environment where facts about hereditarianism are readily accessible from credible sources, genes that now lead to wokism might have a different effect.

Man the Herd Animal

Humans are uniquely adapted to live in an environment where critical information is transmitted culturally. Other animals get by on instincts and a bit of individual learning. In contrast, we cannot even feed ourselves without a wealth of cultural information about what is safe to eat and how to process it. The tools we need to survive do not grow out of bodies, but have to be constructed via cultural knowhow. This created selection pressures for learning dispositions that led people to acquire adaptive information—and to filter out maladaptive information—from the social environment.

We evolved two key heuristics.

First, conform. Man is by nature a herd animal. From a fitness perspective, adopting the beliefs and practices of the majority is usually a good bet. If most people avoid eating red berries, your default should be to stay away from red berries. Unless you have a really good reason to think that most people are wrong, it’s rational to do what has been tested and works for them.

Second, copy the successful. We evolved an impulse to copy successful people because they’re probably doing something right. Suppose Ug is the best hunter in the tribe. Unlike everyone else, he always attaches feathers to the back of his arrows. You have no idea what makes Ug successful. But if you do everything that he does, you might hit upon his secret. So you start fletching your arrows. If, unlike everyone else, he also eats red berries (he says they give him extra energy), you might as well follow his example for that, too. Perhaps the red berries are slowly poisoning both of you, but at least your arrows are flying straighter.

People usually aren’t consciously aware that they are acting on evolved learning heuristics. It’s an automatic cognitive process. The beliefs of the majority of people around us and/or prestigious people just feel right.

Obviously, these heuristics can misfire. Whenever a celebrity commits suicide, there is a spike in people killing themselves at the expense of their fitness. People even copy the method of suicide. If a celebrity slits his wrists, fans reach for a razor. If he hangs himself, a rope. Advertisers take advantage of our caveman psychology by paying prestigious people to use a product, thereby inducing consumers to copy them. But, throughout our evolutionary history, our learning heuristics have served us well enough (fitness-wise) to be favored by selection.

Who Wants It More?

Ideas don’t always compete on an even playing field. If questioning the Quran in Afghanistan will get your head cut off, there isn’t a free competition between the memeplexes of Islam, Christianity, and atheism. When the majority of the population punishes nonbelievers in X, the conformity impulse reinforces both belief in X and the practice of punishing X heretics. Society can enter a stable equilibrium from which escape is difficult.

The fate of X doesn’t necessarily come down to how many people believe X, but how many people are willing to fight for X. If you’ve ever been to a conservative conference, you might have noticed that the most common question people ask is, “What can I do to help if I’m not in a position to be public about my views?” Leftists never ask this question—they just fight for what they believe in. Modern conservatism fails to inspire large numbers of people to sacrifice for the cause. Even if the left and the right were otherwise evenly matched (which they aren’t), leftists would still win in the long run because they care more.

Virtue Signaling

In the 1880s, the American clothing company Levi’s sold blue jeans with a label that said “made by white labor.” At the time, being racist was seen as morally virtuous, whereas now the opposite is the case. In 2025, Levi’s website claims that “inclusion,” not racism, is “woven into the fabric of our company.”

People bond with each other over shared beliefs and values. In any society, you can increase your status by proclaiming that you agree with the herd. And people easily believe what they have an incentive to believe.

By advertising your commitment to popular beliefs, you also stimulate conformist impulses in other people and therefore reinforce their faith in the orthodoxy.

Feelings vs. Facts

Most people gravitate to beliefs that make them feel good—that satisfy their psychological needs for meaning, a feeling of importance, comfort, community, and so on—or that have some obvious practical utility. They may have some interest in truth for its own sake, but Galileos are rare. As long as a belief isn’t too easy to falsify, and it doesn’t lead to immediate, tangible bad results, people have an impressive ability to maintain pleasant delusions.

Christianity didn’t prevail because its creation story (“God said ‘let there be light’”) was more persuasive than pagan myths, or because there was strong evidence for the divinity of Jesus. In fact, the Latin Church Father Tertullian argued that we should believe in Christianity because the stories about Jesus’s miracles were so improbable that no one would have the audacity to make them up, ergo they must be true. “And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.” (This is sometimes quoted as credo quia absurdum—“I believe because it is absurd.”)

The world’s great religions and ideologies owe their success in large part to their ability to appeal psychologically to a wide range of people. For example, Christianity fosters a strong community of mutual aid and delivers a powerful message than can be understood by the average person. At the same time, it provides a complex theological tradition for intellectuals to satisfy their “need for cognition.” It contains enough contradictions that it can be interpreted to suit many different temperaments: trade your clothing for a sword (Luke 22:36) but turn the other cheek (Matt. 5:39); give to anyone who asks you (Matt. 5:42) but don’t feed someone who doesn’t work (2 Thess. 3:10); pursue knowledge (2 Pet. 1:5; Rom. 15:14; Tit. 1:9) but “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27; cf. Matt. 11:25; Lk. 10:21); and so on. However, Christianity isn’t obviously logically incoherent, at least compared to most other belief systems.

Rationality concerns logic and means–end reasoning, not our ultimate goals. The human needs for love, hate, hope, and adventure are not inherently rational or irrational. But people tend to latch onto ideologies that push their psychological buttons in the most agreeable way, not necessarily those that embody the most truth.

Ethics

According to the behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer, “it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.” Howard Gardner of “multiple intelligences” fame says:

[E]ven if at the end of the day, the bad guys [who emphasize the importance of IQ] turn out to be more correct scientifically than I am, life is short, and we have to make choices about how we spend our time. And that’s where I think the multiple intelligences way of thinking about things will continue to be useful even if the scientific evidence doesn’t support it.

Many people do not make a sharp separation between facts and values. They think there is an ethical imperative to believe—or at least pretend to believe—what would be nice if it were true.

Neuroplasticity

The economist Paul Samuelson said that “Science advances funeral by funeral.” He was paraphrasing Max Planck’s somewhat less pithy observation that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” It is the same in the realm of politics.

When is the last time you saw a 70-year-old change his mind about something important? Or even a 25-year-old? Some people remain open to revising their core beliefs in adulthood, but they are exceptions. The beliefs and values that we are imprinted with in childhood and adolescence leave an indelible mark, which in most cases can never be erased.

The ethologist Konrad Lorenz speculates that teenage rebellion is a biological adaptation. During the pubertal period, people “loosen their allegiance to all traditional rites and social norms of their culture” and become open to new ideals. In this way, norms are subject to critical examination every generation, providing an opportunity to revise them in the light of new experience. But once beliefs and values crystalize in late adolescence, there is (usually) no more questioning, at least as far as the individual is concerned. Empirical evidence supports the existence of a sensitive period in childhood and adolescence.

When surveyed in 1996, Germans born in the 1930s were twice as likely as Germans born in the 1910s to hold “extreme anti-Semitic beliefs.” People in the former group spent the first 6–15 years of their life in the Nazi education system, while those in the latter experienced Nazi propaganda only as adults. Among Germans born in the 1920s, only women had significantly elevated rates of anti-Semitism, but the researchers provide evidence that this is because the most fanatically anti-Semitic men in that cohort were more likely to die in the trenches. In other words, people who spent a significant part of their childhood or adolescence (but not early adulthood) under Nazism resisted de-Nazification in a way that others did not.

Analysis of the Eurobarometer surveys and the World Values Survey shows that people’s values tend to remain relatively stable after young adulthood. The graph below shows the proportion of individuals in different birth cohorts who hold “materialist” vs. “postmaterialist” values over time. Materialists value tradition, conformity, and physical and economic security while postmaterialists prioritize self-expression, autonomy, tolerance, and diversity. In the graph, 0 represents an even split in an age cohort between materialists and postmaterialists. Above the 0 point there are more postmaterialists, and below 0 there are more materialists.

“Cohort analysis: Percentage of Postmaterialists minus percentage of Materialists in six West European countries (Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands), 1971–2009,” from Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Evolution, Figure 2.2.

Fluctuations within birth cohorts largely track inflation rates. (Economic hardship makes people more materialist.) But change at a population level is driven mainly by generational replacement, not individuals becoming more postmaterialist.

Stubborn as people may be, change is not impossible.

The World Values Survey shows that, in the past few decades, all age cohorts have become far more tolerant of homosexuality, divorce, and abortion. The same is presumably true of transgenderism, which came out of left field about a decade ago and suddenly became widely accepted.

Going back to anti-Semitism in Germany, Germans born in the 1930s were much more likely to be anti-Semitic than those born in the 1910s. But the proportion of “extreme anti-Semites” in the former cohort was still fairly small at 10%. Most of the Hitler Youth significantly moderated their views in the decades after the war. Even the extreme 10% had enough neuroplasticity to learn not to march around with swastikas like they were taught when they were children.

The former director of the World Values Survey, Ronald Inglehart, argues that “exceptionally rapid changes in Individual-choice norms are occurring in high-income societies because conformist pressures have reversed polarity.” Once you reach a tipping point where more than 50% of a population adopts a new belief or value, suddenly, the powerful force of conformity begins working against the old orthodoxy. Because many people take their cue about what to believe from the majority, minority beliefs fight a steep, uphill battle until they win the allegiance of 51% of the population. Once they make it to that point, winning another ~20% happens almost automatically.

To see this phenomenon in action, you can plot attitudes toward gay marriage over time. From 1999–2010, American support for gay marriage rose by 9 percentage points (from 35% to 44%). After passing the 50% mark in 2011, support rose by 18 percentage points in the following eleven-year period (from 53% to 71%).

Higher IQ is associated with greater neuroplasticity in adulthood. The minority who remain open to changing their minds later in life will disproportionately be cognitive elites.

Facts and Logic

If a set of premises generates a contradiction, at least one of the premises must be wrong. Our faculty of reason, shaped by natural selection to help us navigate the world, includes an innate aversion to obvious logical inconsistency.

In general, people with higher levels of general intelligence have a superior ability to perform the logical operations required for correct thinking. Therefore, they are (on average) more responsive to reason and evidence. For example, people with higher IQs are less likely to smoke. They understand the evidence that smoking is harmful while dumb people dismiss the evidence on the basis that “my grandfather smoked his whole life and never got cancer.” Smart people are less likely to “invest” in lottery tickets because they understand that the expected payoff is low.

Like a Ferrari running into a lamppost, the best minds can adopt crashingly wrong and stupid beliefs. But at least they have a superior capacity to follow a chain of reasoning to its logical conclusion, even if they sometimes (or often) fail to do so. A smooth brain may be committed to reason in principle, but he will often run up against his own cognitive limitations.

Liberal Elites Care about Facts and Logic

When you think of a woke leftist, you might picture a blue-haired, septum-pierced she/they waving a “Queers for Palestine” placard and screaming into a megaphone. People like that exist. They will not be swayed by an “information campaign” about hereditarianism or anything else that contradicts their ideology.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that information campaigns are never effective. Advances in science and philosophy always reach intellectual elites first, and sometimes trickle down to the plebeians over the course of decades or centuries. Smart people have far more influence than dumb people over the culture. The former are more likely to gain political power and create effective, knowledge-generating institutions. So public discourse tends to reflect the views of the cognitive elites.

And Yet It Moves

Astronomers marshalled strong evidence for heliocentrism in the early 17th century. At the time, the idea that the Earth orbits another celestial body was seen as highly offensive. It contradicted religion and diminished man’s place in the universe. However, heliocentrists won over the scientific community with facts and logic. Eventually even the Church relented. In 1758, Pope Benedict XIV (partially) rescinded the prohibition on books about heliocentrism, and, in 1835, the ban was lifted completely.

A 2012 survey found that 26% of Americans said that they think that the Sun goes around the Earth. (This could mean that up to 52% of Americans have no idea what the truth is, and half guessed Earth and half guessed Sun.) However, because geocentrists skew toward the bottom half of the bell curve, their views have virtually no cultural influence. Satellites remain in orbit, airplanes navigate, and textbooks state that Galileo was right because the people whose opinion matters accept heliocentrism.

Man and Monkey

For most of Western history, smart people believed that god(s) created life to serve a divine purpose. According to the Bible, “God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kind...,” and it was so.” This is what Charles Darwin grew up believing. As a young man, Darwin was particularly impressed by William Paley’s watchmaker analogy. A watch has intricately connected parts that are optimized for timekeeping. From these features, we infer that it had a designer (the watchmaker). In the same way, the watch-like functioning of a human, flower, or beetle also points to a designer (God).

In 1809, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck noted that fossils show a gradual progression as you go from older to newer rock strata, culminating in organisms that resemble those living today. He posited a teleological law of nature that drives species to evolve greater complexity over millions of years.

In 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which proposed natural selection as the principle creative mechanism of evolution. In 1860, the Oxford University Museum hosted a debate on natural selection. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce mocked T. H. Huxley (aka “Darwin’s bulldog”) by asking if he was descended from an ape on his father’s side or his mother’s side. Huxley replied (as he himself later recounted):

If then...the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitantly affirm my preference for the ape.

A woman in the audience named Lady Brewster fainted from shock. Admiral Robert FitzRoy—the captain of the Beagle who hosted Darwin during the famous voyage of 1831–1836—held a Bible above his head and commanded the audience to “believe God rather than man.” “If I had known then what I know now,” said FitzRoy, “I would not have taken him aboard the Beagle.” However, supporters rallied behind Darwin, and, in a short period of time, he won over a large part of the intellectual elite. In 1882, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

As of 2024, 24% of Americans agree with Darwin that our species arose through naturalistic evolution, 37% are young earth creationists, and 34% believe in intelligent design. But if you watch Hollywood films, read newspapers, go to an elite university, or work at a tech company, you would think that approximately 99% of Americans are in the first group. Because the elites accept Darwinism, that’s the only view that has any real cultural influence.

From Commies to Neoliberals

The natural political condition of humanity is small-scale communism. All nomadic foragers are politically egalitarian (at least among adult males) and demand the more or less equal distribution of important resources such as meat. Our political instincts are largely adapted to this way of life.

Hunter–gatherer communism collapsed with the transition to agriculture and sedentary living. However, the communist impulse remained, bursting forth in 19th and 20th centuries. The world wars persuaded many intellectuals that capitalism had been a failure, and they dreamed of recreating the communist hunter–gatherer community on a global scale. George Orwell, who later became famous for describing how communism can go wrong, wrote the following in 1941: “What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism—that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—does not work. It cannot deliver the goods.” In his 1949 essay, “Why Socialism,” Albert Einstein called for a planned economy: “A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.” These are just two random examples. For decades, “intellectual” almost implied “commie.” You couldn’t run a university, science project, or much of anything else without being infiltrated by Soviet spies and fellow travelers.

When communism failed, most left-wing cognitive elites gave it up. Not even Bernie Sanders (neither an intellectual nor an establishment figure) wants a planned economy. The Democratic Party platform advocates regulated markets and some redistribution of wealth. Belief in free markets is now correlated with intelligence. Communism survives among the low-IQ wing of the left, including Antifa thugs and professors of grievance studies.

The History of Race Denial

Liberalism vs. Human Nature

John Locke is known as the Father of Liberalism. In 1690, he declared that the human mind begins as “white paper, void of all characters.” In regard to race, he endorsed the empirical premise of wokism:

Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania [in South Africa], possibly our thoughts and notions had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hottentots that inhabit there. And had the Virginia king Apochancana been educated in England, he had been perhaps as knowing a divine, and as good a mathematician as any in it; the difference between him and a more improved Englishman lying barely in this, that the exercise of his faculties was bounded within the ways, modes, and notions of his own country, and never directed to any other or further inquiries.

In other words, a European is no different from an African, and anyone can be an Englishman. (Sound familiar?) These beliefs were not based on evidence. Although Locke was writing at the tail end of the scientific revolution, there was no social science, let alone behavioral genetics. Locke made his assertions about human nature based purely on intuition and wishful thinking.

It’s not a coincidence that the Father of Liberalism was also the Father of Blank Slatism and Race Denial. Traditional morality grows out of collective experience. In contrast, liberalism starts with an abstract vision of rights and liberty, and demands that society be reorganized accordingly. There is an inherent tension between liberalism and the idea that human nature puts limits on what is possible. In reality, human nature is adaptable, but not infinitely so. We are not blank slates, and we are not interchangeable as individuals or groups.

Race denial is a recurring theme in the history of liberalism.

Many Christian abolitionists hung their hats on the claim of racial sameness. For example, in 1785, Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson argued that environmental forces “overwhelm [Africans’] genius, and hinder it from breaking forth.” Nevertheless, he said, to prove the equality of whites and blacks, “examples of African genius...can be produced in abundance.” Henri Grégoire was a French revolutionary leader and Catholic priest who belonged to the Société des amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks). He wrote in 1808 that “Negroes being of the same nature as whites, therefore have with them the same rights to exercise, the same duties to fulfill.”

Prominent liberal race deniers included John Stuart Mill (Father of Classical Liberalism), Alfred Russel Wallace (socialist and co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection), Alexander von Humboldt (German explorer and polymath), and Theodor Waitz (German anthropologist and author of an 1859 book on human equality). In 1852, conservative British politician and (later) Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli complained about “that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man,” which he said was being pushed in the spirit of “cosmopolitan fraternity.” Writing in 1916, the reactionary American anthropologist Madison Grant attributed the “widespread and fatuous belief in the power of the environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics.”

In 1924, John B. Watson—the Father of Behaviorism—wrote the following:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

As Watson acknowledged in the last sentence, his position was not based on evidence (“I am going beyond my facts”). But he believed that his opponents didn’t have sufficient evidence, either, and in his view that licensed him to believe what he preferred.

The torch of behaviorism was picked up by B. F. Skinner—a fanatical blank slatist who thought that all behavior is determined by conditioning. According to a 2002 study, Skinner was the most influential psychologist of the 20th century followed by Piaget and Freud.

Left-Wing Hereditarianism

Some of the heroes of late 19th- and early 20th-century leftism were eugenicists and/or race realists.

President Theodore Roosevelt—a progressive—compared people to livestock and said they should be bred for desirable physical and moral traits. Though he advocated for political equality, he believed that races are different on a biological level.

Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw said that “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” In the preface to Man and Superman, he argued: “We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy.” He lamented the fact that “we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality.”

In 1931, the left-wing British magazine New Statesman and Nation (later known as the New Statesman) published an article titled “Sterilisation of Defectives,” which reasoned as follows:

The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.

Indeed, at the time, the primary opponents of eugenics were Christians who claimed as a religious principle that all of God’s children are equal, and someone with Down syndrome is just as precious as Einstein or Beethoven.

Hereditarianism is not inherently incompatible with a liberal or left-wing perspective. But, again, there is a natural tension. It’s easier for the liberal/leftist to reject hereditarianism, and insist that we can achieve a just society through education alone. Throughout history, the brightest luminaries of liberalism (Locke, Mill, et al.) have mostly leaned toward blank slatism and race denial. Even Thomas Jefferson—an outspoken hereditarian—could not resist declaring it to be a “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.”

Literally Hitler

The Nazis were pseudoscientists who rejected Darwinism in favor of a bizarre creation story called “world ice theory.” They dismissed IQ tests as a tool “of Jewry [to] fortify its hegemony.” Nevertheless, eugenics and race science became morally tainted by their association with Hitler.

As I mentioned before, many people do not draw a sharp distinction between facts and values. If science conflicts with morality, the science must be wrong. The Nazis did bad things under the banner of “eugenics” and “race science,” ergo the science of heredity must be false, at least when applied to humans.

In 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a statement on “the race question.” The preamble led with a moral argument, referring to “racism as one of the social evils which [UNESCO] was called upon to combat.” Citing UNESCO’s Constitution, it declared: “the great and terrible war which has now ended was a war made possible by...the doctrine of the inequality of men and races.” The statement asserted that “The scientific evidence indicates that the range of mental capacities in all ethnic groups is much the same.” It concluded with some liberal slop: “biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives toward co-operation, and unless these drives are satisfied, men and nations alike fall ill....[E]very man is his brother’s keeper.”

In 1951, UNESCO published a report acknowledging that its 1950 statement had been “much criticized, especially by physical anthropologists and geneticists.” They released a new version, which took essentially the same position on race as the first one: “within different populations consisting of many human types, one will find approximately the same range of temperament and intelligence....Available scientific knowledge provides no basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development.”

The revised 1951 statement was published alongside comments by leading scientists, several of whom called it out for being political propaganda. R. A. Fisher (one of the founders of modern genetics) referred to the “well-intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences [between races] that exist.” Ernst Mayr (Father of the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology) described the statement’s treatment of race differences in intelligence as “exceedingly weak.” C. D. Darlington (the geneticist who explained chromosomal crossover) wrote that “genetics has given us every reason to agree” with Darwin, who said that the “mental characteristics [of races] are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties.” But these objections were buried in a technical report that few people read. The actual text of UNESCO’s statement, which was used as the basis for a global educational campaign, gave the false impression that there was a scientific consensus that race realism is evil and wrong.

In the wake of WWII, many people were eager to embrace a message of “universal brotherhood.” The hereditarian argument that “Nazi race science was bad but now we’re going to do it right” didn’t jibe with the moral zeitgeist. Proclaiming the psychological unity of man as an empirical fact was seen as a weapon against the scourge of race hatred and tribalism, regardless of whether it was scientifically justified. Some post-war anti-hereditarians were probably true believers. Others thought the noble lie of race denial was justified because it would have good consequences. Idealistic and intelligent people—the segment of society that exerts disproportionate control over institutions such as the United Nations and the education system—came down on the side of denial.

The Death of God

With each advance of science, the space for God became smaller and smaller. The fire-and-brimstone, in-your-face God of the Middle Ages eventually became an aloof “God of the gaps.” This process reached its logical conclusion around the end of the 19th century, by which point most elite intellectuals took the position that there was probably no God at all, and we would be better off abandoning religion altogether.

As atheism trickled down to the masses, the result was not an efflorescence of rationality. Instead, many people found alternative outlets for their irrational and violent impulses. The newly godless turned to radical political ideologies, the most destructive of which (communism) killed at least 50 million people in half a century. Meanwhile, the bulwark of liberal enlightenment—the United States—remained moderately religious.

The New Atheists of the 2000s relentlessly attacked religion with no clear idea of what would take its place. In 2003, philosopher Daniel Dennett said that atheists should be known as “brights,” regardless of any other views they hold. It never occurred to the “brights” that much of what they disliked about religion reflected features of human nature that would not disappear with the death of God.

For many people, wokism became a psychological substitute for Christianity. That’s not to say there aren’t Christian SJWs who are committed to taking the equality thesis seriously. But atheists are particularly susceptible to using wokism to fill what believers call the “God-shaped hole in their heart.” The parallels between wokism-in-practice and traditional Christianity are obvious, including the concept of original sin (white privilege) and an emphasis on guilt and penance (“I am a racist”). The moral premise of wokism (moral equality) comes straight from the Gospels.

Ironically, the New Atheists were one of the first communities to go mega-woke, and they played a role in precipitating the Great Awokening. In 2012, a popular atheist blogger introduced the Atheism+ movement, declaring:

We are...

Atheists plus we care about social justice,

Atheists plus we support women’s rights,

Atheists plus we protest racism,

Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

She introduced three possible logos for Atheism+, all of them featuring the cross-shaped plus sign.

One of the first proposed logos for Atheism+

To be clear, wokism doesn’t depend on Christianity per se. But many woke atheists have not removed the cross from their shields, and the hereditarian will have to pierce through tough psychological resistance.

Breaking the Taboo

There is no law of nature that says truth will win in the end. But it is an empirical fact that liberal elites have shown themselves to be responsive to reason and evidence on a wide range of issues including religion, evolution, and economics. Why wouldn’t they be responsive to evidence for hereditarianism?

The equality thesis delusion is currently in a strong position. Think back to the reasons people hold beliefs in the first place.

Conformity: The vast majority of people (claim to) believe that hereditarianism is evil pseudoscience. This message is repeated by almost every credible source of information.

Copying the successful: Virtually every successful person (publicly) affirms the equality thesis. If they didn’t, they would immediately lose their status and no longer be successful.

Race deniers care more: If it becomes publicly known that you are a hereditarian, there is a high probability that you will be fired from your job and socially ostracized. Even if your employer and friends secretly agree with you, they may betray you anyway because they fear the wrath of liberals. Note that, in 2013, Jason Richwine was fired from the conservative Heritage Foundation when liberals discovered that his PhD dissertation at Harvard talked about race differences.

Virtue signaling: In our culture, Hitler is the incarnation of evil because he was the ultimate racist. According to popular opinion, the best way to show that you are not Hitler (and therefore not a bad person) is to proclaim yourself to be a race denier. A failure to sufficiently distance yourself from Hitler will bring swift punishment.

A pleasant delusion: Racial inequality is a source of never-ending bitterness and strife. The idea that we can make it all go away by adopting a soon-to-be-discovered magic intervention to equalize the races is a beautiful idea. This delusion is then wrapped up in an ideology that acts as a psychological substitute for Christianity.

Brainwashed from birth: People are inculcated with the equality thesis virtually from birth. It is a pillar of the Western education system starting on day one of formal schooling. By the time some people develop the ability to critically evaluate their beliefs in adolescence, they only have a few years to un-brainwash themselves before their minds calcify in their early 20s. Once they make it past the point of no return, most people will be stuck with the same core beliefs until they die.

Ethics: Many people think there is an ethical imperative to believe that all groups are the same and/or to avoid any investigation that could uncover evidence to the contrary. I already quoted Eric Turkheimer saying that “it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.” According to Noam Chomsky, “To anyone not afflicted with these disorders [of racism and sexism], it is of zero interest whether the average value of IQ for some category of persons is such-and-such.” For people like this, anti-hereditarianism is completely outside the bounds of rationality.

This looks bad, but the hereditarian has at least two aces up his sleeve.

First, hereditarianism is true. Due to censorship, many if not most educated people don’t even know that there are racial gaps in IQ, let alone the evidence implicating genes. Most college graduates I meet have no clue about intelligence testing, behavioral genetics, or the fact that every remotely plausible environmental theory of race differences has been tested dozens of times and failed. When people are exposed to information about hereditarianism, it is often from sources that they (rightly or wrongly) do not view as credible, or it is mixed with crackpottery and actually-bad-racism. If we exposed people to accurate information in a way that smart people can take it seriously, the results would be different.

Second, being wrong has consequences. Policies predicated on the equality thesis inevitably fail to achieve their objectives, often at great expense. Head Start and No Child Left Behind accomplished nothing. We invaded nations and spent trillions of dollars trying to turn non-Westerners into white Americans, but it only (sort of) worked in East Asia. The noble lie/delusion that all races are the same has not brought an end to racial strife, but has fostered mutual, growing resentment among groups with different outcomes. The hereditarian does not have to appeal only to people’s love of truth for its own sake (what one commentator called the “faintest of all human passions”). He can point out that the wokester’s model of the world doesn’t lead to success.

Ye of Little Faith in Reason

Christopher Rufo counters:

“Pointing out the false empirical premise is our most powerful weapon” is magical thinking. People have been publishing the hereditarian argument for decades, in prestigious places, at great length. If “pointing out the false premise” were enough, woke would have never happened.

I asked Rufo where people have been defending hereditarianism “for decades, in prestigious places, at great length.” There was some discussion in 1994 after the publication of The Bell Curve, but The Bell Curve didn’t explicitly state that the black/white IQ gap is substantially genetic. And conservative institutions cancel their own people for hereditarianism just as fast as leftist ones. (I already mentioned what happened to Jason Richwine at the Heritage Foundation.) Hereditarians like me are blackballed from National Review, The American Conservative, and all the rest of them. Rufo replied:

Moynihan and Nixon were talking about this in the 1960s!

This is the famous conversation between Nixon and Moynihan that Rufo is referring to:

Nixon: I couldn’t agree more with you that the Herrnstein stuff and all the rest, first, nobody must think we’re thinking about it, and second, if we do find out it’s correct, we must never tell anybody.

Moynihan: I’m afraid that’s just the case.

Nixon: That’s right.

Moynihan: Yeah.

...

Nixon: This is knowledge, but it is knowledge that it is better not to know.

Rufo’s own example to show that “publishing the hereditarian argument for decades” didn’t work is Nixon and Moynihan agreeing that we should never talk about hereditarianism!

The Bell Curve contains four sentences about the authors’ views on the possible genetic cause of the black/white IQ gap:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. (p. 311)

That was our big petard. In 1994, Herrnstein and Murray said it’s “likely” that genes “have something to do with racial differences,” and they are “resolutely agnostic” how much of the black/white gap is genetic. Though his views are obvious if you read between the lines, to this day Murray has never made a clear, public statement that he believes in hereditarianism.

The historical record provides no evidence that liberal elites wouldn’t respond to arguments for hereditarianism. But you have to make the argument.

Hereditarian Race Communism

Many rightists imagine that persuading wokesters of the truth of hereditarianism would, if anything, make them even woker than before.

On X, Hunter Ash wrote:

I posted recently about how understanding [hereditarianism] changed my views, but I’m a weirdo who cares about truth and consistency. And the responses support your [Rufo’s] position. Leftists either denied it or said “if I believed this, I would want to do equity even harder!”

Rufo agreed with that, saying, “Right.”

Costin Alamariu, aka “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP), wrote an essay called “Race in America and the Dork Right,” which he said was a response to Richard Hanania, i/o, Razib Khan, HBD Chick, and “to a lesser extent Cofnas.” He asserted that leftists are

offended by inequality of whatever origin, and [they] believe that whites are the Original Oppressors and exploiters who must atone. People who want to believe this will find the arguments to fit these moral desires....

The willingness of liberals and leftists to invoke the necessity of state action to correct the injustice of nature, which they absolutely would do if forced to accept the reality of innate racial differences in ability (some already do this, and John Rawls the prophet of the center left bureaucracies did already long ago).

Last January, the woke writer James Surowiecki declared that he agrees. If the empirical claim that is the foundation of his worldview were proved wrong, he would double down on everything he was committed to before. He wrote on X:

If success is due to inherited traits that people have no control over, rather than individual effort and dedication, redistribution obviously makes more sense, not less.

In other words, don’t talk about the one thing that undermines my ideology because, um, it won’t make a difference! Many rightists fell for this. In a post that got 1.7 thousand likes, Bennett’s Phylactery replied to Surowiecki saying:

BAP called it

HBD [Human Biodiversity = race realism] acceptance as a matter of fact doesn’t solve anything

You have to actually confront the moral question

There are at least two reasons why rightists fail to recognize that hereditarianism is the cure for wokism.

First, some people on the right have trouble seeing liberals as rational agents. But, as I explained, history shows that liberal elites have a fairly good record of changing their political views in response to information. Left/liberal elites gave up the dream of genuine equality among individuals in response to evidence that blank slatism is wrong and communism doesn’t work. They were the first to give up fundamentalist religion. Meanwhile, conservative thought leaders are still talking about demons, questioning the germ theory of disease, and advocating economic policies that smart people have recognized as ridiculous since the 19th century.

Second, many rightists mistakenly project their own (or their own side’s) intellectual dishonesty onto liberals. On the right, arguing in bad faith is the norm. For example, for many years, the standard argument against Jews and Indians was that they are bad because they vote Democrat. In 2024, many prominent Jews and Indians came out in favor of Trumpism. This triggered a tidal wave of racism among rightists who said that actually Jews and Indians are bad no matter what they do. Many people on the right assume that liberal elites are as dishonest as they are, and any justification liberals give for their views is a smokescreen. That’s not to say that there aren’t bad-faith actors on the left, and some good ones on the right. But history shows that many liberal elites respond to evidence in a way that most rightists do not.

In Search of a Unicorn

Wokesters defend the taboo on hereditarianism with such ferocity because they know what is at stake. If the empirical premise of wokism is acknowledged to be wrong, the ideology collapses. Some wokesters may have doubts about the equality thesis in their hearts, but they have to at least pretend to believe it in order to justify their position.

There is not a single, prominent race communist who accepts hereditarianism with respect to group differences. But wait...what about Kathryn Page Harden and/or Freddie deBoer? Neither one of these people is a counterexample.

DeBoer is a Marxist who thinks it is unfair for individuals to have better or worse outcomes based on their innate abilities. He refers to “the racist notion that some races are smarter than others,” which he “reject[s].” He expounds: “Some immediately assume that these discussions of genetics and IQ must result in ‘race realism’, the racist notion that black people are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than white....My interest in behavioral genetics...lies in individual differences, not group differences.” He explicitly endorses the logic of wokism:

I reject race science and believe that the racial achievement gap is the product of environmental differences between races, the multivariate and complex ways that structural racism alters outcomes....[Our goal is] eliminating racial and gender imbalances in our educational distributions, so that the number of students from various demographic categories in the upper echelons of performance matches their numbers in society writ large. No more racial achievement gaps, no more lower averages in SAT math for women. Precisely because I don’t believe that there are any inherent racial or gender differences in intelligence, I believe such a world is possible....”

Harden advocates redistribution to correct for the unfairness of the “genetic lottery,” which endows individuals with different talents. In regard to race, she claims “there is zero evidence that genetics explains racial differences in outcomes like education.” She describes scientific investigation into race differences as “scientific racism” and “racist rhetoric” that is “empirically wrong,” “morally blinkered,” and “pseudoscience.”

However, Harden implies that if, hypothetically, race differences in intelligence were heritable, she would still be a race communist. “[I]f we are interested in making our commitment to racial equality ‘genetics-proof,’” she says, “we must dismantle the false distinction between ‘inequalities that society is responsible for addressing’ and ‘inequalities that are caused by differences in biology.’” In other words, society would be morally responsible for fixing racial inequalities caused by genes.

That is a logically possible position. The question is whether it is politically viable. Currently, wokesters have the moral high ground. They point to massive racial disparities as proof of injustice, and no one can effectively rebut them because of the taboo on talking about hereditarianism. Imagine wokesters pivoting to the claim that whites have an obligation to compensate other races for disparities caused by genes, which are not anyone’s fault. Some people might accept that. After all, there are hundreds of millions of people in the Western world. You can find a handful of eccentrics who hold whatever crazy view you can think of. But there is no evidence that Harden’s dystopia will appeal to large numbers of people, let alone that it will become a new orthodoxy with the cultural capital of wokism.

Another piece of evidence that people wouldn’t accept Harden’s argument for hereditarian race communism is that almost no one accepts her argument for hereditarian individual communism. Harden has been widely dismissed as a Nazi by her fellow leftists, who (rightly) perceive that hereditarianism in any form is a mortal threat to their ideology.

The Day After

Suppose I’m wrong, and the left clings to race communism even after accepting hereditarianism. This wouldn’t be all bad. We could at least have a political debate that’s grounded in reality. Hereditarian race communists might demand quotas and wealth transfers. But, when it comes to basic facts, they would be living on planet Earth. If they recognized that disparities are the fault of Mother Nature, they would have no need to blame whites for imaginary racism, or to cancel people for microaggressions. The Grievance Industrial Complex could not continue in its present form.

But we don’t need to speculate about what a hereditarian leftism would look like, because it already existed. As I discussed, before hereditarianism became right coded, there were liberal and socialist race realists. Many of them advocated eugenics and/or a limited amount of paternalism and charity (“white man’s burden”) for the lesser endowed groups. Among hereditarian leftists, even the literal socialists didn’t adopt views resembling wokism. Hereditarian leftists today would probably favor genetic engineering and embryo selection as a way to elevate all races. Nothing inherent to leftism makes hereditarian race communism inevitable.

There is no remotely plausible scenario where, in a post-hereditarian world, everyone becomes a race communist. Whatever happens, there will be strong pushback against new incarnations of wokism. And the right will be in a much stronger position than it is now. For generations, the right has been on the defensive, unable to give a convincing rebuttal to the left’s moral argument: all groups are innately the same, but massive disparities persist, ergo an injustice must be corrected so that outcomes are equalized. An alternative argument that evolution has shortchanged some populations, and it falls on higher-performing groups to compensate them, does not shock the conscience in the same way. Post hereditarianism, the right-wing position will become much more attractive: some inequality is built into nature, and it is better to just make peace with that fact.

Due to ongoing litigation, we weren’t able to talk about the most recent controversy he was involved in. I will simply note what is public information, namely, SUNY Fredonia is shutting down its philosophy department, which will have the effect of terminating its only member (Steve).

Timestamps

00:00 – How Steve got in trouble

2:05 – Do we really need to attack every taboo?

36.49 – The contradictions of institutionalized philosophy

1:18:15 – What is racism?

1:29:44 – Do people differ in value?

1:40:48 – Closing

On April 17, researchers led by Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge announced that they had detected dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of K2-18b, an exoplanet 120 light-years from Earth. On our planet, dimethyl sulfide is only produced by living organisms. It is emitted in large quantities by certain species of algae, and gives the ocean its special smell. The presence of this chemical on K2-18b might be the strongest evidence ever recorded for alien life.

Candace Owens is one of the most popular podcasters in America. On April 17, she also had an announcement to make. She did her own research on astronomy and concluded that the moon landing was “fake and gay.” She told her millions of followers: “You need to learn the history of NASA, of the Apollo programs, which were a cult and satanic....They just wanted people to believe in scientific advancement.” Owens has come to similarly unorthodox conclusions on many topics including WWII, the history of communism, and, of course, Jews and Israel.

Obviously, Candace Owens should have free speech to express her opinions. At the same time, a healthy society needs mechanisms to ensure that people like her don’t have an outsize cultural influence. When it comes to astronomy, for example, the voice of Madhusudhan, not Owens, is the one that should be amplified. In some ways it is. Madhusudhan is a professor at Cambridge, publishes his views in peer-reviewed astronomy journals, and gets covered in the New York Times. Twenty years ago, that’s all that would have mattered. But now, Owens, Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, or Russell Brand can go on Spotify, YouTube, or Twitter and reach a larger audience than the New York Times. They might even swing elections. Rogan & Co.’s support for Trump may have tipped the balance in his favor.

People who don’t trust “experts” now look to podcasters and other alt-media figures—many of whom (including Rogan and Brand) are comedians—to decide what to believe about everything from WWII to vaccines to Ukraine to tariffs. The result has been a proliferation of ignorance with disastrous consequences for our culture and public policy.

Uneducated podcast bros have not found a magic shortcut to knowledge. Even on Covid, they have not outperformed actual experts. However, it’s true that many so-called experts are fake and/or corrupt. Blind obedience to credentialed authority (associated with the left) or trust in a “marketplace of ideas” that rewards brain-rotting infotainment (associated with the right) are both failed strategies.

The Flame War

Last month, Sam Harris criticized the king of alt-media, Joe Rogan. According to Harris:

When [Joe] brings someone on to just shoot the shit about how the Holocaust is not what you think it was, or maybe Churchill’s the bad guy in WWII, or he’s got Dave Smith being treated as an expert on Israel and Palestine, and the history of that conflict....[Smith is] a pure misinformation artist on top of many others....Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe has interacted with information....It’s...avoidable. He could actually take the responsibility that really is his to take at this point to get his facts straight.

The week after that, Rogan hosted a debate between Douglas Murray and the aforementioned Dave Smith. Murray is the British face of Conservatism, Inc. He went to Oxford, writes books with footnotes, and hangs out with academics. Smith is an American comedian who recently started a second career as an Israel critic and opponent of the West’s support for Ukraine.

Before the debate even started, Murray (channeling Harris) complained that Rogan is platforming people who are “not experts.” Murray attempted to list the non-experts but mixed up their names. He became histrionically shocked when Smith admitted that he had never been to Israel. “You’ve never been?!...I have a journalistic rule of trying never to talk about a country even in passing unless I’ve at least been there.” (Critics pointed out that Murray has talked about countries he hasn’t been to.)

Harris then invited Murray onto his own podcast to celebrate his performance in the debate with Smith. Both Harris and Murray agreed with each other that expertise is real, and even Joe Rogan understands that expertise is real when it comes to topics that he knows about. Besides being a comedian, Rogan is a mixed martial artist. He would never invite a self-taught amateur onto his show to talk about the fine points of grappling. He would want to hear from someone who has real experience as a fighter or a coach, i.e., an expert. (This point was also made by Triggernometry host Konstantin Kisin.)

Harris and Murray are technically correct, but they’re missing the point. There’s a reason why people became tired of so-called experts. The “expert” class face planted about five times in a row. The podcast bros argue they have a better track record of sussing out the truth on controversial topics. Smith said this explicitly during the Rogan debate. Murray said that “[the solution is] to have more experts around.” Smith retorted: “The expert class hasn’t done a great job....This is ‘follow the science.’” With regard to vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the lab-leak theory, Smith said: “I will put my track record against any of the expert class on Covid.” DarkHorse Podcast host Bret Weinstein said that, on Covid, Joe Rogan’s record was “Pretty great.” Weinstein continued:

whether we’re talking about Covid origins, whether we’re talking about vaccine safety and effectiveness, whether we’re talking about repurposed drugs, whether we’re talking about how to understand the evidence of harm in the aftermath of these things—Joe Rogan figured it out. How? Through exactly the mechanism that Douglas Murray is arguing against right here. Douglas Murray is arguing, you’ve got to have standards, you can’t just put on people who are reporting things that, you know, they’re not even experts. Well, the non-experts actually did figure out how to follow the evidence and reach the correct conclusions. And a bunch of us figured out how to dodge the freaking shots, and I don’t know a single person who’s sorry they did.

As I mentioned, Harris and Murray say that Joe Rogan wouldn’t platform a rando with no serious training in martial arts to talk about MMA. If someone passed himself off as an MMA commentator, and his only credential was that he watched some old kung fu movies, Rogan would have no interest in hearing his opinion. But suppose the guy who learned kung fu from movies started fighting in the UFC, and beat the top Brazilian jiu-jitsu experts to win the Championship Belt? Rogan would definitely invite him onto his podcast! The podcast bros believe that they are in the position of that kung fu master outsider. You couldn’t persuade Rogan not to interview the self-taught UFC champion by insisting that we need to honor the expertise of jiu-jitsu black belts.

A Two-Sided Problem

At the height of our society’s “expert” worship, credentialed technocrats told a bunch of self-serving lies, imprisoned people in their apartments for two years, and then said that anyone who questioned them was a racist conspiracy theorist. Almost the entire academic and media establishment covered for them. On top of that, we are told that people with PhDs in how smells are racist are also “experts” before whom we must genuflect.

But the fact that some people with fancy credentials are corrupt, fallible, and/or frauds doesn’t mean that expertise isn’t real. Some people have knowledge and training that make their opinion more credible and worthy of attention than the opinion of a rando comedian with a microphone. Responding to Sam Harris et al., Glenn Greenwald attacks a straw man when he says that “you can become an expert in a particular field without necessarily having degrees from top universities.” No one is denying that. Almost all knowledge is available on the Internet for free. In theory, you can become an expert on almost anything without stepping foot onto a university. Scott Horton is a radio host who, based on public information, may not have gone to college at all. He knows the history of the Russia–Ukraine conflict backwards and forwards, and he wrote a well-sourced book arguing that Putin was “provoked” into war. Whether his conclusion is right or wrong, it’s rooted in deep knowledge of the subject, not some factoids he picked up from Twitter or Wikipedia.

But consumers of alt-media have largely given up on the notion of expertise, at least when it comes to politicized topics. When every credible economist on earth says that Trump’s tariffs are going to be a disaster, they say, “Nate Silver failed to predict the 2016 election, so maybe Oren Cass (a lawyer), Batya Ungar-Sargon (a Marxist English major), and Catturd are just as likely to be right about tariffs as people who know how to draw supply and demand curves (whatever those are).”

Defenders of the alt-media point to Covid as the great event that discredited the experts. But the lessons of Covid are not what people think they are.

Six Bowls of Bat Soup

A Racist Conspiracy Theory

In 2018, the US-based EcoHealth Alliance in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the University of North Carolina came up with a plan to genetically engineer a furin cleavage site into the spike protein of a bat coronavirus. In a draft of their proposal, they bragged that their work would be “highly cost-effective” because it would be conducted in a Biosafety Level 2 laboratory. (BSL-2 requires safety measures equivalent to those taken in a typical dentist’s office, such as wearing latex gloves.) EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal was rejected for funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Nevertheless, in November 2019, several researchers at the WIV became ill with a mysterious flu. By December 2019, bodies were piling up on the street because the morgues were out of space. The “Wuhan flu,” later given the more politically sensitive name of Covid-19, turned out to be a novel bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site in its spike protein.

In the US, the public face of the government’s pandemic response was National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Anthony Fauci. Under Fauci’s leadership, the NIH had given millions of dollars to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research. In a paper published in 2012, Fauci acknowledged that gain-of-function research, which involves making naturally occurring viruses more virulent, might cause a pandemic due to a lab accident, but he said it was worth the risk. In his words:

Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.

A group of scientists—several of whom would have been directly or indirectly implicated in a lab leak, including Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance director Peter Daszak—announced that there was scientific proof that the virus had a natural origin. A letter published in the Lancet, which was signed by 27 scientists including Daszak, stated: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin....Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice.” Another letter signed by five scientists and published in Nature declared that “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” According to “science,” the only explanation for Covid that wasn’t a racist conspiracy theory was that Chinese people got infected from bats that were being sold for food in a wet market in Wuhan.

Some of the scientists were outright lying. Regarding the Nature letter, an article in the New York Times recently reported: “we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the [lab-leak] scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely.” One of the authors of the letter, Kristian Andersen, wrote a Slack message saying: “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Establishment apparatchiks rallied behind the party line. A Washington Post headline in February 2020 referred to the “coronavirus [lab-leak] conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” In May 2020, the fact-checking organization PolitiFact ran a headline referring to the “debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab.” PolitiFact asserted: “The claim is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” There were many similar examples. Under pressure from the Biden administration, Facebook deemed discussion of the lab leak to be a violation of its Terms of Service and not allowed on its platform.

Flattening the Curve

On March 16, 2020, the US government announced that we had “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” Fauci promised that, if everyone fell into line, we could “flatten the curve” and get the virus under control. 15 days turned into two plus years of lockdowns and social distancing.

During the lockdowns, people were forbidden from seeing their dying relatives or going to their funerals. Children and young adults spent some of their most formative years in social isolation. When they were allowed to interact with other human beings, they were forced to wear masks and/or stay six feet away from each other despite the fact that the virus posed almost no serious risk to otherwise healthy young people. Anyone who questioned this was written off as a dangerous science denier.

In June 2020, more than 1,200 medical professionals signed an open letter declaring that, in the name of public health, social-distancing restrictions shouldn’t apply to Black Lives Matter protests. They explained: “the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters’ demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.” It became obvious that many medical professionals were using the moral and legal authority they had been granted to advance a leftist political agenda. The mainstream media, which came down hard on lockdown skeptics, took the side of the BLM protesters.

Students at a high school in Washington State in 2021 demonstrate how “science” says you should live when you aren’t participating in a left-wing protest

Noble Lie: Vaccines

On May 16, 2021, after the Covid vaccine became available, Fauci went on television and said that it would provide “well over 90% [protection] against the disease,” “it is very unlikely that a vaccinated person...would transmit [Covid] to someone else,” and vaccinated people are “a dead end to the virus.” Around the same time, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky said: “Our data from the CDC today suggests...that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real world data.”

The government’s internal documents showed that there was no scientific basis for these claims. A report by the Food and Drug Administration published in December 2020 stated: “Data are limited to assess the effect of the vaccine against transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from individuals who are infected despite vaccination.” This was still the state of our knowledge in May 2021. Apparently, Fauci and Walensky exaggerated the known benefits of the vaccine in order to encourage people to get the shot. As it turned out, the vaccine lowered the risk of serious illness but had only a modest effect on transmission rates.

Noble Lie: Masks

In March 2020, Fauci ordered Americans not to wear masks because (a) masks don’t work and (b) we needed to save masks for healthcare workers. This is what he said in an interview on 60 Minutes:

Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks....When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences—people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face....It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.

Just a few weeks later, on April 3, he reversed his position and became a fanatical proponent of masks. Soon he was telling people that they should wear two masks.

During a Congressional Hearing in July 2020, Fauci was asked if he regretted not telling people to wear masks sooner. He indignantly explained that, when he told people masks don’t work, he was lying because he didn’t want regular citizens buying up Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that was in short supply:

At that time there was a paucity of equipment that our healthcare providers needed, who put themselves daily in harm’s way taking care of people who are ill. We did not want to divert masks and PPE away from them to be used by the people. Now that we have enough, we recommend [that people wear them]....

I’m not saying mask mandates were a good idea. The point is that Fauci admitted to lying, and he was not held accountable in any way.

Philosopher King

In 2021, Fauci said that “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” He added that critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” The mainstream press largely accepted the idea that there was no legitimate criticism of Fauci. Leftists showed their commitment to science by buying Fauci action figures and wearing T-shirts with his face printed on them.

Plato said that people should be ruled by philosopher kings. (“Philosopher” literally means “lover of wisdom.” In ancient Greek it referred to something like “scholar/scientist.”) According to Plato, philosopher kings should tell “noble lies” to maintain the social order. One could argue that a political figure should be forgiven for lying in the service of a noble cause when the result is unambiguously positive. But Fauci lied mainly to protect himself and his friends, and to manipulate people in ways that would obviously backfire and cause them to lose trust in medical authorities.

“I represent science”

Russian Disinformation

Although it wasn’t directly related to Covid, the Hunter Biden laptop incident was a big part of the story of how the establishment discredited itself. In October 2020, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was running against the incumbent Donald Trump. A few weeks before voting day, the New York Post published an article, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad,” which potentially implicated Joe Biden in corruption. The Post’s source was a tranche of emails obtained from a laptop that Joe’s drug-addict son (and close advisor) Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. Five days later, the fact-checking news site Politico published a headline, “Hunter Biden Story Is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.” 51 former intelligence officials wrote an open letter stating that the New York Post’s story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The Post’s article was blocked on Twitter, and distribution was limited on Facebook under its policy against sharing false information. After the election, the mainstream press admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop story was 100% correct.

The True Lessons of Covid

According to the podcast bros, the lesson of Covid is that the experts were wrong, but Joe Rogan was right, therefore expertise is fake and you should get your information from Rogan and his “interesting conversations.” Here are three actual lessons.

(1) Experts have the same human nature as non-experts

People need to let go of the fantasy that “experts” or “scientists” are angels who act only for the greater good and aren’t corrupted by power. Experts can lie and make risk/reward calculations that heavily weigh their own selfish interests at the expense of everyone else.

Making a dangerous virus via gain-of-function experiments may seem rational from the perspective of an individual researcher. In the best case scenario, he gets funding for his project and publishes a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. (Theoretically, information from GoF research can help scientists predict future viral evolution. In practice, it is unclear whether this has any actual benefits for public health.) In the worst case scenario, a virologist accidentally rubs his eye, gets infected, and a genetically engineered supervirus escapes from the lab and kills a chunk of the world’s population. (A lab leak isn’t such a fanciful possibility. A paper in the Lancet documented 309 “laboratory-acquired infections” and 16 pathogen escapes across the world between 2000 to 2021.) In most cases, the scientist is probably thinking about the glory of publishing a paper and writing another line on his CV. The rest of us, who don’t benefit from that, would probably prefer that the dangerous pathogen was never made in the first place.

Experts lie to avoid personal accountability and get people to do what they want. Trusting science doesn’t mean trusting scientists. People with PhDs have the same human nature—with both its angels and demons—as everyone else.

(2) The experts largely got it right—they just lied

Scientists, not Joe Rogan, sequenced Covid’s genome, developed a way to test for the disease, created an effective vaccine, derived the antiparasitic medication ivermectin from avermectin (a substance produced by a soil bacterium), and figured out that ivermectin doesn’t cure viruses. So why are we supposed to be impressed with Rogan but not scientists? Scientists told some noble and not-so-noble lies. That might be morally bad, but it doesn’t mean the scientists were wrong.

After prominent figures including Rogan touted ivermectin as a Covid treatment, some health authorities branded it as “horse dewormer.” This was misleading if not technically a lie. (Ivermectin is used as a dewormer in animals including horses and humans.) In this case, their motivation was noble—to scare people away from following Joe Rogan’s dumb and dangerous advice. You can argue that they shouldn’t have misled people. But nothing about this shows that Rogan was smarter than the experts.

From day one, many scientists knew—or at least strongly suspected—that Covid came from a lab. In the end, real evidence for the lab leak wasn’t discovered by Joe Rogan, who knows nothing about viral phylogenetics or furin cleavage sites. The first high-profile figure to publicly make the case for a lab leak was Nicholas Wade. Wade has a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge, worked as an editor at Nature and Science, and was a science editor and reporter at the New York Times for many years. He got his information about Covid’s origins from professional virologists. Now the torchbearers of the lab-leak theory are Alina Chan and Matt Ridley. Chan has a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from UBC and is a postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Ridley is a science writer with a DPhil in zoology from Oxford.

(3) Podcast bros largely got it wrong—except when they had the relevant expertise

On June 18, 2021, Bret Weinstein appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said that “ivermectin alone, if properly utilized, is capable of driving this pathogen to extinction.” (Ivermectin has no meaningful effect on Covid unless you’re infected with parasites.) When Rogan got Covid, he treated it with ivermectin. He was widely criticized for this by experts, and the experts were right.

While interviewing the comedian Tim Dillon, Rogan said that he wouldn’t get vaccinated because he already has antibodies from the time he got Covid and treated it with ivermectin. “It doesn’t make any sense” to get the vaccine, he said. He was wrong. “Hybrid immunity” (infection + vaccine) would have made him less likely to contract Covid again, or to get seriously sick if he got reinfected.

In December 2021, Rogan interviewed Robert Malone, a biochemist who played a role in developing mRNA vaccines before he become an anti-vaxxer. During the interview, Malone falsely claimed that there had been an “explosion of vaccine-associated deaths.” They both suggested that when Joe Biden got the Covid vaccine on television, he was given a fake shot. Their evidence was that the person administering the shot to Biden didn’t aspirate the syringe. (Aspiration is when you pull back the plunger to make sure the needle didn’t penetrate a blood vessel.) In reality, this wasn’t evidence of anything. CDC guidelines say that you should not aspirate a syringe when administering vaccinations. Rogan said that one-out-of-a-thousand people who are vaccinated against Covid get “significant injuries like myocarditis.” He was citing a study that had been retracted for being wrong. In reality, the Covid vaccine is less likely to cause myocarditis than Covid itself.

Regarding lockdowns, Rogan made the evidence-free claim that “It makes things worse, you know why—because people go inside, they are trapped inside, and that’s where it spreads.” This was incorrect. Lockdowns did lower transmission. The reason to be against lockdowns is that the harm they caused was probably greater than the benefit, not that people are more likely to spread the disease when they are alone watching porn and Netflix in their apartment. Many health authorities favored lockdowns because they saw things from a narrow medical perspective. But whether or not lockdowns were justified was a moral/political question, not a medical one. Theoretically, anyone was entitled to have an opinion on lockdowns as long as they (unlike Rogan) had their facts straight.

In September 2020, Rogan said that Covid probably came from a lab, but “obviously I don’t know whether or not it came from a lab or whether it came from people eating bats.” In March 2021, he interviewed commentator Jamie Metzl, who called for an investigation into a possible lab leak.

I publicly stated that “It seems highly likely that the coronavirus leaked from a lab studying bat viruses” on April 17, 2020—five months before Rogan. But you didn’t need to be an expert in virology to make this call. You just needed to look at publicly available evidence, and have the social intelligence to see the hallmarks of a coverup. It took journalists a long time to catch on because most of them lack basic critical thinking skills, and their heuristic is to trust people in positions of authority (especially scientists) even when they have obvious conflicts of interest. Rogan may lack critical thinking skills, too, but at least he has a reasonable degree of social intelligence and skepticism—i.e., he has the qualifications needed to spot an obvious lie. Ultimately, neither Rogan nor I made a scientifically informed case for the lab leak. As I said before, that was done by people with expertise in virology.

Who Deserves to Have an Opinion?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist turned YouTuber. She argues that CERN’s plan to build an expensive new particle accelerator is a mistake, and physicists should focus on resolving inconsistencies in their current theories and data. Many of her peers strongly disagree. Critics on Internet message boards have hurled obscenities at her. A group of physicists working at CERN tried to get her fired from her then position at the Perimeter Institute.

What am I, a non-physicist, supposed to make of this squabble? What Hossenfelder says sounds persuasive to me. As a philosopher of biology, I have views about how science ought to work, which seem to line up with hers. But it would be grossly irresponsible for me to adopt a strong position on particle accelerators. It would be doubly irresponsible for someone with a large platform to invite me onto their show to pontificate about how physicists need to change their ways.

That doesn’t mean I can’t have a tentative opinion, or ever talk about the issue publicly. I might mention that there’s a debate about whether to build a new particle accelerator, and Hossenfelder expressed a position that seems reasonable to me. But I would be clear about the fact that I’m not an authority on the subject myself, and I don’t think the decision about whether to build the Future Circular Collider should be made by me. Just as I wouldn’t pass myself off as a physics expert, I wouldn’t invite someone with my level of physics knowledge onto the Cofnas Podcast to shoot the shit about particle accelerators.

Darryl Cooper calls himself a “storyteller.” He likes to tell stories about how the standard account of World War II is wrong. For example, in an interview with Tucker Carlson that has thirty-five million views on Twitter, he says: “maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic, maybe, [but] Churchill was the chief villain of the second world war.” According to his story, Hitler actually wanted peace, and Churchill was bribed into going to war by “Zionists.” Also, millions of Soviet POWs under Nazi control perished due to poor logistics rather than ill intent. Tucker Carlson introduced Cooper as maybe “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” A couple months ago, Rogan also interviewed Cooper, allowing him to spread his message to an even larger audience.

Many of Cooper’s claims can be easily refuted in ways that people who are not experts on WWII can understand. He refused to debate the eminent historian Andrew Roberts because he knew he would lose. As Cooper wrote to Roberts: “As much as it would be an honor to meet one of my favorite historians,...I’ve read enough of Mr. Roberts’ books to know how that would go for me.” He prefers to talk to people like Carlson or Rogan who are unwilling and/or unable to challenge him. Roberts published a devastating response to Cooper documenting some of his errors.

Douglas Murray told Rogan that a non-expert like Cooper shouldn’t go around challenging the expert consensus on history. Rogan replied that “Darryl Cooper does not think he’s an expert,” and Dave Smith said “it’s everybody else who’s always calling him an expert, and he’s like, I’m just a history nerd.” Murray was quite right to push back on this. It’s not that a (near) expert consensus can never be wrong. But, if it is, this will be discovered by someone who knows at least as much as the experts, not someone who is ignorant of basic facts. Cooper should not be talking publicly about history. (Obviously, I mean “should” in a moral, not a legal, sense.)

Dave Smith gets basic facts wrong in ways that reveal deep ignorance and intellectual irresponsibility. For example, he tells his audience that Churchill described WWII as the “unnecessary war” because “he was looking back at it and going, man, okay, yeah, we really shouldn’t have done that. That turned out to be a huge mistake.” According to Smith, Churchill admitted that it would have been better if the West hadn’t stood up to Hitler after the invasion of Poland. In Andrew Roberts’s words, “the ignorance is just astonishing.” Churchill said that WWII was an “unnecessary war” because it could have been prevented if the West had taken his advice in 1934 to rearm and adopt a more aggressive stance against Hitler from the beginning. The idea that Churchill admitted it was a mistake to go to war after Hitler started his rampage is ludicrous, and contradicted by the text of his book, which Smith presumably didn’t read.

On Rogan’s show, Smith falsely asserted that the Soviets agreed to give up communism in 1991 in exchange for a “promise” and “deal” that was both verbal and “put in writing” that “NATO would not expand one inch to the east.” In fact, a verbal proposal to not expand NATO eastwards had been made to Gorbachev by US Secretary of State James Baker in 1990 during the negotiations over German reunification. (This was a year before anyone was seriously anticipating the collapse of communism.) The White House didn’t approve of Baker’s idea. The Soviet government signed an agreement that allowed NATO to expand (with some restrictions) into East Germany and said nothing about NATO expansion into other countries.

The problem isn’t that Dave Smith makes mistakes—everyone makes mistakes. The problem is that, if you think Churchill regretted going to war with Hitler, you don’t know the first thing about Churchill. If you think the West made a solemn promise in writing that, if the Soviets gave up communism, NATO would not expand one inch to the east, you will have a profoundly distorted view of the present conflict. (I used these two mistakes for the purposes of illustration. There are other examples.) Smith is like one of the French teachers in Scottish primary schools who doesn’t speak French and tries to stay one chapter ahead of his students. Suppose the French teacher says the same thing that Smith said to Harris: “What did I get wrong? Point to something I got wrong!” Sure, I can give you a list of things you got wrong—you conjugated savoir incorrectly, you got the gender of livre wrong—but this misses the bigger picture. The problem is that you don’t speak French and therefore you shouldn’t be teaching it.

What about anti-vaxxer Robert Malone? Is it a good idea to give him a huge platform to tell people not to get vaccinated? It’s true he has a good claim to be an expert in vaccines. And, if experts disagree with each other, the non-expert shouldn’t automatically side with the majority. But Malone makes many claims that intelligent non-experts can evaluate, and he’s often wildly inaccurate. Since there is clearly something wrong with his reasoning ability, it’s rational to defer to the consensus of the experts whose minds are not obviously impaired. (I would make similar comments about the revisionist historian David Irving, who appears to be the source of many of Darryl Cooper’s ideas.) An epistemically healthy society would ignore Robert Malone.

Last year, Rogan interviewed the writer Coleman Hughes. Rogan asserted that Israel killed “30,000 innocent civilians” in Gaza, and was therefore committing genocide. First, Hughes corrected his statistic. According to Hamas, 32,000 people had been killed, not “innocent civilians.” Israel claimed to have killed 13,000 soldiers. Taking those numbers at face value, it would imply a civilian to combatant death ratio that’s pretty normal for urban warfare. Rogan replied, “I see what you’re saying if you wanted to look at it cold and objectively” (as opposed to emotionally and inaccurately?). Then Hughes made the obvious point that you can’t live in a world where terrorists get a free pass to commit atrocities as long as they run and hide behind their civilians. Rogan said: “I appreciate your perspective. I see what you’re saying. You clearly know more about it than I do.” It was clear from the exchange that, besides having a tenuous grasp of the facts, Rogan hadn’t considered basic questions about the ethics of war. This is not the kind of person who should be broadcasting his opinions on serious topics to millions of people.

Who should pontificate about Israel if not Joe Rogan and his comedian friends? Douglas Murray and Sam Harris say we need to hear from “experts.” But what does it mean to be an expert on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict? In order to have an opinion, do you need expertise in all relevant subjects: history, archaeology, political science, religion, military science, genetics, Middle Eastern languages, and just war theory? Should no one comment unless he has eight Ph.D.s and follows hourly updates on the war in Gaza (and, of course, has been there)?

There are different aspects of the conflict (or any complicated situation), and no mortal can grasp everything there is to know about it. But for someone’s opinion to be worth sharing with millions of people, they should meet at least two conditions. First, they should achieve some level of intellectual seriousness. They should, for example, grasp the difference between killing combatants vs. innocent civilians without this needing to be explained to them. Second, they should have least some claim to expertise—to knowledge that goes beyond what you pick up from scrolling through Twitter and watching TV—that justifies handing a megaphone to them.

How to Follow the Science

I get it, people are sick of hearing that there’s a “scientific consensus” and “experts agree” that leftists are correct about whatever they wish to be true. Journalists attribute every claim they make to an expert, where “expert” is defined as anyone vaguely connected to the subject who agrees with the journalist’s narrative, while anyone who disagrees is ipso facto a “non-expert.”

For example, in 2019 I published a paper in Philosophical Psychology defending research into all possible causes of race differences in intelligence, including genes. There was a petition to retract the paper and fire the journal’s editors. This is how the controversy was described in Inside Higher Ed: “Scholar makes argument in favor of race-based research into intelligence, but experts in that subfield say it’s an unnecessary plea that doesn’t square with scientific realities.” At the time, I was a doctoral student at Oxford working in the philosophy of biology, had published extensively on evolutionary theory and related topics, and had just published specifically on the topic of race differences in a respected peer-reviewed psychology/philosophy journal. The “experts” the journalist cited to oppose me were Mark Alfano (a philosopher who started the anti-Cofnas petition, does work on “epistemic humility,” and wants Trump supporters to be killed), Quayshawn Spencer (a philosopher of biology who acknowledged to me that he never read my paper), and Joseph L. Graves (a biologist who works with fruit flies). Apparently, anyone who agrees with the journalist and is willing to provide a quote can be an expert!

However, the fact that the leftist establishment plays games like this doesn’t mean that we should just give up and listen to Candace Owens or Russell Brand. Sometimes we should listen to people who know what they are talking about—namely, experts.

Thomas Young was a British physicist who played an important role in decoding the Rosetta Stone. He has been described as “the last man who knew everything”—in other words, who mastered all the knowledge of his time. He died in 1829. Since then, there has been an exponential growth in knowledge. No matter how smart you are, it is impossible to be a true Renaissance man. You have to take most of your information on faith. A big part of being a critical thinker is having good heuristics about whom to trust, not trying to understand everything for yourself.

Many areas of “scholarship” are fake, existing only to promote left-wing activism. Sometimes it’s easy to figure out where a field falls on the fake-to-real spectrum. Experts in aeronautics have tangible accomplishments like airplanes that can fly, so you can be confident that aeronautics isn’t totally made up. On the other hand, critical theorists produce zero evidence that they have special insight into anything, and they make obviously wrong claims about observable reality (for example, about sex differences). Critical theory falls on the fake end of the spectrum. Most fields will occupy some intermediate position, perhaps closer to one end or the other.

Suppose a field is (largely) real and there is a (near) consensus among people who are trained in the field that, in regard to some topic that they study, X is correct. That is strong evidence in favor of X. Of course, many experts might be biased in favor of X. Universities might create incentives to espouse X. But it’s very unlikely that everyone with expertise relevant to X will have the same prejudices, or be so corrupt that they are willing to lie if they think X is wrong. If the whole community agrees, the best explanation is that arguments for X really have the strongest pull.

That doesn’t mean you should accept claims about “consensus” uncritically. You should ask: Is the consensus actually real? Is it being enforced via external pressure? And so on. Unless you find a really good reason to think that all the experts got it wrong, it would be absurd for you as a non-expert to disagree with them.

In a large community, it’s inevitable that there will be an occasional crackpot who acquires some credential and then veers off into la-la land. For example, there are perhaps several thousand Americans with serious economics bona fides. They include individuals from across the political spectrum. They disagree on many issues large and small. They vote Republican, Democrat, and libertarian. They have different views on gun control, tax policy, and immigration. However, virtually all of them say with one voice that Trump’s tariffs are moronic and will fail to achieve their aims. The two apparent exceptions are Peter Navarro and Stephen Miran, both of whom have Ph.D.s in economics from Harvard and support the tariffs. Navarro is notorious for being incoherent and angry during interviews. In six of his books, he cites a fictional economist named “Ron Vara” (an anagram of “Navarro”) for support because he struggles to find actual authorities who agree with him. Miran has a single, coauthored publication in a second-tier economics journal, and is not a genuine expert at all. In such cases, it is appropriate to dismiss the cranks.

A more difficult case is when an alleged consensus is opposed by someone who isn’t a crank. Richard Lindzen—a chair professor emeritus of meteorology at MIT—is one of the most prominent climate scientists in the world. Against the majority, he thinks that climate change is not something to freak out about. (If you examine Lindzen’s position carefully, it might not be as far outside the mainstream as it first appears. But I’m not going to get into the weeds of this debate.) If the expert (near) consensus is wrong, someone has to point it out, and that person will start off in a small minority. That’s how scientific progress happens. You can’t dismiss minority views as a matter of principle. However, as a non-expert, you’re generally not in a position to adjudicate these debates. All things being equal, the non-expert should assign a higher probability to the dominant view, because that has a stronger pull on the majority of people who know what they’re talking about. (Climate change is a highly politicized issue and all things might not be equal in this case. But the conceptual point still stands.)

Suppose the experts disagree: Do minimum wage laws increase average earnings for low-skilled workers? Are there race differences in intelligence? Should we spend thirty billion dollars building the Future Circular Collider? First, you can look for clues about whether advocates of one position or the other have biases or conflicts of interest. When it comes to the question of race differences in intelligence, for example, many “experts” on one side have stated openly that they take their position for moral rather than scientific reasons. That’s something to consider. Second, note that you don’t have to take a stand on every issue. If experts are split and you have no way to know whom to trust, you should probably treat both positions as equally likely to be right.

Finally, if experts advocate X, you have to ask is their expertise relevant to X? Many medical professionals said that both lockdowns and BLM protests were necessary for the sake of public health. In both cases, expertise in medicine was irrelevant to the moral/political question of how to balance the physical health of the population, freedom, the psychological development of children, the demands of activists, and so on. When people try to invoke their authority as “experts” when it isn’t appropriate, they should be treated like anyone else with an opinion.

Fixing Alt-Media

Twenty years ago, if you were (fairly or unfairly) blackballed by establishment media, your options included standing on the street with a sandwich board, printing fliers, mailing out a newsletter, or holding in-person conferences. Realistically, you couldn’t compete with CNN or the New York Times in terms of reach. Ubiquitous high-speed Internet in the 2010s created a marketplace of ideas that didn’t exist before. The floodgates really opened in 2022 when Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it a “free speech” platform with almost no attempt to enforce any standard of accuracy or ethics.

We now know who is rewarded in an unregulated marketplace of ideas—at least on the right. It’s people who appeal to the intuitions of the lowest common denominator in the most entertaining way. Winning ideas include anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, WWII revisionism, drinking unpasteurized milk, vaccine denial, moon landing conspiracy theories, fascism, the notion that Americans would be happier working in factories, and the theory that America is being “screwed” by Madagascar because we spend more on their vanilla beans than they spend on food and medicine from us. Some of these bad ideas are being implemented into policy by the Trump administration. Three-and-a-half months of what Alex Kaschuta calls “government by meme” has destroyed trillions of dollars in American wealth, irreparably harmed our global status and influence, and set the stage for a global left-wing backlash.

Dave Smith mocks Sam Harris for thinking that alt-media figures with large audiences should enforce intellectual standards. Smith says:

There does seem to be something so inherently anti-democratic in this [Harris’s] worldview that like...everybody’s just too stupid to figure it out except for you and a small cabal of people. The rest of us are all just too dumb that like, man, if Joe Rogan is allowing lies to be told on his podcast, then I’ll guess we’ll all be fooled into believing them. Then how can you trust people to have the right to vote?...Like, the common person just isn’t smart enough to figure all this shit out.

But that’s exactly right. If Dave Smith goes on Rogan’s podcast and says that Churchill admitted it was a mistake to fight Hitler, many people are not going to “figure it out.” Even if you have a live debate where one side spews lies while the other side has a chance to correct them, many people in the audience are just going to believe whoever they think is more charismatic, or whatever sounds truthier.

As for this observation being “anti-democratic,” there’s a reason the Founding Fathers explicitly created America as a republic rather than a democracy. A recent survey of US adults found that 9% have a favorable view of the Black Plague, and 17% “don’t know” how they feel about the plague. And that’s without Joe Rogan bringing a bunch of plague apologists onto his show. Garett Jones’s book 10% Less Democracy should arguably have been called At Least 26% Less Democracy. Flattering the intelligence of the “common person” is a good way to get a big audience. But huge numbers of people are going to latch onto disastrously wrong ideas unless elites exercise some paternalistic control over their informational environment.

Sam Harris’s solution to the misinformation problem is for Joe Rogan to “take the responsibility that really is his to take...to get his facts straight.” But a system that depends on one man acting responsibly is inherently unstable. In any case, Rogan appears to have no interest in taking Harris’s advice. His audience will continue to reward him for providing them with more Dave Smiths and Darryl Coopers.

Instead of begging Rogan, Bret Weinstein, et al. see the error of their ways, people like Harris and Murray should focus on creating alternative institutions that embody the values they want to see. (I don’t mean hosting their own podcasts, but building actual institutions.) That would mean enforcing standards among their friends as well as their political opponents—something they may be reluctant to do. Demands for rigor and expertise shouldn’t be used selectively as weapons against people we disagree with. We can’t criticize Darryl Cooper but say nothing when Jordan Peterson pontificates on philosophy and argues that dragons are real.

Social status on the right is determined mainly by how much attention you can generate, regardless of the quality of that attention. People who appeal to the lowest common denominator rise to the top. The right won’t be able to attract large numbers of cognitive elites—and therefore won’t be successful—if it doesn’t create alternative tracks for people and ideas to gain influence. Nietzsche says: “Far from the marketplace and from fame happens all that is great.” I think there are occasional exceptions to that principle. But, when it comes to ideas, the marketplace rewards “space is fake and gay” a lot more than “there’s dimethyl sulfide on the exoplanet K2-18b.”

Batya Ungar-Sargon is a self-identified Marxist who supports Trump because he is waging “class warfare” and “tell[ing] Wall Street to screw itself.” She looks forward to Trump’s tariffs taking us back to the 70s because:

“Back in the 70s...the majority of the GDP in America was in the middle class. That’s kind of like the golden era...when the economy was really healthy, and working-class people felt that they could afford a middle-class life. 25% of our economy was in manufacturing.”

The idea that the economy was better in ye olden days was a message of Oliver Anthony’s viral song from a couple years ago, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” According to Anthony, “your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end.” He also complained (somewhat paradoxically) about “folks in the street [who] ain’t got nothin’ to eat” while “the obese [are] milkin’ welfare.”

Two days ago, Trump’s tariffs came into effect. He called this “liberation day” because (as I understand it) he believes the tariffs will restore manufacturing in America and free us from the rest of the world that is “ripping us off.”

The actual effect of the tariffs will be to halt the American economic juggernaut, discredit the anti-woke movement, pave the way for a left-wing populist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, stop the right’s momentum in other countries, and bring an end to Pax Americana, which is the masking tape holding the pieces of the world together.

Historically, the American right was better than the left on economics. But as the Republican Party degenerated into a low-IQ cult of personality, this was unsustainable. The benefits of free trade are counterintuitive, and require a certain degree of intelligence to understand. On average, people who believe in capitalism have higher IQs. If you chase all the smart people away from your movement, your economic policies will come to reflect the intuitions of below average people who think that trade is inherently exploitative and only workers who make physical objects add value. The base will demand that we return to a simpler time when Americans worked in factories, life was easier to understand, and we didn’t have so many vaccines.

Trump was elected largely because he was the anti-woke candidate. His executive orders on DEI were a cause for celebration. But the point of fighting DEI is to pave the way for something better—not merely to attack leftists for its own sake. If we destroy America and go back to living in caves, then we will have “won” the war on woke, but that’s not the kind of victory that we should aspire to. The goal is to bring about a better world.

Here I will explain how MAGA communism is based on lies and delusions, and everything is about to blow up in our faces. A reality-based movement needs to accept the following facts:

• until Trump came back the American economy was better than ever

• income inequality has not increased since the 1970s

• taxes are paid mostly by the rich

• people deny the aforementioned facts out of ignorance and/or for political gain

• mob rule by ignoramuses is not an effective long-term strategy to fight wokism

American Is Rich

A hundred years ago, Charlie Chaplin made films where he plays an industrious hobo who frantically runs around looking for work so he can afford to buy a piece of bread. Many people are under the impression that millions of Charlie Chaplins are running around America unable to catch a break, but that there was a “golden age” in the 70s when the average factory worker could afford a house, family, and car on just his own income. In reality, there has been an explosion in wealth since the 1970s. The kind of poverty that existed in the 70s—not to mention Charlie Chaplin’s time—doesn’t exist anymore. If people feel poor, in most cases it’s because their desires have become inflated along with their standard of living. If you’re an able-bodied person and think you can’t afford to live the lifestyle of a Detroit autoworker in 1975, it’s because you don’t want to live like him, not because you can’t buy whatever he had and more.

There are a few methods to compare economic conditions across time. Consider GDP per capita.

GDP measures the sum of goods and services produced by an economy. It is equal to the sum of consumption spending (spending on new goods and services), business investment, government spending, and exports minus imports. (Imports are subtracted because GDP is a measure what is produced by an economy.) To measure the strength of the economy relative to population size, we can divide GDP by the number of people to get GDP per capita.

How do we compare GDP across time, say, in 1975 (the height of the supposed golden age) vs. 2024 (the end of Biden’s presidency when eggs became more expensive)? We could just run the calculation mentioned above. But, due to inflation, this would overestimate growth. Suppose the economy didn’t grow at all, but a dollar in 2024 was worth a tenth of what it was in 1975. GDP (or “nominal” GDP) will be ten times higher, although nothing important actually happened.

How do you control for inflation? You compare how much it cost to buy a basket of goods—e.g., an apple and a banana—in 1974 vs. 2024. Suppose an apple and banana cost 20¢ each in 1974 and $1 each in 2024. To adjust for inflation, you could multiply 1974 nominal GDP by 5 (to express it in 2024 dollars) or divide 2024 GDP by 5 (to express it in 1974 dollars). In practice, this can be misleading. Suppose there was a banana blight in 2022 that made the price of bananas jump to $2, so many banana eaters switched to buying pears for $1. Your formula says people have gotten poorer after adjusting for inflation, but they are still getting comparable fruits for what is effectively the same amount of money. If you compare the price of many goods, this should largely cancel out.

Real GDP per capita in 2017 dollars in the first quarter of 1975 and 2024 was, respectively, $27,690 and $67,981. That’s an increase of 146%.

This statistic, however, seriously underestimates how much the economy has improved since 1975, in part because it doesn’t account for differences in what you can buy. It’s not only iPhones, Wi-Fi, and temperature-controlled water kettles. Apples are bigger and juicier. Cars and airplanes are safer and cleaner. We have an unimaginable amount of choice, and almost anything we want can be delivered overnight. Most of that isn’t captured by comparing GDP.

When it comes to individual well-being, consumption is more relevant than GDP. For the past 50 years consumption has been going up in a straight line. In the first quarters of 1975 and 2024, real personal consumption expenditures per capita (in 2017 dollars) were, respectively, $4,820 and $9,951—an increase of more than twofold. This measures how much money people actually spend on goods and services, adjusted for inflation.

We can look at another metric: “time price.” Human Progress reports how many hours the typical blue-collar worker has to put in to earn enough to afford 75 finished goods ranging from a vacuum cleaner to gloves to jogging shoes in 1979 vs. 2019. (This doesn’t account for the fact that the amount of choice and quality of all these things is far superior today.) The time price of everything fell by an average of 72.3%. So if a typical blue-collar worker in 1979 had to work 1 hour to buy something, on average his counterpart in 2019 had to work 16 minutes 37 seconds. The only item whose time price increased was a gold necklace, which rose by 3.1%.

Source: Human Progress

Economic progress isn’t driven primarily by Charlie Chaplin screwing in bolts in an assembly line faster than before. It’s driven by technological progress and greater efficiency. Efficiency is a matter of the distribution of effort and resources. The Wall Street fat cats who extend credit, manage risk, and provide other financial services were instrumental in that. A philosophy of “tell[ing] Wall Street to screw itself” so Americans can return to factories is not going to lead to more wealth creation.

Across borders, people are more efficient at producing different kinds of goods. Countries with cheaper labor have an advantage in producing labor-intensive products like fabric. More educated countries can produce advanced technology like cell phones. Then they trade fabric for cell phones, and everyone gets something they want. Tariffs prevent free trade, which will reduce wealth.

Recently, a video came out of a man on the sidewalk in New York City eating a rat. The replies were full of people blaming the cameraman for not buying the man a hot meal, as if he had resorted to eating rats because there was no other food available. This shows how delusional some people are about the nature of poverty in the United States. I grew up in New York in the 90s and 2000s. High school students needed to do community service for their college applications, so there was an army of young people looking to do good deeds. Because everyone wanted to work in the soup kitchens, only kids from the most politically well-connected families were able to obtain one of these cushy spots. There simply weren’t enough poor people to meet the demand of the do-gooders. And America has become a lot richer since then. If the man eating a rat so desired, he could find rich college-bound high school students to give him a bath in soup whenever he wants. (That would make a great college application essay.) In reality, the homeless problem in America (not just New York) is almost entirely a problem of drugs and mental illness, which has little to do with the economy.

Rob Henderson was raised in foster homes, enlisted in the military at age 17, went to Yale on the GI Bill, got a Ph.D. from Cambridge, and became a successful writer. He tells an anecdote about his friend who worked part-time at Burger King, and complained about not getting enough hours. One day they were at Applebee’s, and Henderson noticed a help wanted sign:

I told my friend to ask for an application. He replied in a mocking tone, “You ask for an application.” I got one and together we filled it out for him. He got hired. Then, when he was scheduled to start his first day on the job, he simply didn’t show up.

He quotes comedian Adam Carolla, who grew up in poverty: “Everyone I tried to help from my old neighborhood has told me to fuck myself.”

My point isn’t that the world is fair or some people don’t have real disadvantages. But if you show up on time and pass a drug test, you can get a decent-paying blue-collar job in the US. There are currently 6.8 million unemployed Americans and 8 million job openings. If you talk to anyone who hires blue-collar workers, they’ll tell you that the problem is getting people to show up. Even if your only concern were providing jobs, we don’t need manufacturing jobs when there are plenty of other opportunities right now.

Did the Greedy 1% Rake in All the Gains?

If Elon Musk spends a trillion dollars to build a pyramid for himself, this could increase GDP per capita without reflecting a significant increase in the condition of the median person. According to a popular view, GDP has gone up only because the rich got richer while leaving everyone else behind.

This is a false. The top 1% share of income after taxes, transfers, and benefits hasn’t changed since 1960. (See the bottom line of the graph below.) The myth that wealth inequality is exploding comes from studies of tax returns. But people at the bottom of the income scale are less likely to get married relative to 20 years ago, which means they file taxes separately—so average income per tax return goes down while household income does not. Also, more of their income is not taxable or picked up by tax returns relative to the past. When corrections are made, the result disappears.

Source: “Recent Research on Income Distribution”

Income is not the same as wealth, and therefore income inequality doesn’t always track (whatever we mean by) wealth inequality. Wealth is a much more slippery concept than income. You might think wealth is “whatever is in your bank account plus how much you could sell all your stuff for.” This formula sounds reasonable if you’re a student with a debit account and a footlocker full of books and clothes, but it doesn’t work so well when we apply it to more complex cases. Take a Harvard Law School graduate with $5,000 in the bank, $100,000 in student loans, and a $150,000/year job at a law firm in New York. Is his “wealth” negative $95,000? Every time the stock market goes up, Elizabeth Warren tweets that Elon Musk “made” X-billion dollars and he should pay a wealth tax on it. (She doesn’t say anything when the stock market goes down.) But Musk can’t actually sell his stock or it would crash. Taylor Swift could sell her underwear for tens of millions of dollars. Does that count toward her “wealth”?

This isn’t to say that wealth isn’t a real phenomenon (obviously it is, even if you can’t clearly define it). But it’s separate from income, and insofar as there is wealth inequality, this doesn’t say much about how the economy is distributing resources. After-transfers income inequality has not increased since the alleged “golden age.”

Poor People Don’t Pay Federal Income Taxes in America

Semi-employed Oliver Anthony complains about the dollar being “taxed to no end.” But he probably doesn’t pay a lot of taxes—at least not federal income taxes. The graph below shows the total percentage of income earned and federal income taxes paid by income bracket. Most taxes are paid by Americans earning more than $500,000/year. On average, people making less than $100,000 get money back.

Source: Heritage Foundation

Millionaires earn around 15% of the total income and pay 39% of federal income taxes. Their average tax rate is 3.5 times higher than it is for the rest of the population.

There is nothing for Oliver Anthony to worry about, unless he became a millionaire from the lucrative conservative grifting circuit.

Why Does No One Say This?

The myths that I just discussed are easily debunked. Why do they persist?

Our political system doesn’t incentivize people to acknowledge when things are okay. Everyone needs to present himself as the solution to a crisis. If a politician says that we just need to stay the course, he sounds like he doesn’t care about your problems, and he’ll lose to the guy who sounds more hysterical.

In 2022, there was an outbreak of bird flu, which caused an increase in the price of eggs. The US economy was doing well in other respects. Although covid triggered inflation across the world, the inflation rate was relatively low in America. Nevertheless, Trump got people to be fixated on the price of eggs, as if this represented some massive failure of Biden’s economic policies. For some reason the Democrats were unable to explain that eggs are not the be all and end all of the economy, and this may have contributed to their loss in the presidential race. (Trump promised to lower egg prices on day one of his presidency, which of course didn’t happen. You can’t make bird flu go away by talking tough to it.)

I know from personal experience that people get very angry if you point out that America isn’t the third-world hellhole that they want to believe it is. For example, in 2023, after I pointed out the absurdity of Oliver Anthony’s song, there was a mass pile-on by conservatives calling me an out-of-touch elitist for sharing facts. Political commentator Ryan Girdusky replied (in a tweet that was retweeted by Ann Coulter): “How dare the working-class feels screwed!!! Don’t they know how much worse it is in Uganda or back in 1870?” According to Girdusky and Ann Coulter, what matters is how conservatives feel, not objective reality. J. D. Vance responded: “Never mind that food prices have risen substantially over the last two years and life expectancy has dropped.” But even if covid caused inflation to rise and life expectancy went down, this doesn’t make Oliver Anthony’s false claims true. Vance would never admit this because there can be nothing good about America as long as his political opponent is in power. Then Mike Cernovich of “Pizzagate” fame went full communist and declared that “The vast majority of the rich don’t add value” and “your neck is 13 inches.” (This was followed by a totally non-gay discussion by hundreds of Trumpists about the details of my neck.) Most people in public life don’t want to face the mob, so they just go along with people’s delusions.

The Consequences of Stupidity

I have been sounding the alarm that the anti-woke right needs to appeal to elites. Mob-rule by morons is not going to be successful in the long run. We need to ask why most smart people lean woke, and come up with a message that can draw them away from the left. I have discussed elsewhere exactly how we can do this.

Trumpists think that wokism triumphed because it had power on its side. The way to defeat it is simply to take power for ourselves and smash everything that leftists have built. Curtis Yarvin says we just need a king who will impose his point of view on society. (Yarvin thinks the king should be J. D. Vance.) Christopher Rufo also calls for a power-first strategy.

I say that this is backwards. Wokism has power mainly because smart people were attracted to the ideology in the first place. Important institutions are staffed by cognitive elites, and, because they lean woke, the elites use their positions of influence to advocate for wokism. There’s a limit to how much you can accomplish via pure bullying. Yes, you can fire government bureaucrats and strongarm universities to axe their DEI staff, but you’re not going to change anyone’s views that way. You can’t build effective alternative institutions with a bunch of Twitter trolls.

The term “fascist” is used as a generic insult, but Trumpism has essentially become 1920s-style fascism. The original point of fascism was to combine nationalism with socialism under the leadership of an authoritarian state. Toward these ends, Mussolini ordered job-making public-works projects and nationalist economic policies. Although it wasn’t an explicit part of the ideology, fascism was also associated with thuggery, which is increasingly the MO of the Trump administration.

If Trump goes through with his tariffs and isolationism, this will have many effects, but probably not the one effect that he intends, namely, bringing back manufacturing jobs. Tariff policy has been changing on a weekly basis, and all of the tariffs could well be rescinded after Trump leaves office. No one is going to start building factories in the US when they don’t know what policies will be in place when the factory is ready to operate.

As for the negative effects: The tariffs have already crashed the stock market, and they will raise inflation. There is a high probability of stagflation (stagnation plus inflation). Trump’s economic warfare and nationalist rhetoric has discredited the MAGA movement in the eyes of the vast majority of non-Americans, thus weakening the MAGA-adjacent anti-woke right in other countries. For example, the conservatives in Canada were on track for an easy victory in the next election, but are now losing after Trump kept threatening to annex their country.

Trump’s impending failure may set the stage for a left-wing backlash. If the next president is a Democrat, he or she (I wouldn’t rule out AOC or someone like her) is going to use Trumpian means to undo what Trump did. This is one of the problems with Yarvin’s king idea. What happens when the other side’s king takes power?

The past few decades have been the era of Pax Americana. Uncle Sam runs around the world putting out fires, making everyone play nice, stamping out pandemics, and preventing less enlightened countries from bringing back slavery or biological warfare. Uncle Sam also presides over the rules-based order that makes cooperation and free-trade possible, and has enabled the “Long Peace.” America Firsters see us spending a small amount of money on other countries, and demand that we cut off the freeloaders. But the consequences of the collapse of the international system will penetrate the borders of America. Pandemics in Haiti can’t be kept out by a wall. If China decides to gobble up all of Asia—and maybe Africa, too—it will eventually pose a threat to us, even given the false assumption that America can achieve autarky. Trump’s plan to alienate our allies and abandon our historic role will create a poorer, more chaotic, and more dangerous world for everyone.

Timestamps and sources

0:27 – Why no one wants to read peer-reviewed philosophy

MH: “Publishing in Philosophy”

50:40 – What is wokism?

MH: Progressive Myths

NC: “Was I Wrong about Woke?”

1:05:05 – Vegetarianism: For and against

MH: Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism

NC: “Is Vegetarianism Healthy for Children?”

F. Leroy & NC: “Should Dietary Guidelines Recommend Low Red Meat Intake?”

1:26:00 – Is ethics real?

MH: Ethical Intuitionism

MH: “A Liberal Realist Answer to Debunking Skepticism”

NC: “A Debunking Explanation for Moral Progress”

NC: “How Gene–Culture Coevolution Can—but Probably Did Not—Track Mind-Independent Moral Truth”

2:17:27 - Closing

I claim that wokism is a rational response to the equality thesis (all groups have the same innate distribution of potential). Therefore, it won’t be stopped without a hereditarian revolution. Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania argue that wokism followed from a “long march through the institutions” and civil rights law, respectively. They say that it will disappear when we muscle our way back into the institutions and/or change the laws. If Trump just ended wokism by signing some executive orders and changing the leadership at key institutions, that would disprove my model and vindicate Rufo and Hanania.

The right is on a winning streak. However, nothing has yet happened that I didn’t explicitly say was possible. When I presented my theory of wokism in January 2024, I said that “Trump [could be] reelected and issue[] executive orders commanding schools and businesses to treat people as individuals.” But I said that this would not by itself win the support of elites or change the long-term trajectory of our culture.

The false hope that wokism can be beaten without a hereditarian revolution stems from a misunderstanding of what the ideology is. The fact that Laurie Penny’s define woke tweet a couple weeks ago elicited thousands of replies, with virtually no correct answers, indicates that the vast majority of people on the right still don’t understand what is driving the left.

Mainstream anti-woke activists have rallied behind the ideal of “colorblindness,” which Rufo calls “The only hope for a diverse nation.” As I explain below, I do not think Rufo et al. have thought through what would happen under a truly colorblind regime. Racial disparities would be enormous—much greater than they are now. As far as I am aware, no advocate of colorblindness has revealed what he plans to tell people in the post-woke utopia when they notice these disparities and demand an explanation.

This is not the first time in relatively recent history that the left has been on the defensive. In 2004, the left hated George W. Bush almost as much as it now hates Trump. The entire media, academic, and cultural establishment was against Bush. Nevertheless, Bush won reelection—including the popular vote—against his Harris-like, establishment Democratic opponent John Kerry. There was a “vibe shift” then, too. But four years later Obama was elected, and four years after that the Great Awokening began. Everything the right has gained in the past couple months could easily slip through our fingers.

Without a hereditarian revolution, we can mobilize the conservative mob to elect figures like Trump and J. D. Vance, get better laws on the books, and intimidate businesses into giving up explicit DEI programs. We can probably win the fight against the most noxious expressions of gender ideology. Those are all good things. But if we squander yet another opportunity to take on the race taboo, this round of conservative activism will end the same way as all previous efforts for the past 80 years—with capitulation to the left.

After I clarify the logic of wokism, I’ll discuss the prospects of the anti-woke movement in light of the Trump presidency, Rufo’s mistaken claim that hereditarianism has already been tried, problems with the ideal of “colorblindness,” some specific issues with the approach of Rufo, Eric Kaufmann, et al., and evidence that a hereditarian revolution may already be underway.

What Is Woke?

“What is woke?” is the right’s version of “what is a woman?”—a question that often short-circuits the brain and makes the rightist tongue-tied, nervous, and angry. A couple weeks ago, Marxist journalist Laurie Penny challenged anyone who claims to be anti-woke “to define—as specifically as possible—what they think ‘woke’ actually means.” Many conservatives replied that they would answer the question only after Penny defined “woman.” But the fact that gender ideologues struggle to say what a woman is doesn’t excuse conservatives’ inability to define woke. In both cases, a clear, non-deflective answer would expose embarrassing contradictions in the ideology of the mainstream left or right.

There’s no objectively correct way to define “woke,” or any other word. But it is an objective fact that something happened in the world around 2012, and intensified in 2020, which involved the left (and to some extent the right) doubling down on social justice and cancellations. If we agree that “woke” is supposed to refer to that, then there is an objectively correct definition, namely, one that identifies whatever it was that animated the left and caused the phenomena in question.

The failure to define “woke” has real political implications. In the long run, you are unlikely to prevail in the fight against woke if you don’t know what it is. You might even think woke is over and we can pack it in!

Taking the Equality Thesis Seriously

A definition of woke should do three things:

• identify what drove the post-2012 spike in social justice talk and cancel culture

• place the ideology in philosophical and historical context

• be more or less acceptable to wokesters themselves

Put in a negative form, a definition should not:

• confuse manifestations or side effects of wokism for the ideology itself

• conflate wokism with other ideologies or trends that are conceptually or historically separate

• be a straw man that makes it impossible to understand the logic and appeal of wokism or to have productive dialogue with wokesters

Armed with the correct definition, one can understand wokism’s appeal, map its relationship to other ideologies, and craft arguments that could theoretically be persuasive to those in the grip of its logic.

There is only one definition of wokism that meets the conditions listed above. As I put it in the “Guide”:

Wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If all races and sexes have the same innate distributions of psychological traits, disparities in socioeconomic status must be due to environmental factors. In practice, that means differences in outcome favoring whites or men will be attributed to past or present white racism or sexism. This triggers an all-consuming crusade against the hidden forces of discrimination.

To be clear, wokism requires two premises, one empirical (the equality thesis) and one moral (spiritual equality). You need both to generate the ideology.

The empirical premise of wokism was first articulated by John Locke in 1690 when he said that if you or I had been born in South Africa, we would be exactly like Africans and vice versa. His ideas were picked up by the French revolutionaries, then scientists like Alfred Russel Wallace, Alexander von Humboldt, Theodor Waitz, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead, and became a tenet of leftism and then mainstream conservatism.

Why the equality thesis became the orthodoxy in the absence of any compelling evidence is an interesting question. For what it’s worth, in his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant (a leading American anti-immigration activist and Nordic supremacist) attributed the “widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment” to “the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics.” Such wishful thinking was certainly a major factor. Carl Degler points out that, in addition, social scientists had professional incentives to downplay the influence of biology on both individual and group differences in order to increase the perceived importance of social forces. But you don’t need to explain where belief in the equality thesis comes from in order to explain what wokism is.

I say that wokism depends on “Christian morality,” although this requires some qualification.

Christianity teaches that God created individuals—and possibly groups—with different capacities. In the parable of the talents, three sons are given different endowments and judged based on what they do with them, not how much they were given (Matthew 25:14–30). But there is a principle of spiritual equality—or at least potential equality—among all of God’s children. Paul explains: “Glory, honor, and peace to everyone who works what is good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For there is no partiality with God” (Romans 2:10–11). “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Christians have often failed to live up to Jesus’s lofty ideals. Nevertheless, Westerners have espoused the doctrine of spiritual equality for almost two thousand years. Most atheists inherited their morality from Christianity, though of course they are unaware of this and believe that the principle of moral equality is based on “reason.”

Wokism doesn’t require Christian morality per se, but rather any morality that calls for equal treatment or the full realization of human potential. Although I reject the moral principle of equal “human worth,” I would be woke if I believed in the equality thesis, since I would like to maximize human performance. But I refer to the moral premise of wokism as “Christian morality” because it was Christianity that first formulated and popularized the idea of spiritual equality, and the secularized version of this principle supplies the moral energy for the left’s crusade against racism. The fact that there are obvious parallels between Christianity and wokism in practice—original sin (white privilege), confession (“I am a racist...”), repentance (“I promise to do the work...”), and so on—indicates that most wokesters are driven specifically by the morality of Christianity.

When you combine the equality thesis with Christian-derived moral sensibilities, the existence of large race (or sex) disparities is intolerable. If all groups are the same, differences must be the result of the environment. It is therefore necessary to fix the environment so that lower-performing groups can reach their potential. If the lower-performing group was previously the victim of actual discrimination—as is the case with people of African descent—it is logical to assume that the environmental cause of the disparities traces directly or indirectly back to past or present racism (or sexism). This leads to an ever-escalating war on racism (and sexism), which, in cases where disparities are due to genetic differences, will never end.

During the civil rights era, the standard leftist position was that legal equality would sooner or later lead to equality of outcome. Obviously, black people cannot reach their potential of they are enslaved or systematically discriminated against. But (the reasoning went) if the boot was lifted from off their neck, disparities would naturally fade away, like when Jews were released from the ghettos.

Legal equality was achieved in the United States with the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But it quickly became clear that, without further intervention, substantial gaps between blacks and whites would persist. Since activists were unwilling to question the equality thesis, they invented a body of theory (e.g., critical theory, critical race theory) to explain the failure of civil rights laws, and they instituted policies like affirmative action to achieve a degree of equality of outcome that would be impossible under a colorblind system.

The Great Awokening occurred when we reached a tipping point around 2012. Four years of Obama had failed to usher in a post-racial era. Everyone realized that another generation of affirmative action, Black History Months, and Kwanza wasn’t going to bring about equality. Brainwashed late millennials and zoomers—people who truly believed the Noble Lie that black, white, Jewish, and Asian people are all born on average exactly the same—arrived on college campuses and demanded an end to the unfairness.

The Great Awokening was catalyzed by developments in technology and changing institutional demographics. Social media made it easier to wind people up and organize cancellations. The feminization of our institutions, which was reaching a new high point, led to a greater emphasis on harm and empathy, and therefore more institutional support for the woke project. However, the conditions that facilitated the intensification of wokism should not be confused with the Great Awokening itself, which was a reaction to persistent group disparities.

The fact that many blue-haired, nose-ringed SJWs might be unable to clearly state the logic of wokism does not mean that my definition is wrong. Many Christians could not give a clear definition of Christianity, or communists of communism. People latch on to ideologies—or to superficial expressions of ideologies—for many reasons, and often without a deep understanding of their logical foundations. Not every action performed by a representative of an ideology will necessarily be consistent with the movements’ stated goals. But ideologies are generally developed and sustained by people who do understand their logic. Wokism is driven by more or less intelligent, morally sensitive people who believe in the equality thesis and are horrified at the persistence of racial disparities.

“Woke Is Everything Bad”

Conservatives often define “woke” as a laundry list of left-coded stuff that they don’t like: gender theory, socialism, drinking soymilk, affirmative consent, etc. But these things are all philosophically and historically distinct from the project of following the equality thesis to its logical conclusion. Suppose we outlawed transgenderism and neopronouns, made Rand Paul the Secretary of the Treasury, disbanded PETA, and kicked the HR department out of our bedrooms, but kept the obsession with white supremacy and racial bean counting. Everyone would recognize that wokism was still with us. On the other hand, if we became race realists, wokism would be over even if some race realists kept their pronouns in their email signatures.

The biggest mistake is conflating wokism with gender theory. Again, you can define the word “woke” however you like. But the project of taking the equality thesis seriously, on the one hand, and saying gender is a social construct, on the other, are separate phenomena. It’s possible to be a race communist and a TERF (there are many real-life examples), or to be a they/them race realist. The equality thesis comes out of a tradition of liberalism and blank slatism going back centuries. Gender ideology comes out of the gay rights movement, and it didn’t go mainstream until approximately ten years ago. These are different ideologies, which should be described with different words.

There is a real possibility that conservatives could win the war on the most extreme expressions of gender ideology. Outside of some far-left university departments, “gender affirming” mutilation of minors, biological men clobbering women in the boxing ring, and men in wigs abusing women in female prisons are not very popular. However, as I said in January 2024, “Wokism could survive a backlash against gender theory.” These are different fights.

Three Ways to be non-Woke

Since wokism is what happens when you take the equality thesis seriously given “commonsense” moral assumptions, there are logically three ways to not be woke:

First, reject the equality thesis.

Second, reject Christian morality, or any other morality that calls for equal treatment or the full realization of human potential.

Third, fail to realize that wokism follow from the equality thesis and commonsense morality due to stupidity and/or moral insensitivity.

As I’ve argued, the mainstream left and right both accept the empirical and moral premises that generate wokism. Smart people are more likely to see that wokism follows, so the elites lean left. The MAGA coalition is made up largely of conservatives who fail to understand that they ought to be woke, given their beliefs, which is why they struggle to craft a message that is compelling to most cognitive elites.

Hanania, Rufo, and Kaufmann have explicitly rejected my model of wokism. However, neither they nor anyone else has ever explained why DEI ideology doesn’t follow from the equality thesis and widely accepted moral principles. If all groups have exactly the same innate potential, how can we possibly not see it as a moral emergency to fix the environmental conditions that lead to massive disparities? Without hereditarianism, it is impossible to win an argument against a smart wokester who demands justice. Nonelites will continue to overwhelmingly lean woke, and they will thwart our attempts to retake the culture and institutions.

Hereditarianism Has Never Been Tried

A few days ago in a conversation with Eric Kaufmann, Rufo responded to my proposed hereditarian revolution saying:

[W]ithout even taking a position on the correctness of [Cofnas’s] analysis, my retort to that is, “but that position has been elaborated, you know, for decades.” There’s been somebody with some prominence making some variation of that argument. It’s the Charles Murray argument, The Bell Curve in that political correctness phase of the 1990s....[W]hen The Bell Curve came out, I remember it being this huge scandal....[It] had more publicity than probably any book since The Closing of the American Mind a decade prior. Yet it was radically insufficient....I’m just very hesitant about this idea that if we only had another paper, we could finally break through with the truth. I think that Cofnas in particular, presenting himself as someone who is willing to step into the breach with the truth is actually somewhat naïve. It’s like, well, okay, you present your paper, good luck. It strikes me as maybe the wrong focus for the work, but in fact, a better focus of the work would be to say how practically can these institutions change. That’s a question that it seems to me that very few people are asking and even fewer have answered. (46:55–49:28)

To be clear, my plan is not just to have another paper! As I said in the “Guide”:

Cultural change doesn’t happen automatically in response to an individual stating a radical idea, even if it’s a true idea backed up with lots of evidence. You can’t just publish a book or a tweet and say, “there was no revolution, I guess we have to give up.” For an idea to spread, millions of people have to argue it out over Thanksgiving dinner tables, water coolers, and dorm room hookahs. Prominent figures have to take a stand in favor of the idea, and show that they are willing to pay a price for their conviction.

Rufo himself argues that wokism triumphed after a “long march through the institutions.” The long march didn’t consist in Marcuse publishing a book and then a few scattered individuals expressing agreement with him. There was a large network and organizational apparatus doggedly advancing woke ideology. The right has never tried anything like that with hereditarianism. In fact, the mainstream right does the opposite: it cancels anyone who violates the left’s race taboos. For example, Jason Richwine—then a rising star in the conservative movement—was fired from the Heritage Foundation in 2013 when it was discovered that he mentioned some politically incorrect facts about race in his dissertation at Harvard University. Harvard was literally more open to evidence-based discussion of race than a leading conservative think tank!

The conservative establishment has decided that Charles Murray (and only Charles Murray) gets a pass to talk about some uncomfortable facts connected to race. However, to this day Murray has never made an unequivocal statement that differences between groups are rooted in genes. When he appeared on the Colbert Report in 2012, Cobert said: “People interpreted what you were saying [in The Bell Curve] as saying that there were racial and genetic components to black people scoring lower on intelligence tests.” Murray replied: “No, no, the book did not say that.” I’m not criticizing Murray. But Rufo can’t point to this as evidence that my strategy has been tested and didn’t work.

The vast majority of smart, educated people in the West have simply never been exposed to the evidence for hereditarianism, at least in a way that they can take it seriously. A real information campaign backed by establishment conservative institutions would have a very different result than what has been tried before.

The “practical” question of “how...institutions change” is important, and, as I have said, Rufoism is a necessary part of the solution to wokism. But cultural change isn’t driven solely by the raw exercise of power. A non-woke regime will have to gain the ideological support of a critical mass of intelligent, thoughtful people—far more than it has now. Regarding the dearth of elites on the right, Rufo himself has lamented how difficult it is to find competent and mentally stable individuals with right-wing bona fides to fill one or two positions at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo is now helping to orchestrate an attempted takeover of American universities. How does he expect to find tens of thousands of serious scholars on the right to be professors?

Kaufmann replied to Rufo saying that woke “was never really about outcomes....It was never really about necessarily bringing blacks up to the level of whites. It was really much more about moralistic virtue signaling, and it was an ideological belief” (49:34–50:21). But virtue signaling is a universal feature of all human morality, not an explanation for why morality takes a specific form. Christians virtue signal about how charitable they are. Online rightists virtue signal by trying to outdo each other in being anti-Semitic. The question is why leftists decided to virtue signal specifically by being race communists. Is it really plausible to think that the left would have the same obsession with race and racism if the black–white gaps had closed in the years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Everything wokesters do and say is exactly what they would do and say if they were taking the equality thesis seriously. Why not assume that it’s because that’s what they’re doing, and they would stop if the equality thesis were refuted?

The Problem with Colorblindness

Both Rufo and Kaufmann advocate “colorblindness.” Rufo says that “The only hope for a diverse nation is a regime of colorblind equality....[R]eformers should outlaw affirmative action and racial preferences of any kind.” What would such a regime actually look like? The chart below shows the percentage of Americans of different races within various IQ bands. Although blacks make up 14.4% of the American population, they are only 0.76% of Americans with IQs of at least 135, and 0.55% of those with IQs of at least 140—the level from which the most high-profile cognitive elites are likely to be drawn.

Estimated racial composition of the population of Americans at different IQ levels, assuming mean 85 for African Americans, 90 for Hispanics, 100 for whites, and 105 for Asians with a standard deviation of 15 for all groups. From Russell Warne, In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, Table 34.2.

Rufo et al. have never said what they plan to tell people after they get their colorblind meritocracy and elite positions become totally dominated by whites and Asians. Do they think people who believe in the equality thesis will not notice what happened, or just accept it without asking questions? In fact, they are setting the stage for a second Great Awokening. The only thing that would stop the cycle of wokism—and allow society to come to some agreement about how to deal with disparities in innate ability—is knowledge of hereditarianism among the elites.

Weakness of the Right

The American right has no coherent message or ideology besides being against the left. It has no good answer to the major issue of our time, which is the question of lingering race disparities. We have almost no effective institutions. We control literally zero serious PhD-granting universities. Even universities in solid red states remain in the hands of our opponents. Among graduate students and assistant professors at elite institutions, our representation is very close to zero percent. The right has been shut out of editing Wikipedia—the most influential source of (alleged) information in our society. Conservative culture revolves largely around figures who are some combination of grifter, crackpot, criminal, conspiracy theorist, anti-Semite, or racist-in-a-bad-way. We produce virtually no art, music, or literature. Right-wing discourse is dominated by people doing “physiognomy checks” on each other, calling Democrats pedophiles, and telling people not to get vaccinated and that they can cure their cancer with ivermectin. None of this was changed by the election of Donald Trump.

As I discussed in “Wokism Is Just Beginning,” surveys show that young people are decisively on the side of DEI and cancel culture. As millennials and zoomers start taking over universities, the judiciary, and government bureaucracies, the institutions are going to increasingly reflect their preferences. Even if Trump, Rufo, et al. had the power to appoint whomever they want as professors and government bureaucrats (which they don’t), they wouldn’t have enough competent, ideologically aligned people to staff even a fraction of these positions. As Rufo himself said to explain his recent hiring decisions at the Manhattan Institute, “the idea that there are ‘thousands of rw bros’ and undiscovered geniuses who would thrive in an institutional environment is simply not the case.”

In “Wokism Is Just Beginning” I cited a survey showing that Kamala “stay woke” Harris was beating Trump among voters under 30 by 2:1. Exit polling, however, indicates that Harris won the youth vote by only 11 points, lost by a point among men under 30, and tied with Trump among whites under 30. Eric Kaufmann suggests that surveys are less likely to reach young people not enrolled in college, so the exit polls are probably more accurate. However, this just means that the elite remains overwhelmingly on the side of woke. According to exit polling, voters with advanced degrees favored Harris by 21 points.

A Hereditarian Counter-elite

Among young (most millennial, virtually all zoomer) intellectuals on the right, race realism isn’t controversial. There is widespread recognition of the fact that the race taboo is the linchpin of the leftist sociopolitical order. While generational turnover as a whole will lead to an entrenchment of wokism, within the small world of conservative institutions, it may lead to more public discussion of the most important topic.

The only elites who currently side with the right in significant numbers are the tech bros. It is an open secret that this community is aware of race differences. Elon Musk frequently promotes HBD (human biodiversity) X accounts. To the extent that the right has won the support of elites—people who were instrumental in Trump’s victory and in setting his agenda—it may be due to the diffusion of information about hereditarianism. Far from being something that has been tested and failed, hereditarianism has proved itself to be the most potent means of de-wokifying elites.

I’m not saying that someone like Rufo should necessarily start publicly talking about race differences. People have different roles in the movement. But I would urge him and other activists to accept that race realism is going to be an integral part of a successful strategy.

Rufo says that “Conservatives...should begin educating and organizing a counter-elite of their own.” But he has no viable plan for doing this. As of now, we don’t have enough raw human capital to educate and organize an intellectual force capable of resisting the left. Rufo says that the principles of his proposed “counter-revolution” are “family, faith, work, community, country,” and “The task for the counter-revolutionary is not simply to halt the movement of his adversaries but to resurrect the system of values, symbols, myths, and principles that constituted the essence of the old regime.” This message isn’t going to win the elites, most of whom don’t care about conservative “symbols” and “myths,” and who want to press on to something new, not restore the values of Leave It to Beaver. The only idea powerful enough to draw talented people away from the left, and prompt them to create a system suited to our new reality, is hereditarianism.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:51 Social behavior vs. IQ

8:51 Rice vs. wheat farmers

16:14 Persistent race differences

19:30 Environmental explanations

28:55 Response to A Troublesome Inheritance

36:43 Academic censorship

39:53 Reforming academia

49:59 Origins of race denial

58:11 Making race realism mainstream

1:01:15 A racial hierarchy?

1:11:04 Academia after race realism

1:13:50 Groupthink and resistance to the lab-leak theory

1:20:43 Conclusion

In the year 1101, I could have produced a number of graphs showing that Christianity had peaked in 1096–1099. My first graph would plot the number of killings perpetrated in the name of Christianity, which fell precipitously in 1100. Production of swords with cruciform hilts also dropped off, and the percentage of Europeans aged 18–60 who agreed with the statement “It is important to wage Holy War for Christianity” had gone down slightly from its historic high in 1095. Just look at the data, I would have said, before being burned at the stake.

The problem with my data-driven argument that Christianity peaked at the end of the 11th century is that it was missing the bigger context. The Crusade, which, unbeknownst to me, would later be known as the First Crusade, was fought from 1096–1099. It ended not because Christianity was on the wane, but because the Christian extremists had achieved victory and there wasn’t much left to do.

The argument that wokism peaked in the early 2020s is similarly flawed. Obviously, the emotional intensity of 2020–2023 could not be permanently sustained. But instead of burning down police stations, social justice warriors are in our boardrooms, universities, and government bureaucracies putting their ideology into practice. Millennials, zoomers, and elites remain firmly on the side of DEI and cancel culture. Regardless of who wins the 2024 presidential election, wokesters are on a path to achieve absolute power in the next ten to thirty years.

Our institutions are largely controlled by boomers and gen Xers who lean toward classical liberalism. This is the demographic that stands in the way of the total wokification of America and other Western countries. But, to repeat Solomon’s observation, “one generation goes, and another generation comes.” In this case, generational turnover will mean the end of free speech, free thought, free association, due process, and everything else that millennials and (especially) zoomers think is less important than diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Once we understand what wokism is—namely, the inevitable consequence of taking the equality thesis seriously—it will be obvious why conservatives and classical liberals have lost the battle of ideas. The argument that we are “passed peak woke,” which recently got a boost from articles in the Economist and the New York Times, misinterprets the consolidation of the woke victory as a decline in the ideology’s power (like Crusaders buying fewer swords in the year 1100). The theory that the market punishes wokism (“go woke, go broke”) is not supported by evidence. The rise of millennials and zoomers will usher in a woke dystopia. There is only one way to escape this fate: attack wokism at its root, namely, belief in the equality thesis.

The Logic of Wokism

As I have explained before, the logic of wokism is simple: Races and the sexes have the same innate distribution of potential, ergo all group disparities must be the result of environmental forces. Given the persistence of massive disparities, there is a moral emergency to fix the environment and achieve equal outcomes. As long as environmental interventions fail to produce equality, we must intensify our efforts until we achieve success. Everything associated with “wokism”—witch hunts, cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, and so on—stems from this reasoning.

The empirical premise that generates wokism—the equality thesis—has been the orthodoxy among establishment intellectuals since the 1960s, if not earlier. Noah Carl argues that this is a problem for my account, since “all the evidence suggests wokeness is a phenomenon that emerged very rapidly between 2010 and 2015.” Why, he asks, was there a delay between acceptance of the equality thesis among elites and the Great Awokening? But there is a simple, two-part answer to this question.

First, it took a few generations for people to absorb the orthodoxy. Race denial began as a relatively transparent Noble Lie that most people probably went along with because it seemed like the nice thing to do. (Even the anthropologist Franz Boas, who promoted environmentalism in the early to mid-twentieth century, acknowledged that there are innate differences in the “mental make-up of the negro race and other races,” and that “it would be erroneous to assume...their activities should run in the same line.”) Each subsequent generation of children was subjected to increasingly intensive brainwashing until the Noble Lie was genuinely believed.

Second, the Great Awokening couldn’t start until after we had tried everything else. Believers in racial sameness originally thought that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s would lead to equality. When that didn’t work, they tried affirmative action, welfare, welfare reform, Head Start, No Child Left Behind, and countless other programs that also failed to equalize outcomes. We finally reached a tipping point around 2012. Obama had failed to live up to liberals’ messianic expectations. It was clear that another generation of affirmative action wouldn’t make a big difference. True believing late millennials arrived on college campuses and demanded an immediate end to the environmental conditions that produce inequality. This inevitably took the form of a hysterical search for hidden “racism.” The process may have been catalyzed by social media and the feminization of the institutions—two forces that Carl has highlighted. But, ultimately, wokism flows from a simple piece of reasoning rooted in the equality thesis, which was endorsed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 when he said: “We seek not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

Note that my account of wokism says nothing about gender ideology. The Great Awokening was a reaction to the persistence of race and (to a lesser extent) sex differences. It was the culmination of trends that began more than a century ago. Transgenderism more or less came out of left field circa 2015—previously it had been a fringe wing of the gay rights movement. Both ideologies reflect an inability to think biologically, and there’s a statistical correlation between wokery and gender confusion. But they are philosophically and historically separate phenomena.

If gender ideology turns out to be a fad but we retain the obsession with white privilege and racial bean counting, wokism will still be with us. On the other hand, if we all become race realists and accept that many racial disparities are the product of nature for which no one is to blame, wokism in any recognizable form will be over even if some race realists demand to be called “zir.”

In principle, there are three ways to undermine woke logic. First, bring about racial equality. But that obviously isn’t going to happen, because there are limits to how much we can correct for nature’s unfairness. Second, convince people not to care about the fact that environmental conditions cause people from certain races to have profoundly worse outcomes when it comes to average IQ, incarceration rates, wealth, health, and so on. This strategy is hopeless, and it probably wouldn’t even be desirable to abandon our moral commitment to helping people reach their potential. Third, teach people that the equality thesis is wrong, and many disparities are not the fault of white people or anyone else. This last solution is the only one that is realistic.

As long as elites accept the equality thesis, they will inexorably follow the logic of their belief up Mount Woke—sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but always up.

“We Passed Peak Woke”: A Case of Wishful Thinking

Circa 2012, there was a spike in the use of social-justice terms like “mansplaining,” “safe spaces,” “sexist,” “racist,” and “white supremacy” in major media outlets. After the death of George Floyd in May 2020, “mostly peaceful protesters” began a campaign of burning and looting, which they claimed would help end racism. Virtually every mainstream institution in the US from the American Ornithological Society to the American Medical Association ritualistically pledged allegiance to antiracism, using the same mind-numbing incantations about the need “do the work” and “educate ourselves.” There were mass purges of anyone thought to be an obstacle to “social justice.” For example, a Mexican American utility worker was fired because he was pictured cracking his knuckles in such a way that it looked vaguely like he was making an OK hand sign, and the OK hand sign looks like a W attached to an upside down P, which are the first letters of the words “White” and “Power.” Countless other people were summarily fired or ostracized for similar offenses.

Woke justice in 2020: Mexican American utility worker fired for cracking his knuckles so that his hand gesture arguably resembled the OK sign.

One of the first articles on the supposed decline of wokism was Musa al-Gharbi’s “Woke-ism Is Winding Down,” published in February 2023. He cited a graph from Eric Kaufmann showing that the rate of “cancel culture” incidents was declining.

Graph from Eric Kaufmann, cited by Musa al-Gharbi.

Al-Gharbi also touted the fact that companies “are walking back their aggressive symbolic commitments to social justice and quietly defunding the financial pledges they made to various activist groups and causes. Many are also making aggressive cuts to the DEI-related positions that ballooned in recent years.” He noted that Netflix rebuffed attempts to cancel Dave Chappelle in late 2021, and Disney toned down some of its LGBTQ propaganda following political backlash and “the box office failures of a number of high-profile movies promoting LGBT relationships.”

Let’s consider these points in turn.

Yes, there were fewer “cancel culture incidents” in 2022 compared to the preceding five years. Al-Gharbi interprets this as evidence that wokism is running out of steam. But a number of alternative explanations may be more plausible.

First, fewer people are being cancelled in part because there’s almost no one left to cancel. Noah Carl and Bo Winegard can’t be fired a second time. Stephen Hsu can’t be forced to resign from his position as vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State, because that already happened. In academia, practically every vocal opponent of wokism has been driven out of the profession or, if they have a position from which they can’t be easily dismissed (as in the case of Amy Wax), they are subject to endless harassment and punishment. (While I am not at liberty to comment on the details of my situation at the University of Cambridge, note that I am raising money for a lawsuit against Emmanuel College and potentially the University.) There are many filters to ensure that ideological nonconformists won’t make it past graduate school, let alone to the level of tenured professor. Similar mechanisms are in place at leading corporations, government bureaucracies, and birdwatching clubs.

Second, people who survived the purges of the past several years have learned to avoid being cancelled by bending the knee to wokism. To the extent that cancellations have eased up, it is partly because people have adjusted themselves to the new reality, or simply given up resistance.

Third, wokesters developed the confidence to be more selective in their cancellations. It didn’t actually serve the interests of their ideology to cancel the Mexican American utility worker for cracking his knuckles. Now that their position of power is secure, they can more carefully investigate offenses without demanding immediate action.

Fourth, we still have a historically high level of cancel culture incidents, and no reason to think that the absolute number is going to return to pre-Great Awokening levels.

The fact that businesses have cut back on symbolic social-justice actions and DEI positions also doesn’t have the implications al-Gharbi suggests. The goal of these businesses was to signal that they are on the “right side of history,” which they accomplished even if they didn’t always follow through on the unpleasant part (actually writing checks). And we don’t need as many DEI enforcers for the same reason we don’t need to hire people to enforce the ideology that women have the right to vote or you shouldn’t sacrifice your children to Ba’al. DEI is just something that (almost) everyone accepts.

The failure to cancel Dave Chappelle was not a blow against wokism. Chappell himself is woke, believing that racial disparities are due to racism. He made some jokes about transgenderism (which is a side issue), although even on this point he still largely supports the orthodoxy. His infamous Netflix special on transgenderism ends with his epiphany about how he needs to support his transgender friend.

Disney realized that most people, who are heterosexual, aren’t entertained by endless gay propaganda. This has nothing to do with a decline in wokism, which, again, concerns the cause of group disparities.

Last month, the Economist published a viral article making some similar points to al-Gharbi based on recent data. It purports to “quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business.” The article concludes that wokism “peaked in 2021–22 and has been declining ever since.”

Consider the first chart presented by the Economist to show that wokism is “nodding off”:

The first thing to notice is that the recent dip in four out of five measures of wokism is barely detectible, and levels remain at historic highs. There is no evidence here that the intellectual establishment is changing its position on race. The percentage of Americans agreeing with the statement that “Race is the most important issue in the US” has gone up and down with the news cycle, reaching peaks in the Trump years and after George Floyd. For this kind of question, many respondents probably say that the most important thing is whatever is getting attention at that moment. There is no evidence that society has given up on following the equality thesis to its logical conclusion.

Here’s another chart from the Economist, which is supposed to illustrate the demise of DEI culture:

I can repeat the points I made in response to al-Gharbi. The reason fewer academics are getting censured isn’t because dissidence is now being tolerated. How many dissident academics can you name who aren’t currently being subject to disciplinary proceedings and/or involved in litigation with their university? But the absolute numbers are down because there’s almost no one left to censure. In regard to DEI officers, dedicated ideological enforcers are in slightly less demand because they aren’t needed as much anymore. DEI has become a background fact of life that almost everyone takes for granted. If anyone steps out of line, punishment will be swiftly administered even if there is no official “DEI officer.”

What about the fact that some universities no longer require “diversity statements” from job applicants? Doesn’t that prove we’re winning the fight against wokism? This appears to be the position of the Economist. It points out that nine states banned universities from requiring diversity statements, and several universities including Harvard and MIT also stopped using diversity statements.

In reality, however, these developments mean very little. Universities in red states like Kentucky and North Dakota, where diversity statements have been banned by law, have many other ways to determine a job applicant’s political views. The laws will not stop hiring committees from discriminating against their political opponents.

What about the universities that voluntarily dropped diversity statements? This is best explained as a ploy to get Republican congressmen off their backs, not an ideological retreat. In the December 2023 Congressional hearings fiasco, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn arrogantly refused to give a clear answer as to whether “calling for the geocide of Jews” violated their code of conduct. There was an outcry among donors and politicians. Some universities realized the political utility of making symbolic gestures toward political neutrality. But they have no plans to hire non-wokesters. In fact, Harvard didn’t even really drop diversity statements, but simply renamed them “service statements.” (If you think “service statements” provide important information that is different from “diversity statements,” why didn’t Harvard ask for service statements before?) Anyone who writes about their service to the cause of free speech or colorblindness is not going to be hired by Harvard, where 2.9% of the faculty identifies as “conservative” or “very conservative,” and probably 0% of assistant professors.

At the end of the article, the Economist acknowledges “several reasons for caution”:

For one thing, although all our measures are below their peak, they remain well above the level of 2015 in almost every instance. What is more, in some respects, woke ideas may be less discussed simply because they have become broadly accepted. According to Gallup/Bentley University, 74% of Americans want businesses to promote diversity, whatever the troubles of DEI.

That is exactly right. Wokism has become a routine part of life with broad support for its goals (“diversity”) and little meaningful resistance. Therefore, there is less need for overt discussion or enforcement. Elsewhere in the article the Economist notes that “The share of new job listings that mention diversity continues to grow...as ever more firms add boilerplate about inclusivity at the bottom of ads.” Again, it is just a background part of life.

Not mentioned by the Economist is the fact that the woke agenda is being championed by the Democratic Party—the political party that represents America’s establishment elites. Christopher Rufo has documented how, under the Biden/Harris administration, the “federal government not only punishes and rewards individuals based on racial identity but also has dispensed billions of dollars toward building a DEI regime spanning government, academia, medicine, and contracting.” Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic presidential nominee, is on video saying, “We have to stay woke, like everybody needs to be woke,” and then cackling. She released a campaign ad in which she explicitly endorsed the logic of wokism, asserting that “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” There is no context that I’m leaving out. Harris literally says “everybody needs to be woke,” she understands this to mean that we will achieve equity when we have equal outcomes, and the Biden/Harris administration has already put this agenda into practice in countless ways. Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, has repeatedly claimed that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation” or “hate speech” (i.e., speech that wokesters dislike). Harris has overwhelming support from both the elites and young people. She leads Trump 3 to 2 among voters with postgraduate degrees and 2 to 1 among voters under the age of 30.

A couple weeks ago, the New York Times published an article, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?,” with the subheading, “A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.” Is the New York Times backing away from wokism? That appeared to be Christopher Rufo’s interpretation. He triumphantly tweeted:

When we launched the “abolish DEI” campaign last year, the Left criticized it as a fringe, right-wing plot. Now, the New York Times is advancing the same arguments and critiques. We are winning—and we will not stop until we abolish DEI and salt the earth over it.

Rufo is the most important anti-woke activist in the country, and I don’t want to take any wind out of his sails. But, unfortunately, this is not the right takeaway from the Times article. If you read it carefully, you will not find a single sentence that challenges the goals of DEI. It critiques DEI from the left, and makes the following specific complaints: DEI bureaucracy demands a lot of paperwork, well-meaning leftists are nervous about getting cancelled over misunderstandings, “D.E.I. theory and debates over nomenclature sometimes obscured real-world barriers to inclusion,” and DEI initiatives have failed to produce the hoped-for results. The top comment in the “NYT Replies” section says that “while I appreciate the goals of DEI, I haven’t seen meaningful results yet. Reading this article has helped me realize that the issue lies more with the execution rather than the intent.” The author of the article responded saying that the problem is taking “a movement rooted in political values and institutionalizing those values as an academic program.” Again, some perfunctory comments about “political diversity” notwithstanding, the Times is not challenging DEI values. To call this an attack on DEI is like saying Martin Luther attacked Christianity because he criticized the Catholic Church.

Go Woke, Go Broke?

According to the “go woke, go broke” theory, wokism is very unpopular, so businesses that promote this ideology are punished in the marketplace. This theory is not backed by the evidence.

First, everyone cites the same two or sometimes three examples of allegedly successful boycotts: Target, Bud Light, and (possibly) Disney. Even if all three of those companies went broke—which is not what happened—it still wouldn’t necessarily support the view that wokism is bad for business, since virtually all major businesses are woke.

Second, all three boycotts were a response to LGBTQ propaganda, not DEI per se. As I mentioned before, the Economist cites a Gallup/Bentley University poll which found that “74% of Americans want businesses to promote diversity.” No business has been boycotted for discriminating against whites, Asians, or men.

Third, the “boycott” of Target mainly took the form of physically harassing and/or making threats against its employees. In May 2023, Target released a statement saying:

[W]e’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work. Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior. Our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.

It’s true that Target’s sales and stock price decreased in the period after the “boycott,” but this may have been a consequence of post-COVID economic trends rather than the wrath of conservatives. A small number of individuals intimidated a business by making physical threats, there was a dip in revenue that probably had little or nothing to do with the boycott, and Target put out an official statement affirming its commitment to LGBTQ ideology. This is not the conservative victory it has been portrayed to be.

Fourth, Disney is doing just fine making the same race propaganda as before, with slightly less emphasis on gay and trans propaganda, which most people find boring. To the extent that they were hurt financially, it was through Ron DeSantis punishing them with the power of the state (taking away their self-governing authority in Florida). The boycott had little or no effect.

The boycott of the cheap beer brand Bud Light is the only relatively clear-cut example of conservatives using their market power to hurt a company whose politics they don’t like. But Bud Light evoked the ire of conservatives not because of its DEI policies, but for making a cartoonish trans woman the star of an ad campaign. The boycott wasn’t even about wokism.

Rise of the Zoomer Red Guard

Clearly, wokism is not “nodding off.” Why do I say it will get worse?

When it comes to predicting the future, what matters isn’t the percentage of the population that believes X, but the percentage of young people that believes X. Eric Kaufmann shows in his book, The Third Awokening, that there is a huge generational divide when it comes to support for cancel culture in the service of wokism. Each generation is more extreme than the previous one, and there is even a significant gap between millennials and zoomers.

In 2021 and 2022, subjects in the US and the UK were asked whether Google was right to fire James Damore—the computer engineer who suggested that the average woman might be less likely than the average man to want to spend 12 hours a day in front of a computer screen writing code. The over-55 demographic leaned toward classical liberalism, with only 35% and 25% in the US and the UK, respectively, supporting Damore’s cancellation. Among 18–25-year-olds, the overwhelming majority—just over two-thirds in both countries—thought that Damore should not be allowed to earn a living.

Support for Google’s decision to fire James Damore in the US and the UK, from Kaufmann’s The Third Awokening, Figure 8.1.

Most young PhD holders in the US, the UK, and Canada passively or actively support firing academics with controversial views. When asked about eight possible cancellation campaigns, which were all based on real-life events, between around 1/3 and 1/2 of respondents aged 35 and younger say explicitly that the unpopular academic should be fired. A substantial proportion (on average 4/10) say they “don’t know” whether they would support a dismissal campaign. This means that the vast majority of young academics are active cancellers or “don’t know” what they would do, i.e., they would probably go along with a cancellation campaign that was being waged by others. This is a significant break with previous generations. Respondents aged 35 and under are more than three times as censorial as those who are 65 and over.

From Kaufmann’s The Third Awokening, Figure 8.3.

You might think that no one likes living under cancel culture, and therefore it is inevitable that young people will eventually rebel against it. But, in fact, most zoomers are happy with this situation. Americans were presented with the following statement: “My fear of losing my job or reputation due to something I said or posted online is a justified price to pay to protect historically disadvantaged [groups].” In 2021, a majority of 18–25-year-olds agreed.

From Kaufmann’s The Third Awokening, Figure 6.2.

But wait...isn’t there a law of nature that says people get more conservative when they get older? No, there isn’t. Analysis of the Euro-Barometer surveys and the World Values Survey shows that people’s values tend to remain relatively stable after young adulthood. The graph below shows the proportion of individuals in different birth cohorts who hold “materialist” vs. “postmaterialist” values over time. Materialists value tradition, conformity, and physical and economic security while postmaterialists prioritize self-expression, autonomy, tolerance, and diversity. In the graph, 0 represents an even split in an age cohort between materialists and postmaterialists. Above the 0 point there are more postmaterialists, and below 0 there are more materialists.

“Cohort analysis: Percentage of Postmaterialists minus percentage of Materialists in six West European countries (Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands), 1971–2009,” from Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Evolution, Figure 2.2.

Fluctuations within birth cohorts largely track inflation rates. Economic hardship makes people more materialist. But, as the World Values Survey’s former director Ronald Inglehart notes, “over a period of four decades we find no overall tendency for the members of given birth cohorts to become more Materialist as they age.” When it comes to materialism vs. postmaterialism, people’s values are mostly shaped by the economic conditions that prevailed in their childhood. With the rise of wealth and security, subsequent generations have been leaning more and more toward postmaterialism.

There is a set of issues about which individuals have changed their values over their lifetime, but they did so in a liberal, not a conservative, direction. When it comes to “individual-choice norms” concerning tolerance toward homosexuality, divorce, and abortion, social change has been driven more by within-cohort change than by cohort replacement. The World Values Survey shows that many people who were opposed to homosexuality twenty or thirty years ago have reversed their position. The same is presumably true with regard to transgenderism, which became widely accepted quite suddenly about nine years ago.

A rise in individual-choice norms (i.e., acceptance of homosexuality, divorce, and abortion) due to within-cohort change and cohort replacement in 14 high-income countries, from Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Evolution, Figure 5.5.

There may have been a historical tendency for Americans and Brits to increasingly vote for conservative parties as they got older. Regardless of how one interprets this, millennials did not follow the same trend, and there is nothing to indicate that either they or zoomers will turn conservative.

Woke Dystopia

Within the next couple decades, millennials and zoomers who have no commitment to free speech or free thought will take charge of academia, our major corporations, government bureaucracies, and the judicial establishment. In every area of life, people will be treated according to their position in the woke race and sex hierarchy. Ideas that are now regarded as extreme in the US such as reparations for slavery, explicit racial quotas, prioritizing healthcare on the basis of race, and legal restrictions on speech will become mainstream, and probably written into law.

The US election currently looks like a tossup. If Kamala “Stay Woke” Harris wins, we will continue the ascent of Mount Woke with direct assistance from the government. There is a high probability that Trump and his MAGA followers will do something to discredit themselves and their movement, which will destroy all organized opposition to wokism in the US. (Organized resistance in other anglophone countries such as the UK is virtually nonexistent.)

A Trump win would be better, but unless it’s combined with a hereditarian revolution, it won’t make a difference in the long run. Trump can reverse the Biden administration’s most noxious DEI policies, appoint conservative judges, and tighten the borders. But nothing he does will make liberals give up their conviction that the meaning of life is to wage jihad against the mystical forces of bigotry that lead to racial disparities. If anything, Trump winning the election will reinforce young and educated people’s identity as leftists and Democrats.

However, there are reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for a hereditarian revolution.

First, because of the Internet, it’s impossible for the establishment to hide scientific information about race differences. Almost anyone who spends time online is going to be exposed to “hate facts” (although it can be challenging to separate “hate facts” from “hate stupidity”). A race-realist information campaign will not be starting from zero.

Second, although generational turnover will make society as a whole woker and more delusional, it will have the opposite effect in the (relatively small) world of right-wing institutions. Almost all zoomer and millennial intellectuals on the right know about race differences, and they understand the political implications. The reason mainstream conservative institutions don’t allow discussion of hereditarianism is mainly because of boomer and gen X gatekeepers who accept the left’s race taboos and think we can defeat wokism by talking about Ronald Reagan and quoting Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. When the rising generations of right-wing intellectuals take the reins at institutions like National Review and the Claremont Institute, they may implement a more effective strategy.

Thomas Sowell is a charismatic speaker and indefatigable writer, publishing almost a book a year (currently 60 and counting). Practically every American intellectual on the right has been influenced by him in some way. For me, his most important work was A Conflict of Visions, which presents a unified field theory of political orientation.

As one of the few intelligent, non-grifter conservatives to rise to prominence, Sowell has guided hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in a better direction. He is a brilliant advocate for libertarian economics and a wise social commentor. However, he can sometimes be tendentious, and that’s particularly the case when it comes to his theory of race differences.

What accounts for persistent racial disparities? There are three serious possibilities: racism, genes, or culture. Wokesters say it’s all white racism, ignoring the many, obvious problems for this thesis. (For example, whites in the US are outperformed when it comes to IQ, income, education, and law-abidingness by several other groups including Indians and East Asians.) Hereditarians say that disparities stem in large part from innate differences in the distribution of traits. (This is my view.) Cultural theorists say that entrenched cultural practices cause races to diverge in their thought and behavior, leading to differences in outcome that cannot be blamed on racism.

Sowell is the leading conservative proponent of the cultural explanation. In regard to race differences in the US, his idea is that black Americans adopted a dysfunctional culture from white rednecks in the South. A different culture would have, and in the future could, set blacks (as well as southern whites) on a different path. While he mostly avoids ad hominem attacks against hereditarians, he portrays most of them as bumbling half-wits with a history of making baseless and contradictory claims.

I was recently interviewed for “The Genius of Thomas Sowell” podcast to talk about hereditarianism vs. culturalism, and the host, Alan Wolan, persuaded me that it would be worth spelling out my objections to Sowell in more detail. Here I respond, in turn, to Sowell’s arguments for the cultural theory of race differences and his critique of hereditarianism. I contend that hereditarianism remains by far the most plausible explanation for persistent gaps among groups living under comparable conditions, including American blacks and whites.

Some hereditarians believe that, even if Sowellism is false, it would be politically expedient to promote it as a means of countering leftist narratives about race and racism. I will explain why this is a mistake. Even if (counterfactually) we could convince large numbers of people to accept Sowell’s scientifically incorrect theory of race differences, this would not stop wokism.

Black Rednecks: The Cultural Theory

Sowell presents his cultural theory of race differences in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” which is the first chapter of a book of the same name published in 2005. In his view, African Americans adopted the culture of white rednecks, which

included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. (p. 6)

Apparently, many conservatives who think it’s too offensive to say there’s a natural 15-point IQ gap between blacks and whites believe it is fine to tell blacks that they are lazy, violent, promiscuous, improvident, drunk, and reckless, but for cultural reasons.

Sowell argues that redneck culture was imported from the lawless border regions and backwaters of Britain from which the majority of colonial settlers in the South emigrated: the Scottish Highlands, Ulster, Wales, and the northern and western uplands of England. He notes that American Southerners exhibited the same behavioral patterns and were stereotyped in exactly same way as their cousins back in Sticksville, Britain. “Very similar kinds of comments were made about these Southerners’ ancestors in the parts of the British Isles from which they came” (p. 18). In contrast, New Englanders received their culture of temperance and education from their ancestors in the southeast lowlands, which happened to be the center of English civilization.

When people resemble their ancestors, the hereditarian, of course, has a potential explanation. People inherit genes from their ancestors, and genes may be causally linked to certain outcomes. When we’re considering traits that are known to be heritable, such as intelligence, and when group differences persist across long stretches of time and under a range of environmental conditions, the hereditarian thesis needs to be taken seriously.

White hillbillies and Boston Brahmins, southern Negros and black Yankees: Not all “white” or “black” people are the same

Sowell writes: “clearly neither racial discrimination nor racial inferiority can explain similar differences between whites in the North and the South in earlier centuries” (p. 23). This is a misunderstanding that comes up repeatedly in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.” Hereditarianism is not the thesis that there is an intrinsic connection between skin color and intelligence, or that all “white” or “black” populations are the same. Groups of “white” or “black” people can vary in their average intelligence for genetic reasons.

In an endnote, Sowell writes:

Arthur Jensen has suggested that particular regional subgroups of Southern whites might be biologically less capable mentally as a result of in-breeding, especially “relatively isolated groups in the ‘hollows’ of Appalachia.” Arthur R. Jensen, Educability and Group Differences, p. 61. But this seems hardly likely to account for lower mental test scores for whites in whole Southern states. (endnote 121)

In fact, Jensen says nothing about inbreeding on p. 61 of Educability and Group Differences, or in the surrounding text. Even if you (in my view mistakenly) read the phrase “relatively isolated groups” as an allusion to inbreeding, this still wouldn’t support Sowell’s objection. Jensen observes that “genetic differences in intelligence among subgroups of the white population are no less improbable than differences among racial groups.” On the preceding page, Jensen refers to “the fallacious belief in racial genetic homogeneity” that gives rise to “the notion that regional differences in IQ among whites must be entirely environmental and therefore, if they are of considerable magnitude, can be pointed to as evidence that racial differences must also be entirely environmental.” Sowell seems to have completely missed Jensen’s important point that not all populations drawn from the same race are identical, and falsely assumed that he was arguing that the IQ deficit among southern whites can only be due to inbreeding.

Another observation made by Jensen, which Sowell doesn’t mention, raises a serious challenge for the cultural theory. Sowell touts the fact that that blacks in four northern states averaged higher scores than whites in four southern states on the Army Alpha test administered to recruits during World War I (pp. 23, 31). However, as Jensen notes, within each state, the black–white gaps tended to be around the same as the gap between blacks and whites in the country as a whole. Pennsylvania blacks had higher Army Alpha scores than Mississippi whites, but much lower scores than whites from the same state. Sowell argues that northern blacks outscored southern whites because they adopted the culture of their northern white neighbors. But if culture determines IQ, why didn’t Pennsylvania blacks score the same as Pennsylvania whites?

The obvious hereditarian explanation for the relatively high IQs of northern blacks—particularly in the early twentieth century—is selective migration. That is, the most intelligent blacks in the South were most likely to move North. Although their IQ was below average compared to the relatively elite whites among whom they now lived, it was higher than that of the blacks (and in some cases even the whites) they left behind.

Blacks living in the North in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were either freed slaves or their descendants, many of whom were mulattos (mixed race). Sowell acknowledges this openly:

As a group, the “free persons of color” also differed from the slaves in racial mixture....While only 8 percent of slaves met the stringent U.S. Census requirement of half or more white ancestry to be classified as mulatto, 37 percent of the “free persons of color” did....[T]here were very noticeable skin color differences between the more acculturated descendants of those freed before the Civil War and those freed as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation. (p. 43)

As examples of prominent black leaders in this category, Sowell mentions W. E. B. Du Bois, Timothy Thomas Fortune, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Thurgood Marshall, and John Hope Franklin—all of whom besides Franklin had obvious, substantial European ancestry.

Sowell asserts that “the historical and cultural antecedents of [the] success [of the descendants of slaves freed before the Civil War] are undeniable,” and refers to “the cultural head starts of this segment of the black population.” I cannot detect any actual argument for this conclusion, which, for some reason, Sowell seems to regard as self-evidently correct. The antebellum freed slaves were (on average) biologically and even racially different from those who were freed after the Civil War. Their success does not pose a challenge for hereditarianism.

“Black” intellectuals Charles W. Chesnutt (left) and Timothy Thomas Fortune (right) illustrate how African Americans can succeed when they have a “cultural head start,” according to Sowell.

Sowell then argues that “the later rise of other blacks to similar levels of achievement undermines the biological explanation of these internal differences among blacks.” This is a non sequitur. Hereditarianism does not say that there cannot be examples of high-IQ blacks even from the less elite population that wasn’t freed until 1865. (I believe Sowell himself is a member of this group.) But higher-IQ populations tend to produce a greater number of such examples.

Sowell’s misunderstanding of hereditarianism is revealed further in the following passage:

Among nineteenth-century Negroes in Philadelphia,...there were major behavioral differences between [mulattos and blacks]. The mulatto neighborhoods had lower crime rates and a higher percentage of their children attending school, as compared to the black neighborhoods, even though it can hardly be claimed that school attendance or crime rates are genetically predetermined. In short, there were major cultural differences—and these differences in turn produced other differences, such as a higher occupational status, better housing, and more wealth among the mulattoes. Nor was this pattern confined to Philadelphia. All across the country, North and South, the elite of the Negro community were lighter in complexion than the masses—and very self-conscious, and sometimes snobbish, about that fact. (p. 44)

Sowell’s chain of reasoning goes as follows: (1) crime rates and school attendance aren’t “genetically predetermined”; (2) mulatto and black communities differed in these outcomes; (3) therefore the differences between the populations must be due to culture rather than genes. But this is a mistake. Outcomes such as being a mugger or going to school aren’t “genetically predetermined,” but they can be influenced by heritable traits. Assuming there was a ~10 point IQ gap between northern mulattos and blacks, you would expect different behavioral patterns with respect to crime and education in exactly the direction that we observed.

Another argument Sowell makes relies on the same mistake that all “black” populations must have the same innate potential. In the mid-twentieth century, blacks who had immigrated to the US from the West Indies had better outcomes than native-born blacks. (Sowell’s data are actually restricted to immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean.) Among inmates in Sing Sing prison in New York State in the early 1930s, West Indian blacks were underrepresented while native blacks were significantly overrepresented. West Indians were more likely to work in higher skilled jobs. In 1970, all black federal judges in New York were from this demographic. The average income of West Indian blacks in New York was 28% higher than that of native blacks. Sowell concludes: “Neither race nor racism can explain such differences” (p. 33).

The fact that West Indian blacks outperformed native-born blacks certainly presents a challenge for the racism theory, since racism is supposed to affect all people with black skin. But there is no problem for the hereditarian theory, because, again, hereditarianism doesn’t say that all black populations are the same. The obvious explanation for the success of West Indian (and certain other immigrant) black populations is selective immigration. If the most intelligent blacks from the West Indies immigrate to New York, then they may have different outcomes from African Americans for entirely genetic reasons. Sowell doesn’t even acknowledge this possibility.

There is an obvious question that Sowell fails to ask: If West Indian black culture produces such good results in New York, why doesn’t the culture work its magic in the West Indies? Countries like Jamaica and Grenada continue to exhibit results that are consistent with lower average IQ.

When culture follows genes

Sowell “emphasize[s] that the culture which Southerners brought over from the parts of Britain from which they came changed in Britain in the years after they left” (p. 22). The implication is that redneck culture in whites (and therefore in blacks) can’t come from genes. However, he provides no evidence whatsoever for the claim that the cultural tendencies of British rednecks have meaningfully diverged from those of their cousins in America. In fact, Britain in 2024 exhibits similar patterns of regional differences as it did in the eighteenth century. To this day, the Scottish Highlands, Ulster, Wales, and the northern and western uplands of England are notably underdeveloped compared to the areas from which New Englanders emigrated. (The fact that Sowell repeatedly refers to Ulster in Ireland as “Ulster County” hints that he might not have undertaken a thorough investigation of the facts. Ulster County is in New York State. Ulster is a region in the north of Ireland, which encompasses the six counties of modern-day Northern Ireland and three counties in Ireland.) To quote a Guardian article published just a few months ago: “the highest level of wealth exists in the south-east of England, with average wealth per head being £415,200—around £195,400 more than the north’s £219,750.” The poorest counties in Ireland are concentrated in Ulster on either side of the Irish–Northern Irish border. Scotland’s wealth still skews toward the Lowlands, not the Highlands, and Wales has long been one of the poorest parts of Britain.

I don’t want to overplay this point. The relative position of different regions of the UK has shifted somewhat over the decades and centuries. There’s been internal migration and gene flow, which would make it difficult to track the descendants of the populations from which the settlers of the American South were drawn. However, there is no evidence to support Sowell’s suggestion that a population of rednecks in Britain assimilated to the more successful “culture” of its neighbors.

Where does the culture come from?

Sowell proposes an extremely unpersuasive just-so story about the environmental origin of redneck culture (pp. 5–6). The British ancestors of southern rednecks lived in a “world of impotent laws, daily dangers, and lives that could be snuffed out at any moment.” “Prudence and long-range planning of one’s life” didn’t have the kind of pay-off that they would have in “more settled and orderly societies.” Ditto for book learning, business, technology, and science. On the other hand, “manliness and the forceful projection of that manliness to others” ensured one’s personal security in the absence of reliable law enforcement. In other words, a culture of ignorance, improvidence, and violence was (on Sowell’s account) a rational adaptation to environmental conditions. “The kinds of attitudes and cultural values produced by centuries of living under such conditions did not disappear very quickly, even when social evolution in North America slowly and almost imperceptibly created a new and different world with different objective prospects.”

There are at least three obvious objections.

First, until recently, impotent laws and daily danger were the norm in almost all societies. But this did not have the same enduring effect on other populations that it had on British and American rednecks. Millennia of continual threat and uncertainty—culminating in mass violence and genocide—did not produce redneck culture in Jews. In 1953, Koreans emerged from generations of oppression, their country was essentially a giant parking lot, and the average 18-year-old man was 5’5’’ due to malnutrition. Why did Koreans quickly develop a culture of doing math drills for hours a day in hagwon rather than a redneck culture suited to their environment?

Second, if culture adapts to environmental conditions, why can’t rednecks adapt their culture to new conditions? Sowell asserts that “attitudes and cultural values produced by centuries of living under such conditions did not disappear very quickly” when circumstances changed (p. 6). But even on Sowell’s account, redneck values have probably been maladaptive for at least two centuries. It is not explained why rednecks only seem to be able to adapt their culture in one direction.

Third, it is not at all clear that redneck values like imprudence were ever particularly adaptive. Sowell notes that outsiders have often been able to take advantage of opportunities in redneck lands that the natives failed to seize. He writes:

Not only in the South, but in the communities from which white Southerners had come in the Scottish highlands, in Ulster, and in Wales of an earlier era, most of the successful businessmen were outsiders. Even the poorest highland Scots would not skin their horses when they died. Instead, “Scots sold their dead horses for three pence to English soldiers who in turn got six pence for the skinned carcass and another two shillings for the hide.” (p. 21)

If outsiders were well-served by “prudence and long-range planning” even when faced with the same conditions as the rednecks, it doesn’t make much sense to say that rednecks rejected these practices because they didn’t pay.

The world is bigger than America

Perhaps the most fundamental problem with Sowell’s cultural theory of race differences is that it only applies to the descendants of African slaves in the United States. But lower average IQ and socioeconomic status are issues for population-representative groups of Africans all over the world. Just as with “whites,” “blacks” are not homogeneous, and populations vary with respect to traits like intelligence. As discussed, in the US, blacks in some northern states might have had higher IQs than whites in some southern states. Today in the United Kingdom, UK-born black employees earn more than UK-born white employees (though this is largely because they’re more likely to live in London), and in England blacks obtain higher scores than whites on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). (In the UK, blacks from the Caribbean have lower incomes and GCSE scores than whites while blacks from Africa have higher incomes and test scores.) But when you compare European vs. African people as a whole, when they are raised under comparable conditions, you tend to find something like a 15–18 point IQ gap. African immigrants to the UK appear to be relatively elite, but it’s not because of their culture. If it were, then Africa itself—which has the benefit of even more African culture—would be a center of education, wealth, and nonviolence, but it is not.

Critique of Hereditarianism

Sowell critiques hereditarianism in his 2013 book, Intellectuals and Race. Unlike many environmentalists, he does not dismiss hereditarianism a priori. He acknowledges that

all races have been subjected to various environmental conditions that can affect what kinds of individuals are more likely or less likely to survive and leave offspring to carry on their family line and the race. Large disparities in the geographic, historic, economic and social conditions in which different races developed for centuries open the possibility that different kinds of individuals have had different probabilities of surviving and flourishing in these different environmental conditions. (pp. 55–56)

However, in Sowell’s view, this remains a hypothetical possibility that cannot be confirmed by science in its present state:

Since there has been no method yet devised to measure the innate potential of individuals at the moment of conception, much less the innate potential of races at the dawn of the human species, the prospect of a definitive answer to the question of the relationship of race and innate mental ability seems remote, if possible at all. (p. 60)

Apparently, Sowell does not think we can get an answer until we devise a method to measure the “innate potential of individuals at the moment of conception,” and maybe even the “innate potential of races at the dawn of the human species” (whatever that means). He seems to have adopted an unreasonably high standard of evidence for hereditarianism, which effectively blocks any possible claim to knowledge on this topic.

In Sowell’s view, a hundred years of psychometrics and behavioral genetics has not only failed to provide a definitive answer to the question of whether there are innate racial differences. He implies that it has taught us virtually nothing about what those differences might be. He mentions the possibility that, at some remote time in the future, science could prove that “the innate mental potential of blacks is 5 percent more than that of whites” (p. 82). In other words, there is currently no scientific basis for speculating on whether a general intelligence advantage lies with blacks or whites.

I claim that the evidence we have today overwhelmingly supports hereditarianism. The case for hereditarianism is particularly strong with respect to the best-studied race gap in the world, namely, the 15–18 point IQ gap between black and white Americans. (This is the gap that Sowell purports to explain with his redneck culture theory.) Hereditarianism doesn’t claim that this gap is necessarily 100% genetic, but that it is substantially genetic, and that stable gaps between other racial groups—particularly those living under comparable conditions—are also likely to have a genetic component.

In his critique of hereditarianism, Sowell (a) focuses on questionable studies from the 1920s and 1930s when the field was in a very immature state, (b) gives misleading accounts of the history of the science, (c) fails to acknowledge strong objections to his claims, and (d) ignores the strongest evidence for the role of genes.

Battle against straw men

Consider the following paragraph:

Progressive-era intellectuals took a largely negative view of the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as of American blacks in general. Because such a high proportion of the immigrants from Poland and Russia were Jews during this era, Carl Brigham—a leading authority on mental tests, and creator of the College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Test—asserted that the Army test results tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.” H.H. Goddard, who had administered mental tests to immigrant children on Ellis Island, declared: “These people cannot deal with abstractions.” Another giant of the mental-testing profession, L.M. Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and creator of a decades-long study of people with IQs of 140 and above, likewise concluded from his study of racial minorities in the Southwest that children from such groups “cannot master abstractions.” It was widely accepted as more or less a matter of course during this era that blacks were incapable of mental performances comparable to whites, and the Army mental test results were taken as confirmation. (p. 26)

Pretty much everything in this passage is wrong or misleading.

First, regarding Brigham’s statement about Jews, Sowell repeatedly emphasizes the claim that intelligence researchers in the early twentieth century thought that Jews had lower average intelligence. But, in later generations, Jews would score well on IQ tests, and Jews were wildly overrepresented among leading scientists. For Sowell, this shows that there is no reason to take the current rank-ordering of intelligence seriously, since the ranking can shift dramatically in a short period of time. “Radical changes in the relative rankings of Jews on mental tests between the period of the First World War and their very different rankings in later years undermined belief in the permanence of group and intergroup IQ levels” (p. 85).

Note that Brigham’s quote, which comes from a book published in 1923, acknowledges that Jews were already stereotyped as “highly intelligent.” Brigham made the mistake of putting his faith in a flawed test given to people who didn’t have the linguistic and/or cultural background to be properly assessed. There is no indication that anyone besides Brigham (and some obviously biased anti-Semites) made this mistake. Indeed, an influential psychology textbook published in 1931 in Germany observed: “When we compare the average German Jew with the average German Gentile we cannot doubt that the Jews greatly excel in intelligence and alertness.” Snyderman and Herrnstein note that Brigham’s book was panned in reviews published in 1923 in Science and Scientific Monthly, and in an article published in Mental Hygiene in 1924. Furthermore, as Sowell acknowledges in another passage, Brigham himself “said candidly in his 1930 article that his previous conclusions were...‘without foundation’” (p. 72). The full quote from Brigham’s 1930 article is an almost unprecedented admission of error:

This review has summarized some of the more recent test findings which show that comparative studies of various national and racial groups may not be made with existing tests, and which show, in particular, that one of the most pretentious of these comparative racial studies—the writer’s own—was without foundation.

Far from discrediting intelligence research, this incident displays a remarkable open-mindedness and capacity for self-correction after a false start. Sowell’s comment that “statistical data that seemed to fit prevailing preconceptions among intellectuals have been accepted and proclaimed, with little or no critical examination” (p. 73) is grossly unfair.

Second, regarding the Goddard quote that immigrant children “cannot deal with abstractions,” this is a complete misrepresentation. Goddard claimed to show that immigrants who were “feebleminded” or “morons” (to use the technical terms of the time) could be identified more efficiently and accurately by administering the Binet scale rather than by laboriously interviewing them. Goddard’s comment about children who “cannot deal with abstractions” was meant to apply to morons, not to immigrants in general or to any races specifically. As Goddard noted: “Our study...makes no attempt to determine the percentage of feeble-minded among immigrants in general or even of the special groups named—the Jews, Hungarians, Italians and Russians.”

Third, attributing the view that minority children in the Southwest “‘cannot master abstractions’” to Terman is another misrepresentation. In this context, Terman was commenting on the limitations associated with “border-line deficiency.” He said that border-line deficiency was far more common among certain races, including blacks, but he did not claim that all members of any race were deficient in this way. He called for race differences to be investigated “anew and by experimental methods,” and he predicted that “there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped away by any scheme of mental culture.” His politically incorrect (and exaggerated) language notwithstanding, Terman’s prediction has largely been supported by subsequent investigation.

The stability of race differences

Sowell argues that “there is nothing unique about the average black American IQ of 85,” since “at various times and places” other groups had IQs in the same range. He cites a 1923 survey of studies of the IQs of Italian Americans, which found scores ranging from 77.5 to 85. A 1926 survey of studies of the IQ of different groups in America found means of “85.6 for Slovaks, 83 for Greeks, 85 for Poles, 78 for Spaniards, and 84 for Portuguese” (p. 72). The implication is that the scores of different populations fluctuate wildly across the generations, and therefore the African American IQ of 85 may shoot up to 100 at any moment. But the African American IQ of 82–85, which has been stable for cohorts born since around 1970 and has resisted intensive interventions, does not have the same status as scores from flawed IQ tests administered a hundred years ago to immigrants who may not have been fluent in English.

In Facing Reality, Charles Murray reported a 0.85 standard deviation gap in cognitive ability between black and white Americans. But this was only because his analysis included academic achievement tests. Actual IQ tests continue to show a 1 to 1.2 standard deviation difference.

Mixed-race children

Continuing to build his case largely on old and dubious data, Sowell cites the famous study of illegitimate children born during the American occupation of Germany after World War II. These children were (according to the story) fathered by either white or black American soldiers and raised by their German mothers. Intelligence testing found no statistically significant difference in the IQs of a sample of 83 white vs. 181 biracial kids from this population. Sowell approvingly cites James Flynn’s conclusion that “the reason for results being different in Germany was that the offspring of black soldiers in Germany ‘grew up in a nation with no black subculture’” (p. 75).

Sowell fails to mention three important facts about this study, which are highlighted by John Loehlin et al.

First, 20 to 25% of the “black” fathers weren’t African American or even black, but were French North Africans who would normally be classified as white.

Second, subjects were tested as young children. At the time of testing, a third were between age 5 and 10, and two-thirds were between 10 and 13. (Sowell doesn’t mention that the subjects were children, referring to them as “the offspring of black and white American soldiers.”) The heritability of IQ is much lower in children than adults.

Third, black American soldiers during the Second World War were relatively elite. 30% of blacks were rejected for military service due to their scores on the pre-induction intelligence test compared to just 3% of whites. Loehlin et al. note that even after this selection there was still a one standard deviation gap between black and white inductees’ average scores on the Army General Classification Test. However, there was certainly a significant environmental component to this gap, as blacks born in the 1920s did not achieve their cognitive potential. (The black–white IQ gap narrowed steadily until the 1970s.) Loehlin et al. do not perform this calculation, but we can estimate the average IQ of black vs. white soldiers in WWII. Assume American blacks and whites had the genetic potential on average to attain IQs of 85 and 100, respectively (with SD = 15). If the Army General Classification Test was a perfect IQ test and 30% of blacks and 3% of whites were disqualified, the black soldiers had an IQ cutoff of 77, while white soldiers had a cutoff of 72. The average IQ of black vs. white soldiers would have been 93 vs. 101—a difference of 8 points.

Why does James Flynn think that the German study supports a cultural theory of the black–white IQ gap? Flynn is aware of the issues I mentioned above, and unlike Sowell he does not base his argument on the mere fact that the white and biracial children had the same IQs. Rather, his argument is based on a fact about the statistical pattern of the scores of the children, namely, the magnitude of the black–white gap isn’t correlated with the g-loading of the subtest as it normally is among whites and blacks in the US. I won’t comment on this argument except to say that when you have to rely on a small, old study with many unknowns, that does not reflect well on the strength of your position.

Flynn effect to the rescue?

Flynn is most famous for his role in discovering the “Flynn effect.” This refers to the steady, worldwide rise in raw IQ scores over the course of the twentieth century. IQ tests are continually re-normed to keep the average at 100, which hides the fact that test takers (both black and white) are answering more and more questions correctly. A raw score that would give you an IQ of 85 in 2024 would have corresponded to an IQ over 100 in 1950. In other words, African Americans today would outscore American whites if they were transported far enough back in time.

Sowell argues:

While the persistence of a gap between blacks and whites in America on IQ tests leads some to conclude that genetic differences are the reason, the large changes in IQ test performance by both black and white Americans, as well as by the populations of other whole nations around the world, undermine the notion that IQ tests measure an unchanging genetic potential.

This is correct in a sense, but it doesn’t support environmentalism about race differences in the way Sowell implies. Yes, there is some environmental factor that varies across generations and influences IQ scores. Probably this is a cultural zeitgeist that increasingly promotes the kind of scientific way of thinking that is rewarded by IQ tests. But this does not necessarily tell us anything about the source of variation within generations. The fact that the average Jew today is taller than the average Dutchman a hundred years ago doesn’t mean that Jews have the same height potential as the Dutch. Under comparable conditions, the Dutch will probably always be taller (on average). Flynn himself does not believe that his eponymous effect explains race differences, and he approvingly cites Arthur Jensen describing his position: “[Flynn] believes that IQ gains show that blacks can match whites for IQ; but he does not believe that they can show that blacks can do this when environments are equal.”

Ignoring evidence

Sowell flat-out ignores the strongest evidence for hereditarianism. He doesn’t say a word about the substantial differences in brain size among races, which track differences in IQ (African << European < East Asian). Although he notes that black children adopted by white families have “higher average IQs than other black children” (p. 79), he doesn’t mention that this advantage fades out by early adulthood, when IQ has a much higher heritability. He doesn’t mention the fact that blacks and whites regress to different means. African Americans whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score lower on the SAT than whites whose parents make between $20,000 and $40,000, which is exactly what we would expect if the differences were rooted in genetics rather than the environment. He doesn’t discuss intensive intervention studies, such as the Milwaukee Project, that have had extremely disappointing results. (This is not to mention the more recent evidence from genetics, which wasn’t available when Sowell’s book was published in 2013.) Clearly, Sowell has not given hereditarianism a fair shake.

SAT scores (out of 1,600) by race and household income in 2008. From the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

Politically Unhelpful

If I am right, hereditarianism remains the best explanation for intractable differences between—and in some cases within—racial groups. Cultural differences often emanate to some degree from differences in biological endowment. A population with an average IQ of 85 (whatever its racial composition) is likely to produce a culture with different features than a population with an average IQ of 100 or 105. To the extent that culture is responsible for group disparities, it may have this effect by reinforcing the tendencies that gave rise to the culture in the first place.

Some conservatives and classical liberals have argued that we can defeat wokism by promoting Sowell’s theory, regardless of whether or not it’s true. This is a big mistake.

As I have explained elsewhere, wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given certain widely accepted moral premises. If you think that all populations literally have the same innate potential, and yet they have very unequal outcomes, there is a moral emergency to correct the environment to uplift lower-performing groups. In practice, disparities favoring whites will be blamed on past or present white racism, and this puts us on an inexorable path to DEI dystopia.

Even if, hypothetically, we could convince people to accept Sowell’s false cultural theory of race differences, this would simply be an indirect route to wokism. Sowell insists that his cultural theory provides an “alternative” to “blam[ing]...the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination” (BRWL, p. 62). But if his theory is right, then white people are still responsible for imposing redneck culture on Africans in the first place, and for creating conditions in which it is able to persist. In fact, Sowell himself blames “white liberals” who “excuse, celebrate, or otherwise perpetuate that lifestyle” and “contributed to its spread up the social scale to middle class black young people who feel a need to be true to their racial identity” (pp. 63–64). My point is that as long as disparities are attributed to the environment, regardless of whether you point the finger at racism or “culture,” someone is going to be held morally responsible. Sowell and his Hoover Institution and National Review friends want to place the blame on white liberals. That would be preferable to blaming all people with white skin, but this strategy does not have a serious political future.

Whether or not it would be politically advantageous to trick people into accepting Sowell’s false theory of race differences is a moot question. Conservatives have been pushing this idea for decades, and people have rejected it. The empirical evidence clearly shows that few people find Sowellism persuasive.

This leaves hereditarianism as both the correct theory of race differences and the only intellectual weapon capable of seriously challenging the left’s narrative about race. We have two choices: promote hereditarianism and have a chance of winning, or accept that our fate is to complain about woke excesses in webzines and on X while wokesters consolidate their power.

Addendum (October 19, 2024)

No one has yet pointed out a single error in my analysis. In fact, responses in the past two months have raised even more serious questions about Sowell’s scholarship, particularly in regard to his extraordinary claims first made in his 1974 paper, “Black Excellence—The Case of Dunbar High School.”

Dunbar was an all-black high school founded in 1870 in Washington, DC. According to Sowell, it achieved miraculous results via the pull-your-pants-up-and-show-some-respect strategy favored by mainstream conservatives. (In his words, the school was “frank in telling the black community that it would have to send its children to school with respect for teachers and a willingness to submit to discipline and hard work.”) He says that although “Dunbar students were not selected on the basis of I.Q. tests,” the average IQ of students at the school was above the white mean, and in some years as high as 111. He repeats these claims in Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005) and Intellectuals and Race (2013), although in the latter book he for some reason drops the claim about the students having an average IQ of 111.

Anyone familiar with intelligence research knows that such results are unprecedented. If what Sowell reports is even 50% true, it would radically alter our understanding of intelligence, heritability, race, and society.

Is it true? Todd Shackelford and Bo Winegard made an intensive effort to track down the source of Sowell’s Dunbar IQ data, and they came up empty handed.

I’m not insinuating that Sowell did anything untoward. But I believe we should know more about the provenance of the data before we take his claims about Dunbar at face value. If anyone has information about this—or is in contact with Sowell and can ask him for the full story—please let me know.

There are other, more minor misrepresentations. A couple weeks ago, someone mentioned Sowell’s claim in Race and Culture that Cicero thought that Britons were “stupid.” (The point is supposed to be that the ranking of groups by intelligence changes radically over time, ergo we shouldn’t put much stock in the current rank order.) I was already familiar with a fake Cicero quote roasting Brits, and I figured that this is what Sowell was referring to.

Sowell writes:

Cicero warned his fellow Romans not to buy British slaves, for he found them unusually difficult to teach....Cicero warn[ed] ancient Romans not to buy British slaves because of their stupidity....

What Cicero actually said:

I fancy you won’t expect any of them to be highly qualified in literature or music.

A completely different statement, which doesn’t support the argument Sowell was making. Not the biggest issue in the world, but this kind of thing comes up again and again.

A couple lessons:

First, no one should write 60 books. (10 out of the 60 are revised editions, but my point still stands even if you call it 50 books.) No matter how smart you are, it is impossible to maintain high standards given this level of output. The fact that Sowell is encouraged to publish a book every year is a systemic failure.

Second, too much praise can be harmful. Sowell’s talent is undeniable, and he has done great things. But for decades he has been surrounded by people who, instead of subjecting his arguments to critical scrutiny, immediately laud him as a historic genius every time he utters a sentence. I believe Sowell is to some extent a victim in this situation. If he had been treated as an equal and forced to defend his ideas like the rest of us, he could have reached greater heights.

Wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Suppose you believe that all groups have exactly the same distribution of abilities. Any disparities in outcome must be the result of environmental factors that could theoretically be corrected. As long as there are enormous gaps in IQ, wealth, health, crime rates, and so on, there is a moral emergency to correct the environment and achieve equal outcomes.

In reality, the equality thesis is false. With all the money and good will in the world, there are limits to how much we can correct for nature’s unfairness. But if you rule out hereditarianism a priori, people who care about inequality will double down on the search for environmental solutions. In practice, that means they’ll blame increasingly microscopic and/or imaginary expressions of bigotry. Society will be in a permanent state of war against racism and sexism. In wartime, you can’t expect free speech, academic freedom, or due process.

The taboo against hereditarianism makes it impossible for conservatives and classical liberals to resist the logic of wokism. Intelligent, morally sensitive people see massive race and sex disparities, and they demand a solution. Saying that we should “treat everyone as individuals” or strive for “colorblindness” doesn’t address the issue. From the perspective of the environmentalist, whites or men have constructed a system in which certain groups cannot reach their potential. There’s a moral imperative to fix the system immediately.

In his fantastic book, The Third Awokening, Eric Kaufmann proposes a 12-point plan to fight wokism, focusing on legal activism: strengthen protections for free speech, command schools to be politically neutral, and so on. These are all important things to do. But without a direct attack on the root cause of wokism—the equality thesis—I don’t see how the plan can be successful.

Kaufmann says that wokism began with the “big bang” of the race taboo around 1965. I agree with that. But he doesn’t have a clear explanation for what caused the big bang, which is what we need in order to understand where wokism came from and how to resist it. The race taboo is wokism. The question of what caused wokism is the question of what caused the race taboo.

The race taboo arose in response to the fact that, contrary to the predictions of the environmentalists, legal equality in the 1960s failed to produce equality of outcome. We started with affirmative action and hypersensitivity to underperforming minorities. Since that didn’t work, we eventually resorted to tearing down statues and canceling people for microaggressions. With every failure, the taboo intensifies.

Kaufmann says that the race taboo needs to be “reformed into a proportionate norm like any other.” He says that the “equity, diversity, and harm protection dials” should be turned down “from today’s eleven out of ten to an optimal five out of ten.” But I don’t think this argument has the moral force necessary to turn people away from wokism. It’s essentially asking people not to care too much about the fact that environmental conditions have caused black Americans to have a 15-point IQ deficit, one-tenth the wealth, and 4 times the incarceration rate compared to whites.

Kaufmann provides very discouraging data regarding the extent to which the young generation has drunk the DEI Kool-Aid. Politically, zoomers are far worse than even millennials. If current trends continue, in a few years they will start taking over our institutions, and they will vote for politicians to implement a woke fascist regime. We need a very powerful weapon to change the trajectory of our culture. Exhorting people to turn the dial down on their moral concerns isn’t going to be enough to counteract the passion of the woke crusaders—not even with the help of conservative activism and legal warfare.

If a critical mass of elites comes to accept hereditarianism, that will make wokism impossible. It will also completely undermine the moral authority of the reigning left–liberal establishment. When people realize that they’ve been lied to about something as fundamental as race, they will become open to new values. For reasons we can discuss, I don’t believe that colorblindness is the solution. My vision is a society in which communities are granted more freedom to organize themselves according to different values. Divisions won’t necessarily be made along racial lines, although when people organize themselves spontaneously, there is often a degree of homogeneity. A society that has absorbed the truth of hereditarianism should be open to this alternative.

Noah Carl is a sociologist, writer, and editor at Aporia.

In this episode we discuss whether hereditarianism is the cure for wokism, and the relationship between intelligence and human worth.

Articles by Carl:

“A Hereditarian Revolution Won’t Solve the Right’s ‘Stupidity Problem’”

“Did Women in Academia Cause Wokeness?”

“Race, IQ and Moral Worth”

Hereditarians who point out these facts are often accused of thinking that people with less intelligence are morally inferior or that IQ is a measure of human worth. Charles Murray dismisses these charges as nonsense. In his 2020 book, Human Diversity, he writes that “it is obvious how senseless it is” to conflate “intellectual ability and the professions it enables with human worth....There shouldn’t be any relationship between these things and human worth.”

Noah Carl defends Murray’s view, and criticizes arguments made by Emil Kirkegaard, Stephen Kershnar, and me. Kirkegaard writes: “Moral worth correlates with intelligence (and other traits).” Kershnar argues that “intrinsic moral value is proportional to autonomy,” which in turn is “proportional to intelligence.” I claim: “Less intelligent people are inferior...in some respect. Everyone has ‘human dignity’, but if two people are drowning and I can save one I’d consider relative intelligence (among other things).” Carl rejects these ideas, and concludes that “Murray is right. IQ is not the same as moral worth and it’s a mistake to treat it as such.” Murray reposted Carl’s article and declared himself to be “baffle[d]” by Kirkegaard and me.

But Carl’s argument misses the mark, and Murray’s bafflement is misplaced. We should not be squeamish about acknowledging a connection between intelligence and “worth,” although the nature of that connection needs to be spelled out.

Sample problem from the National Adult Literacy Survey (Document Level 4). 77% of white American adults cannot reliably answer this question.

Sample problem from the National Adult Literacy Survey (Document Level 2). 16% of white American adults cannot reliably answer this question.

Human Worth, Moral Worth, and Inferiority

Murray and Carl do not define the terms “human worth” or “moral worth.” What could they be referring to?

Start with the idea of “moral worth.” Moral realism is the theory that there are objective, mind-independent moral facts. A proposition like “it’s wrong to shoot random people for fun” is true in the same way as 2 + 2 = 4 is true. If you’re a realist, you might say that an individual’s “moral worth” is a function of their relationship with the true morality. Perhaps moral worth corresponds to the purity of a person’s will, the perfection of their character traits, or the amount of good that they actually accomplish.

In my view, moral realism is an illusion. Our intuitions about right and wrong are the product of morally blind evolutionary and cultural forces. There is no reason to think that our moral beliefs correspond to an independently existing reality. Furthermore, moral realism is conceptually incoherent. I have no idea what it would even mean for there to be objective truths about how we’re supposed to think and act. Any concept of moral worth that is predicated on moral realism can be dismissed.

If moral realism is false, there are two options. Either we can reject morality (and therefore the concept of “moral worth”) as a myth, or we can interpret morality non-realistically. I favor the latter. The institution of morality, when stripped of illusions, serves a useful function. It is a vehicle to express collective values. Judgments about what is “right,” “wrong,” “just,” “unjust,” “good,” or “bad” are not mind-independently true or false. They are evaluations made in accordance with the conventions of a community. “Moral worth” is a measure of what we value, all things considered, in an agent, object, or situation.

What does Murray mean by “human worth”?

Perhaps he would argue that “human worth” is the intrinsic value we possess in virtue of our species membership. Philosophers call this view “speciesism.” As Peter Singer notes, the term is meant to invoke offensive “isms” like racism and sexism. But speciesism has defenders. Bernard Williams asks how we would respond to extraterrestrials who, having correctly judged us to be cognitively inferior and emotionally impoverished, decided to exterminate earthlings for the good of the universe. Should we submit to our own genocide in order to make way for a species that is superior to us with respect to everything that we care about except species membership? Williams defends the “human prejudice.” We make judgments from our own perspective, and there’s no rational basis for objecting to a bias in favor of ourselves. Singer rejects this argument, noting that we would not accept the same style of reasoning if it were applied to race. My own view is in between those of Williams and Singer. On the one hand, there is no law of reason that stops us from being partisans for Team Human. On the other hand, speciesism is an arbitrary way of assigning worth from the perspective of what we normally take to be relevant. If a parrot or an alien starts speaking to me as a rational, emotionally sensitive being, I will treat it as a person. If it displays a good and noble character, I will probably respect it more than a bipedal earth ape without these qualities.

Suppose Murray rejects speciesism but argues that “human worth” stems from properties that are statistically associated with Homo sapiens such as self-awareness, the ability to plan, or moral sensitivity. (Presumably he wouldn’t say “intelligence,” although virtually every other candidate property—including the ones I just listed—would depend on intelligence.) In that case, people probably vary in how much of the worth-giving properties they possess. The distribution might overlap with that of some other species. Thus, so-called “human worth” would not be universal in humans (at least it wouldn’t be possessed to the same degree by all of us), nor would it be distinctively human. A magpie that can recognize itself in a mirror and grieve the death of its friends would probably surpass a coma patient, a psychopath, or a severely mentally disabled person with respect to one or more of the special properties.

One could argue that “human worth” is a threshold concept: you have human worth if and only if you have X, and intelligence beyond what is necessary for X does not confer extra worth. But there is no indication that Murray would want to take this position. He says that higher intelligence is irrelevant to human worth, not that all humans have the same worth. So he should accept the possibility that human worth varies, and that this variation might be correlated with differences in intelligence.

What does it mean to say that someone or something is “inferior”? Carl appears to treat this term as equivalent to “less moral worth.” But a judgment of inferiority is relative to a standard of evaluation. It makes no sense to say that “A is inferior to B” without specifying the standard in question. A smart person is superior to a dumb one with respect to the ability to do calculus. But they are inferior with respect to the ability to be entertained by chanting “Jerry! Jerry!” while hillbillies brawl on a stage after getting the results of a paternity test. In some cases, the standard of evaluation is not stated explicitly, but can be inferred from the context. If we’re talking about sports, philosophy, or music, our judgments are relative to the standards in those different fields. “Kevin Love is inferior to LeBron James” obviously means he’s not as great a basketball player. “Kevin Love is inferior to Woody Allen” doesn’t mean anything unless you explain what the standard is.

Operationalizing “Human Worth”

I’ll focus on the general notion of “human worth.” Once we have a grasp of human worth, we can ask how someone can be inferior or superior with respect to this standard.

There are two kinds of value: intrinsic and instrumental. In other words, X can be valuable in itself, and/or because it is part of a chain of causes that leads to something that is intrinsically valuable. Money is valuable because of what it can be used for: buying things, acquiring social status, or the like. Its value is instrumental. On the other hand, pleasure has (at least under certain conditions) intrinsic value. We value our own pleasure and that of (worthy) other people as an end in itself.

“Human worth” must be a function of properties that have intrinsic and/or instrumental value. The question is whether intelligence could be among these properties, and whether variation (at least within the normal range) could have significant implications for the relative standing of individuals.

Let’s consider how to operationalize the concept of X having value in the context of human worth. You might:

• pay a cost to preserve X (in yourself or others) even if you don’t expect X to produce anything else that you value

• pay a cost to preserve X (in yourself or others) because you think X will lead to desirable effects

• choose X over not-X in the context of embryo selection, all else being equal

• rescue a drowning X-possessor over a not-X-possessor, all else being equal

• blame people for not having X

• praise people for having X

High intelligence clearly satisfies some if not all of these conditions.

Part of what makes humans more intrinsically valuable than other animals is our superior capacity to understand, contemplate, plan, have an identity, and (as Kershnar highlights) exercise autonomy. All of these things are rooted in intelligence. Presumably that’s why Peter Singer avers that “The most obvious candidate for regarding human beings as having a higher moral status than animals is the superior cognitive capacity of humans.” The more intelligence you have, the greater your potential to manifest what is intrinsically valuable. This is one of the reasons why, for example, we would hesitate to take a drug that permanently impairs intelligence even if the drug would have some benefit.

When it comes to instrumental value, intelligence is the composer and the conductor. It is the basis of virtually all successful action. It is the power that wields every other instrument. By the exercise of intelligence we obtain food, cure disease, confine our natural predators to cages, and read a bus schedule. One day (we hope) it will allow us to build megaprojects, colonize the galaxy, and escape our dying star. We value intelligence, and do our best to cultivate it, in part because of these extrinsic benefits.

When performing IVF, it is now possible to sequence the genome of different embryos to choose the one with the most desirable combination of expected traits. With the current technology, when choosing among ten embryos, there will be an expected difference of about 12 IQ points between the lowest and the highest. IQ is not the only trait we care about. But, when choosing between different possible lives, any informed person would consider intelligence, among other traits.

If two people are drowning and you can only save one, commonsense “morality” does not demand that you make the decision by a coin flip. The convention is to save women and children first. All else being equal, we value the lives of women over men, and the lives of children (who have more potential life) over adults. All else being equal, we save a parent over someone without dependents, because the former’s death would cause more aggregate suffering. Since intelligence has both intrinsic and instrumental value, the relative intelligence of the drowning victims should also be part of our calculation. Obviously, that doesn’t mean intelligence automatically trumps everything else. If Jeffrey Epstein’s yacht is sinking, we would save Epstein last even though he probably has a higher IQ than most of the sailors and waiters.

Theoretically, we can only praise or blame people for outcomes that are under their control. (I leave aside the philosophical question of what it means for something to be under your control.) Within developed societies, IQ is largely fixed by genes and random developmental factors. No one is responsible for being born with a particular polygenic score for IQ, or for the random ways in which their nerve cells differentiate. For the most part, we don’t praise or blame people merely for being born bright or dim.

But intelligence—or at least the expression of intelligence—is to some extent the result of our choices. E = mc² wasn’t encoded in Einstein’s genome, growing out of him like a limb. He chose to study science and exert himself rather than doing the early 20th-century equivalent of watching TV. Ditto for all intellectual accomplishments, great and small. This is part of the reason why we praise people for displaying intelligence. Conversely, we might blame someone for failing to live up to their intellectual potential due to their choice to be a drunk, a sloth, or a grifter.

We also blame people for manifesting their natural stupidity by choosing to do something offensive—for example, arguing about something they don’t understand, or occupying a position of influence for which they are not qualified. Thus, we might call a low-IQ Internet commenter, an incompetent politician, or a not-so-bright professor an “idiot” in an insulting way. This can be justified on the grounds that the offending person made the choice to strive for something for which they had no natural right. There’s nothing blameworthy per se about the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale Jason Stanley getting an SAT score of 1280, which is more than a standard deviation above average. We insult Stanley for his intelligence when he poses as a great intellect with the authority to pass judgment on everyone else.

There is an element of cosmic unfairness in praise and blame. We don’t build statutes for all of the hundreds of thousands of scientists who worked just as hard as Einstein and with equally noble intentions, but failed to accomplish as much as he did. We don’t give the Medal of Honor to every soldier—let alone every person—who would rescue his comrade in the face of danger, but who never had the chance to do so. When it comes to blame, we do not hang everyone who would have been a vicious concentration camp guard if only he had the moral misfortune of being born in Dachau in 1905 and offered the job. And even if we did, this would not correct for the world’s cosmic unfairness. The innate potential to be a genius, a hero, or a criminal is itself the result of luck. Nevertheless, this is the logic of praise and blame.

Calculating Human Worth

There is no formula for calculating “human worth,” and no objective standard that tells us how to weigh different values. But I suggest the following general principle holds: all else being equal, more of a worth-giving property (whether it has intrinsic and/or instrumental value) imparts greater aggregate worth.

When it comes to intelligence, Carl and Murray agree that some people are objectively better than others. As Murray puts it, “ability varies” and “half of the children are below average.” Someone who can remember only 5 digits is inferior to someone who can remember 11 digits vis-à-vis the standards associated with that cognitive task. If the words in question are understood in their usual senses, my original claim, which Carl took issue with, that “less intelligent people are inferior...in some respect,” cannot be intelligibly denied. If intelligence is a worth-giving property, all else being equal, smarter people have more worth.

Carl trumpets the fact that the top government officials in Nazi Germany were highly intelligent. The average IQ among 21 Nazi leaders who were tried at Nuremberg was 128. As Carl puts it, “Despite these men’s high IQs, their moral worth was far from exceptional,” and the guilty ones may have had “little or no moral worth” at all. This is certainly true. But who does Carl claim to refute with this example? Does he refute Kirkegaard? Kirkegaard says that “Moral worth correlates with intelligence (and other traits).” To say that there is a correlation between X and Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing, or that it’s impossible to have cases where a high level of X is associated with a low level of Y. Kershnar says that “other things equal, intrinsic moral value is proportional to intelligence....[I]t is possible that a person with great autonomy uses these capacities while acting wrongly.” He goes on to say that “There are other plausible grounds for intrinsic moral value in persons,” including “moral goodness (i.e., the moral nature of one’s character and acts).” Again, I say that the less intelligent are “in some respect” inferior. I leave open the possibility that a less intelligent person can be in some respect superior, or that they can have more all-things-considered worth.

Any instrument can be used for bad purposes. In practice, intelligence is more often employed for good. As documented by Garett Jones, most high-IQ countries are not Nazi dystopias. They are on average wealthier, more cooperative, and less corrupt. Whether morality is construed realistically (which would be an error) or non-realistically, moral reasoning requires intelligence. No matter how well-meaning they are, those who are unintelligent have less ability to reason through moral dilemmas, understand morally relevant facts, and evaluate moral trade-offs.

Intelligence isn’t one-dimensional or equivalent to “IQ.” But some people intellectually outperform others in virtually every way. On average, higher IQ corresponds to greater ability across the board. This has implications for both the kinds of good you can and are likely to accomplish (your instrumental value) and the kind of good that you instantiate (your intrinsic value).

There are many routes to “human worth,” and ways to achieve greatness that do not require a stratospheric level of general intelligence. George Motz has devoted his life to the study of hamburgers. He is the grill master of his own burger shop in New York, where he makes the most historically authentic, traditional American hamburger. I don’t know what his IQ is. It’s probably well above average, though I doubt it’s off the charts. Yet, when it comes to “human worth,” in my view, Motz ranks among the elites. He is far superior to Chris Langan—the conspiracy theorist and philosophy crackpot who supposedly has the highest IQ in the world.

Grill master George Motz exhibits far more worth than most philosophy professors

Superiority (with respect to overall worth) does not depend only on the kinds of accomplishments that make headlines. Raising a family, keeping a promise, making money, or perfecting your character can also confer high levels of worth. As my ancestor King Solomon said, “he who rules over his spirit is better than he who conquers a city.” There can even be greatness in failure.

Diversity itself can be intrinsically valuable. We think the extinction of the dodo bird was sad despite the fact that the dodo was probably dumber than a pigeon, with no special redeeming quality. A person’s contribution to diversity can also count toward their intrinsic worth. The special adaptations of different populations or the unique features of individuals are potentially worth-giving properties, all the more so the rarer they are.

John von Neumann was the quintessential high-IQ genius. With his computer-like brain, he revolutionized mathematics, physics, computer science, and economics. Charles Murray likes to challenge people who think intelligence is connected to human worth, saying, Do you think von Neumann was more valuable than you? A “yes” answer is supposed to be unthinkable, so the interlocutor is offended into accepting the claim that high intelligence doesn’t confer extra value.

But this is a rhetorical trick. Of course most people value themselves more than a stranger with a higher IQ—or even a stranger who is superior to them in every important way. As Bernard Williams said, we make value judgments from our own perspective. There is no objective stance, or point of view of the universe. Being me confers value for me. My friend is more valuable to me than a stranger, perhaps even a stranger who is, according my own value system, superior to them in every respect except for not being my friend. The fact that what is valuable to me depends on my personal interests says nothing about whether intelligence is a worth-giving property.

A better question would be, Do you think von Neumann was more valuable than a random person? Now the value of intelligence shines through. Obviously the answer is “yes.”

Carl says that “It may be reasonable to argue that, all else being equal, higher IQ equates to greater moral worth—though this is true of all socially valued traits, so there’s nothing special about intelligence.” This concedes everything. According to Carl, if you hold all else equal, the person who is smarter is more valuable in a “moral” sense. In real life all else is usually not equal, and there are other factors to consider besides intelligence. But no one denies this.

Political Equality

Kershnar suggests that, intuitively, it seems that the interests of those of greater “moral worth” should count for more. Should we create a caste system, granting special privileges based on worth or characteristics known to be associated with it such as intelligence?

The egalitarian might assert that, although technically we are not equals in terms of worth, we are equal in some other sense. Perhaps we are political equals, or “equal under the law.” Or, despite having different degrees of worth, there is some moral sense in which we are equal.

In political philosophy, the principle of “human equality” is often taken for granted, but rarely elucidated. Liberal legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron observes: “Among those who make use of some very basic principle of human equality, virtually no one has devoted much energy to explaining what the principle amounts to in itself.” Uwe Steinhoff highlights the fact that Waldron only complains about the failure to clarify the principle of human equality, not the failure to justify it. Waldron does not seem to think that the principle requires justification. For him it is just obviously correct. Waldron explains why philosophers hold their nose at the prospect of clarifying the principle of human equality:

No doubt part of the reason for reticence here has to do with the unpleasantness or offensiveness of the views—sexist and racist views, for example—that one would have to pretend to take seriously if one wanted to conduct a serious examination of these matters.

It is unclear why a critical examination of the principle of “human equality” would require one to take “sexist and racist views” seriously. Those who deny “human equality”—whatever that is supposed to refer to—needn’t claim that ancestry or sex per se make people unequal. There can also be inequality within a race or sex.

Some critics see the principle of political, moral, or human equality as a contentless tautology. Legal philosopher Peter Westen refers to the “empty idea of equality.” People can only be equal with respect to a rule or principle. But the rule itself already tells us how to treat people. The declaration of equality adds nothing. Suppose there’s a law that says, “if you drive without a license, you must pay a fine.” Then I come along and say, “we’re all equal under the law.” What have I added to the law? The law specifies who has to pay the fine under what conditions. Saying that we’re all equal under the law, or that the law has to be applied equally, is the same as saying “you have to follow the law.”

On the other hand, if the assertion of political or moral equality is treated as the substantive, nontautological claim that everyone should have “equal respect and concern,” then it is blatantly false. At least it’s something that no one genuinely accepts. As Steinhoff notes, we do not owe a vicious criminal and his victim “equal respect and concern.” But, to be fair to the egalitarians, perhaps all they mean is that “persons initially owe all other persons equal respect and concern, but not after they have made different and perhaps immoral choices.” Steinhoff retorts that, “if that is really all they mean, then that should be all they say.” If that is what they choose to say, they are probably still wrong. A mother is free to be partial to her own children.

I think there is a meaningful sense in which we can be considered political equals. It’s not because we’re “equal under the law” (a tautology), but that the law ignores certain differences between people that might otherwise be relevant. Theoretically, desert is proportional to worth. But there are limits to how much the law tries to distribute rewards in accordance with that criterion. Whether you are entitled to a tax refund does not depend on whether you have a low or high IQ, whether you’re a jerk, or how autonomous you have. If a private individual were giving away money, perhaps they would consider these things. But the law deliberately blinds itself to certain considerations. In the context of most laws, we are (almost always) treated as if we had the same level of intelligence.

Accepting the Hierarchy

Murray complains that “no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones.” My message to high-IQ children is different: “You were born into the natural aristocracy. You have an obligation to strive for the greatness of which you are capable. Your moral superiority is not guaranteed by your score on an IQ test. If you fail to reach the summits to which nature has equipped you to ascend, your ignominy is as great as your squandered gifts. And so is your culpability if you misuse your talents to destroy or oppress.”

The egalitarian ethos is epitomized in the false declaration that “all men are created equal.” The hereditarian says what every sensible person already knows to be true, namely, that there is a natural hierarchy for everything. Coming from a background of Christian egalitarianism, we hesitate to state the truth so nakedly. The task is to align our moral intuitions with the truth of hereditarianism.

In this episode we discuss strategies for defeating wokism. Contra Richard Hanania who says we should “shut up about race and IQ,” Amy and I say that we can dewokify the elites by teaching them the truth about race.

Rufo’s siege of the institutions and Hanania’s proposed legal reforms are necessary for success. But by themselves they won’t change the trajectory of the culture.

Any realistic path to victory over wokism requires widespread acceptance of hereditarianism among the elites. As I explained in “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem,” wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If all races and sexes have the same innate distributions of psychological traits, disparities in socioeconomic status must be due to environmental factors. In practice, that means differences in outcome favoring whites or men will be attributed to past or present white racism or sexism. This triggers an all-consuming crusade against the hidden forces of discrimination. That’s what wokism is. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to the woke left because the mainstream right accepts the equality thesis but fails to recognize its implications. Woke law and woke institutions are primarily effects rather than causes of elites being woke. Undermining the equality thesis destroys the intellectual basis of wokism and gives the elites a reason to join the right.

The prospect of a hereditarian revolution strikes some people as inconceivable and/or even more terrifying than wokism itself. Here I argue that, without hereditarianism, the fight against wokism is futile, and that a hereditarian revolution is both feasible and desirable. “Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position. When the elites accept race realism, we can construct a better world.

Only Hereditarianism Stops the Cycle of Wokism

The empirical and moral premises that motivate wokism had become the orthodoxy among elites by the 1950s. It took a couple generations for the intellectual class to impose its ideology on the rest of society through the law and education system.

Rufo argues that “critical theorists” conquered the culture via a “long march through the institutions.” But, in fact, academia, government agencies, and the education establishment latched onto critical theory because the elites who controlled these institutions were already woke. Herbert Marcuse said this openly: “What I did is formulate and articulate some ideas and some goals that were in the air at that time. That is about it.”

Hanania argues that (much of) wokism was created by civil rights law, and the solution is to fix the law. But the law cannot be the cause of wokism if wokism came first. The original civil rights laws unambiguously prohibited discrimination against whites and men. But when it became clear that legal equality would not lead to equality of outcome, lawyers and bureaucrats decided that the law says that everyone has to be woke, and they looked to philosophies like critical race theory to justify their decisions. As long as the elites who are responsible for interpreting and implementing the law remain environmentalists with respect to race and sex differences, there is nothing to stop this from happening again. The intellectual class will interpret race and sex disparities as a moral wrong that needs to be corrected. They will read their ideology into the law, and we’ll be back to where we started.

Until we defeat the taboo on hereditarianism, our victories will always be temporary. Every time we cut off a tentacle of the DEI monster, it will grow back. Harvard President Claudine Gay will be replaced by someone worse. We’ll ban “diversity statements” for university job applications, but zero Republicans will be hired. Our legal reforms will be purposefully misinterpreted. The leviathan will live on.

Hanania argues that getting the elites to accept hereditarianism would require a “cultural revolution,” which is “bound to have unforeseen consequences.” In his view, we might be able to bring wokism down to a tolerable level without attempting such radical and dangerous measures. If we change the law to demand colorblindness, he says, we can live with “permanent cognitive dissonance” regarding the fact that blacks and other groups will be massively underrepresented in certain positions.

What’s to stop the elites from doing the same thing they did before, namely, interpreting colorblind laws as requiring quotas and DEI? Hanania suggests that this time will be different. According to him, wokism triumphed because the conservative movement was “asleep at the wheel.” Now that conservatives are mobilized against DEI, we will be able to stymie the process of rewokification of the law, and thereby maintain permanent cognitive dissonance.

I’m afraid this strategy is hopeless. Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. (Even that might be an overestimate, since high-school credentials are sometimes given a boost by affirmative action.) In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment. This is not the kind of crisis that people will forget about after the next news cycle. The elites who have adopted wokism as their religion will launch a massive counterassault. The woke elite has far more collective intelligence than the conservative mob, and a thousand ways to outsmart and outmaneuver us.

I agree with Hanania that wokism is at least partly caused or reinforced by civil rights law. Hypothetically, better laws would mean less wokism at the margins. But, as I’ve pointed out, besides the fact that anti-woke legal reforms will invariably be undermined by activist judges and bureaucrats, woke corporate, media, and academic culture is driven largely by the preferences of smart people. Google and Harvard are far woker than they are required to be by the law, and much of this is due to employee demand. There is no law that said Google had to have a company-wide crying session after Trump was elected, or that their employees had to shed so many tears. Suppose we eliminated civil rights laws and gave people back their freedom of association and the right to create their own workplace cultures. Most leading institutions would continue to be almost the same as before, with some minor procedural adjustments. But this is a moot point, because it’s probably pointless to attempt to change the law unless we also gain the support of the people who interpret and implement the law.

We simply cannot win without bringing a substantial number of the elites to our side. Neither Rufo nor Hanania has a specific plan to make the elites give up wokism. Hanania is pessimistic about changing anyone’s mind, and hopes that legal reform will produce a cultural shift a few generations down the line. He writes: “Millennials may be lost to conservatives, along with Generation Z, but the college graduates of 2030 and beyond might not be” (p. 27). Rufo acknowledges the importance of appealing to elites, writing in his “manifesto for counterrevolution”:

A movement gains legitimacy by taking territory in discourse, the adoption of its discourse by society’s elite, and eventually, through elevation of its discourse into law. Win the argument, win the elite, and win the regime—that is the formula, which traces the path from the pamphlet to power.

This is certainly true. But how do we “win the argument, win the elite”? I have carefully read Rufo’s book and many of his articles, but I did not see a formula for winning arguments and the support of elites. Hereditarianism is the only idea that is powerful enough to actually make a difference.

Following Thomas Sowell, mainstream conservatives sometimes attribute racial disparities to cultural differences. Amy Wax calls this “soft realism” in contrast to “hard realism” (hereditarianism). There are at least three reasons why soft realism (which Wax herself doesn’t advocate) is not an adequate substitute for the hard version.

First, soft realism is not “realism” at all, but a false scientific claim. Obviously, human behavior is influenced by culture, and bad outcomes can sometimes be improved via cultural change. But “culture” is not the reason why we see the same basic pattern of racial disparities among population-representative groups of sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans, and East Asians wherever they go all over the world. Furthermore, culture generally reflects the average characteristics of the community that generates it. A culture of doing homework is more likely to arise in a mean IQ 105 population that is genetically adapted to the arduous demands of the rice paddy than it is in a mean IQ 85 population that is adapted to hunting and gathering on the savanna. Culture influences academic outcomes, but it is not a completely independent force that can be detached from genes. Conservative advocates of soft realism who claim that we can fix the problem of racial disparities by improving “culture” are making false promises. If we ever put their theories to the test, they will (at tremendous cost) be proved wrong, and conservatives will be discredited.

Second, most smart people don’t find soft realism convincing. Many Sowellians have an intuition that culture-based theories of race differences can become popular, but the empirical evidence shows that their intuition is wrong. Conservatives have been promoting Sowellism for 50 years, and it has failed to attract a significant number of supporters. It remains a niche idea espoused by National Review readers.

Third, even if we could convince people to accept the scientifically incorrect theory of soft realism, it would only raise the question of who is morally responsible for creating—and who is on the hook for fixing—the bad culture. This is just an indirect route to wokism. Whites are the ones who brought blacks out of Africa and created the conditions where they failed to develop a culture of homework, respect for the law, and strong nuclear families. So we’ll need to take increasingly extreme measures to fix the “culture” that produces bad outcomes in certain groups. Again, we’re back to wokism.

Winning over the elites isn’t just a necessary means to victory over wokism, but a component of victory. Due to brainwashing, many of the best people in our society are wasting their moral energy on a cause that is based on lies. We should not forsake them. Suppose (counterfactually) that we had the power to strike down the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and permanently enshrine anti-wokism into law. Wokism would still be the religion of the elites. Companies would still compete with each other to be woke in order to attract the best employees. University professors would have the same political views as before. Conservatives wouldn’t suddenly gain 8.5 IQ points (the current difference in WORDSUM IQ between very liberal and very conservative whites). We need the elites on our side not only because we need their help in taking over the institutions, but because rescuing them from error is an end in itself.

A Hereditarian Revolution Is Feasible

Amy Wax writes: “If versions of soft realism are a tough sell, the harder realism—the possibility that innate factors partly account for racial differences in behavior or traits—hits a brick wall.” But we should not forget that hard realists have an ace up their sleeve: the fact that hereditarianism is true! The fact that Sowellians failed to convince the elites to accept their false theory of race differences does not necessarily mean that a more taboo-violating but true theory cannot be successful.

The equality thesis is based on lies. Expose the lies and present the truth in a way that smart people can understand, and you can change minds. Some critics will say I am naïve: people (with the exception of the critic) aren’t rational, and presenting evidence that they are wrong is a waste of time. There is, ironically, little evidence to support that cynical view. Yes, the taboo is powerful. Many people are psychologically incapable of critically examining a belief that society has taught them is right and virtuous. After a certain age, most people lose the ability to change their mind about anything important. But we don’t need to convince everyone immediately. There only needs to be a critical mass of intelligent people who are sufficiently rational and open-minded. Slowly the taboo will erode.

Not too long ago the idea of biological evolution was considered extreme and inflammatory. In 1844, when Darwin revealed to a friend that he no longer believed in the immutability of species, he wrote that it felt like he was “confessing a murder.” Fifteen years later he published On the Origin of Species with a mainstream publisher and to wide acclaim. By his death in 1882, the intellectual class was largely on his side. The Church of England awarded him the great posthumous honor of being buried in Westminster Abbey alongside such national heroes as Isaac Newton. Within the lifetime of Darwin’s longer-lived children, religious taboos that had existed for millennia in the West mostly faded out of existence. This process was driven by evidence and rational argument.

We can’t expect to win in an afternoon. People’s beliefs and moral intuitions are sticky, and many people are just incorrigible dogmatists. But a taboo is not a law of nature. It can be undermined by evidence. In a world with the Internet and social media, cultural change can happen a lot faster than it could in the 19th century.

The strategy of giving people accurate information about race is something that mainstream conservatives have never tried before. Even today, there are barely a dozen serious scholars who are spreading awareness of the relevant facts, and they are doing so with virtually no institutional support—and often opposition—from Conservatism, Inc.

In response to “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem,” Imperium Press argues that “Wokeness was not installed by reason and it will not be deposed by reason—only by power.” But attributing cultural change to “power” is not an explanation. Power is the proximate cause of most social change. The ultimate cause is the motivation of those who wield the power. Our culture became woke because government bureaucrats, courts, educators, and corporate leaders—in other words, smart people—exercised their power to impose wokism on us. Wokism will end when the people who have the power decide they want something else.

In his book, Why Race Matters, Michael Levin fantasizes about the president of the United States delivering a speech on race differences to a joint session of Congress and the American people. This is not the right way to introduce a radical scientific idea into the mainstream, just like it wouldn’t have been a good way to promote evolutionary theory in the 19th century. We start with the intellectual elites—people who are capable of understanding the evidence—and let the culture tag along at its own pace. This is how wokism achieved power. The elites went woke in the 1950s, if not earlier. Over the next few decades, important institutions came to reflect their views. No American president spoke the language of modern wokism until Barack Obama. President Obama was, of course, a product, not a cause, of the woke takeover.

When Hanania argues that getting elites to accept hereditarianism would require a “cultural revolution,” he seems to imply that this would not only be dangerous but very difficult to accomplish. But the cultural revolution isn’t a completely separate thing that has to happen in addition to an information campaign. When people discover that the taboo at the heart of our culture was constructed to protect a lie, their moral intuitions will change, and they will become receptive to new moral authorities. It’s difficult to change people’s values just by presenting moral arguments. But if you show people that they’ve been lied to about such a fundamental issue as race, you will trigger their emotions in a way that will bring down the value system that was associated with the lie. All we have to do is make people aware of a simple scientific fact. The cultural revolution will take care of itself.

A Righteous Cause

As Kant says, “whoever wills the end also wills...the indispensably necessary means” (G 4:417). Should we will the end of wokism if that means a hereditarian revolution? Or should we stick with the DEI devil we know rather than take a risk on something that could be worse? I say blaze forward. Although we cannot know for sure where any path will lead in the long run, there are good reasons to choose revolution.

We are told that belief in race differences goes hand-in-hand with Nazism and genocide. In reality, the delusion of racial sameness isn’t what is holding the elites back from mass murder. Most liberal elites already at least implicitly acknowledge the reality of individual differences in traits like intelligence. Yet they don’t go around exterminating the less intelligent, or show any indication of a desire to do so. In fact, America devotes far more money and resources to “special” than to gifted education. The empirical evidence shows that, for the vast majority of people, there is no clear psychological connection between viewing someone as less intelligent and hating them, let alone wanting to discriminate against or murder them. Actual genocidal racist movements were and are based on myths and pseudoscience, not accurate information about group differences. The Nazis didn’t believe in Darwinism, but in a pseudoscientific creation story called “world ice theory,” which is so bizarre I don’t even know how to summarize it. They rejected IQ testing as a tool “of Jewry [to] fortify its hegemony.” Contemporary neo-Nazis are just as scientifically illiterate.

A newly hereditarian elite would not look like the current community of self-identified race realists. As of now, some race realists are truth seekers who followed the evidence where it leads. But many others are misfits looking for an outlet to express “hate,” or they are contrarians who reflexively disagree with the establishment about everything. In the General Social Survey, whites who endorse a hereditarian explanation for black–white socioeconomic disparities score 8.5 WORDSUM IQ points lower than whites who endorse environmentalism. Most self-identified race realists are probably not realists, but subscribers to a different kind of wokism that substitutes Jews for whites and blames the world’s ills on “Jewish supremacy” instead of “white supremacy.” Once we start chipping away at the taboo on hereditarianism and presenting information in a way that smart, relatively normal people can appreciate, race realism will be associated with a higher caliber of person, and it will take a different form.

While race realism may be less dangerous than we think, the DEI devil may be more dangerous. Brainwashing generations of children to believe that intractable group differences are the fault of a particular race (whites) that will soon be a shrinking minority can end in a dark place. Even now, when wokism does not pose a serious physical threat to anyone, it has poisoned art, culture, scholarship, and social relationships. White children are brainwashed to despise themselves because of their skin color. Anecdotally, white children are sometimes driven to transgenderism in an attempt to escape the shameful status of oppressor. The humanities and much of the social sciences have been slain on the altar of DEI. Meaningful art of any kind has become almost impossible. In short, wokism is ruining everything that matters except (for the time being) GDP. The fact that we can imagine a worse-case-scenario end to the hereditarian revolution shouldn’t blind us to the dangers of the status quo, and the damage that it has already inflicted upon us.

Don’t Give Up the Word “Race”

One of the ways the left protects its taboos is by suppressing language that is necessary to express taboo-violating thoughts. Suppose you make the empirical claim that race differences in intelligence are largely the result of genetic differences. You will be told that “race” is an incoherent concept, there’s no such thing as “black” or “white,” “intelligence” is subjective, and the “nature–nurture” distinction is meaningless. Everyone’s attention is then diverted to interminable philosophical debates about the meaning of “population” or “gene,” and we never get around to examining the evidence for the original claim. If you attempt to express the politically incorrect idea in leftist-approved newspeak, your statement will be so convoluted that no one will understand what you’re trying to say.

I am a professional philosopher of biology, and I am interested in understanding concepts like race and the nature vs. nurture debate on a deeper level. I’m not against philosophy. However, philosophical questions can be weaponized to protect a favored view from critique by making communication impossible. We should not fall into the left’s philosophy trap.

Some rightists in the hereditarian camp think that we should give up the word “race” and use euphemisms that are less triggering to leftists. In Human Diversity, Charles Murray asserts that “The [leftist] orthodoxy is...right in wanting to discard the word race....[T]he word race has been freighted with cultural baggage that has nothing to do with biological differences....Scientifically, it is an error to think of races as primordial.” Therefore Murray uses the term “population” or “ancestral population” instead (p. 135). In a reply to “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem” published on Helen Dale’s Substack, Lorenzo Warby argues on similar grounds that we should jettison the terms “race” and “race realism.” First I’ll explain why “race” is the right term for us to use, and then address some specific points made by Warby.

Opponents of the term “race” observe that there are no clear criteria to delineate one race from another, that there are intermediary cases such as hybrid populations, clines, and mixed-race individuals, and that racial categories vary across time and place. If taken seriously, these arguments would undermine almost all biological classification, as well as classification in other areas of science. There are no objective or unambiguous criteria that say where one language begins and another one ends. Languages combine to form creoles, they borrow words and grammar from each other, and diverge in more or less subtle ways. Exactly how far into the hills of Appalachia do you need to go before hillbilly twang becomes its own dialect? Is Austrian German the same language as German? South Koreans use thousands of loan words from English. Do they speak the same language as North Koreans? The way we answer these questions is influenced by politics, culture, context, and personal preferences. Yet the concepts of “language” and “dialect” are still meaningful, and they refer to patterns of differences that exist in the real world. To say that Mandarin and English are different languages is a perfectly legitimate statement.

The fact that species, sub-species, races, and families blend into each other was recognized to some extent by pre-Darwinian naturalists. As Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species:

Certainly no clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species and sub-species—that is, the forms which in the opinion of some naturalists come very near to, but do not quite arrive at the rank of species; or, again, between sub-species and well-marked varieties, or between lesser varieties and individual differences. These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage. (p. 51).

One of Darwin’s insights was that continuous variation can be explained by the theory of evolution by natural selection. According to the traditional view, each species is the result of a “distinct act of creation” (p. 44), so you would expect sharp dividing lines between different groups. But if races and species branch off from evolving and sometimes interbreeding populations, there will often be no clear boundaries between them.

People who use the term “race” are often accused of thinking that races are “discrete,” “immutable,” or (as Charles Murray puts it) “primordial.” These critics never cite real-life examples of post-Darwin biologists describing race in such an unsophisticated way, because there are no examples. Since the late 19th century, “race” has referred to populations that are more or less distinguished from each other due to common descent.

Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond attacks racial classification as arbitrary. He says: “races defined by body chemistry don’t match races defined by skin color.” Swedes and Fulani Africans both have the ability to digest dairy in adulthood, so they would be grouped in a “lactase-positive race,” while “most African ‘blacks’, Japanese, and American Indians” would belong to the “lactase-negative race.” On the other hand, “if we classify human populations by their fingerprints,” which have different ratios of arches to loops to whorls, “most Europeans and black Africans would sort out together in one race, Jews and some Indonesians in another, and aboriginal Australians in still another.” In Diamond’s mind, racial classification could just as well be based on “antimalarial genes, lactase, fingerprints, or skin color,” all producing different and equally arbitrary racial categories.

Diamond fails to understand what racial classification is supposed to be. The point is not to classify people in random ways, but to highlight phylogenetic relationships among populations. Race is a classification system based on ancestry. A Nigerian albino who looks more like a Swede than an average Nigerian is still a Nigerian because that’s what his parents are. 23andMe will recognize him for what he is.

We now know that traditional racial classifications correspond closely to genetic clusters, which reflect phylogenetic relationships. One study found that, among 3,636 subjects in the United States who identify as white, African American, East Asian, or Hispanic, in only 5 cases was self-reported race different from “genetic cluster membership.” In other words, folk racial concepts, which are intended to capture ancestral relationships, do exactly what they’re supposed to do with something like 99.86% accuracy. (For details on the legitimacy of the race concept, see Neven Sesardić’s article, “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept.”) “Race” means the same thing as the euphemism “ancestral population,” except that people are familiar with the term race and will be confused if you insist that races aren’t real but ancestral populations are.

Now I’ll address a few specific points made by Warby, since this provides an opportunity to clarify what the hereditarian hypothesis is and how it should be defended.

Warby writes:

Biological races exist in our nearest genetic relative—Pan troglodytes (Chimpanzees)—but not in humans: biologists call them sub-species. We humans simply have not been separate breeding populations for long enough, in part due to back-flows among human populations.

He presents the conclusion that race exists in chimpanzees but not humans as a statement of fact with no further explanation, although he links to a paper by Alan Templeton. Templeton argues:

Adaptive traits, such as skin color, have frequently been used to define races in humans, but such adaptive traits reflect the underlying environmental factor to which they are adaptive and not overall genetic differentiation, and different adaptive traits define discordant groups. There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans.

Templeton makes the same mistake as Jared Diamond. Traits like skin color do not “define” race, but are merely associated with race—that is, with ancestral populations.

Templeton makes a big deal out of the irrelevant fact that the terms “white” and “black” are used in different ways in the United States and Brazil. In America, says Templeton,

self-identified “whites”...are primarily of European ancestry, whereas...“blacks” are primarily of African ancestry, with little overlap in the amount of African ancestry between self-classified U.S. “whites” and “blacks.” In contrast, [among] Brazilians who self-identified themselves as “whites,” “browns,” and “blacks [there is] extensive overlap in the amount of African ancestry among all these “races.”

Notice that Templeton has no problem talking about precise combinations of African vs. European ancestry, which are reflected in DNA. But that is exactly what race is! The fact that different societies use categories that are suited to their own circumstances, and which map onto biological race in more or less precise ways, does not mean that the underlying biological phenomenon is unreal.

The style of argument employed by Templeton would also undermine the concept of “language.” But language and race in chimpanzees get a pass because language and race in other animals aren’t politically sensitive.

On what basis does Templeton claim that race exists in chimpanzees but not humans? He writes: “One commonly used threshold is that two populations with sharp boundaries are considered to be different races if 25% or more of the genetic variability that they collectively share is found as between population differences (Smith, et al., 1997).” Based on this criterion, he claims that there are three species of chimpanzee rather than the usual five recognized by primatologists, and that there are zero races in our species. But, as Holtz points out, there is no convention to define race according to this genetic threshold, and Smith et al., whom Templeton cite, do not claim that there is. Smith et al. refer to a 75% principle for classifying subspecies based on morphology, which can be used by anthropologists who don’t have access to DNA. Templeton is free to make up his own, arbitrary definition of the word “race,” but that doesn’t change the fact that ancestral populations in our species are genetically distinguishable just as they are in chimpanzees.

Warby argues:

My difficulty is with the notion of race as the correct descriptor of such groups. It is quite clear that, for instance, the descendants of American slaves, Afro-Caribbeans and recent African immigrants have rather different social outcomes in the US. Lumping them together as being “black” is hugely misleading: it’s an obscuring of reality, not an expression of it.

This is so even given that there is clear “regression to the mean” across generations in features such as IQ and scholastic attainment. That last link—to an excellent piece by Cremieux—if nothing else illustrates the importance of culture. Clearly Nigerians who immigrate to the US (and elsewhere) come with much healthier parenting and educational norms than those already present in the US. They tumble down the achievement slope towards the black American mean in the second generation.

Outcomes are influenced by factors other than race, so different groups of people drawn from the same race may not turn out the same. But this is not denied by race realists. Within the same race, there can be genetic as well as cultural differences. None of this is a challenge for race realism.

Contra Warby, regression to the mean does not illustrate “the importance of culture.” Heritable, biologically based traits like IQ and height regress to the mean. Suppose Nigerian immigration is selective, so the average immigrant is in the 90th percentile of Nigerians for intelligence. If the first generation has an average IQ of 100, their children will have an average IQ of 90, assuming heritability of 50%. None of the facts cited by Warby suggest that culture is more important than race realists think it is.

Warby wildly overestimates the potential for culture to correct racial disparities in the contemporary United States. He claims that

there is no difference in African-American and Euro-American homicide rates in the rural US....So yes, there is a greater propensity for violent crime among those with Sub-Saharan African ancestry..., but this is an almost entirely soluble problem. How do we know? Rural US has solved it.

As Steve Sailer and Crémieux point out, this is false. Even out in the sticks, blacks commit homicide at several times the white rate. (Warby acknowledged that the study he relied on “may not replicate.”) More important than the fact that Warby’s statistic is inaccurate is the fact that race realism does not say that culture plays no role in outcomes, or that all groups of the same race are genetically identical.

We must look the taboo on hereditarianism straight in the face and say, “No.” We cannot avoid a confrontation by adopting circumlocutions that we hope are less likely to offend leftist sensitivities. This would only serve to undermine our ability to express ourselves and to be politically effective.

Strategy

Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, Linda Gottfredson, Richard Lynn, Philippe Rushton, Steve Sailer, and a bunch of YouTubers and X posters have so far failed to trigger a hereditarian revolution. Anatoly Karlin wonders why the strategy that I advocate, which he says hasn’t worked in the past 30 years, “would be any more successful in the next 30 years.” Indeed, why do I think my race-realist “information campaign” will have a better result than what has already been tried?

Cultural change doesn’t happen automatically in response to an individual stating a radical idea, even if it’s a true idea backed up with lots of evidence. You can’t just publish a book or a tweet and say, “there was no revolution, I guess we have to give up.” For an idea to spread, millions of people have to argue it out over Thanksgiving dinner tables, water coolers, and dorm room hookahs. Prominent figures have to take a stand in favor of the idea, and show that they are willing to pay a price for their conviction. The good news is that millions of people—including many academics—already know the truth about race. They need recognize what is at stake and start making their case.

One of the reasons why it has been so hard for race realism to get a fair hearing is because, as I noted, most self-identified “race realists” are not actually realists, but below-average-intelligence JQ (Jewish Question) obsessives whose beliefs have little to do with science. Virtually every genuine scholar of race is one or (at most) two degrees of separation removed from deranged crackpots and neo-Nazis, which makes it difficult for intellectually responsible outsiders to know whom to listen to. Even Lynn and Rushton produced some profoundly flawed scholarship and often exercised poor judgment about their associations. With the exception of Aporia—a magazine and podcast that was founded a couple years ago—race-realist institutions tend to be either officially anti-Semitic or closely associated with anti-Semites. (American Renaissance is not anti-Semitic, and it is an important center for high-quality discussions of race. But many JQers attend and speak at its conferences.) Most normal people have no interest in sorting through this mess, so they just dismiss the whole thing. Successful leaders will have to make a greater effort to distinguish themselves from thugs and crackpots, even if, in the short run, this alienates some of their would-be followers.

Another problem is that the best hereditarian scholars are often timid about stating their views. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray wrote:

It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. (p. 311)

In 2012 Murray appeared on the Colbert Report, where following conversation took place:

Colbert: People interpreted what you were saying [in The Bell Curve] as saying that there were racial and genetic components to black people scoring lower on intelligence tests.

Murray: I know that’s what people said.

Colbert: Right. Did you not say that?

Murray: No, no, the book did not say that.

Colbert: Did you say that?

Murray: I have never said that.

I do not mean to insinuate anything negative about Murray, whom I greatly admire. However, this is not what trying to destroy the taboo on hereditarianism looks like. Perhaps that’s not what Murray was trying to do. (On X Murray said “there’s a story behind” his statement to Colbert that is “too long for tweets.” A couple months ago he said he might tell the story in his next book.) But if we want to convince people to take hereditarianism seriously, we have to show that we believe it ourselves.

Arguments don’t prevail just because they’re good. The people who make the argument have to inspire respect and confidence. How did a small Jewish cult called Christianity become the most influential ideology in the world? It was partly due to the fact that pagans were impressed by the early Christian martyrs who sacrificed themselves in the colosseum for the sake of their faith. Luckily, we don’t have to do that. Also, unlike the Christians, we have the advantage of having truth and evidence on our side. But we need to be willing to take a stand and demonstrate our commitment, or our arguments will fall flat.

What comes after the DEI regime? Murray says he “want[s] America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals” and that we have a “moral obligation to treat others as individuals even though mean differences between groups are a reality and will be with us indefinitely.” Rufo says that “the only hope for a diverse nation is a regime of colorblind equality.” People often attribute similar views to me. Keith Woods writes: “Cofnas is not any kind of White identitarian, and he favours the Charles Murray approach of maintaining a liberal, meritocratic society while simply being honest about natural racial differences.” Imperium Press says: “It’s not clear what Cofnas wants to put in place of colourblind liberalism, but one can only assume that it is a form of race realist liberalism. He explicitly forecloses on the possibility of incorporating the identitarian right.” (The last claim is based on my observation that currently self-identified race realists are mostly low-IQ, anti-Semitic white nationalists.)

With respect to white nationalism, I share Nietzsche’s attitude toward Germans who

advocate nationalism and race hatred and...take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine....

We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being “modern men,” and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the “historical sense.” (The Gay Science, § 377)

I feel no need to quarantine myself from nonwhites (or non-Jews). And the historical record suggests that white nationalism is invariably expressed mainly as negativity toward other races and perceived enemies within the “white” race, which is not something I find attractive. A generation of Internet white nationalists has produced tens of millions of pieces of racist online content, but zero great works of music, art, or literature, and a relatively small amount of high-quality scientific analysis. Despite their claimed love of classical music, there isn’t a single well-known, white-nationalist classical performer, let alone composer. This is not the community that is carrying the torch of Western civilization, as I understand it.

That does not mean that I advocate colorblindness or multiculturalism, or say that race is politically irrelevant. A race is like an extended family (although you’ll probably be disappointed if you expect your racial brethren to treat you that way), and it’s natural to care about the fate of your people. Our physical and psychological nature reflects our racial heritage, and for partly biological reasons we may feel a connection to our cultural traditions. Those who truly value diversity should favor the preservation of racial distinctions. There must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius. And in the case of group conflict, racial tribalism can sometimes be the key to solving collective-action problems. If whites are attacked qua whites, it makes sense for them to fight back as whites.

Coleman Hughes defends the ideal of colorblindness, which he defines as “treat[ing] people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.” He calls for “policies aimed at reducing the gap between the haves and the have-nots [that] should be executed on the basis of class, not race.” First, class-based affirmative action, which punishes children for the success of their parents, is worse than the current system of explicitly anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-male discrimination. A class-based affirmative action regime would not only discriminate against higher-performing racial groups. Within the white and Asian populations it would disproportionately target the most talented individuals, who are more likely to have high-SES parents. We need to end the war on nature, accept that talent is not distributed equally within or across groups, and allow people to succeed based on their merit. Second, the ideal of colorblindness is probably not tenable. Race provides important information about expected outcomes. That’s why AI ethicists find it so difficult to stop pattern-recognizing algorithms from becoming “racist.” People spontaneously organize themselves to some extent along racial lines, and groups can have conflicting interests. Racial realities will inform interpersonal behavior and public policy.

In the light of race differences, certain core liberal values will have to be reexamined. We will probably have to rethink ideals like multiculturalism and a borderless world. Legislators should take into consideration how their policies will influence the racial makeup of society, and what effects this is likely to have.

After knowledge of race differences spreads, people’s moral intuitions will start to adjust, and institutions and social norms will increasingly reflect the new preferences of the elites. There will be a multidecadal transition period between wokism and a new, reality-based system, which will require various stopgap measures. In the short run, it may be necessary to guarantee some minimal representation in certain leadership positions to major demographic groups. That doesn’t mean we need quotas to ensure proportional representation of blacks at Google, Harvard, and air traffic control. But when it comes to policy making in a multiracial society, we might need to make sure that everyone feels they have a voice in determining our collective fate. In the long run, a more permanent solution may be to grant communities more freedom to organize themselves according to different values. Divisions won’t necessarily be made along racial lines, although it’s likely that many self-segregating communities will be relatively homogeneous.

Race realism is not utopianism. It is not the solution to the problem of political organization, which our species has been grappling with for a quarter of a million years. The fact that race and race differences are real does not tell us what our ultimate values should be, or what kind of society we should strive for within the limits of what is possible.

But race realism crumbles a central pillar of our moral–political system. Widespread acceptance of hereditarianism, especially among the elites, will undermine the reigning left–liberal order as we know it. Initially, many individuals will follow Kathryn Paige Harden’s lead and cling to the old value system even after the empirical claims that undergirded it are shown to be wrong. In the long run the Harden approach will be unsuccessful. When race realism is accepted, our cultural values will change. A new equilibrium will arise.

If the intelligence deficit among conservatives—and right wingers in general—is real, there are at least two reasons why we need to talk about it. First, although IQ may not be under our control, being smart is to some extent a choice. Behaviors like doing “physiognomy checks” on X or getting all of your information from Internet memes are not genetically determined. It is sometimes possible to shame people into living up to their intellectual potential. Second and more important, the fact that an ideology fails to attract smart people is an indication that there is something wrong with the ideology, which needs to be corrected. If smart people overwhelmingly choose wokism over right-wing alternatives, we need to understand why.

Following Marjorie Taylor Greene, some American conservatives think the solution to our political problems is a “national divorce.” I think this would be a bad deal for both sides, but worse for conservatives. The Conservative States of America would most likely be a middle-income country that squanders its national budget on hunting down abortion doctors and erecting Pyramid of Giza-scale Ten Commandments monuments. Not satisfied with country music and Daily Wire films starring Gina Carano, the conservatives would have to import most of their entertainment from Wokistan, which the conservatives would still complain about despite being unable to produce their own alternatives. Many conservative elites would probably apply for asylum in Wokistan. This is obviously not what we should be aiming for. Instead of striking out on our own, the right needs to figure out how to turn smart people away from the left.

I’ll review several lines of direct and indirect evidence that the left has a crushing intelligence advantage over the right, especially among the elites. Then I’ll consider why this is the case, and explain the strategic implications.

To explain the appeal of leftism—which increasingly takes the form of wokism—you have to explain what wokism is. I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races, and probably the sexes, too. (Mainstream conservatives acknowledge the existence of physical sex differences, but they rarely chalk up disparities in, for example, mathematical achievement to differences in innate ability—at least not publicly.) As I will explain, wokesters correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities.

There are two popular theories of the origin of wokism, which are defended in Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. Rufo traces the revolution back to the philosophy of “critical theory” or “critical race theory,” while Hanania points the finger at civil rights law, which in his view made it illegal not to be woke. On my account, both the embrace of critical race theory and the establishment of civil rights laws were more effects than causes of wokism. The driving cause of wokism was widespread acceptance of the equality thesis, and that is what must be explained.

I will show why my explanation of wokism is superior to Rufo’s wokism-as-philosophy theory and Hanania’s wokism-as-law theory. Wokism needs to be attacked from philosophical and legal angles, and Rufo and Hanania provide important guidance on how to do that. Ultimately, however, the woke system can only be brought down by exposing the Big Lie upon which it is based (the equality thesis), thereby giving elites a reason to change their minds and defect to the right. Wokism will end when the right becomes smart enough to attract the people who matter.

Liberals Are Smarter: The Evidence

One of the most robust findings in social psychology is “stereotype accuracy.” The stereotype that Jews are rich or Jamaicans are good sprinters reflects statistical realities about the distribution of money and fast-twitch muscle fiber, and is not based entirely on irrational prejudice. There are many individual exceptions—many poor Jews and fat, slow Jamaicans—but on average there are differences between populations in the direction of stereotypes. (After writing this I Googled “richest person in Jamaica.” Surprise—up popped a picture of a Jew. The fastest man in Israel is Ghanaian.)

Stereotype accuracy is bad news for conservatives and right wingers, who are stereotyped as low-IQ rubes—and not only by liberals. It was a conservative Republican Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, who nicknamed the Republican Party “the stupid party.” National Review writer Noah Rothman notes that the Republican Party is known as “the stupid party” to its critics “both within and outside its ranks.” It’s hard to understand why the party of conservatives should have this reputation if conservatives are just as smart as liberals.

There is no definitive study on the IQs of self-identified liberals vs. conservatives or Democrats vs. Republicans. The best data we have come from the General Social Survey (GSS), which every other year surveys a representative sample of Americans. Participants in the GSS answer questions about their political identity, take a ten-item vocabulary test called WORDSUM, a test of probability knowledge, and a test of verbal reasoning. The interviewer also assesses the respondent’s ability to understand the survey questions. The GSS’s intelligence tests and the interviewer’s assessment of the subject are not proper IQ tests, but scores can be used to estimate IQ. Noah Carl found that, when all of these measures of intelligence are converted to IQ, Republicans have a 1–4 IQ-point advantage over Democrats.

However, the results are skewed by the large number of lower-average-IQ minorities who vote Democrat. When Emil Kirkegaard restricted the analysis to whites (still the most culturally influential demographic) and considered ideological rather than party identification, he found a substantial difference favoring liberals in WORDSUM IQ. “Extreme liberals” score the highest at 107, followed by “liberals” at 105. They were trailed by “conservatives” at 101, and “extreme conservatives” at 98.5. Only people who reported that they “don’t know” their political orientation scored worse than extreme conservatives. The same conservatives who complain about immigrants not speaking proper American know fewer English words than liberals, and this indicates lower IQ.

An 8.5 IQ-point gap between extreme liberals and extreme conservatives might not be conspicuous on an individual level. To put it in context, the average sibling pair differs by 12 IQ points, and it’s often hard to tell which sibling is smarter. But, on a population level, an average 8.5-point difference has far-reaching implications. Higher IQ populations will be noticeably better at constructing effective institutions, and will tend to develop more intellectually oriented cultures. Assuming intelligence is normally distributed (with the same variance) in liberals and conservatives, even a relatively small liberal-favoring difference in the averages entails significant conservative underrepresentation at the highest levels of ability. Other more indirect evidence is consistent with these predictions.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranks the world’s universities based on objective criteria such as the number of publications they produce in Nature and Science and how many of their alumni have won Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals. It gives more weight to achievement in the hard sciences, which conservatives consider “real subjects,” than in the humanities. According to the ranking, 5 of the top 20 universities in the world are in California—the bluest and gayest state in America. In the top 50, there are 28 American universities, of which 23 are in blue states. The five in red states are UNC Chapel Hill (ranked 21st in the US), Duke (22nd in the US), Washington University in St. Louis (17th in the US), the University of Texas at Austin (25th in the US), and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (27th in the US). All five of these red-state universities are located in solidly blue cities, and none of them are conservative institutions—in fact, they are about as woke as their blue-state counterparts. The only relatively conservative university in the US that’s even listed on the ARWU is Brigham Young University, whose global ranking is in the 501–600 range. I say BYU is “relatively conservative” rather than “conservative” because it still leans liberal, with 61% of its political donors giving to liberal rather than conservative causes. If conservatives are just as smart and intellectual as liberals, why have they failed to create even a single major conservative-friendly university that is remotely competitive with the top liberal universities?

The right has a handful of think tanks that in some cases employ scholars who are as good as, or better than, those at elite universities. But these are relatively small operations. The annual expenditures at the conservative American Enterprise Institute are less than $50 million. At the Manhattan Institute, they’re less than $20 million. If conservatives seriously cared about building elite institutions of learning and scholarship, they could do better than this. The fact that they don’t is further evidence that they are not as intellectually oriented as liberals.

Tucker Carlson recently said: “Let’s keep dumb people and crazed partisan demagogues away from our financial system and our power grid. They can keep the sociology department—have fun. But why don’t you stay away from the fundamentals that keep the country running.” A liberal commentator would never say something like this, because most liberals understand that culture is influenced by ideas, and surrendering idea-generating institutions to the enemy is a bad strategy. Carlson himself is far more intelligent than most professors of sociology. But he knows that, to his conservative audience, the notion of studying social phenomena in a scholarly way (what sociology is supposed to be) is literally a punchline. The fact that conservative leaders often express this kind of attitude is evidence that the average conservative doesn’t get why ideas are important.

Journalism is another area in which conservatives display less intelligence and competence than liberals. In a moment of lucidity at the 2009 CPAC convention, Tucker Carlson lamented the fact that conservatives have been unable to create institutions like the New York Times. Over boos from the audience, he noted that “yes they are liberal, yes they twist it. But they are still out there finding the facts and bringing them to people.” He said that “conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations.” They should “not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media but gather the news themselves.” And yet, 14 years later, after Carlson was fired from Fox News and the fetters were off, he started trumpeting fake news about UFOs and Barack Obama’s gay affair. He was ultimately pulled down to the level of his conservative audience.

One could argue that the Wall Street Journal is the conservative New York Times, but I think this is a mistake. The Journal leans non-woke and libertarian, especially in its op-ed pages, but it does not usually go out of its way to defend the right-wing perspective, and it does not do a lot of narrative-busting reporting. Amy Wax points out that, just a few weeks ago, this reputedly conservative newspaper ran a “full-page puff piece” about a DEI officer who is the director of product inclusion and equity at Google. Two months after George Floyd’s death, the Journal announced it would start capitalizing “Black” but not “white”! In any case, the Journal does not have the kind of influence on the right that the Times has on the left. A 2012 survey found that Journal readers are more likely to identify as Democrat than Republican (31% vs. 20%), though they leaned conservative over liberal (32% vs. 21%). A post-Great Awokening 2014 survey found that Journal readers lean slightly left, with consistent liberals (20%) and mostly liberals (21%) outnumbering consistent conservatives (13%) and mostly conservatives (22%).

The right’s lack of appreciation for intelligence is reflected in the fact that it provides no clear career path for right-leaning intellectuals, especially if their work is not directly related to hot-button policy issues like immigration, taxes, or gender ideology. Most young scholars who were kicked out of academia for challenging liberal orthodoxy, such as sociologist Noah Carl and psychologist Bo Winegard, were not picked up by establishment conservative institutions. (Carl and Winegard are both currently employed at the new magazine Aporia.) Sometimes serious scholars are hired by conservative institutions, but then fired after liberals complain. That was the fate of Jason Richwine, whose Harvard dissertation mentioned facts about race that made liberals upset. Harvard rebuffed calls to revoke his degree, but the conservative Heritage Foundation fired him. As a philosopher on the right, it’s literally easier for me to be hired by the University of Cambridge than it is to publish in National Review or the American Conservative. The fact that the left rewards its intellectuals while the right chases them away supports the view that those on the right are not as interested in ideas.

I don’t want to exaggerate the intelligence or integrity of the left, which can be almost as stupid, conspiratorial, and mendacious as the right.

Hanania calls conservatives “gullible morons” because a small number of them were supposedly taken in by a liberal parody account on X that would, for example, defend affirmative action by saying, “no Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system.” But when liberal outlets reported that a pregnant white nurse tried to steal a bicycle from a group of young black men—a story straight out of the Twilight Zone—tens of thousands of liberals accepted this at face value. According to an article published in REVOLT and reprinted in outlets including Yahoo! News: “A white woman in New York City has earned the nickname ‘Citi Bike Karen’ after a video went viral of her trying to steal a Black youth’s rentable bicycle.” In a tweet that got at least 21.9 thousand likes before being deleted, Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump wrote: “This is unacceptable! A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC.” The woman’s employer, Bellevue Hospital, thought that this narrative was plausible enough to place her on leave. NBC News ran a segment edited to portray the white woman as a racist villain, even sending a camera crew to knock on her door in an attempt to confront her, and filming the front of her building so that everyone can know where she lives. The NBC report concluded with an interview with a neighbor saying: “It’s clearly like a Karen....She thinks that she’s viewed as [a] victim because she’s white....That’s obvious in this America that we all live in.” It took the New York Times two-and-a-half months to publish an op-ed cautiously defending the “Citi Bike Karen.” The Times then published several letters from readers, some of which were against the “Karen,” including one by a Hunter College sociology professor. The equally preposterous Jussie Smollett hoax was widely taken at face value by the establishment media. I’m not saying conservatives aren’t gullible morons who wouldn’t believe an absurd hoax that supports their own prejudices. But it’s not obvious that liberals are superior in this respect.

When it comes to conspiracy theorizing, the liberal press can hold its own against the conservative. The right-wing press is justly criticized for promoting denialism about Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. But the New York Times published more than 3,000 articles on the baseless conspiracy theory that Trump “colluded” (whatever that means) with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election. Mainstream leftist ideology—which is promoted by the liberal media establishment—is one giant conspiracy theory about how society is controlled by invisible “white supremacist” or “patriarchal” forces, which control our lives in ways that no one can clearly explain (although, as I’ll argue, the woke conspiracy theory has more internal logic than mainstream conservatism).

Hanania notes that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed publish a combined 350,000 pieces of journalism a year. He argues: “Just because one can find a lot of mistakes made by the NYT, it doesn’t mean that we have any right to expect that we could’ve reasonably expected any institution to do better.” That’s true. Journalists are human beings who, besides making honest mistakes, may sometimes succumb to laziness or a temptation to lie in order to get clicks or promote a political agenda. We can’t blame them for not being gods. But it is wrong to conclude, as Hanania does, that “the media is honest and good” and that we shouldn’t expect “any institution to do better.” A 2020 survey found that 53.5% of people who self-identify as “very liberal” thought that the police killed around 1,000 or more unarmed black men in the previous year, including 22.2% who thought the police killed 10,000 or more. The true number is between 60 and 100 mostly justified killings. Liberals wouldn’t be so confused about this and many other topics if mainstream journalists were trying to be honest.

And yet conservatives have been unable to produce an alternative that is better or even just as good. There is no conservative New York Times that sends semiserious reporters out to investigate the origins of COVID, election fraud, or vaccine safety, and which then presents the results in relatively unhysterical and polished articles and videos. There is no conservative magazine that seriously competes with the Atlantic or the New Yorker. In fact, liberal magazines are often better at reporting news that favors conservatives than the conservative media itself. The New Yorker recently published the best report I’ve seen on the major fraud scandals in behavioral science—a story that is highly damaging to the liberal establishment, and which is barely on the radar of the conservative press. The “replication crisis” refers to the fact that many alleged scientific findings—especially in anti-conservative fields like social psychology—are bogus. A search of foxnews.com for “replication crisis” turns up a single instance in one article in 2018. A search of nationalreview.com for “replication crisis” gets 34 hits, while a search for “Chuck Schumer” (a New York senator disliked by conservatives) gets 5,280 hits. The New York Times has given almost twice as much coverage to the replication crisis as National Review, with a search of the Times’s website turning up 64 results.

To illustrate the point with another random example, I recently stumbled on a Vox YouTube video explaining why Florida transformed from a swing state to a red state. It occurred to me that no conservative organization can routinely produce videos that have this combination of accuracy, neutrality, and production value. It’s not because we need billions of dollars to get an operation like Vox off the ground. Independent YouTube channels like Veritasium and Vsauce, which lean left of center, are just as good at this kind of thing. But there is no conservative equivalent.

The problem isn’t that no one on the right is as smart as the creator of Veritasium (IQ 134), as good a writer as Ezra Klein, or as judicious a reporter as Maggie Haberman. At the very highest levels of intelligence and talent, I suspect that the political divide is not so lopsided, and may even favor the right. In my personal life, the smartest people I’ve known have been disproportionately right wing (and race realist). But great institutions aren’t built by lone geniuses. They require a large network of staff and supporters to competently execute the myriad tasks that keep the gears turning. A media company benefits from an audience that is discerning enough to guide the institution in a positive direction, and that doesn’t goad it into being sidetracked by UFOs, gay-sex conspiracy theories, and hydroxychloroquine. The collective intelligence of the community from which an institution arises can be just as important as the wisdom of its guiding visionaries.

It’s true that the playing field is not equal for right- and left-wing content creators. A newspaper or video channel that reported accurate information about race, crime, and IQ would be deemed a hate organization and would probably be kicked off of mainstream platforms. Some of the best right-wing YouTube channels were snuffed out by the censors. However, the right’s failure cannot be attributed entirely to censorship. There are plenty of spaces on the Internet where people can speak openly about whatever they want, and where right-wing talent is free to express itself. Liberals are not solely responsible for the right’s failure to capitalize on these opportunities.

I recently tweeted that “A right-wing equivalent of the Atlantic podcast would have 200 listeners. Conservatives want to hear about UFOs, flame wars, Hunter Biden’s laptop, pedos, myocarditis, the rich men north of Richmond who force them to drink their life away, and/or Jews, not science and ideas.” Since accuracy is important, I want to correct the record and say that this is wrong. The right does have a handful of podcasts that have the same or better standards of accuracy and the same production value as Radio Atlantic, and which regularly get thousands or tens of thousands of listeners. I myself have appeared on two of them—Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive and the Aporia Podcast. Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning, which, when it comes to controversial issues in genetics, has infinitely higher standards than any left-wing podcast, has over 36,000 subscribers on Substack. Unsupervised Learning is implicitly right wing just because accurate information about genetics ipso facto supports right-wing views. But while the numbers we’re talking about are higher than 200, they are not high enough to suggest that the right has the same appetite for intellectual content as the left. Between them, the Atlantic and the New Yorker have over 2,000,000 paid subscribers. The New York Times has over 10,000,000.

The situation is actually worse for conservatives than these statistics suggest. A substantial portion of the relatively modest audience for intelligent right-wing content may be made up of liberals. On the Unsupervised Learning website, Razib Khan highlights endorsements from five people: Steven Pinker (a liberal democrat), Scott Sumner (a libertarian who claims that “the press has gone easy on Trump”), Carlos D. Bustamante (the geneticist whom Elizabeth Warren charged with proving her Native American ancestry), Arnold Kling (a right-leaning libertarian), and Freddie deBoer (a Marxist). Although a substantial minority of New York Times readers are conservative (22%), if the Times had to select endorsements from its most prominent readers, they wouldn’t be five Trump voters. Despite the fact that he is promoting right-wing ideas, Khan may have more influence over the left than the right! Khan was even hired as an opinion writer for the New York Times, though he was fired after just two articles when his history of publishing in controversial outlets like Taki’s Magazine came to light.

Why Everything Goes Woke

When we understand what wokism is, it will be obvious why it is such a powerful attractor for smart people—at least when the other option is mainstream conservatism.

Wokism is what comes from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If you assume that all human populations have literally the same distribution of innate ability, it follows that all group differences in outcome must be the result of environmental factors. Suppose you truly believe that African Americans and Chinese Americans would on average be equally good at math and equally likely to run afoul of the law if only they were treated the same. With the right intervention, Nigeria could become like Korea, and our inner cities could be transformed into Silicon Valleys—or at least Koreatowns. The persistence of race differences in income, IQ, education, health, crime rates, etc., almost all disfavoring blacks, triggers an increasingly hysterical effort to find and correct the environmental cause.

The existence of disparities between groups with supposedly equal potential is only interpreted as a moral emergency in the light of certain Christian-derived moral premises. An ancient Assyrian, a Roman pagan, an Aztec, or Genghis Khan wouldn’t have cared about the lower performance of different groups. But the WEIRD mind is deeply imprinted with the idea that all individuals are moral equals, and that this entitles them to equal opportunities to flourish and develop. Given our moral sensitivities, it is difficult to accept a situation where environmental conditions cause one group to have a fraction of the wealth, to suffer a 15-point IQ deficit (or a 20- to 25-point deficit if you compare African Americans to Asians or Jews), and to resort to murder at more than 30 times the rate as another group with the same capacities (if you compare blacks and whites in New York City).

For three generations we’ve waged an all-out war against anti-black racism. Racial discrimination against blacks is treated as a heinous crime, and ruthless discrimination in favor of blacks is the norm in business and academia. And yet enormous disparities persist. It therefore follows that the environmental forces that produce the disparities must be far subtler than anyone previously imagined. Maybe racism survives in some mysterious form even when no living individual is racist (“structural racism”). Maybe statues of white men with politically incorrect views about race cause blacks to live up to racist stereotypes. Maybe an insensitive facial expression, or telling a black person that he’s “articulate,” inflicts devastating harm (“microaggressions”). This leads inexorably to witch hunts, cancellations, discrimination against conservatives, and pseudointellectual “grievance studies” academic fields in an effort to root out the hidden racism. A similar line of reasoning occurs with regard to sex differences. That is what wokism is.

Both the mainstream left and right accept the empirical premise upon which wokism is based, namely, the equality thesis. Smart people are more likely to correctly determine that, given equality, wokism follows. Mainstream rightists, in contrast, supposedly believe in equality, but they fail to recognize its implications. Consider the right-wing positions on the following issues:

Affirmative action: everyone should be held to exactly the same standard in university admissions and hiring.

Immigration: it’s important to prevent large numbers of different people from coming into our country.

Microaggressions: insensitive words and minor slights based on identity aren’t a big deal.

These views are very difficult to defend if all populations are identical. If blacks, whites, and Asians have the same potential, then a black person with a 1,200 SAT score can be the intellectual equal of an Asian who scores 1,500 if only we put him in the right environment. Why would you be against giving black people opportunities to achieve what they are capable of? If lower black performance is the result of injustices of the past, why would you not feel a moral obligation to take measures to correct this? In regard to immigration, if all groups are the same, they are equally capable of becoming “American” (whatever that involves). If we open the border to Mexico and Haiti, immigrants from these places can be taught in one generation to be just as high performing as Jews, Chinese, or Brahmins. If microaggressions don’t cause tremendous damage to their victims, what’s your explanation for the persistence of racial disparities?

There are smart conservatives who think that they can square these circles, and I’m not going to argue with them here. My point is just that intelligent, thoughtful people are disproportionately likely to recognize the tension between the equality thesis and most right-wing views.

Mainstream conservatives are unable to effectively push back against wokism because they accept the premises—both empirical and moral—that entail it. That’s why conservatives can’t describe what wokism is, because that would reveal their own failure to follow their beliefs to their logical conclusion. You can see conservative writer Bethany Mandel’s brain melt like warm ice cream when she is asked to define “woke.” Other conservatives propose vague or tendentious definitions that would never be accepted by wokesters themselves. A recent National Review article titled “It’s Not Hard to Define Wokeness If You’re Honest” says that there are five “core elements” including “Woke ideology obsesses over hierarchies among identity groups” and “Woke ideology aims to be constantly evolving rather than a fixed doctrine.” Conservatives cannot actually be honest and admit that wokism is what happens when people are serious about the equality thesis, because they themselves accept—or at least pretend to accept—the claim that all groups are innately the same.

The standard conservative approach to racial disparities is to hope that no one challenges them to provide a serious solution. When they are forced to address the issue, they appeal to their own culture-only theories that do not invoke racism, and which are generally unconvincing to intelligent, open-minded, non-delusional people. Conservatives often blame liberals or Democrats for failed policies that destroyed the black family or caused blacks to choose welfare over work, ignoring the fact that government policies create identical incentives for members of all races. Or they cite Thomas Sowell’s idea that disparities are due to “culture”—a culture that for some reason follows (population-representative) people of certain ancestries wherever they go all over the world, and is impervious to the most extreme interventions, including cross-racial adoption, and which tracks biological markers such as brain size.

I’m not going to explain what’s wrong with mainstream conservative explanations of race differences in detail. For now I’ll just point out that all non-racism-based cultural explanations for race differences have fatal problems that most intelligent people immediately recognize. If it were true that the races were on average psychologically equal, the best explanation for disparities would be the continued existence, or the legacy, of white racism. For this reason, intelligent people tend to choose wokism over mainstream conservatism.

This model explains why virtually all institutions—from the American Ornithological Society (which recently renamed dozens of birds as part of its effort to fight racism) to Harvard to Heterodox Academy—invariably become wokified. Note that this includes institutions (like the aforementioned HxA) they were explicitly founded to promote “free speech” and “open inquiry.” As long as they accept the taboo on recognizing race and sex differences, those on the right—and even anti-woke liberals—are powerless against woke encroachment. There is no way to argue effectively against those who call for drastic measures to equalize group outcomes unless you can say that those outcomes reflect natural differences. Within every institution, the ratchet goes one way: toward more wokism.

Technically wokism is about more than race and sex differences in outcome: it’s also associated with gender theory (the idea that your gender is whatever you feel like), safetyism, and some other views. But what is distinctive about wokism mostly traces back to race. Race denial destroyed people’s ability to think biologically, thus making them open to radical, social-constructivist views on gender. Part of woke morality, including an emphasis on feelings and safety over free speech, is simply the result of the feminization of our institutions, which was more or less inevitable as women were integrated into schools and workplaces. But the essence of wokism is the equality thesis about race and sex. Wokism could survive a backlash against gender theory. If we kept gender theory but turned hereditarian about race differences, wokism would be over.

The True Origin of Wokism

The central tenet of wokism, namely, psychological equality, was first expressed by the English philosopher John Locke in 1690. Locke—the father of both blank slatism and political liberalism—declared that the human mind begins as “white paper, void of all characters.” In regard to race, he wrote:

Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our thoughts and notions had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hottentots that inhabit there. And had the Virginia king Apochancana been educated in England, he had been perhaps as knowing a divine, and as good a mathematician as any in it; the difference between him and a more improved Englishman lying barely in this, that the exercise of his faculties was bounded within the ways, modes, and notions of his own country, and never directed to any other or further inquiries.

In other words, race differences are environmental. In 1758, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, who was arguably more influential than Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the decades preceding the Revolution in France, developed a radically egalitarian political philosophy based on Lockean psychology. Another English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, may have been the first liberal in a semi-contemporary sense, and he was a Lockean with respect to group differences. In 1848, he wrote that “attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural influences” is the “most vulgar” way of “escaping from the consideration of the effects of social influences on the human mind.” In 1873, he wrote that “by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes,” are “produced by differences in circumstances.”

Other 19th- and early 20th-century liberals and radicals converged on similar conclusions. Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently discovered the principle of natural selection and coauthored the first paper on the theory of evolution by natural selection with Darwin in 1858, was a socialist who claimed that intelligence is equal among all races. In 1859, the German scholar Theodor Waitz published On the Unity of the Human Species and the Natural Condition of Man, which argued that all people are “equally destined for liberty,” and differences between them are not innate but “something acquired in the course of their development, which, under favorable circumstances, might have been equally acquired by peoples who appear at present less capable of civilization.” The idea of racial sameness was picked up by the Christian abolitionists in America, who used it to argue against the view that blacks are by nature suited for slavery. By the 1880s, if not earlier, race denial was beginning to crystalize as the orthodoxy among liberal intellectuals. Its attraction was mainly ideological. Blank slatism justifies the utopian aspirations of intellectuals.

The trend toward race denial in academia was driven mostly by ideology, and also by the professional interest that anthropologists and sociologists had in deemphasizing biology in favor of culture. In the early to mid-20th century, celebrity anthropologists like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict argued strongly against race as an important explanatory variable in social science. (Boas himself acknowledged the existence of innate physiological differences in the brains of blacks and whites, which he thought had implications for intelligence. But he wrote these differences off as not very significant.)

After World War II, the association of “race science” with Nazi pseudoscience and genocide gave the moral high ground entirely to the race deniers. Most people don’t make a strong distinction between empirical and moral questions, and when morality conflicts with science, science usually loses. The civil rights movement aroused justified sympathy for the plight of blacks, who had been seriously oppressed. By the time major civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, respectable people had almost unanimously embraced the fantasy that legal equality would solve the race problem. Idealistic school teachers inculcated children with the dogma that race is skin deep, and that only a deranged hater could think otherwise. Once a taboo becomes established, it is very difficult to undo it. Full-blown wokism was inevitable.

The evidence cited by Rufo and Hanania provides further support for my model of wokism.

Wokism Is Not Philosophy

In his book, Christopher Rufo highlights four individuals who he says “represent the intellectual genesis of the revolution” (p. 3). They are Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. Marcuse was a German-born Jew who was associated with the Frankfurt School. He developed the philosophy of “critical theory,” which divides everyone into oppressors (bad) vs. oppressed (good). Along with the German activist Rudi Dutschke, he devised a plan to achieve cultural hegemony via the “long march through the institutions.” Angela Davis was a black radical and student of Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego. She developed “critical praxis,” calling for violent revolution to achieve Marcuse’s vision. Freire developed “critical pedagogy,” and came up with the plan to take over the education system. Bell was a black civil rights lawyer and professor at Harvard who invented critical race theory, and whose disciples conquered the legal profession.

Rufo’s three-part methodology works like this: he (1) finds that an intellectual such as Marcuse expressed a woke idea (e.g., whites are oppressors) or came up with a plan (e.g., take over the institutions), (2) observes that the idea came to be widely accepted or the plan came to fruition, and (3) traces a causal path from wokism back to the intellectual.

I don’t deny that intellectuals can sometimes be responsible for cultural trends. If Jesus, Paul, Confucius, Martin Luther, or Thomas Jefferson had not come up with certain ideas, the world would be radically different. An intellectual can have a history-altering effect due to the intrinsic power of his ideas, his personal charisma, support by a power structure, or—what is always necessary—luck. But the fact that philosopher A was the first person to say X doesn’t necessarily mean that, if X becomes widely believed, we can conclude that A was responsible. It could be that X was already in the air, or that people were ready to accept X, and someone was bound to propose it sooner or later. When it comes to Marcuse, Davis, Freire, and Bell, the evidence described by Rufo makes it clear that these activists were walking through a door that had already been opened. Marcuse et al. are responsible for some of the specific expressions and slogans used by the woke left. But the only reason they had any influence at all is because elites had already accepted the basic tenets of wokism for reasons having nothing to do with their philosophies.

Rufo repeatedly describes Marcuse and his associates as having a “strategy” to take over institutions, and then he says that the strategy succeeded. But he does not adequately explain why they were able to succeed, and why their opponents surrendered so quickly.

Regarding the fact that Marcuse’s “fringe ideas” became dominant in academia and the mass media, Rufo comments that “The critical theories proved to be irresistible: through persuasion or through force, they were able to attract followers, undermine certainties, suppress enemies, and establish a foothold in the knowledge-forming institutions” (p. 45). But the question is why? Libertarians, Evangelical Christians, Muslims, neo-Nazis, Scientologists, Freudians, and many others would like their more or less fringe ideas to become dominant in academia and the mass media, but they fail to gain traction. The thing that needs to be explained is why the red carpet was laid out for Marcuse’s ideas but not others.

Rufo writes that Marcuse

implored the students to learn “how to use the mass media, how to organize production,” as part of a “concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions” and develop mastery over “the great chains of information and indoctrination.” Over time, they did. The radicals waged a generational war for the prestige media and the critical theories became the house style of establishment opinion....[T]he old stalwarts of free expression, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, have also succumbed to the logic of Marcuse’s philosophy....The state, it turned out, was an easy capture. The revolutionaries were able to easily translate the strategies, tactics, and policies of the universities to the state bureaucracy. There was barely any resistance at all. The activist–bureaucrats had a simple list of objectives: capture the culture of the federal agencies; enforce political orthodoxy with critical theory-based DEI programs; turn the federal government into a patronage machine for left-wing activism. (pp. 55–58).

Again, the radical left’s victory is presented as something that just happened. The Marcusians demanded that people accept their ideas, and then they did with “barely any resistance at all.”

The book only contains a few passages that attempt to explain why the Marcusians rather than their opponents were able to prevail. Rufo argues:

In retrospect, their ascension was inevitable. The radicals had learned bare-knuckled politics in student protests, guerrilla factions, and underground bomb factories. It was only a matter of time before they asserted dominance over faculty meetings and academic conferences. They were able to use their old tactics of manipulation—accusations of racism, evocations of guilt and privilege, rituals of criticism/self-criticism—to push out more conservative scholars and delegitimize traditional conceptions of knowledge. Their revolution might have failed in society, but it worked all too well in academia. (p. 42)

But this is not really an explanation. You can’t take over all of academia just by “assert[ing] dominance over faculty meetings and academic conferences.” (How did they join the faculty in the first place?) And “accusations of racism, evocations of guilt and privilege,” and the like, are only effective if people already accept woke premises about racism, guilt, and privilege.

Rufo says that

Marcuse’s “critical theory of society” spawned an enormous brood of new academic disciplines, which matured into hundreds of new departments, programs, and subfields: Critical Studies, Critical Identity Studies, Critical Race Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Black and Africana Studies, Women’s Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, and Race, Class, and Gender Studies. The old radicalism has shed the need for its prefixes—“counter-sociology” has become sociology; “counter-psychology” has become psychology; “counter-education” has become education—and the new disciplines have cannibalized every traditional field in the humanities and social sciences. (p. 43)

Rufo sidesteps the question of who was responsible for the “critical theory of society” spawning all these disciplines, departments, programs, and subfields. “Critical theory” doesn’t have agency. The fake departments in Critical Studies, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, and so on were established because the people in charge of universities wanted to create them. Nothing was stopping them from founding departments of Race Science, Eugenics, or Conservative Studies, but they decided to go with critical theory instead. They did this because they already accepted woke ideology.

Rufo refers to critical race theorists’ “blitz through the institutions,” which faced little resistance to becoming “the default ideology of the universities, the federal government, the public schools, and the corporate human resources department” (p. 207). Rufo says that “It is a stunning coup that began with the vision of one brilliant but troubled man,” Derrick Bell. It is true that Bell was the first person to systematize the principles of wokism in a legal framework. But the fact that critical race theory was immediately embraced by the establishment indicates that the establishment was already woke, and simply waiting for a figure like Bell to spell out how to wokify the law.

It was the same story when it came to Paulo Freire, whose book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, brought critical theory into education. Rufo says that “History should have reduced Pedagogy of the Oppressed into an ideological curiosity” (p. 170), but, instead,

one hundred bespectacled and shabbily dressed academics [who followed Freire] expanded their influence, recruited followers, and achieved dominance in the field of education. They pumped out papers, secured tenure, marginalized rivals, and transformed scholarship into activism. Pedagogy of the Oppressed became the bible of teachers colleges throughout the United States and created a cottage industry in academic publishing. (pp. 162–163)

As Rufo himself observes, there was nothing particularly special about Freire, his book, or his disciples. The world was simply waiting for someone to apply these ideas to education. If it hadn’t been Freire, it would have been someone else.

The best explanation for the institutional takeover described by Rufo is that by the time Marcuse, Davis, Freire, and Bell came along, the elites were already committed to doing whatever it took to bring about equality of outcome among races. Because of the taboo on hereditarianism, they demanded an environmentalist explanation for disparities, which was bound to look something like “critical theory.” At one point, Rufo himself hints at this, writing:

There was a sense of optimism that pervaded all of the literature of the era. The courts had decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the legislature had passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965. Figures such as William Hastie believed that legal equality was the end of a long road—once blacks had attained full citizenship, they would finally reach the Promised Land.

But this turned out to be a false hope. As the 1960s came to a close, many activists felt the creeping realization that equality under the law would not lead easily to the equality of human conditions. (pp. 210–211)

Given that legal equality failed to usher in an era of racial equality of outcome, and that the elites were unwilling to accept striking racial disparities as a product of nature, there was no way to avoid wokism.

Wokism Is Not Civil Rights Law

In 2017, James Damore was fired from Google for correctly stating that, due to biological differences, women are less likely than men to want to sit in front of a computer screen all day writing code. Libertarian-leaning conservatives argued that Google is a private company that should be free to fire whomever it wants. I pointed out in an article in the Weekly Standard that the hidden hand of the government all but forced Google’s executives to punish Damore:

Companies themselves are under legal compulsion to enforce political correctness. What looks like private censorship is actually a form of government censorship by indirect means. Google might not have evolved such a liberal, politically correct culture—or fired Damore—if it didn’t have to protect itself from hostile-work-environment lawsuits or falling afoul of anti-discrimination laws.

That article was titled “PC Corporate Culture Is a Plague that Government Helps Spread,” and I still hold the same position. Hanania has a much stronger thesis: in his view, the government doesn’t just help spread wokism (what we used to call “political correctness”); the government created wokism. Contra Hanania, my view is that although the law reinforces wokism, and sometimes influences the form it takes, the relevant laws were established because the elites were already woke before the laws took effect.

Hanania’s argument can be summarized like this: In 1964 and 1965, the United States Congress outlawed discrimination based on characteristics like race and sex. The prohibition on sex discrimination was, as Hanania emphasizes multiple times, “originally introduced as a joke” (p. 119) by an opponent of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 in an attempt to derail it. Legislation and executive orders related to civil rights ended up having far-reaching unintended consequences. Those who voted for the Civil Rights Act thought they were protecting all groups from discrimination, including straight white men, and that quotas would never be allowed. But activist bureaucrats, judges, and lawyers decided that “disparate impact” was evidence of discrimination. This forced businesses and universities to implement de facto quotas, but without admitting what they were doing, since quotas based on race and sex were technically illegal. The HR bureaucracy arose in part to achieve balanced representation through various indirect means. Because the standards for what constitute discrimination and harassment are vague and enforcement is often arbitrary, the best strategy for institutions is to try to create cultures of deference to progressive ideology, thereby protecting themselves from lawsuits and the wrath of government regulators. Wokism was thus forced on everyone, largely by accident.

One of the big holes in this story is that it doesn’t explain why laws that clearly prohibited discrimination against whites and men were interpreted as demanding exactly that. Hanania’s own observations show that the driving force behind woke interpretations of civil rights law was that the judicial, bureaucratic, and academic establishment was already woke. Insofar as wokism caused the law, the law cannot be the cause of wokism. I can make my case using Hanania’s words:

While Congress banned “discrimination” based on certain protected categories in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it never defined the term. That was done later, mostly through executive actions, the unelected bureaucracy, and the courts. Together, these actors decided that discrimination did not have to be explicit, or even conscious, and that it was a sin committed not against individuals but against “classes” of people entitled to pursue class action remedies. It consisted of practices having a disparate impact on a protected group, potentially creating legal liability regardless of intent. And affirmative action was not only not banned by the [Civil Rights Act] but for all practical purposes required by it. (p. 6)

[P]oliticians and government bureaucrats in institutions like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...and the Department of Labor, usually under pressure to produce tangible results, undertook a long-term project to get around the plain text of the law and ultimately try to achieve equality of outcome, first for blacks and later for other minorities and women. (p. 11)

[M]any liberals within the federal bureaucracy wanted to impose racial quotas on industry, which contradicted the plain text and original intent of the Civil Rights Act. They instead had to settle for standards like disparate impact, which said that any hiring practice that had a disproportionately negative effect on minorities or women was presumptively illegal. While this interpretation of the law was no more legally defensible, the Supreme Court ultimately signed off on it. (p. 12)

In some ways, its interpretations have directly contradicted what legislators promised and agreed to. In his opening statement in the debate over the bill, Sen. Hubert Humphrey told fellow legislators that there was no chance that it would lead to reverse discrimination....The text of the document and the legislative history agree on this point. Yet ultimately none of this would matter, and it would be used to justify proportional hiring by race and sex. (p. 30)

The history of the disparate impact doctrine is illuminating in showing the extent to which government bureaucracies and judges can ignore the law in pursuit of a political agenda....Time and again, members of Congress foresaw the possibility that Title VII could be used to push for a disparate impact standard or equality of outcomes, and it is difficult to imagine how they could have made themselves clearer that such interpretations were forbidden. Seeing the extent to which Congress was explicit about the bill it was passing, and how judges and bureaucrats would ignore its wishes anyway, raises serious questions about who ultimately has the power to make law under our system of government. (pp. 39–40)

When faced with undeniable evidence in the plain text of the law and historical record, judges have appealed to the higher purpose of the statute. By passing the Civil Rights Act, Congress meant to help black people, so the “purpose” of the law can supposedly allow disparate treatment by race in order to achieve equal results....If this sounds like a judge making up the law to fit his own political preference, that is because that is exactly what it is. (pp. 42–43)

Again, why was the intellectual establishment that interprets the law woke even before the law? Hanania writes: “due to pressure both from within and outside government, things soon began to change radically, and by the early 1970s, feminism in something resembling its current form had triumphed within the federal bureaucracy” (pp. 28–29). Elsewhere he refers to “the left, whose ideas dominate among the federal bureaucracy, the activist class, and the legal profession” (p. 155). He notes: “As of 1969, there were only four Republicans under sixty serving on any US court of appeals....Lawyers are more likely to be liberal than conservative, and the ratio is particularly lopsided at the top firms and in the nonprofit world” (pp. 162, 201). The wokism of the intellectual class is treated as a law of nature, with no real explanation.

Hanania argues that we know wokism didn’t come from the university because

identity politics had to originally be forced upon much of higher education by Washington, with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare originally coercing schools like Columbia and UC Berkeley to adopt quota-based faculty hiring during the early 1970s. The government mandates came first, and the ideology later. (p. 10)

To support this claim he cites a 1972 article in Commentary, which actually undermines his argument. The article only provides evidence that faculty and administrators at Columbia and Berkeley didn’t like the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare breathing down their necks and demanding documentation regarding their affirmative action programs. It does not say that these people disagreed with the government’s goals or ideology.

In 1971, Columbia University President William J. McGill commented in connection with affirmative action regulations that “We are no longer in all respects an independent private university.” Both the Commentary article and (in another place) Hanania (p. 64) quote McGill, and his statement can easily be misinterpreted to suggest that woke values were being imposed on an unwilling Columbia. But that was not McGill’s point. He did not reject the government’s “standards and goals of affirmative action.” McGill wrote:

Columbia University cannot tolerate discrimination in its hiring practices....It must be the university’s role to take a position of leadership in building a new and more equal society....[W]e have no doubt as to our position on such moral questions. It is quite another thing to provide data of the range and scope necessary to establish our accountability to the federal agencies with which we deal. This is a technical and administrative question.

This was a squabble over administration, not a disagreement about values. It was a similar story at Berkeley. The Commentary article only referred to the “recent reluctance of Berkeley” to turn over faculty files, and makes it clear that, by 1972, the university had already purged Republicans and opponents of “social justice.”

This isn’t to say that wokism came specifically out of universities. Rather, it came from every place where smart people worked out the implications of the equality thesis. The ideology wasn’t imposed on universities from above. The law only reinforced trends that already existed.

Another big issue with Hanania’s account is that it overlooks the extent to which woke cooperate and academic culture is driven by employee demand, which has nothing to do with the law. As Josh Barro and Charles Fain Lehman observe, many highly educated people want wokism. They want to work at companies that subject their employees to DEI struggle sessions, police microaggressions, and take stands on political issues that have nothing to do with the business. Hanania lauds Coinbase, Substack, and Basecamp, for “explicitly disavowing political activism,” but doesn’t mention that Basecamp’s and Coinbase’s experiments in dewokification—which simply involved banning political discussion in the workplace—resulted in 35% of Basecamp’s employees and 5% of Coinbase’s employees ragequitting. There is no law—or even interpretation of the law—that says businesses have to allow employees to spend their workday talking about politics, which in practice means wokesters harassing and intimidating everyone around them. But creating an environment that makes conservatives uncomfortable is often good for the bottom line. There are very few conservatives whom companies want to hire, and many valuable leftists whom they can attract by alienating the former. The threat of civil-rights lawsuits played an important part in shaping the woke bureaucracy and catalyzing the trend toward wokism. But employee preferences would probably have pushed corporate culture in this direction in any case, because smart people (who are valuable employees) prefer it this way.

Another problem with Hanania’s theory is that if wokism is the consequences of peculiarities of US civil rights law, why is it that other countries are woker than the US? As Eric Kaufmann observes, “Canada is the world’s first woke nation.” Sweden is in many ways woker than the US and Canada combined. So is Iceland. Most countries in Western Europe are following a similar path. Hanania retorts: “the fact that what we may call ‘wokeness’ in Europe tracks closely with their prohibitions and regulations, while our version does with our own, is strong evidence for the view that culture is downstream from law.” First, the fact that the ideology is expressed somewhat differently in America, Canada, the UK, and Sweden may just reflect the fact that these countries have different populations with different histories. The essence of the ideology is still the same. Second, the fact that there is a correspondence between ideology and law says nothing about the direction of causality. The obvious explanation for why all these countries decided to create woke laws (with some variations) is that the underlying morality was already deeply rooted in the culture of their elites.

Like Rufo, Hanania hints at the true cause of wokism:

Before the Civil Rights Act, the entirety of the civil rights lobby was united in consistently calling for racially neutral anti-discrimination laws. Soon, however, there was a realization among elite institutions that, under a color-blind system of college admissions, there might not be many more blacks in positions of power and authority than there were before the Civil Rights Act. (p. 14)

Belief in psychological equality clashed with reality: racial disparities persisted after legal barriers were removed. Because of the taboo on hereditarianism, racial disparities were attributed to environmental factors, triggering an ever-escalating effort to correct the environment.

What to Do

Rufo understands that the “deepest conflict in the United States...pits elite institutions against the common citizen” (p. 281). He calls for a “counter-revolution” that “mobilize[s] the tremendous reservoir of public sentiment” (p. 280). The problem is that the elites collectively wield more cultural power than the plebeians. Most people don’t like being forced to attend DEI struggle sessions, or being called racists, or having their working lives micromanaged by HR commissars. But if most academics, lawyers, judges, writers, filmmakers, songwriters, and high-value employees do want these things, it will be very difficult for the resisting majority to impose its will.

In a recent article, Rufo acknowledges that “conservatives cannot rely on a populist, blue-collar coalition alone,” and he calls for “elevat[ing] a new class of professionals with the capacity to wield power within complex institutions.” “Conservatives,” he says, “should begin educating and organizing a counter-elite of their own.” The problem is that conservatives don’t have enough human capital to produce a counter-elite that can seriously contend with the reigning liberal elite. When Trump was president, he struggled to find even a few dozen staffers who were both minimally competent and ideologically aligned with him—in the end, his appointees (Omarosa, John Bolton, et al.) often fell short on one or both counts. There are talented people on the right, but with a few exceptions (including Rufo!) they rarely achieve much prominence. Again, a movement’s leaders reflect the collective intelligence of the group, and the mass of conservatives do not have the capacity to recognize or appreciate intellectual competence. In short, Rufo’s strategy of creating a counter-elite won’t work unless left-wing elites start defecting to the right on scale.

Regarding the issue of racial disparities, Rufo refers to “the catastrophic cultural conditions in poor communities that are the greatest barrier to substantive equality in America,” and “the intractable truth that the only viable answer to inequality is to strengthen the very institutions that [leftists] have helped to dissolve” (p. 278). The problem is that no amount of strengthening institutions or fixing cultural conditions will do much to close currently existing racial disparities. In the unlikely event that a revolution of the common citizen achieved a (temporary) victory, and we instituted the colorblind system favored by Rufo, blacks would virtually disappear from elite positions outside of sports and entertainment. People would notice that, and demand answers. If you can’t appeal to hereditarianism, you’re back on the road to wokism and woke law.

Hanania argues that if wokism is a “matter of philosophy and belief,” the solution is “more books, articles, essays, and scientific studies debunking the beliefs that form the basis of identity politics and political correctness. In other words, keep employing the same strategy that opponents of earlier and more contemporary forms of wokeness have used since at least the 1970s” (p. 19). But we have never tried the strategy of refuting the belief that forms the true basis wokism, which is the equality thesis. There is every reason to think that undermining the equality thesis is the ultimate solution. The entire woke system collapses when it is recognized that disparities are due to nature. That’s why the left fights so hard to defend the taboo on hereditarianism. Leftists understand what is at stake: everything.

Suppose Trump is reelected and issues executive orders commanding schools and businesses to treat people as individuals—something that may theoretically be within the president’s power. Institutions would circumvent the new legal requirements by, for example, looking at proxies for race in order to achieve the same outcomes. (This is presumably what universities will do in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action.) Hypothetically, suppose the law were followed, and Harvard and Microsoft and every other prominent institution truly became colorblind. Overnight, blacks would virtually disappear from these places. Then what? People would demand a return of civil rights law! At least the elites would, and, at the end of the day, it’s their preferences that matter.

In my article, “How to Take Back Academia,” I proposed a three-part plan:

(1) Promote knowledge of the cause of race differences

(2) Change the population of decision makers on campus

(3) Leverage political power

The same plan can be generalized. Promoting knowledge of the genetic cause of race differences destroys the premise of wokism, but this is not enough to attain victory. Our institutions are brimming with delusional—and in many cases mentally ill—true believing Red Guard thugs who were appointed to maintain the ideological status quo. Many of these people will fight to the gates of hell to defend the woke system, and won’t accept evidence for hereditarianism no matter what. We need to find legal ways to remove these people from positions of authority: get rid of fake grievance-studies departments at universities; revoke the tenure of pseudoscholars who were hired in job searches that illegally discriminated against whites, Asians, and men; mass fire the woke commissars in the state department; and so on. We have to leverage political power both to change the population of decisions makers and in order to deprive the woke of one of their most powerful weapons, which is civil rights law. The law might not be the ultimate cause of wokism, but as long as it’s illegal not to be woke, it will be far more difficult to reform our institutions.

Rufo is the most effective activist with respect to getting rid of wokesters, and he is pushing lawmakers in the right direction. Hanania’s book is the ultimate guide for how to reform the law. But the anti-woke trident doesn’t work without its first prong: we must destroy the taboo against hereditarianism, and teach people not to seek scapegoats for differences that are the product of nature.

The fact that the right’s stupidity stems from its failure to embrace race realism does not mean that current, publicly self-identified “race realists” are particularly intelligent or talented. In fact, they are often the opposite. I confirmed this with GSS data, which show that, on average, whites who attribute lower black socioeconomic status to genes (i.e., admit to being race realists) have WORDSUM IQs that are 8.5 points lower than whites who espouse environmentalism. That’s because a large proportion of race realists—especially those who are willing to admit it—are not actually “realists.” Many of them subscribe to a right-wing version of wokism that substitutes Jews for whites. They cherry-pick, misrepresent, or simply misunderstand findings in psychology and genetics to support their ideological views. My call for a race-realist right is not a recommendation to look to these emotionally disturbed fools for leadership or support. Race realism needs to be incorporated into the right from the top. The priority for right-wing intellectuals should be disseminating accurate information about race and race differences, and devising a new political philosophy that is intellectually and morally appealing to the current left-wing elites.