Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem

To win over the elites, the right needs to challenge the Big Lie that motivates wokism: the equality thesis

Attributions of low intelligence are considered insults—something we lob at our enemies, not our friends. So why should I, who am committed to the defeat of leftism, say that my own side is the dumb one? I cannot shame my political allies into having higher IQs. Talking about the right’s intellectual limitations seems demoralizing and mean. What’s wrong with letting conservatives view themselves as intellectually superior to the “libtards” who invent vaccines and run academia, big tech, and our major corporations?

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.