A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution

How to win the elites and create a better world

Nipping at the wheels of the woke juggernaut is not going to derail it. Talking about Thomas Sowell, calling liberals “the real racists,” or National Review publishing its (as of now) 3,131st article about how Chuck Schumer is a hypocrite are not effective weapons. If we want to joust with the juggernaut and win, we need a sharper lance.

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 to 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 nationals 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.