Beating Woke with Facts and Logic

No victory without hereditarianism

Wokism is based on the following logic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Rufo recently wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Illusion of Victory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mechanics of Belief

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

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

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

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

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

Beliefs Aren’t Genetically Determined

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

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

Man the Herd Animal

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

We evolved two key heuristics.

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

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

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

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

Who Wants It More?

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

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

Virtue Signaling

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

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

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

Feelings vs. Facts

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

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

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

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

Ethics

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

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

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

Neuroplasticity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stubborn as people may be, change is not impossible.

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

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

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

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

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

Facts and Logic

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

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

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

Liberal Elites Care about Facts and Logic

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

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

And Yet It Moves

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

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

Man and Monkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Commies to Neoliberals

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

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

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

The History of Race Denial

Liberalism vs. Human Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Left-Wing Hereditarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literally Hitler

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Death of God

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

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

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

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

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

We are...

Atheists plus we care about social justice,

Atheists plus we support women’s rights,

Atheists plus we protest racism,

Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

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

One of the first proposed logos for Atheism+

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

Breaking the Taboo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ye of Little Faith in Reason

Christopher Rufo counters:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nixon: That’s right.

Moynihan: Yeah.

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hereditarian Race Communism

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

On X, Hunter Ash wrote:

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

Rufo agreed with that, saying, “Right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

BAP called it

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

You have to actually confront the moral question

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

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

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

In Search of a Unicorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Day After

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

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

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