I think a good recent example of this phenomenon is the treatment of Sam Harris. A few years ago Sam had Charles Murray on his podcast and was quickly pilloried in Vox, and then later in a debate with Ezra Klein. But Sam being who he is did not cave, apologise or retract his interview.
Notwithstanding that obvious demonstration of integrity, Sam is now one of the most hated individuals on the US Right simply because he did not bend the knee to MAGA, and he did not go along with his former buddies when they became retarded on vaccines.
Does he get any credit from the Right for bringing some of science on intelligence into the mainstream? Of course not. Does he get any credit for being frank about the threat of Islamism and the importance of defending Western civilisation from barbarians? Of course not.
So smart centrists, liberals and small-c conservatives look at the treatment of people like Sam Harris and think to themselves "why the f would I align myself with these idiots" and go back to their quiet lives of raising families and making money.
"Does he get any credit from the Right for bringing some of science on intelligence into the mainstream? Of course not. Does he get any credit for being frank about the threat of Islamism and the importance of defending Western civilisation from barbarians? Of course not."
this is true. i've pointed this out and get pointing and sputtering from the 'based' right-wing ppl
If you're fool enough to think DJT is anything other than a degenerate, hedonistic serial rapist, you deserve to be looked down upon. The single biggest reason he was able to take hold of the Republican party is because of the IQ gap between left and right.
What is out of the ordinary is in 2016 Trump garnered votes from folk who only voted Republican in the past in landslide years. In 2024 he had both cultural and economic reasons working for him.
DJT isn't a serial rapist. He is our good president. The Right, and the right, aren't stupid. But I'm just another degenerate, low-IQ deplorable so what do I know.
They are provably more stupid. That doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong always or even most of the time, but they are statistically more stupid. Their politicians certainly are. The left is admittedly only barely less stupid.
I don’t take the IQ gap as proven. The Left _has_ not proved its claim to be the “reality based community”, either.
It would help if the Democrats did not cheer for and abet the Republican candidates most likely to lose the general election, or govern badly if they do win.
DJT was deemed to be the most likely nominee to lose to HRC. Only, he didn’t. They can’t forgive him for that. They also want him as an albatross to hang from the neck of the Republican party.
Ah yes, it was the Democrats who immediately vaulted Trump to the top of the GOP primary polls in 2015, a position he held for almost the entirety of the contest. Republicans and right wing media have no agency. Just Democrats.
This kind of lazy thinking is exactly what the article is about, the kind of thinking that makes the right feel smart by denigrating the social sciences.
So many comments about the titles red-hot commentary “the stupid problem” addressed in the first many paragraphs is obscuring the argument made in the central thesis. I hope you got to read the whole thing. It’s quite poorly reasoned and quite weak.
The gist is that the right will never win until it stops shying away from hereditarian explanations for disparities. Similar to Charles Murray's argument in Facing Reality. I think he is right but I'm pessimistic that that will work either. It may just be that leftism is inevitable because people find hereditarianism unpleasant and are motivated to find alternative explanations even if they aren't really that convincing. In other words, belief in the equality hypothesis may not be some arbitrary mistake but may be an inevitable consequence of the human proclivity to deny unpleasant facts. In the same way that he kept asking why all these institutions embraced woke policies if they weren't already believers, I think he needs to ask why the equality hypothesis has outcompeted the hereditarian hypothesis even though it clearly inferior at predicting outcomes and explaining the patterns that we see.
There are certain people who don’t want to deal with the messy details of whether or not the person in front of them is competent. Obama spouted nonsense about the woman he appointed to oversee the federal insurance exchange. It was obvious that he had no idea what he was talking about. They pretend that people are interchangeable. That’s one step from considering us fungible.
Why does a belief in the *moral* equality of all people necessitate a belief that all people are equal in intelligence, aptitude, economic output, etc. ?
Sam Harris proclaimed that it was morally good to hoist a lie upon the American people (to blame Russia for 'misinformation' regarding the Hunter Biden laptop) and pervert the electoral process in order to keep Trump from ruining "our democracy." That and the fact he peddled the illiberal intervention of coercing the American people into getting vaxxed demostrated to all that worse than any hypocrite, Sam doesn't give a damn about liberty, truth or human dignity.
The weirdest thing is how Clare Lehman chooses to describe this bizarre unhinged behaviour as Harris refusing to 'bend the knee to MAGA' as if anyone demanded that. It's similar to how Palestinian obsessives will accuse Israel of committing 50 million genocides of children every hour and then, when called to account for their unhinged rhetoric will say something stupid and passive aggressive like 'Oh sorry I don't genuflect to Israel as much as you would like'.
Go watch Harris' infamous interview with triggernometry. "Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement and I would not have cared."
"Absolutely it was a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump, but I think it was warranted"
You don't have to support Trump to be accepted by conservatives, all you need is to not be unhinged.
The vaccine doesn't work very well and has unusually bad side effects, and vaccine mandates which denied people the right to do things as basic as go to a restaurant were an appalling denial of civil liberties far worse than most of the things Sam Harris complains about. Sam Harris made a fool of himself hysterically demanding one draconian policy after another for a disease that wasn't an important problem (and whose net social result was probably positive in light of the looming pension crisis). You did too, but not as much as him.
It worked incredibly well. Substantially better and less risky than traditional inactivated-virus vaccines which we used prior. And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown, which genuinely was a huge encroachment on human freedom for a gain that wasn't worth its cost. I have no problem supporting, and continuing to support, a vaccine mandate. Especially when the alternative is continued needless death versus genuinely minor personal inconvenience.
Bray Wyatt, a celebrity pro-wrestler, died last year primarily because he refused to get the Covid vaccine.* He left behind a wife and four kids over an illness he could've easily avoided. That's not like the lockdown at all. Only cretins pretend there's a genuine tradeoff in this case.
* He also refused to take proper care of himself after his illness, but he never would've gotten the illness had he had the vaccine.
I sometimes wonder whether the mere word 'vaccine' has magical powers. Significant numbers of, albeit not very influential, people will, when told a given medicine is a vaccine, attribute to it almost limitlessly malign powers. On the other hand, an even larger group of rather more influential people are willing to declare any pharmaceutical product, no matter how patently mediocre, to be miraculous and 'incredibly' effective so long as it has the magic v-word attached. There's even the interesting phenomenon of both pro and anti-jabbers combing the internet for random stories of people dying to prove their point.
Normal people, however, have a rough working model of whether a vaccine works. If they get vaccinated and they get the disease, and they get a booster, and get the disease, then another booster, and get the disease they conclude it's a dud. That's why Germany has already disposed of 83,000,000 unused vaccine doses and is literally paying Pfizer not to send them any more while American status-conscious strivers fall over themselves to declare, after getting a cold that they have been injected against seven times, that they would, sans this 'incredible' vaccine, have probably died.
The lucky thing is that most people aren't even vindictive about this. They just want to move on and pretend it didn't happen. But vaccine worshippers can't stop bringing it up like a bad tic.
The vaccine reduces the chance of serious risk and death by 90%. However, only the old and sick were at serious risk of disease and death to start with, so for everyone else 10% of basically nothing is basically nothing.
That we were firing people for not getting a shot that had no impact on their lives is insane.
During the actual vaccine mandate hysteria a lot of this boiled down to a concerted misinformation campaign by the left to tout the sterilizing effects of the vaccine. If the vaccine could prevent you from getting and transmitting COVID then there might be some reason for a mandate. But the evidence was never there for it if one was being honest, and what little evidence there was collapsed the second a new variant came along.
I think the entire thing was done in the hope that "beating" COVID with SCIENCE and blaming everything on the unvaxxed was part of an electoral strategy that backfired. Once the Nov 2021 elections showed it wasn't working people started quietly looking for a face saving exit.
Plenty of people who were under 60 and weren't fat died of Covid: Adam Schlesinger, Carlos Marín, Jay Jay Phillips, Siti Sarah, Chris Trousdale. There's also a fairly good chance it was Brodie Lee's real cause of death, and it ultimately caused the heart problem that killed Bray Wyatt, who only died last year because HE REFUSED TO TAKE THE COVID VACCINE.
So no, I don't have any sympathy for opposition to a Covid vaccine mandate. If anything, we were way too lax on that point. The stoking of opposition to it was either cynical politics, disbelieved even by those pushing it (hence why the likes of DJT and Tucker Carlson got it for themselves); or a sign of groundless, self-destructive paranoia, worthy of the dumbest and craziest postcolonial African dictator.
There are only a couple of hundred thousand death of people under age 65 (most age 50+ with obesity and health conditions).
There is no way that justified lockdowns and school closures and masking.
I was in a state that switched over to a Republican governor in Nov 2021. In addition to this resulting in less direct COVID NPIs from the change in leadership, it was also part of the broader electoral rejection that got democrats to start giving up on NPIs.
About 3/4 of the people who voted GOP in that election opposed vaccine mandates. If we told all of them we didn't want their votes we would still be masking kids in schools.
"but he never would've gotten the illness had he had the vaccine."
You literally said that after having been vaccinated 5[?] times you were 'as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever'. Are you trying to make sense?
That's cause I was a reasonably healthy kid. I wasn't a cancer patient or a malaria survivor or something. I never had mumps, I never had measles, I never had rubella, I had a fairly manageable case of chicken pocks, and I didn't need my tonsils or appendix removed.
And I wasn't vaccinated five times. I was vaccinated once -- the first shot and the post-month booster -- before getting Covid the first time when a new wave broke out. I got it twice later, and wouldn't get a new shot until last week, but that was motivated by laziness.
I never had measles too, because I was vaccinated against it. Same with rubella and everything else I have been vaccinated against. That is a good indication *that these vaccines actually work*.
You didn't get measles again because the measles virus doesn't mutate that much. Indeed, it mutates so little that even people who had it as children, which pretty much everybody did before the '70s, are unlikely to ever get it again.
For viruses that mutate frequently -- such as coronaviruses like the cold and Covid, or HIV -- traditional vaccines will never be as reliable as mRNA or vector or subunit vaccines. Hence why the Chinese Covid vaccine, which is a traditional vaccine, is notorious for being worthless horsepiss.
We finally have a reliable vaccine against HIV on the horizon, and retard rightoids like you are actively fighting on the side of preventing its dissemination. This is the reason why the Right keeps losing.
"And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown"
The vast majority of people that oppose vaccine mandates also opposed lockdowns. And the vast majority of people that support vaccine mandates supported lockdowns. The Venn diagram of pro-vaccine mandate, anti-lockdown was very small, completely electorally insignificant, and composed almost entirely of people that while they complained about lockdowns on twitter continued to vote for democratic politicians that imposed lockdowns.
The meaningful divide on COVID was between people that "thought it was a big deal" vs people who "didn't think it was a big deal". Vaccines indeed reduced the risk of COVID by 90%, but if you overestimated the risk of COVID by 10,000% that didn't change your calculus.
Many young healthy liberals considered the chance of being hospitalized for COVID to be 50%, and believed Long Covid would cripple them for life.
Meanwhile, if you considered COVID not a big deal, then 10% of not a big deal is still not a big deal, so no change.
There is an analogy to police shooting of blacks. The actual number of police shootings of unarmed black men is 10-20 a year (many justified anyway). About 50% of liberals believe that the number is over 1,000. Over 20% think 10,000 or more. If you could give these people a vaccine that reduced their estimate of black men killed by the police by 90%, they would still be wildly overshooting. That's what it was like with COVID. The vaccine didn't move the needle on COVID hysteria at all for the vast majority of the left. The only thing that worked was a combination of doing terrible in the Nov 2021 elections (because all those vaccine mandate deniers voted against them) and they all got Omicron anyway that winter and realized it wasn't a big deal.
I'm sorry but what I saw during COVID was extreme cowardice on the part of liberals. Either they became outright COVID scolds, or they complained mildly while trying to bash the right to keep their leftist cred.
Covid isn't remotely like police shootings. We have about a thousand fatal police shootings in the US per year, mostly of armed men. Over a million people died in the first two years of Covid in the US alone. More than we lost in WWII and the Civil War combined. It's like comparing police shootings to deaths in trampoline accidents.
Also, I did have Omicron, after getting vaccinated (for Delta, months prior), and it absolutely was a big deal, even though I'm neither old nor obese. I was as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever. It was worse than any time I've had pneumonia.
Because as sick as I was, I still missed the worst symptoms: I kept my senses of smell and taste, I didn't have chest pain, I didn't have oxygen deprivation so I didn't need an inhaler or nebulizer (which I did need when I had pneumonia), my skin never turned blue, and I suffered no noticeable permanent damage afterwards. I had huge fatigue, an endless and unquenchable thirst, chills, fever, soreness, congestion, and it lasted forever (longer than any time I've had pneumonia), but I was still able to handle it by staying home. Which was good, because it's not like the hospital could do much for me, nor did they need to waste their time with someone who could get better on his own.
Second time, when I wasn't up to date on vaccination, I ended up with all those symptoms again, plus a compromise to my sense of taste. Everything tasted spoiled. But thankfully, it lasted a lot shorter. I also gave it to my whole family, but they were all either up to date with their vaccinations or immunised by having too recent a case, so they all barely had any symptoms. Had it again early this winter, when I also hadn't been up to date on my vaccination, and I wasn't as sick as either the first or second time, but it lasted even longer than the first, so I got an inhaler and a humidifier to help with the linger.
"I was as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever. It was worse than any time I've had pneumonia." And yet it doesn't occur to you that you got this sick BECAUSE of the vaccine? Or that in the least, the vaccine didn't work? I'm unvaccinated, I was exposed to covid for 2 weeks at home, never tested positive, and I have a chronic illness to boot.
See, your vaunted vaccine likely made you sicker with covid because the mRNA makes you TOLERANT to the spike protein, so you won't have a cytokine storm, but you can't kick the virus out properly either.
I just don't get the psychology of people who get this sick after a vaccine and think the vaccine still works. The vaccine is NOT WORKING. If it did work, you wouldn't be getting sick at all!
A bunch of old sick people died. Probably made the country better. Defiantly not worth masking kids. The cost/benefit ratio of COVID policy was awful.
I had Omicron too. It felt like a bad flu, and the disease didn't feel much worse then getting the vaccine (which made me and my wife very sick, everyone seems to gloss over the fact that its the only vaccine I've ever taken that made me extremely ill).
I've often found myself wondering what a national leader of 50 years ago would have said has an aide come to his office and described this new Covid pandemic:
"So, basically, a lot of people who would have 'lived' to 84 requiring constant medical interventions are actually going to die at 82"
Vaccine reactions vary. I had a day’s hangover. Immune responses also differ. Some people get nearly complete immunity, some get less.
The kicker is that Covid is of the same family of viruses as the common cold. Coronaviruses mutate constantly. We expect to catch colds each year.
This particular coronavirus was more deadly because it was novel, in a similar way that native Americans died in droves from European diseases like the common cold.
Vaccination gives us a base level of protection in general, just as flu vaccines do. The manufacturers target the strains they think most people will encounter.
It quite literally did not work. It didn’t do what they said it would do, an it still doesn’t do what they are saying jt will do.
Never mind the enormous increase in excess death and disability corresponding exactly to the vaccine roll out. You’re quite frankly delusional if you actually believe the mRNA shots “worked incredibly well”. Complete indefensible position.
The vaccine did work incredibly well. It was the most sophisticated fascistic business venture and sociological experiment of our time. Hundreds of governments taking the testimony of bureaucrats who were currently or previously employed by a handful of pharmaceutical companies that their new products, developed in about 6 months, would save the human race from the virus and even prevent everyone who accepted Jesus as their Lo, er, everyone who accepted a vaccination from contracting the virus at all. These governments preceded to mandate this product to over 7 billion people with differing levels of severity depending on the country, from causing uncooperative individuals to lose their jobs to barricading them in their apartments until they relented. Thankfully, millions of elderly people were spared from the virus, but I can’t help but suspect this was not the primary motive here. Based simply on this most basic outline of events, what happened here is one of the most seamless and effective public-private partnerships and fastest transfer of wealth in history. The sovereign scientific decrees of the time continue to be quietly walked back every few months, but the vaccine performed beyond all expectations. The main question is, for whom?
The right wins almost every election. State Governors? More and more every election top to bottom has gone right. Trump beat Joe by a mile. But the election was stolen. Obviously. Almost NO ONE believes in what progressives believe. Men should not compete against women in sports. It doesn’t matter if they change their name to a female name. And dress up. Boys should not have their penises cut off because a psychologist says he will be happier. The border should be closed. And so on. The vast vast majority of people are on the same side. And it isn’t the side of the left. Last, the vaccines are the worst medicines ever foisted on mankind. The fallout will effect mankind for at least three generations. If you keep getting boosted you will die.
"Trump beat Joe by a mile. But the election was stolen."
Fucking LOL.
No wonder smart people don't wanna lump up with retards like you. A guy who couldn't even win the popular vote the first time around against a historically unpopular and unlikable Dem challenger, whose highest-ever approval rating was 49%, who drove off college-educated and suburban voters like no other Rep since Goldwater (who at least had integrity), whose own wife cited rape as the reason for their divorce when adultery was a perfectly viable option, and you think he ever had the majority on his side?
Thank fuck I'm not an office holder. I don't need to win over retards like you. My goal is to win over the people who live on Planet Earth. Perhaps you can join us someday when you get tired of failure.
Your own personal experience is irrelevant when compared with the averages. On average, the Left dominates every high-Q profession, has done so for at least living memory, probably a lot longer (JS Mill called the Tories "the Stupid Party", and he died in 1873), and the Right's response to this has been to pander to the retard flank harder than ever. This holds true in IQ surveys as well.
The only reason things might change is that the Right's pro-stupidity has grown in tandem with the Left's anti-hereditarianism. And militant anti-hereditarianism is incompatible with being a stable, happy home for a cognitive minority, whether on the left or right end of the Bell Curve.
By the way, I love how RINO has become the default insult of the retard right when you've rallied around a guy who spent most of his adult life as either a Dem or an Independent, whom primarily won his nomination by jettisoning most of the conservative platform of the last century aside from chauvinism and anti-immigrationism. You Retardlicans could at least pick a somewhat accurate insult.
"Bray Wyatt, a celebrity pro-wrestler, died last year primarily because he refused to get the Covid vaccine.*" Where did you get this information? Because it's certainly not available via any search I've done.
He ultimately died of a heart attack, but may very well have survived that had he worn his damnded heart monitor while he was sleeping like his doctors told him to:
Presumably the reason more attention wasn't drawn to this is because, while tragic, Bray's death was both extraordinarily stupid and exceptionally selfish, neither of which are things grieving friends and families like to bring up about their deceased if it can be avoided.
That is so true. Frustrating. I have no interest in being a social warrior. You do you, I will do me worked fine. Until the left said ‘I will do me and you better respond as you should. And then, I will do your children’.
If Sam Harris suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome and from Covid hysteria, you’re not allowed to call him out because he interviewed Charles Murray .Smart take !
Furthermore, in writing a book endorsing never lying, Sam forfeited any right to consideration as a potential Straussian. So we have every right to take his statements literally, and given the total and unexplained inconsistency between his pre-Trump statements on Islam, and his post-Trump opposition to the Muslim ban there isn't much of a mystery as to what the logical conclusion is. Sam sacrificed one of his most important principles out of personal dislike, and in doing so, revealed himself as undeserving of respect.
The later, 'dead kids in the basement' gate only sealed this deal. I personally didn't find it particularly offensive, until I realized that this is the guy who wrote a book endorsing never lying. Now maybe the price really was worth it (I disagree of course), but you have no right to pretend he doesn't deserve to pay it. And the price is the hatred of those of us who admired Sam deeply.
Hi. Problem is, for all his good work in some areas, Sam is utterly wrong, scientifically, about the covid vaccines. He has shown no sign that he understand the underlying biology at all. He is utterly wrong but just doesn't know it yet. But it shouldn't be too much longer now ... In addition—I would argue—he has failed to understand the importance of Trump and what he represents. In the end, Sam has been seduced by the prestige afforded him by the utterly degenerate mainstream, it appears.
I don't pay close attention to Sam Harris, but from what I've seen, he was afflicted with TDS. I can't recall the last time I saw him say anything that wasn't complaining about Trump or some other attack against the right. At some point, if you engage in enough friendly fire, people will conclude that you are the enemy. Not exactly rocket science.
There are plenty of people who don't like Trump, and who even criticize Trump, while still remaining clearly of the right. The difference is that they do not make complaining about Trump the only thing they ever talk about.
I gree 100% what you wrote about Sam Harris, and I would add the most paradoxical stuff is rightoids, especially the most extreme ones would prefer elevating far left intellectuals like Chomsky or Greenwald just because they happens to get cited by Tucker Carlson. But aren't people like Chomsky or Greenwald that same kind of "evil jew bolsheviks" right wingers like to talk evey time online?
I am right wing. I don’t know any right wing racists or anti Semites. All the racists I know, and anti Jew people, are left wing. One of my sons married a black African woman. I was so excited when their first was born. One of the highlights of my life. Becoming a grandpa. I showed my friends and neighbours pics of this beautiful child. All my right wing friends oohed and aahed. My left wing friends? Not so much. They were afraid to mention it was a black baby. When they did they asked ‘are you okay with having a black grandchild?’ Maybe 25% of my lefty acquaintances. 0% of my conservative friends. It blew me away because I really thought everyone was decades past that. Apparently half of lefties aren’t.
Best example is Norman Finkelstein, who isn't even a talented scholar, like Chomsky, or a principled defender of free speech, like Greenwald, but, aside from being a communist, is basically just a freak.
Greenwald a free speech defender? yeah, a free speech defender married with a gay brasilian pornographer and adoptive father of four black kids. Integrity, this unknown!
Chomsky's intellectual prestige comes from his work as a linguist (even as a programmer I had to learn about "Chomsky normal form"), but once that got him ensconced in academia he became known for his unrelated political commentary.
I still listen to Sam Harris and think most of his insights are valuable but I also think he was an idiot on the Trump question (not the vaccine question, the anti-vaccination ideas have no merit). Saying someone has TDS (yes, predicting that Trump would somehow bring in real fascism when the trends and evidence point far stronger to the other side doing it does mean trump derangement syndrome, regardless of what you think of his policies otherwise) doesn't mean you hate them.
I'm very right wing (but actual right-wing, non-religious libertarian right).
Sam Harris, like you, supported the Zero Covid stupidity. He also is a foreign policy neocon, who has repeatedly stated that the US should send it's military around the world fighting every conceivable conflict. He also thinks everyone should throw their religion out yet offered literally nothing to replace it (his book on morality was just a giant question begging exercise). I wonder why the new right dislikes him even though he had Charles Murray on once.
Claire: The first few pages make the authors argument in the headline satisfying but I hope people who risk making comments like “really insightful” do get beyond those primary arguments (about the stupidity problem) to assess the writers actual, central premise of “How/Why”. I think it’s quite awful, reading like any of many Anti-vax-style screeds. Beware wandering into unlocked doors.
Interesting. I never saw that Quillette piece (and will read it later). I have followed your work at Quillette for years - appreciated much but not everything yet perhaps not that closely, lately. As mentioned, I think the piece starts off strong but the analysis was quite bad, the piece reads like a disorganized rant, perhaps lacked reviewers / editors to strengthen an argument (that I still might have disagreed with). The Right does “appear” to have a stupidity problem and the paper documents clear trouble, but again, everything else here falls apart. Sorry!
Your analysis attacks the fundamental premise ("equality uber alles"), which neither Rufo nor Hanania address, and without which, their respective 'theories' are merely ineffectual whitewashing.
Hanania's interview with Amy Wax discusses whether discussing "equality uber alles" is a good strategy or not.
I'm in the "nothing but losing strategies camp". I think it's electorally impossible to discuss HBD openly in a multi-racial democracy. But I also think it's impossible to stop wokeness long term without discussing it. Amy Wax's "soft realism" strikes me as the kind of 80s-2012 strategy that this essay calls out as ineffective and that ultimately lost to wokeism. I think immigration has made that strategy untenable.
Aesthetically, I would go with honest HBD and we gets what we gets whatever it is.
LKY is the only world leader I know that discussed HBD openly and he thought that multi-racial democracies were doomed (his own was basically a super majority Chinese run ethno-state with some minorities that have to fall in line).
Another possibility is the "dueling ethnic spoils" strategy. Jews just ousted Claudine Gay because they said essentially "fuck with Jews and we will fuck you up." They showed zero worry about DEI until it messed with Jews, then they nuked it. I don't think whites have the solidarity for that (they care more about inter-white conflict that extra white conflict), but who knows.
A better option is shifting from the quest for Equality to the quest for Upward Mobility, which requires economic growth that benefits almost all people.
Also a shift from Beliefs to Results.
Both shifts fundamentally undermine all the assumptions of the Left with forcing us into a zero-sum clash of races and genders.
I find that upward mobility suggestion quite reasonable, which means now I will have come to Nathan's Substack from another one, and go on to yours from his. Thus I will end up skipping the other 200 comments herein, so somewhat a toss of the dice that I found your link here. Fate or ??? There are not enough hours in the (new or any) year for all of this internet rabbit holing!!
Before retiring I worked for a defense contractor who had an affirmative action agenda, so I came into contact with a cohort of the better educated (and more successful) blacks and STEM oriented women; but I also found blacks achieving success as AC repairman, windshield re-installers, electricians, and (sometimes) quite competent call center respondents (insurance, medical, etc.). Let alone the large complement of publicly successful blacks (and women) in athletics, law, medicine, entertainment, etc. (even academia and politics).
I suspect we don't really care how much money other people make as long as they don't use that wealth directed towards (excessive) political power and influence counter to our preferences or outside the legal and ethical realm. Thus bringing everyone up via the clearly established "success factors" makes sense. This can be obtaned regardless of a person's starting and ending points based on IQ or muscle strength or vocal cords or any of a vast array of inherent characteristics and abilities, plus any eventually learned set of skills.
Looking forward to examining your link, but maybe not today :-(
I examined Michael's Substack Manifesto link today. I don't agree with all that I found there, but suggest some here might find it useful to explore over there for an hour or so to see if his proposals and ideas match with your views (or that a contrasting view still merits consideration).
It does seem electorally impossible to discuss HBD openly now. But things can change rather quickly. How many people in say 2010 would have expected that trans ideology would become such a central dogma in mainstream left wing politics? I don’t even recall people talking about it back then. And remember that about 15 years ago, Obama declined to endorse gay marriage.
LKY = Lee Kuan Yew (based on general knowledge and context; still had to look it up to confirm my expectation)
"Aesthetically, I would go with honest HBD..." I agree with honesty as the best policy, but I am also intrigued by Michael Magoon's Upward Mobility suggestion.
But LKY made those comments in the 2000s and while Lee Hsien Loong remarks are very recent, it's interesting to me that they were made just before he passed the reins of PM to his Successor.
Singapore isn't yet as "woke" as most western countries but clearly it's changing as the younger people rise to positions of power.
When I was younger I used to think the East Asians were "based" because I was around a lot of fresh of the boat STEM boys that didn't conform to western attitudes on things.
But having watched those people grow up I think this was just ignorance on their part, rather then a conscious rejection of western norms. Once an East Asian immigrant identifies wokeness as "the path to status climbing" they embrace it.
Asians I knew in college that were "based" became NPCs. One of my best friends drove three hours alone in a car to see me with an N95 mask on the entire way in the summer of 2021. He wasn't like that in college, but he married a Harvard grad and this was the message being transmitted by the powers that be at the time.
The biggest problem East Asia is going to face is that there are no families. Singles, especially single women, are the raw fuel of wokeness.
On the last day of the NatCon conference in Hungary, Chris Rufo had a horrifying thought. "Finnish fishermen could be here" he shuddered, "I've never been on this continent before. There could be Finnish fishermen here right now." The chills ran through his fingers, as he scrolled through tickets to DC. "What do I have in common with Finnish fishermen, anyway?". Hovering over the buy now button he felt a sense of relief after remembering that, "Spirit Airlines can take you anywhere you want, anywhere at all." And so, he booked his ticket, away from the terrifying apparition they call Sanna and towards the warm embrace of Lizzo.
Excellent and inspiring article. Regarding the roots of Wokeism in Christianity/blank slatism: wasn’t it the case that in the 1920s large numbers of Western elites accepted the Darwinian paradigm regarding group differences? How did they escape the (proto) woke paradigm? (And why would the Holocaust cause elites to throw out the Darwinian baby with the Nazi bath water?) I agree that Rufo/Hanania have not adequately explained the roots of Wokeism, but neither does your article adequately explain why high IQ, scientifically-minded, Leftists, who could easily read/comprehend Jensen, et al., prefer less sophisticated (if not downright silly!) woke arguments over superior, scientifically-based, arguments. Sometimes I think many Leftists know the truth about group differences but since minorities are crucial to their political coalition, they lie about it.
More or less extreme forms of race denial go back to the 17th century. At that time, there probably wasn't enough evidence for anyone to have an informed opinion on hereditarianism one way or the other. But blank slatism was attractive to many intellectuals for ideological or emotional reasons. In addition, slavery and other abuses were justified by appeals to natural differences, which provoked liberals to adopt an unreasonably dogmatic position on the other side. As I point out, denial was already becoming an orthodoxy among a large segment of the intellectual class by the late 19th century. Then there was a strong reaction against Nazism. Once the taboo is established and people are punished for dissent, you're stuck in a new equilibrium. Jensen didn't make his case until 1969, at which point the blank-slate juggernaut was very difficult to derail. Many people had doubts, but most of them kept their mouths shut or they would be punished.
In connection with this process I often quote Nietzsche's observation that "in the son that becomes conviction which in the father was still a lie." People pretended to believe in the equality thesis before they actually believed it. Franz Boas didn't say black and white brains are literally identical. But, over the generations, belief became further and further divorced from reality, until you get zoomers who, on a deep, emotional level, cannot understand why we don't have equality of outcome.
Many of the factors that made HBD completely undeniable are fairly recent.
Blacks didn't get equality till the 60s and then a reasonable person could give them a generation or two to catch up.
De-Colonization didn't get going till around the same time, so who's to say why the third world was so held back. And again, don't they deserve a generation or two to catch up.
Asians didn't really prove they had what it took undeniably until the 80s or 90s. China being stagnant under communism probably held back this realization even further.
The knowledge economy becoming more and more important was a gradual thing that raised the salience of IQ. And the post WWII SAT sorting that is the primary thesis of The Bell Curve was also fairly recent. It used to be that there were a lot more smart people outside of the knowledge economy and professional class.
So probably the earliest HBD became pretty dominant empirically was say the 90s, which puts it right around The Bell Curve. While the information was probably good enough then, I can see how someone who was a bleeding heart or didn't like HBD because it conflicted with their ideology (right or left) would hold out hope that education reform or some other magic bullet might solve things.
And anyway, the whole world was gravy in the 1990s so why upset any apple carts. Then in the 2000s we had a strategy of making the Middle East Democracies and the compassionate conservatism of the ownership society was going to win over naturally conservative Hispanics.
Right around the second Obama term I think this all came undone. The end of communism meant unleashing the high IQ Chinese on the world. The third world continued to stagnate. Education reform failed. The Middle East was a shitshow. Hispanics rejected Romney.
Obama's first term could ride on rejecting Bush-ism, but his second turned much more towards black racial resentment and juicing the handouts. Oberfegell basically declared open season on the most insane gender and sex stuff.
I myself didn't really come around to HBD until the late 2000s, and I had a lot of strong reasons to know better before and a dramatically stronger statistical background then most of the population.
But by the time you get to the 2010s HBD is both empirically undeniable while being demographically, culturally, and legally a non-starter. So the response is basically people who know they don't like this shit but can't explain why.
You make a number of excellent points. I would add in massive funding for medical research which requires research on genome.
I think much of the hysteria of Wokeness is because all the facts now undermine the entire world view of the Left. They have nothing left but rejecting reality, celebrating mental disorders and implementing censorship.
It will not work. The entire system will come crashing down at some point soon.
Voters will accept rolling back research on human genome for medical purposes, so more and more evidence will keep rolling out.
It may seem like that, but in reality a lot of people dating back had just as clear a picture of race differences from heritability, simply google "darwin racism" and you will see he clearly understood racial differences.
Much good analysis, but do think you underestimate the role that Darwin played in racism. From Descent of Man:
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world."
If you accept Gould's account of the effect of this idea: "Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory."
I think it's important to emphasize that Darwin was making a prediction, not a recommendation. I'm not familiar with this claim by Gould, but it seems to contradict obvious facts. In between the publication of the Origin and the Descent, race-based slavery in the West, which was justified by biological differences, came to an end. The Nazis were not influenced by Darwin at all, as documented by Bob Richards in "Was Hitler a Darwinian?"
Anti-black racism was first developed by Muslim intellectuals early in the history of Islam, as they had to justify the mass enslavement of the children of Allah. Even nowadays, the colloquial Arabic for a Sub-Saharan African is ‘abd’ — ‘slave’ or ‘creature’: as in Abdullah = Slave of God.
They also developed anti-white racism at the same time and for the same reason. To the extent that racism increased after 1859, it was to “explain” European imperial dominance.
Gobineau’s ‘An Essay On the Inequality of Human Races’ came out in 1855. The demand was there already.
what youre saying is just false, it was world war 2 that marked the significant change in common acceptance of race to completely distancing itself. It was common knowledge among society that races were different, that these differences resulted in different societies etc in that pre-ww2 era. We can prove this using word book chronologies etc. That shift was largely lead by jewish communist intellectuals who openly stated their goals in a 1961 point plan, which clearly achieved many of it's goals, including the erasure of race. i also wondered why you didn't mention that Franz Boas was part of the jewish USSR propaganda. Kevin McDonalds culture of critique does a far better job at explaining how these radical left agendas took place than anything else, and he's far more scientific/race realist than most leftists. Mark Rufo and Richard Hannania are both establishment hacks
I don't know if you actually read the post, but I provide quotes from some of the most influential pre-WWII (gentile) thinkers endorsing race denial. Almost everything Kevin MacDonald says about Franz Boas is a lie, as I document here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-022-00352-x
I did read it, and your attempt to argue a few quotes from intellectuals as somehow dominating the entire school of thought is a very weak argument, the entire society was racially conscious, and many other strong intellectuals directly contradicted the quotes you brought up in many other works. Darwin also said "It is an interesting fact that ancient races, in this and several other cases, more frequently present structures which resemble those of the lower animals than do the modern. One chief cause seems to be that the ancient races stand somewhat nearer in the long line of descent to their remote animal-like progenitors.”
Also your attack on Kevin MacDonald was clearly some type of self distancing attempt and not based on anything truthful, Andrew Joyce did a great job debunking it https://www.unz.com/article/the-cofnas-problem/ .
The turning point in shifting the social consciousness is directly laid out as a planned shift by yes, a jewish individual Samuel Flowerman, where he directly laid out exactly how they planned to shift that natural in group preference/natural xenophobia. https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/01/14/modify-the-standards-of-the-in-group-on-jews-and-mass-communications-part-one-of-two/ It's a direct document with their exact plans, the individuals involved did exactly as the plan stated, and they achieved this goal of turning natural racial in group preference in whites, into self policing white shame which opened the door for these other movements to succeed/work in parallel.
Seems you're clearly just joining the kosher approved club and distancing yourself from the truth as you'd rather sell out and write harmless to the jewish power structure pieces on establishment hacks like Christopher Rufo who's tweeted things like
"Good. White identitarianism is pathetic and disgusting."
"I love this. Ten percent of all marriages in America are interracial. We have the power to transcend racial divisions, but critical race theory seeks to deepen them."
I think Cofnas would say that even if Jews did have a disproportionate influence regarding blank slatism after (and somewhat prior) to WWII, the vast bulk of intellectuals were already predisposed to Wokeism due to centuries of Christian egalitarianism and blank slatism prior to the arrival of Leftist Jews. But MacDonald might still be correct that the disproportionate number of Jews in the media and academia, reacting to anti-Semitism, gave blank statism a bigger shove than it would have gotten in the absence of Jews.
Jewish intellectuals clearly really like Systems (Kabbala anyone?), and Marxism and its derivatives was the last big System. Not coincidentally, Marx developed his core ideas well before the publication of ‘Origin of Species’.
Also, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, French intellectual life was almost entirely innocent of Darwinism (even French biology): they are functionally pre-Darwinian thinkers.
“Systemic racism” and CRT, although perhaps less sophisticated (at least on the surface) than Marxism, also seem to have been systematized (not necessarily by Jews, but they certainly helped pave the way by attacking the Darwinian paradigm and racialism).
I read the Joyce article a while ago. I recall thinking it was good but will revisit. Cofnas does seem to want to leapfrog over the 1890-1924 racially conscious period by tracing woke back to Christianity and/or Locke, Rousseau, et al. But we can also see that this debate is a matter of interpretation about the degrees of influence of this or that idea and/or groups. However, I do think Jews have had an outsized influence regarding racialism and not just because they, too, were influenced by blank slate ideas. Top Jewish intellectuals are certainly smart enough to comprehend racialist arguments as well as realize it doesn’t take too much effort to figure out how to distance yourself from anti-Semitic individuals/organizations who also embrace racialism. Therefore, it seems contradictory to say that Jews are disproportionately woke/Leftists because they have high IQs and are urban. A high IQ should lead vastly more Jews to embrace racialism.
I'm sure many of them know, but think "is this good for us?" as Brother Nathanial mentioned in his recent Alex Jones appearance. Hopefully many start saying "no" as the end results are pretty obviously bad for them as well.
You wignats would be more serious in your anti-judeo bolsheviks rants if you weren't the same people always promote literal jewish bolsheviks like Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald.
Accepting Jewish influence on matters of race does not automatically make you a Wignat; also, it’s not contradictory to accept MacDonald’s thesis (in part or whole) and agree with Jews like Chomsky et al. (in part or whole).
Nope. If you believe jewish are the evil incarnate you should always disagree with them. In fact nazis were dreadful coherent, they neither accepted jews with german nationalist tendencies!
What if you believe that Jews are influential and lean Left and/or promote blank slatism for group safety? That wouldn’t require rejecting the views of all Jews.
Chomsky isn't a literal bolshevik, I believe his ideology is anarcho-syndicalist. Greenwald is less interested in economics, but is primarily a civil liberties lawyer reacting to the War on Terror and has in the past been aligned with libertarians (although if you go far enough in the past he was also an immigration restrictionist). I would say Greenwald's current stance on economics is not especially principled but something he can come up as a critic of various companies who has also spent a lot of time writing for lefty publications.
My point wasn't about Chomsky or Greenwald. What I wanted to underlying is the fact there are several people believing in JQ loving to cite and follow both of them. I can understand if you are a lefty or a lolbert, but if you are one of those believing the "jewish race" is the evil incarnate It's a bit inchoerent in my view.
Yes, if you literally think Jews are “evil incarnate”, then you should reject Greenwald, Chomsky, et al. But embracing the JQ doesn’t remotely require thinking that all Jews are evil or ethnocentric in their motivations. This is no different than recognizing that not all blacks are criminals or dumb even though they are disproportionately so.
Using slurs because you can't make arguments says all we need to see. Jewish ppl are clearly behind all the major social movements that are now proving to be very destructive, Kevin MacDonald's book Culture of Critique does an excellent job explaining why this happened. For the record, Glenn Greenwald will never criticize the overwhelmingly jewish control of the media, he also says things we already know and don't really advance anything. Noam Chomsky is a complete hack, look up his tweets around covid.
One thing that just occurred to me is that it seems odd, if not contradictory, to argue that present day egalitarianism--even among brilliant Jewish/ gentile elites--is rooted in a 2,000+ year old religion and/or blank slatism from hundreds of years ago but, at the same time, elites have managed to tear themselves away from religion (atheism is widespread among elites) and/or false scientific doctrines not related to racialism.
Because egalitarianism - although having strong roots the universalism of Christianity - is actually the result of the Enlightment and the French Revolution. That's when every male citizen regardless of race have gotten the right to vote.
Before it, there was a 'natural order of things'.
I also think that the Cold War played a role - if Americans wanted to get third world countries on their side, it was important to show them that they are morally superior to the Soviet Union (and the Nazis they defeated).
You are another living proof of Cofnas' theory of right wing stupidity. You complain about da jooz ruling the world while getting upset for mean words of internet.
As I just mentioned, if all you have is ad hominem you're the one making it clear who lacks a brain. I'm also sorry you lack basic pattern recognition to simply look at over representation, way beyond any IQ explanation specific to jewish ppl in banking, media, social movements to promote hatred against host populations etc. They did the exact same thing in the USSR against the native slavs, in fact that's when the term "racist" was first used as a slur by murderous jewish supremacist Trotsky
Thank you for your reply. Your answer sounds reasonable but I’m still puzzled that so many brilliant Leftists would succumb to this orthodoxy given that the 1920s showed more than a glimmer of hope that the woke paradigm could be resisted by the elites. I agree that the Holocaust put many more nails in the Darwinian coffin, but it’s still perplexing that so many brilliant elites succumbed to blank slate nonsense given their access to the scientific literature. The fact that there are many notable exceptions shows that the literature is impressive. Given these exceptions, the formation of the woke orthodoxy doesn’t seem to quite add up in my mind. I understand the taboos that developed because of Nazism, but I still don’t see why the Darwinian baby had to get thrown out with the Nazi bath water. Surely scientifically-minded elites are more nuanced than that? You are a good example of that and hardly alone.
If you believe in any sort of politics of the transformational future — the ability to create a profoundly different future, free of [fill in sin] — you are pretty well stuck with the blank slate thesis. Which is Marxism and everything that descends from it.
Sailer wrote that he thinks it began with the 1929 Crash. It was a big shock that such a large (huge?) number of bright and successful people lost everything and there was a movement in the direction of Marxism. I think it was James Burnham who said if the franchise had then been limited to Ph.D.s the CPUSA would have won the 1932 election.
The 1930s was “The Red Decade” (Eugene Lyons) but there were already splits in the socialist/communist movement. I have no idea what % of PhDs voted for the CPUSA but I suspect that Burnham was being hyperbolic. The “Mensheviks” won pretty easily n the West.
I've just one quibble with your excellent analysis...."wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously". Wokeism is not, at bottom, driven by a serious thesis of ANY kind. It is more in the way of a mind-game.....one in which you the woke person get a nice FEELING about yourself as one of a caring (and sophisticated) elect. At the same time you get to indulge some delicious hate towards your notional peers.
My view, expressed in a blog post I linked, is that there's a lot of contingent history behind this. The US became one of two global superpowers after WW2 and justified its stature based on its defeat of the Nazis. During the Cold War, it competed with the USSR for client states in the Third World. The USSR regularly attacked the US for its mistreatment of African-Americans... and, interestingly, in diminishing the moral standing of the US & British Empire against the Nazis Charles Lindbergh engaged in some similar "whataboutism".
An early Eric Kaufmann book, *The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America,* goes into some of this history. Kaufmann also published an exchange with Kevin MacDonald on related topics.
What most conservatives do not realize is that most Leftists do not actually believe half of what they say. It is what psychologists call “Preference Falsification.”
They just want to:
1) Feel virtuous
2) Project an image of virtue to others.
3) Preserve their social status of being a member of a group associated with high social status and intelligence.
That is why you should always shift the discussion to Results, not beliefs and intentions. There entire world view collapses when you focus on Results.
I wouldn’t discard a desire to socially belong from the motivations of high IQ leftists, especially among the younger cadre. People do weird things just to be accepted. I distinctly recall convincing myself in my youth that I gave two shits about utterly incomprehensible entities like U2, for instance.
Sometimes if you are less concerned about social acceptability, it can be hard to gauge the degree to which others crave social acceptance and are willing to suppress or refrain from voicing doubts. But middle-class white Leftists often have few or no black friends and prefer to live among whites, so that speaks volumes (although some might say that they would be happy to have minorities with middle-class values living among them and are trying to boost them into the middle-class as fast as possible via DEI, etc.). However, Leftists--at least the more radical variety--have often forsaken social acceptance (e.g., Eugene Debs went to jail) and it is the radical Wokels who have gotten the milquetoast Lefties to toe the woke line to avoid being ostracized as a racists, [...]phobic, etc. It’s quite remarkable. But Cofnas is correct that the milquetoast Lefties helped pave the way with the endless proselytizing against racism. Many mainstream tv programs beginning in the early 70s (e.g., “All in the Family”, etc.) attacked racism. Archie Bunker (the main character in “All in the Family”) starts out as an unrepentant racist (albeit not remotely a vicious one) and by the end of the show he has adopted a Jewish girl and gives her a Star of David necklace as a gift. (Not sure you can blame this on John Locke. Lol)
Rufo and Hanania are missing the core of the issue. The morality that exists enables and empowers leftist philosophers and activists, which translates into the law. Both Rufo and Hanania are talking about the second-order effects of egalitarian morality, which stems from Christianity. I am sure it's easier to sell to a right-wing conservative audience that Wokeness is all the result of either nefarious Marxists (which plays to Rufo's right-wing conspiratorial biases) or legal machinations of "Big Government" (which plays to Hanania's anti-government libertarian biases), both of which are acceptable explanations within the mainstream right, instead of the true and real explanation, that being Christian morality.
Imagine going on Fox News and saying that Wokeness is caused by Christian morality; they'd never let you back on, not to mention the fact that you would be swarmed by right-wing religious nuts calling you a "cringe atheist" and a libtard. You would be persona non grata even in many of the more intelligent parts of the right.
On the matter of destroying the taboo against hereditarianism and group differences, I think most of that will not come down to the facts. After all, the studies have been known to exist for generations, and ultimately, people, even including elites, are not driven mostly by empirical reality. As you said, when facts collide with morality, morality is the one that wins. First and foremost, changing morality is key. The questioning, challenging, and deconstruction of those base assumptions is and should be the first attack; the facts will come in a close second. That will be an immense task, and you're going up against two millennia of Christian assumptions.
The question we should be asking is: What is the great utopian appeal of defecting and leaving behind egalitarian moral assumptions and social conditioning? Can a better world be created through the acceptance of these facts? Offering a better story than the egalitarian utopianism of our elites will be key to sewing doubt and disillusionment and ultimately defection.
I am religious and many studies show a relationship between Christianity and human capital formation. However, you are right. Nietzcheans dislike Christianity because it promotes a radical form of egalitarianism that validates people on the basis on their humanity rather than on their achievement. The Greco-Roman world esteemed people based on status and achievement being a person did not impute dignity. Human dignity is not a bad concept, but the implication is that it leads people to have similar expectations for all groups.
As a Nietzschean myself, I would argue that the problem is not Christianity per se, but the decline of Christianity. Woke is a kind of zombie Christianity, the Christianity you have when you no longer believe in God. Belief in God redeems Christian values, without it you are left with woke nihilism.
You won't be able to offer a better deal than egalitarian utopianism. The appeal of egalitarianism has a psychological leveling of the people who, if you were honest with yourself, are better than you in some way. Taken to its logical extreme, at some point everyone will be just as happy, rich, pretty, and talented, nobody will be above you.
Nobody...above you...not even God?
I'd argue the "Christian assumptions" need to be spelled out pretty clearly. Christ's kingdom is not of this world (what does that mean?), perhaps postmillennialism is heretical.
You make a compelling case but I think you’re missing a discussion on the perils of your own position.
When the average person hears about hereditarianism they will apply such views to all members of whatever group without regard to individual differences within that group. This is the massive threat that leads to despicable outcomes as bad as the ones we are seeing today. It seems to me that even more fundamental than a rejection of the role of heredity is an inability to treat individuals as individuals rather than as members of a group. A society that fully accepted hereditarianism without concurrently and fundamentally embracing individualism to avoid such pitfalls will degrade into the kind of racism we all deplore.
We should all start with the assumption that membership in a group does not fully define a person. Nor should anyone mistreat someone just because some is a member of a demographic group.
Groups are about distributions, and we should always keep the focus on the individual.
you make a lot of good pts, including about my endorsers, but, some rejoinders
- steven pinker is partisan democrat, but a centrist, not a liberal (he is a classical liberal). probably in many ways his beliefs would be 'ordoliberal'
- carlos bustamante is a republican. he obv did not want to advertize that when he was deep in academia, but it's well known
i guess i'll get some right-wing endorsements. there are plenty of fans of my work on the right like michael anton. my readership actually tilts a bit right, but is pretty diverse
Excellent piece. However, you missed a critical point - the right's inability to engage controversial right-wing thinkers. Paul Gottfried and Walter Block are yet to be interviewed by people posing as dissidents. How can you say that you are radical when you don't engage people who were cancelled before wokism became ubiquitous? Also, why are right-leaning intellectuals positing that wokism is embedded in Marxism, when Marxist scholars are arguing that Cultural Marxism is an incoherent concept? Why are conservative intellectuals commenting that the far-right is Christian when it is a Nietzchean movement?
No, I don't think so. Like your article said there is an unwillingness to confront controversial ideas on the right. I don't believe that this inability is rooted in stupidity, probably some of these anti-PC people are not conservative or even eccentric, but they are using the fallacies of identity politics to launch new enterprises. I sent a column on IQ to a leading publication and the editor responded that it was interesting, but it never got published. I have a podcast and I have interviewed several mainstream Professors and people like yourself, but I don't see people with a bigger audience engaging interesting people. My youtube channel dabbles in some wild ideas, but it has earned the respect of establishment figures. When you have the clout that some of these people have you can interview anybody, but they refuse to go beyond saying that identity politics is corroding the United States. Look, I started my podcast, because I was not please with the conversations on the right. Eric Voegelin is a crucial thinker in the present environment because he wrote on gnosticism and there are parallels between gnosticism and identity politics. Nobody is talking about Voegelin. Immigration is good because of Europeans and some people from East Asia. Not all groups are equally productive. Usually, I am elated when writers are offered positions at think tanks. But I know many elegant writers who are not employed at think tanks because they are white and not obsessed with racism.
There are plenty of controversial right-wing thinkers who are engaged with. They just tend to be either exceptionally pandering to the very dumbest kookery of the simpleton right (like Beck or Carlson or Jones or Limbaugh), or so abrasive that they have a hard time maintaining orthodoxy and keeping people on their side (like Coulter or Schlichter).
The kook-feeding complex is a sympton rather than the disease, though. The Right in America, and the broader Free World, is still a very unfriendly place to be smart. The IQ gap is real, but an embrace and evangelization of the truth about it being hereditary is the only path the Right has to escape being the Camp of the Dumb.
I remain amused, at the very smart people who believe they can wish reality to be what they want.
Evolution is not a moral process. Inequality, genocide, rape, are all by-products of its design. When we peer over the ledge of our construction, we shouldn't expect to see a friendly face.
I took my time reading this because it was exceptional, but I'd add that on top of being stupid, right wingers are also just cruel. You'd need to be a callous and morally stunted person to not want to strive for equality if you believe that all groups are equal in ability. Left-wingers have a stronger moral compass which allows them to see inequality and injustice, but it often backfires when they're not able to see that some inequalities and injustices might have non-deliberate causes(i.e. they're part of nature).
Thanks for writing this. It amazes me that excellent conservative thinkers like Glenn Loury still can’t bring themselves to admit to the painfully obvious truth of hereditarianism.
Very interesting and thorough, and largely agree that developments like formal philosophy and law are naturally derivative of changing social attitudes and beliefs. There are two assertions of which I'm not completely convinced. Maybe you can change my mind.
The first is the implicit assumption that intelligence is responsible for the majority of variation in group outcomes. As you write, the debate between 'conservatives' and your camp hinges upon whether intelligence is largely determined by culture or genes. Yet even if one accepts that intelligence is largely hereditary, it still remains unshown that outcomes like crime, absolute measures of poverty, infant mortality, etc., are uniquely caused by one's intellect. Seems more intuitive to me that social circumstances (e.g. family composition, behavior of peers) and resource provision (e.g. top-notch schools and hospitals) would have more causal power on these outcomes than intelligence. Indeed, the hyper-focus on intelligence only seems well-suited to explain scalar measures of individual achievement, especially those at the top end of the distribution (i.e. MATHCOUNTS contest results, FAANG engineer job hires), rather than measures of deprivation like those above.
The second is perhaps more relevant to this specific article -- your contention that 'hereditarianism' needs to be widely promoted in elite circles. Notwithstanding that this may result in a hyper-fixation on intelligence by the Right (rather than foci on social or material factors that institutions can actually solve ... see above), 'race realism' advocacy seems like a poison pill right now. You write that "Rufo’s strategy of creating a counter-elite won’t work unless left-wing elites start defecting to the right on scale" -- yet these defections will never happen in the first place by formally introducing race realism into public debate. If anything, it'll push centrist liberal-types leftward again and get you uninvited to every Georgetown/Upper West Side dinner party along the way.
Aside from the plan's strategic flaws, it seems hard to square widespread elite acceptance of 'race realism' with multiracial democracy. If, as you say, Locke was wrong and certain groups of people are fated to be more intelligent than others, why should we confine ourselves to a Lockean political system where every adult can vote? Shouldn't the highly intelligent groups dictate a disproportionate amount of political affairs (de jure, not just de facto)? More importantly, what do you tell the groups of people who, by virtue of their race and upbringing combined with predominant 'hereditarian' thought, have internalized feelings of inferiority or impotence? How do you dissuade them from antisocial behavior, rampant crime, and conflict? The reality is that times in the West are good right now (as they have been for at least 79 years), so much so that elites are willing to accept the costs of weird 'wokism' in order to avoid the horrors of a world that swallows what some might call the 'race realist red-pill.'
The destruction of merit and the expanding pollution of the signals of competence are incompatible with the maintenance of a complex technological society.
As the presumption that folk are diversity hires spread, folk will rely more and more on stereotypes, as they become more accurate than formal signals of competence.
DEI is currently generating commissars and inquisitors (aka diversity officers) and the equivalent of Test Act affirmation oaths (diversity statements). Much of the West is also engaging in migration policies of remarkably destructive stupidity.
You cannot sustain complex, technological and free societies on the basis of toxic lies.
The problem essentially amounts to the fact that it starts with the "costs of tokenism" and it ends in ideological insanity and dysgenic demographic replacement.
There just isn't a very good "stopping point" for egalitarian logic. Even if there are some points where people would be happy to hypocritically rest, the logic of the whole thing invites ideological entrepreneurs to push things further.
And so we get this pattern of push until resistance, rest, push again. And each time things move further in one direction. At some point they move so far that its no longer "the price of doing business."
Great job on identifying the many problems with Rightoid epistemic culture. However, I think that they are even more intractable than you imply, and that the most prospective approach is to try to creatively route around them, as opposed to spending decades more trying to convince people who have no interest in being convinced.
"The Conservative States of America would most likely be a middle-income country that squanders its national budget on hunting down abortion doctors and erecting Pyramid of Giza-scale Ten Commandments monuments."
To me, this labels you as a bad faith actor motivated by anti-Christian bigotry, and disinclines me to trust anything else you say because of it. If you want to sway people on your own side, you shouldn't start by insulting them with crass caricatures. But then again, maybe the whole point is that you don't want to speak to anyone but your fellow atheists, and would rather that all us stupid backwards Christians just shut up and go away. Alienating the religious seems like an awful strategy for pushing back against leftism, but then again, I'm not an atheist, so I'm probably just too stupid to understand it.
Really insightful analysis.
I think a good recent example of this phenomenon is the treatment of Sam Harris. A few years ago Sam had Charles Murray on his podcast and was quickly pilloried in Vox, and then later in a debate with Ezra Klein. But Sam being who he is did not cave, apologise or retract his interview.
Notwithstanding that obvious demonstration of integrity, Sam is now one of the most hated individuals on the US Right simply because he did not bend the knee to MAGA, and he did not go along with his former buddies when they became retarded on vaccines.
Does he get any credit from the Right for bringing some of science on intelligence into the mainstream? Of course not. Does he get any credit for being frank about the threat of Islamism and the importance of defending Western civilisation from barbarians? Of course not.
So smart centrists, liberals and small-c conservatives look at the treatment of people like Sam Harris and think to themselves "why the f would I align myself with these idiots" and go back to their quiet lives of raising families and making money.
"Does he get any credit from the Right for bringing some of science on intelligence into the mainstream? Of course not. Does he get any credit for being frank about the threat of Islamism and the importance of defending Western civilisation from barbarians? Of course not."
this is true. i've pointed this out and get pointing and sputtering from the 'based' right-wing ppl
Poor Sam will have to live without the love of people he looks down upon.
If you're fool enough to think DJT is anything other than a degenerate, hedonistic serial rapist, you deserve to be looked down upon. The single biggest reason he was able to take hold of the Republican party is because of the IQ gap between left and right.
The tragedy of US politics is that Trump is bad and his opponents are worse. Trump got the votes he did for cultural reasons.
https://www.brookings.edu/books/trumps-democrats/
"Trump got the votes he did for cultural reasons."
You think that's out-of-the-ordinary?
What is out of the ordinary is in 2016 Trump garnered votes from folk who only voted Republican in the past in landslide years. In 2024 he had both cultural and economic reasons working for him.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/a-unified-theory-of-trump-derangement
>degenerate, hedonistic serial rapist
Most of these adjectives are just hollow, poorly defined emotional charges, so I won't be asking about that, but you got me interested with the noun.
Would you mind making your case as to why you think Trump is a rapist?
DJT isn't a serial rapist. He is our good president. The Right, and the right, aren't stupid. But I'm just another degenerate, low-IQ deplorable so what do I know.
They are provably more stupid. That doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong always or even most of the time, but they are statistically more stupid. Their politicians certainly are. The left is admittedly only barely less stupid.
I don’t take the IQ gap as proven. The Left _has_ not proved its claim to be the “reality based community”, either.
It would help if the Democrats did not cheer for and abet the Republican candidates most likely to lose the general election, or govern badly if they do win.
DJT was deemed to be the most likely nominee to lose to HRC. Only, he didn’t. They can’t forgive him for that. They also want him as an albatross to hang from the neck of the Republican party.
Ah yes, it was the Democrats who immediately vaulted Trump to the top of the GOP primary polls in 2015, a position he held for almost the entirety of the contest. Republicans and right wing media have no agency. Just Democrats.
This kind of lazy thinking is exactly what the article is about, the kind of thinking that makes the right feel smart by denigrating the social sciences.
I didn’t say they got him the nomination. They were definitely cheering for him. They certainly didn’t put him in office.
Don’t cheer for the weakest candidate on the other side.
The social sciences are a mess. Have you ever tried looking at Daniel Moynihan's scholarship? It all goes downhill starting there.
So many comments about the titles red-hot commentary “the stupid problem” addressed in the first many paragraphs is obscuring the argument made in the central thesis. I hope you got to read the whole thing. It’s quite poorly reasoned and quite weak.
The gist is that the right will never win until it stops shying away from hereditarian explanations for disparities. Similar to Charles Murray's argument in Facing Reality. I think he is right but I'm pessimistic that that will work either. It may just be that leftism is inevitable because people find hereditarianism unpleasant and are motivated to find alternative explanations even if they aren't really that convincing. In other words, belief in the equality hypothesis may not be some arbitrary mistake but may be an inevitable consequence of the human proclivity to deny unpleasant facts. In the same way that he kept asking why all these institutions embraced woke policies if they weren't already believers, I think he needs to ask why the equality hypothesis has outcompeted the hereditarian hypothesis even though it clearly inferior at predicting outcomes and explaining the patterns that we see.
There are certain people who don’t want to deal with the messy details of whether or not the person in front of them is competent. Obama spouted nonsense about the woman he appointed to oversee the federal insurance exchange. It was obvious that he had no idea what he was talking about. They pretend that people are interchangeable. That’s one step from considering us fungible.
Why does a belief in the *moral* equality of all people necessitate a belief that all people are equal in intelligence, aptitude, economic output, etc. ?
Sam Harris proclaimed that it was morally good to hoist a lie upon the American people (to blame Russia for 'misinformation' regarding the Hunter Biden laptop) and pervert the electoral process in order to keep Trump from ruining "our democracy." That and the fact he peddled the illiberal intervention of coercing the American people into getting vaxxed demostrated to all that worse than any hypocrite, Sam doesn't give a damn about liberty, truth or human dignity.
The weirdest thing is how Clare Lehman chooses to describe this bizarre unhinged behaviour as Harris refusing to 'bend the knee to MAGA' as if anyone demanded that. It's similar to how Palestinian obsessives will accuse Israel of committing 50 million genocides of children every hour and then, when called to account for their unhinged rhetoric will say something stupid and passive aggressive like 'Oh sorry I don't genuflect to Israel as much as you would like'.
They think in terms of ‘bending a knee’. To whom do you genuflect? That is their question.
This!!!
He never said that anyone should lie to the public about Russian misinformation. You are either confused or lying.
Go watch Harris' infamous interview with triggernometry. "Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement and I would not have cared."
"Absolutely it was a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump, but I think it was warranted"
You don't have to support Trump to be accepted by conservatives, all you need is to not be unhinged.
Now Harris feels vindicated because of Trump’s behavior after the election.
He is vindicated. Harris didn’t make Trump do that. It was utterly predictable, and many did predict it.
The vaccine doesn't work very well and has unusually bad side effects, and vaccine mandates which denied people the right to do things as basic as go to a restaurant were an appalling denial of civil liberties far worse than most of the things Sam Harris complains about. Sam Harris made a fool of himself hysterically demanding one draconian policy after another for a disease that wasn't an important problem (and whose net social result was probably positive in light of the looming pension crisis). You did too, but not as much as him.
It worked incredibly well. Substantially better and less risky than traditional inactivated-virus vaccines which we used prior. And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown, which genuinely was a huge encroachment on human freedom for a gain that wasn't worth its cost. I have no problem supporting, and continuing to support, a vaccine mandate. Especially when the alternative is continued needless death versus genuinely minor personal inconvenience.
Bray Wyatt, a celebrity pro-wrestler, died last year primarily because he refused to get the Covid vaccine.* He left behind a wife and four kids over an illness he could've easily avoided. That's not like the lockdown at all. Only cretins pretend there's a genuine tradeoff in this case.
* He also refused to take proper care of himself after his illness, but he never would've gotten the illness had he had the vaccine.
I sometimes wonder whether the mere word 'vaccine' has magical powers. Significant numbers of, albeit not very influential, people will, when told a given medicine is a vaccine, attribute to it almost limitlessly malign powers. On the other hand, an even larger group of rather more influential people are willing to declare any pharmaceutical product, no matter how patently mediocre, to be miraculous and 'incredibly' effective so long as it has the magic v-word attached. There's even the interesting phenomenon of both pro and anti-jabbers combing the internet for random stories of people dying to prove their point.
Normal people, however, have a rough working model of whether a vaccine works. If they get vaccinated and they get the disease, and they get a booster, and get the disease, then another booster, and get the disease they conclude it's a dud. That's why Germany has already disposed of 83,000,000 unused vaccine doses and is literally paying Pfizer not to send them any more while American status-conscious strivers fall over themselves to declare, after getting a cold that they have been injected against seven times, that they would, sans this 'incredible' vaccine, have probably died.
The lucky thing is that most people aren't even vindictive about this. They just want to move on and pretend it didn't happen. But vaccine worshippers can't stop bringing it up like a bad tic.
The vaccine reduces the chance of serious risk and death by 90%. However, only the old and sick were at serious risk of disease and death to start with, so for everyone else 10% of basically nothing is basically nothing.
That we were firing people for not getting a shot that had no impact on their lives is insane.
During the actual vaccine mandate hysteria a lot of this boiled down to a concerted misinformation campaign by the left to tout the sterilizing effects of the vaccine. If the vaccine could prevent you from getting and transmitting COVID then there might be some reason for a mandate. But the evidence was never there for it if one was being honest, and what little evidence there was collapsed the second a new variant came along.
I think the entire thing was done in the hope that "beating" COVID with SCIENCE and blaming everything on the unvaxxed was part of an electoral strategy that backfired. Once the Nov 2021 elections showed it wasn't working people started quietly looking for a face saving exit.
Plenty of people who were under 60 and weren't fat died of Covid: Adam Schlesinger, Carlos Marín, Jay Jay Phillips, Siti Sarah, Chris Trousdale. There's also a fairly good chance it was Brodie Lee's real cause of death, and it ultimately caused the heart problem that killed Bray Wyatt, who only died last year because HE REFUSED TO TAKE THE COVID VACCINE.
So no, I don't have any sympathy for opposition to a Covid vaccine mandate. If anything, we were way too lax on that point. The stoking of opposition to it was either cynical politics, disbelieved even by those pushing it (hence why the likes of DJT and Tucker Carlson got it for themselves); or a sign of groundless, self-destructive paranoia, worthy of the dumbest and craziest postcolonial African dictator.
Woah, Carlos Marin died. CARLOS MARIN? Now that I know Carlos Marin died, I am now very afraid of Covid.
Seriously though, who was Carlos Marin, or any of the people on that list?
There are only a couple of hundred thousand death of people under age 65 (most age 50+ with obesity and health conditions).
There is no way that justified lockdowns and school closures and masking.
I was in a state that switched over to a Republican governor in Nov 2021. In addition to this resulting in less direct COVID NPIs from the change in leadership, it was also part of the broader electoral rejection that got democrats to start giving up on NPIs.
About 3/4 of the people who voted GOP in that election opposed vaccine mandates. If we told all of them we didn't want their votes we would still be masking kids in schools.
"but he never would've gotten the illness had he had the vaccine."
You literally said that after having been vaccinated 5[?] times you were 'as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever'. Are you trying to make sense?
That's cause I was a reasonably healthy kid. I wasn't a cancer patient or a malaria survivor or something. I never had mumps, I never had measles, I never had rubella, I had a fairly manageable case of chicken pocks, and I didn't need my tonsils or appendix removed.
And I wasn't vaccinated five times. I was vaccinated once -- the first shot and the post-month booster -- before getting Covid the first time when a new wave broke out. I got it twice later, and wouldn't get a new shot until last week, but that was motivated by laziness.
I never had measles too, because I was vaccinated against it. Same with rubella and everything else I have been vaccinated against. That is a good indication *that these vaccines actually work*.
You didn't get measles again because the measles virus doesn't mutate that much. Indeed, it mutates so little that even people who had it as children, which pretty much everybody did before the '70s, are unlikely to ever get it again.
For viruses that mutate frequently -- such as coronaviruses like the cold and Covid, or HIV -- traditional vaccines will never be as reliable as mRNA or vector or subunit vaccines. Hence why the Chinese Covid vaccine, which is a traditional vaccine, is notorious for being worthless horsepiss.
We finally have a reliable vaccine against HIV on the horizon, and retard rightoids like you are actively fighting on the side of preventing its dissemination. This is the reason why the Right keeps losing.
"And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown"
The vast majority of people that oppose vaccine mandates also opposed lockdowns. And the vast majority of people that support vaccine mandates supported lockdowns. The Venn diagram of pro-vaccine mandate, anti-lockdown was very small, completely electorally insignificant, and composed almost entirely of people that while they complained about lockdowns on twitter continued to vote for democratic politicians that imposed lockdowns.
The meaningful divide on COVID was between people that "thought it was a big deal" vs people who "didn't think it was a big deal". Vaccines indeed reduced the risk of COVID by 90%, but if you overestimated the risk of COVID by 10,000% that didn't change your calculus.
Many young healthy liberals considered the chance of being hospitalized for COVID to be 50%, and believed Long Covid would cripple them for life.
Meanwhile, if you considered COVID not a big deal, then 10% of not a big deal is still not a big deal, so no change.
There is an analogy to police shooting of blacks. The actual number of police shootings of unarmed black men is 10-20 a year (many justified anyway). About 50% of liberals believe that the number is over 1,000. Over 20% think 10,000 or more. If you could give these people a vaccine that reduced their estimate of black men killed by the police by 90%, they would still be wildly overshooting. That's what it was like with COVID. The vaccine didn't move the needle on COVID hysteria at all for the vast majority of the left. The only thing that worked was a combination of doing terrible in the Nov 2021 elections (because all those vaccine mandate deniers voted against them) and they all got Omicron anyway that winter and realized it wasn't a big deal.
https://www.policemag.com/patrol/news/15310860/half-of-surveys-very-liberal-respondents-believe-1000-or-more-unarmed-black-men-killed-by-police-in-2019
I'm sorry but what I saw during COVID was extreme cowardice on the part of liberals. Either they became outright COVID scolds, or they complained mildly while trying to bash the right to keep their leftist cred.
Covid isn't remotely like police shootings. We have about a thousand fatal police shootings in the US per year, mostly of armed men. Over a million people died in the first two years of Covid in the US alone. More than we lost in WWII and the Civil War combined. It's like comparing police shootings to deaths in trampoline accidents.
Also, I did have Omicron, after getting vaccinated (for Delta, months prior), and it absolutely was a big deal, even though I'm neither old nor obese. I was as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever. It was worse than any time I've had pneumonia.
"Also, I did have Omicron, after getting vaccinated (for Delta, months prior)"
Bro, your vaccine isn't very good and you should take some vitamin D or something.
Because as sick as I was, I still missed the worst symptoms: I kept my senses of smell and taste, I didn't have chest pain, I didn't have oxygen deprivation so I didn't need an inhaler or nebulizer (which I did need when I had pneumonia), my skin never turned blue, and I suffered no noticeable permanent damage afterwards. I had huge fatigue, an endless and unquenchable thirst, chills, fever, soreness, congestion, and it lasted forever (longer than any time I've had pneumonia), but I was still able to handle it by staying home. Which was good, because it's not like the hospital could do much for me, nor did they need to waste their time with someone who could get better on his own.
Second time, when I wasn't up to date on vaccination, I ended up with all those symptoms again, plus a compromise to my sense of taste. Everything tasted spoiled. But thankfully, it lasted a lot shorter. I also gave it to my whole family, but they were all either up to date with their vaccinations or immunised by having too recent a case, so they all barely had any symptoms. Had it again early this winter, when I also hadn't been up to date on my vaccination, and I wasn't as sick as either the first or second time, but it lasted even longer than the first, so I got an inhaler and a humidifier to help with the linger.
"I was as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever. It was worse than any time I've had pneumonia." And yet it doesn't occur to you that you got this sick BECAUSE of the vaccine? Or that in the least, the vaccine didn't work? I'm unvaccinated, I was exposed to covid for 2 weeks at home, never tested positive, and I have a chronic illness to boot.
See, your vaunted vaccine likely made you sicker with covid because the mRNA makes you TOLERANT to the spike protein, so you won't have a cytokine storm, but you can't kick the virus out properly either.
I just don't get the psychology of people who get this sick after a vaccine and think the vaccine still works. The vaccine is NOT WORKING. If it did work, you wouldn't be getting sick at all!
A bunch of old sick people died. Probably made the country better. Defiantly not worth masking kids. The cost/benefit ratio of COVID policy was awful.
I had Omicron too. It felt like a bad flu, and the disease didn't feel much worse then getting the vaccine (which made me and my wife very sick, everyone seems to gloss over the fact that its the only vaccine I've ever taken that made me extremely ill).
I've often found myself wondering what a national leader of 50 years ago would have said has an aide come to his office and described this new Covid pandemic:
"So, basically, a lot of people who would have 'lived' to 84 requiring constant medical interventions are actually going to die at 82"
"OK, but what's the catch?"
Vaccine reactions vary. I had a day’s hangover. Immune responses also differ. Some people get nearly complete immunity, some get less.
The kicker is that Covid is of the same family of viruses as the common cold. Coronaviruses mutate constantly. We expect to catch colds each year.
This particular coronavirus was more deadly because it was novel, in a similar way that native Americans died in droves from European diseases like the common cold.
Vaccination gives us a base level of protection in general, just as flu vaccines do. The manufacturers target the strains they think most people will encounter.
seems like the vaccine really... did its job?
It quite literally did not work. It didn’t do what they said it would do, an it still doesn’t do what they are saying jt will do.
Never mind the enormous increase in excess death and disability corresponding exactly to the vaccine roll out. You’re quite frankly delusional if you actually believe the mRNA shots “worked incredibly well”. Complete indefensible position.
The vaccine did work incredibly well. It was the most sophisticated fascistic business venture and sociological experiment of our time. Hundreds of governments taking the testimony of bureaucrats who were currently or previously employed by a handful of pharmaceutical companies that their new products, developed in about 6 months, would save the human race from the virus and even prevent everyone who accepted Jesus as their Lo, er, everyone who accepted a vaccination from contracting the virus at all. These governments preceded to mandate this product to over 7 billion people with differing levels of severity depending on the country, from causing uncooperative individuals to lose their jobs to barricading them in their apartments until they relented. Thankfully, millions of elderly people were spared from the virus, but I can’t help but suspect this was not the primary motive here. Based simply on this most basic outline of events, what happened here is one of the most seamless and effective public-private partnerships and fastest transfer of wealth in history. The sovereign scientific decrees of the time continue to be quietly walked back every few months, but the vaccine performed beyond all expectations. The main question is, for whom?
Nailed it
The right wins almost every election. State Governors? More and more every election top to bottom has gone right. Trump beat Joe by a mile. But the election was stolen. Obviously. Almost NO ONE believes in what progressives believe. Men should not compete against women in sports. It doesn’t matter if they change their name to a female name. And dress up. Boys should not have their penises cut off because a psychologist says he will be happier. The border should be closed. And so on. The vast vast majority of people are on the same side. And it isn’t the side of the left. Last, the vaccines are the worst medicines ever foisted on mankind. The fallout will effect mankind for at least three generations. If you keep getting boosted you will die.
"Trump beat Joe by a mile. But the election was stolen."
Fucking LOL.
No wonder smart people don't wanna lump up with retards like you. A guy who couldn't even win the popular vote the first time around against a historically unpopular and unlikable Dem challenger, whose highest-ever approval rating was 49%, who drove off college-educated and suburban voters like no other Rep since Goldwater (who at least had integrity), whose own wife cited rape as the reason for their divorce when adultery was a perfectly viable option, and you think he ever had the majority on his side?
Thank fuck I'm not an office holder. I don't need to win over retards like you. My goal is to win over the people who live on Planet Earth. Perhaps you can join us someday when you get tired of failure.
This is my experience. My conservative friends are significantly smarter than my liberal friends. Not even close.
Your own personal experience is irrelevant when compared with the averages. On average, the Left dominates every high-Q profession, has done so for at least living memory, probably a lot longer (JS Mill called the Tories "the Stupid Party", and he died in 1873), and the Right's response to this has been to pander to the retard flank harder than ever. This holds true in IQ surveys as well.
The only reason things might change is that the Right's pro-stupidity has grown in tandem with the Left's anti-hereditarianism. And militant anti-hereditarianism is incompatible with being a stable, happy home for a cognitive minority, whether on the left or right end of the Bell Curve.
The Party of Stupid mantra is used by righties against RINOS. We don’t play to win. It isn’t because we believe we are stupid.
You --are-- stupid.
By the way, I love how RINO has become the default insult of the retard right when you've rallied around a guy who spent most of his adult life as either a Dem or an Independent, whom primarily won his nomination by jettisoning most of the conservative platform of the last century aside from chauvinism and anti-immigrationism. You Retardlicans could at least pick a somewhat accurate insult.
If you actually tried to appraise the evidence for that statement rather than follow your gut, you'd be in for some surprises
"Bray Wyatt, a celebrity pro-wrestler, died last year primarily because he refused to get the Covid vaccine.*" Where did you get this information? Because it's certainly not available via any search I've done.
It came out shortly after he died. Bray had to cancel his Wrestlemania match with Bobby Lashley because of "a life-threatening illness":
https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/exclusives/bray-wyatt-faced-life-threatening-illness-finally-hopefully-nearing-wwe-return
Which was revealed to be Covid not long after he died by Sean Ross Sapp:
https://deadline.com/2023/08/bray-wyatt-dead-wwe-wrestling-star-was-36-obituary-1235527800/#!
He ultimately died of a heart attack, but may very well have survived that had he worn his damnded heart monitor while he was sleeping like his doctors told him to:
https://www.tmz.com/2023/08/28/wwe-bray-wyatt-not-wearing-heart-defibrillator-time-of-death/
Presumably the reason more attention wasn't drawn to this is because, while tragic, Bray's death was both extraordinarily stupid and exceptionally selfish, neither of which are things grieving friends and families like to bring up about their deceased if it can be avoided.
Normal people wanting "quiet lives of raising families and making money" is also how deranged ideologues have taken over institutions.
Yes, that is one of the worst effects of deranged ideologues. It forces people to stop making their own lives better and fight back against them.
That is so true. Frustrating. I have no interest in being a social warrior. You do you, I will do me worked fine. Until the left said ‘I will do me and you better respond as you should. And then, I will do your children’.
If Sam Harris suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome and from Covid hysteria, you’re not allowed to call him out because he interviewed Charles Murray .Smart take !
MAGA and HBD aren't really the same circles, and he was certainly deranged wrt Trump https://youtu.be/Vy18j7IKzOI
the ven diagram is just 2 circles
Sam's hatred of Trump was entirely consistent. His entirely unjustified surrender on the Muslim immigration question on which he had previously taken a hardline, was not: https://futuristright.substack.com/p/the-new-atheists-betrayed-the-west
Furthermore, in writing a book endorsing never lying, Sam forfeited any right to consideration as a potential Straussian. So we have every right to take his statements literally, and given the total and unexplained inconsistency between his pre-Trump statements on Islam, and his post-Trump opposition to the Muslim ban there isn't much of a mystery as to what the logical conclusion is. Sam sacrificed one of his most important principles out of personal dislike, and in doing so, revealed himself as undeserving of respect.
The later, 'dead kids in the basement' gate only sealed this deal. I personally didn't find it particularly offensive, until I realized that this is the guy who wrote a book endorsing never lying. Now maybe the price really was worth it (I disagree of course), but you have no right to pretend he doesn't deserve to pay it. And the price is the hatred of those of us who admired Sam deeply.
Or maybe, maybe, he believed that the Muslim ban is done poorly, not that its underlying wish is bad?
Hi. Problem is, for all his good work in some areas, Sam is utterly wrong, scientifically, about the covid vaccines. He has shown no sign that he understand the underlying biology at all. He is utterly wrong but just doesn't know it yet. But it shouldn't be too much longer now ... In addition—I would argue—he has failed to understand the importance of Trump and what he represents. In the end, Sam has been seduced by the prestige afforded him by the utterly degenerate mainstream, it appears.
I don't pay close attention to Sam Harris, but from what I've seen, he was afflicted with TDS. I can't recall the last time I saw him say anything that wasn't complaining about Trump or some other attack against the right. At some point, if you engage in enough friendly fire, people will conclude that you are the enemy. Not exactly rocket science.
There are plenty of people who don't like Trump, and who even criticize Trump, while still remaining clearly of the right. The difference is that they do not make complaining about Trump the only thing they ever talk about.
I gree 100% what you wrote about Sam Harris, and I would add the most paradoxical stuff is rightoids, especially the most extreme ones would prefer elevating far left intellectuals like Chomsky or Greenwald just because they happens to get cited by Tucker Carlson. But aren't people like Chomsky or Greenwald that same kind of "evil jew bolsheviks" right wingers like to talk evey time online?
It’s currently the right who is defending Israel? So, maybe you just don’t understand those you like to criticize
I am right wing. I don’t know any right wing racists or anti Semites. All the racists I know, and anti Jew people, are left wing. One of my sons married a black African woman. I was so excited when their first was born. One of the highlights of my life. Becoming a grandpa. I showed my friends and neighbours pics of this beautiful child. All my right wing friends oohed and aahed. My left wing friends? Not so much. They were afraid to mention it was a black baby. When they did they asked ‘are you okay with having a black grandchild?’ Maybe 25% of my lefty acquaintances. 0% of my conservative friends. It blew me away because I really thought everyone was decades past that. Apparently half of lefties aren’t.
Best example is Norman Finkelstein, who isn't even a talented scholar, like Chomsky, or a principled defender of free speech, like Greenwald, but, aside from being a communist, is basically just a freak.
Thanks to have reminded me Finkelstein, I didn't hear that name since 2010's at least. Chomsky is a talended scholar? Sure, a talented scholar who denied every communist atrocity in South Asia and was a Jeffrey Epstein associate. https://www.timesofisrael.com/noam-chomsky-ehud-barak-among-names-on-jeffrey-epsteins-newly-uncovered-calendar/
Greenwald a free speech defender? yeah, a free speech defender married with a gay brasilian pornographer and adoptive father of four black kids. Integrity, this unknown!
Chomsky's intellectual prestige comes from his work as a linguist (even as a programmer I had to learn about "Chomsky normal form"), but once that got him ensconced in academia he became known for his unrelated political commentary.
Also his work on debunking behaviorism was very important (if kind of blindingly obvious in retrospect).
Oh please. Sam Harris is one of the left-liberal clowns who has made Western civilization easy pickins for the barbarians.
I still listen to Sam Harris and think most of his insights are valuable but I also think he was an idiot on the Trump question (not the vaccine question, the anti-vaccination ideas have no merit). Saying someone has TDS (yes, predicting that Trump would somehow bring in real fascism when the trends and evidence point far stronger to the other side doing it does mean trump derangement syndrome, regardless of what you think of his policies otherwise) doesn't mean you hate them.
I'm very right wing (but actual right-wing, non-religious libertarian right).
Re: Sam Harris:
https://www.mattball.org/2018/03/the-enemy-of-my-enemy.html
Sam Harris, like you, supported the Zero Covid stupidity. He also is a foreign policy neocon, who has repeatedly stated that the US should send it's military around the world fighting every conceivable conflict. He also thinks everyone should throw their religion out yet offered literally nothing to replace it (his book on morality was just a giant question begging exercise). I wonder why the new right dislikes him even though he had Charles Murray on once.
Really insightful comment on a really insightful analysis.
Claire: The first few pages make the authors argument in the headline satisfying but I hope people who risk making comments like “really insightful” do get beyond those primary arguments (about the stupidity problem) to assess the writers actual, central premise of “How/Why”. I think it’s quite awful, reading like any of many Anti-vax-style screeds. Beware wandering into unlocked doors.
I read the article and am familiar with Cofnas's academic work. I've published him him at Quillette, e.g. https://quillette.com/2022/01/13/philosophers-want-to-censor-kevin-macdonald/
Interesting. I never saw that Quillette piece (and will read it later). I have followed your work at Quillette for years - appreciated much but not everything yet perhaps not that closely, lately. As mentioned, I think the piece starts off strong but the analysis was quite bad, the piece reads like a disorganized rant, perhaps lacked reviewers / editors to strengthen an argument (that I still might have disagreed with). The Right does “appear” to have a stupidity problem and the paper documents clear trouble, but again, everything else here falls apart. Sorry!
The fact that you’re somehow comparing this to “anti-vax style screeds” makes clear your dogmatic blindspots.
Your “critique” so far has been to insult the readers and to slip in this anti-vax straw man.
A good critique. I think the approaches here—cultural history, civil rights law, philosophical problems—are complementary.
Agree. As I say, "Wokism needs to be attacked from philosophical and legal angles, and Rufo and Hanania provide important guidance on how to do that"!
Your analysis attacks the fundamental premise ("equality uber alles"), which neither Rufo nor Hanania address, and without which, their respective 'theories' are merely ineffectual whitewashing.
Hanania's interview with Amy Wax discusses whether discussing "equality uber alles" is a good strategy or not.
I'm in the "nothing but losing strategies camp". I think it's electorally impossible to discuss HBD openly in a multi-racial democracy. But I also think it's impossible to stop wokeness long term without discussing it. Amy Wax's "soft realism" strikes me as the kind of 80s-2012 strategy that this essay calls out as ineffective and that ultimately lost to wokeism. I think immigration has made that strategy untenable.
Aesthetically, I would go with honest HBD and we gets what we gets whatever it is.
LKY is the only world leader I know that discussed HBD openly and he thought that multi-racial democracies were doomed (his own was basically a super majority Chinese run ethno-state with some minorities that have to fall in line).
Another possibility is the "dueling ethnic spoils" strategy. Jews just ousted Claudine Gay because they said essentially "fuck with Jews and we will fuck you up." They showed zero worry about DEI until it messed with Jews, then they nuked it. I don't think whites have the solidarity for that (they care more about inter-white conflict that extra white conflict), but who knows.
A better option is shifting from the quest for Equality to the quest for Upward Mobility, which requires economic growth that benefits almost all people.
Also a shift from Beliefs to Results.
Both shifts fundamentally undermine all the assumptions of the Left with forcing us into a zero-sum clash of races and genders.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-for-the-progress-based
Well, darn you (and Substack), MM. :-)
I find that upward mobility suggestion quite reasonable, which means now I will have come to Nathan's Substack from another one, and go on to yours from his. Thus I will end up skipping the other 200 comments herein, so somewhat a toss of the dice that I found your link here. Fate or ??? There are not enough hours in the (new or any) year for all of this internet rabbit holing!!
Before retiring I worked for a defense contractor who had an affirmative action agenda, so I came into contact with a cohort of the better educated (and more successful) blacks and STEM oriented women; but I also found blacks achieving success as AC repairman, windshield re-installers, electricians, and (sometimes) quite competent call center respondents (insurance, medical, etc.). Let alone the large complement of publicly successful blacks (and women) in athletics, law, medicine, entertainment, etc. (even academia and politics).
I suspect we don't really care how much money other people make as long as they don't use that wealth directed towards (excessive) political power and influence counter to our preferences or outside the legal and ethical realm. Thus bringing everyone up via the clearly established "success factors" makes sense. This can be obtaned regardless of a person's starting and ending points based on IQ or muscle strength or vocal cords or any of a vast array of inherent characteristics and abilities, plus any eventually learned set of skills.
Looking forward to examining your link, but maybe not today :-(
I examined Michael's Substack Manifesto link today. I don't agree with all that I found there, but suggest some here might find it useful to explore over there for an hour or so to see if his proposals and ideas match with your views (or that a contrasting view still merits consideration).
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/613948-hitler-has-grasped-the-falsity-of-the-hedonistic-attitude-to
It does seem electorally impossible to discuss HBD openly now. But things can change rather quickly. How many people in say 2010 would have expected that trans ideology would become such a central dogma in mainstream left wing politics? I don’t even recall people talking about it back then. And remember that about 15 years ago, Obama declined to endorse gay marriage.
HDB = human biodiversity (based on prior exposure to here: http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/whatever-happened-to-european-tribes/ Whatever happened to European tribes? 04/04/2011 )
LKY = Lee Kuan Yew (based on general knowledge and context; still had to look it up to confirm my expectation)
"Aesthetically, I would go with honest HBD..." I agree with honesty as the best policy, but I am also intrigued by Michael Magoon's Upward Mobility suggestion.
As a Singaporean I find it jarring to suddenly see LKY or Lee Kuan Yew mentioned.
His son the third PM of Singapore also made remarks on wokeness https://theindependent.sg/elon-musk-praises-lee-hsien-loongs-comments-on-wokeness/
But LKY made those comments in the 2000s and while Lee Hsien Loong remarks are very recent, it's interesting to me that they were made just before he passed the reins of PM to his Successor.
Singapore isn't yet as "woke" as most western countries but clearly it's changing as the younger people rise to positions of power.
When I was younger I used to think the East Asians were "based" because I was around a lot of fresh of the boat STEM boys that didn't conform to western attitudes on things.
But having watched those people grow up I think this was just ignorance on their part, rather then a conscious rejection of western norms. Once an East Asian immigrant identifies wokeness as "the path to status climbing" they embrace it.
Asians I knew in college that were "based" became NPCs. One of my best friends drove three hours alone in a car to see me with an N95 mask on the entire way in the summer of 2021. He wasn't like that in college, but he married a Harvard grad and this was the message being transmitted by the powers that be at the time.
The biggest problem East Asia is going to face is that there are no families. Singles, especially single women, are the raw fuel of wokeness.
On the last day of the NatCon conference in Hungary, Chris Rufo had a horrifying thought. "Finnish fishermen could be here" he shuddered, "I've never been on this continent before. There could be Finnish fishermen here right now." The chills ran through his fingers, as he scrolled through tickets to DC. "What do I have in common with Finnish fishermen, anyway?". Hovering over the buy now button he felt a sense of relief after remembering that, "Spirit Airlines can take you anywhere you want, anywhere at all." And so, he booked his ticket, away from the terrifying apparition they call Sanna and towards the warm embrace of Lizzo.
https://substack.com/@futuristright/note/c-45760115
Excellent and inspiring article. Regarding the roots of Wokeism in Christianity/blank slatism: wasn’t it the case that in the 1920s large numbers of Western elites accepted the Darwinian paradigm regarding group differences? How did they escape the (proto) woke paradigm? (And why would the Holocaust cause elites to throw out the Darwinian baby with the Nazi bath water?) I agree that Rufo/Hanania have not adequately explained the roots of Wokeism, but neither does your article adequately explain why high IQ, scientifically-minded, Leftists, who could easily read/comprehend Jensen, et al., prefer less sophisticated (if not downright silly!) woke arguments over superior, scientifically-based, arguments. Sometimes I think many Leftists know the truth about group differences but since minorities are crucial to their political coalition, they lie about it.
More or less extreme forms of race denial go back to the 17th century. At that time, there probably wasn't enough evidence for anyone to have an informed opinion on hereditarianism one way or the other. But blank slatism was attractive to many intellectuals for ideological or emotional reasons. In addition, slavery and other abuses were justified by appeals to natural differences, which provoked liberals to adopt an unreasonably dogmatic position on the other side. As I point out, denial was already becoming an orthodoxy among a large segment of the intellectual class by the late 19th century. Then there was a strong reaction against Nazism. Once the taboo is established and people are punished for dissent, you're stuck in a new equilibrium. Jensen didn't make his case until 1969, at which point the blank-slate juggernaut was very difficult to derail. Many people had doubts, but most of them kept their mouths shut or they would be punished.
In connection with this process I often quote Nietzsche's observation that "in the son that becomes conviction which in the father was still a lie." People pretended to believe in the equality thesis before they actually believed it. Franz Boas didn't say black and white brains are literally identical. But, over the generations, belief became further and further divorced from reality, until you get zoomers who, on a deep, emotional level, cannot understand why we don't have equality of outcome.
Many of the factors that made HBD completely undeniable are fairly recent.
Blacks didn't get equality till the 60s and then a reasonable person could give them a generation or two to catch up.
De-Colonization didn't get going till around the same time, so who's to say why the third world was so held back. And again, don't they deserve a generation or two to catch up.
Asians didn't really prove they had what it took undeniably until the 80s or 90s. China being stagnant under communism probably held back this realization even further.
The knowledge economy becoming more and more important was a gradual thing that raised the salience of IQ. And the post WWII SAT sorting that is the primary thesis of The Bell Curve was also fairly recent. It used to be that there were a lot more smart people outside of the knowledge economy and professional class.
So probably the earliest HBD became pretty dominant empirically was say the 90s, which puts it right around The Bell Curve. While the information was probably good enough then, I can see how someone who was a bleeding heart or didn't like HBD because it conflicted with their ideology (right or left) would hold out hope that education reform or some other magic bullet might solve things.
And anyway, the whole world was gravy in the 1990s so why upset any apple carts. Then in the 2000s we had a strategy of making the Middle East Democracies and the compassionate conservatism of the ownership society was going to win over naturally conservative Hispanics.
Right around the second Obama term I think this all came undone. The end of communism meant unleashing the high IQ Chinese on the world. The third world continued to stagnate. Education reform failed. The Middle East was a shitshow. Hispanics rejected Romney.
Obama's first term could ride on rejecting Bush-ism, but his second turned much more towards black racial resentment and juicing the handouts. Oberfegell basically declared open season on the most insane gender and sex stuff.
I myself didn't really come around to HBD until the late 2000s, and I had a lot of strong reasons to know better before and a dramatically stronger statistical background then most of the population.
But by the time you get to the 2010s HBD is both empirically undeniable while being demographically, culturally, and legally a non-starter. So the response is basically people who know they don't like this shit but can't explain why.
You make a number of excellent points. I would add in massive funding for medical research which requires research on genome.
I think much of the hysteria of Wokeness is because all the facts now undermine the entire world view of the Left. They have nothing left but rejecting reality, celebrating mental disorders and implementing censorship.
It will not work. The entire system will come crashing down at some point soon.
Voters will accept rolling back research on human genome for medical purposes, so more and more evidence will keep rolling out.
It may seem like that, but in reality a lot of people dating back had just as clear a picture of race differences from heritability, simply google "darwin racism" and you will see he clearly understood racial differences.
Much good analysis, but do think you underestimate the role that Darwin played in racism. From Descent of Man:
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world."
If you accept Gould's account of the effect of this idea: "Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory."
I think it's important to emphasize that Darwin was making a prediction, not a recommendation. I'm not familiar with this claim by Gould, but it seems to contradict obvious facts. In between the publication of the Origin and the Descent, race-based slavery in the West, which was justified by biological differences, came to an end. The Nazis were not influenced by Darwin at all, as documented by Bob Richards in "Was Hitler a Darwinian?"
Anti-black racism was first developed by Muslim intellectuals early in the history of Islam, as they had to justify the mass enslavement of the children of Allah. Even nowadays, the colloquial Arabic for a Sub-Saharan African is ‘abd’ — ‘slave’ or ‘creature’: as in Abdullah = Slave of God.
They also developed anti-white racism at the same time and for the same reason. To the extent that racism increased after 1859, it was to “explain” European imperial dominance.
Gobineau’s ‘An Essay On the Inequality of Human Races’ came out in 1855. The demand was there already.
what youre saying is just false, it was world war 2 that marked the significant change in common acceptance of race to completely distancing itself. It was common knowledge among society that races were different, that these differences resulted in different societies etc in that pre-ww2 era. We can prove this using word book chronologies etc. That shift was largely lead by jewish communist intellectuals who openly stated their goals in a 1961 point plan, which clearly achieved many of it's goals, including the erasure of race. i also wondered why you didn't mention that Franz Boas was part of the jewish USSR propaganda. Kevin McDonalds culture of critique does a far better job at explaining how these radical left agendas took place than anything else, and he's far more scientific/race realist than most leftists. Mark Rufo and Richard Hannania are both establishment hacks
I don't know if you actually read the post, but I provide quotes from some of the most influential pre-WWII (gentile) thinkers endorsing race denial. Almost everything Kevin MacDonald says about Franz Boas is a lie, as I document here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-022-00352-x
I did read it, and your attempt to argue a few quotes from intellectuals as somehow dominating the entire school of thought is a very weak argument, the entire society was racially conscious, and many other strong intellectuals directly contradicted the quotes you brought up in many other works. Darwin also said "It is an interesting fact that ancient races, in this and several other cases, more frequently present structures which resemble those of the lower animals than do the modern. One chief cause seems to be that the ancient races stand somewhat nearer in the long line of descent to their remote animal-like progenitors.”
Also your attack on Kevin MacDonald was clearly some type of self distancing attempt and not based on anything truthful, Andrew Joyce did a great job debunking it https://www.unz.com/article/the-cofnas-problem/ .
The turning point in shifting the social consciousness is directly laid out as a planned shift by yes, a jewish individual Samuel Flowerman, where he directly laid out exactly how they planned to shift that natural in group preference/natural xenophobia. https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/01/14/modify-the-standards-of-the-in-group-on-jews-and-mass-communications-part-one-of-two/ It's a direct document with their exact plans, the individuals involved did exactly as the plan stated, and they achieved this goal of turning natural racial in group preference in whites, into self policing white shame which opened the door for these other movements to succeed/work in parallel.
Seems you're clearly just joining the kosher approved club and distancing yourself from the truth as you'd rather sell out and write harmless to the jewish power structure pieces on establishment hacks like Christopher Rufo who's tweeted things like
"Good. White identitarianism is pathetic and disgusting."
"I love this. Ten percent of all marriages in America are interracial. We have the power to transcend racial divisions, but critical race theory seeks to deepen them."
I think Cofnas would say that even if Jews did have a disproportionate influence regarding blank slatism after (and somewhat prior) to WWII, the vast bulk of intellectuals were already predisposed to Wokeism due to centuries of Christian egalitarianism and blank slatism prior to the arrival of Leftist Jews. But MacDonald might still be correct that the disproportionate number of Jews in the media and academia, reacting to anti-Semitism, gave blank statism a bigger shove than it would have gotten in the absence of Jews.
Jewish intellectuals clearly really like Systems (Kabbala anyone?), and Marxism and its derivatives was the last big System. Not coincidentally, Marx developed his core ideas well before the publication of ‘Origin of Species’.
Also, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, French intellectual life was almost entirely innocent of Darwinism (even French biology): they are functionally pre-Darwinian thinkers.
https://youtu.be/772WncdxCSw?si=KGp2UScfHP3QLpXU
“Systemic racism” and CRT, although perhaps less sophisticated (at least on the surface) than Marxism, also seem to have been systematized (not necessarily by Jews, but they certainly helped pave the way by attacking the Darwinian paradigm and racialism).
I don't deny the idea that Christianity helped pave the way for egalitarianism, but it was concrete, distinct actions that actually lead to these things happening. You can do book word searches into all of these "tolerance" movements and they all started right after WW2, prior to this whites were racially conscious. A great piece is the one I linked above, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/01/14/modify-the-standards-of-the-in-group-on-jews-and-mass-communications-part-one-of-two/
I read the Joyce article a while ago. I recall thinking it was good but will revisit. Cofnas does seem to want to leapfrog over the 1890-1924 racially conscious period by tracing woke back to Christianity and/or Locke, Rousseau, et al. But we can also see that this debate is a matter of interpretation about the degrees of influence of this or that idea and/or groups. However, I do think Jews have had an outsized influence regarding racialism and not just because they, too, were influenced by blank slate ideas. Top Jewish intellectuals are certainly smart enough to comprehend racialist arguments as well as realize it doesn’t take too much effort to figure out how to distance yourself from anti-Semitic individuals/organizations who also embrace racialism. Therefore, it seems contradictory to say that Jews are disproportionately woke/Leftists because they have high IQs and are urban. A high IQ should lead vastly more Jews to embrace racialism.
I'm sure many of them know, but think "is this good for us?" as Brother Nathanial mentioned in his recent Alex Jones appearance. Hopefully many start saying "no" as the end results are pretty obviously bad for them as well.
You wignats would be more serious in your anti-judeo bolsheviks rants if you weren't the same people always promote literal jewish bolsheviks like Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald.
Accepting Jewish influence on matters of race does not automatically make you a Wignat; also, it’s not contradictory to accept MacDonald’s thesis (in part or whole) and agree with Jews like Chomsky et al. (in part or whole).
Nope. If you believe jewish are the evil incarnate you should always disagree with them. In fact nazis were dreadful coherent, they neither accepted jews with german nationalist tendencies!
What if you believe that Jews are influential and lean Left and/or promote blank slatism for group safety? That wouldn’t require rejecting the views of all Jews.
Chomsky isn't a literal bolshevik, I believe his ideology is anarcho-syndicalist. Greenwald is less interested in economics, but is primarily a civil liberties lawyer reacting to the War on Terror and has in the past been aligned with libertarians (although if you go far enough in the past he was also an immigration restrictionist). I would say Greenwald's current stance on economics is not especially principled but something he can come up as a critic of various companies who has also spent a lot of time writing for lefty publications.
My point wasn't about Chomsky or Greenwald. What I wanted to underlying is the fact there are several people believing in JQ loving to cite and follow both of them. I can understand if you are a lefty or a lolbert, but if you are one of those believing the "jewish race" is the evil incarnate It's a bit inchoerent in my view.
Yes, if you literally think Jews are “evil incarnate”, then you should reject Greenwald, Chomsky, et al. But embracing the JQ doesn’t remotely require thinking that all Jews are evil or ethnocentric in their motivations. This is no different than recognizing that not all blacks are criminals or dumb even though they are disproportionately so.
What is a "lolbert"?
Using slurs because you can't make arguments says all we need to see. Jewish ppl are clearly behind all the major social movements that are now proving to be very destructive, Kevin MacDonald's book Culture of Critique does an excellent job explaining why this happened. For the record, Glenn Greenwald will never criticize the overwhelmingly jewish control of the media, he also says things we already know and don't really advance anything. Noam Chomsky is a complete hack, look up his tweets around covid.
One thing that just occurred to me is that it seems odd, if not contradictory, to argue that present day egalitarianism--even among brilliant Jewish/ gentile elites--is rooted in a 2,000+ year old religion and/or blank slatism from hundreds of years ago but, at the same time, elites have managed to tear themselves away from religion (atheism is widespread among elites) and/or false scientific doctrines not related to racialism.
They kept the religious impulse while transferring the associated power from the church/clergy/community to the academy/bureaucracy
Because egalitarianism - although having strong roots the universalism of Christianity - is actually the result of the Enlightment and the French Revolution. That's when every male citizen regardless of race have gotten the right to vote.
Before it, there was a 'natural order of things'.
I also think that the Cold War played a role - if Americans wanted to get third world countries on their side, it was important to show them that they are morally superior to the Soviet Union (and the Nazis they defeated).
You are another living proof of Cofnas' theory of right wing stupidity. You complain about da jooz ruling the world while getting upset for mean words of internet.
Go to buy a lollipop and let adult people alone.
As I just mentioned, if all you have is ad hominem you're the one making it clear who lacks a brain. I'm also sorry you lack basic pattern recognition to simply look at over representation, way beyond any IQ explanation specific to jewish ppl in banking, media, social movements to promote hatred against host populations etc. They did the exact same thing in the USSR against the native slavs, in fact that's when the term "racist" was first used as a slur by murderous jewish supremacist Trotsky
Thank you for your reply. Your answer sounds reasonable but I’m still puzzled that so many brilliant Leftists would succumb to this orthodoxy given that the 1920s showed more than a glimmer of hope that the woke paradigm could be resisted by the elites. I agree that the Holocaust put many more nails in the Darwinian coffin, but it’s still perplexing that so many brilliant elites succumbed to blank slate nonsense given their access to the scientific literature. The fact that there are many notable exceptions shows that the literature is impressive. Given these exceptions, the formation of the woke orthodoxy doesn’t seem to quite add up in my mind. I understand the taboos that developed because of Nazism, but I still don’t see why the Darwinian baby had to get thrown out with the Nazi bath water. Surely scientifically-minded elites are more nuanced than that? You are a good example of that and hardly alone.
If you believe in any sort of politics of the transformational future — the ability to create a profoundly different future, free of [fill in sin] — you are pretty well stuck with the blank slate thesis. Which is Marxism and everything that descends from it.
Sailer wrote that he thinks it began with the 1929 Crash. It was a big shock that such a large (huge?) number of bright and successful people lost everything and there was a movement in the direction of Marxism. I think it was James Burnham who said if the franchise had then been limited to Ph.D.s the CPUSA would have won the 1932 election.
The 1930s was “The Red Decade” (Eugene Lyons) but there were already splits in the socialist/communist movement. I have no idea what % of PhDs voted for the CPUSA but I suspect that Burnham was being hyperbolic. The “Mensheviks” won pretty easily n the West.
I've just one quibble with your excellent analysis...."wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously". Wokeism is not, at bottom, driven by a serious thesis of ANY kind. It is more in the way of a mind-game.....one in which you the woke person get a nice FEELING about yourself as one of a caring (and sophisticated) elect. At the same time you get to indulge some delicious hate towards your notional peers.
My view, expressed in a blog post I linked, is that there's a lot of contingent history behind this. The US became one of two global superpowers after WW2 and justified its stature based on its defeat of the Nazis. During the Cold War, it competed with the USSR for client states in the Third World. The USSR regularly attacked the US for its mistreatment of African-Americans... and, interestingly, in diminishing the moral standing of the US & British Empire against the Nazis Charles Lindbergh engaged in some similar "whataboutism".
I see that comment is so far down you would have to page through several times to find it. I was linking to here https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/01/03/reply-to-nathan-cofnas/
An early Eric Kaufmann book, *The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America,* goes into some of this history. Kaufmann also published an exchange with Kevin MacDonald on related topics.
You absolutely correct about the lying.
What most conservatives do not realize is that most Leftists do not actually believe half of what they say. It is what psychologists call “Preference Falsification.”
They just want to:
1) Feel virtuous
2) Project an image of virtue to others.
3) Preserve their social status of being a member of a group associated with high social status and intelligence.
That is why you should always shift the discussion to Results, not beliefs and intentions. There entire world view collapses when you focus on Results.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-the-left
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-do-ideologies-fail
I wouldn’t discard a desire to socially belong from the motivations of high IQ leftists, especially among the younger cadre. People do weird things just to be accepted. I distinctly recall convincing myself in my youth that I gave two shits about utterly incomprehensible entities like U2, for instance.
Sometimes if you are less concerned about social acceptability, it can be hard to gauge the degree to which others crave social acceptance and are willing to suppress or refrain from voicing doubts. But middle-class white Leftists often have few or no black friends and prefer to live among whites, so that speaks volumes (although some might say that they would be happy to have minorities with middle-class values living among them and are trying to boost them into the middle-class as fast as possible via DEI, etc.). However, Leftists--at least the more radical variety--have often forsaken social acceptance (e.g., Eugene Debs went to jail) and it is the radical Wokels who have gotten the milquetoast Lefties to toe the woke line to avoid being ostracized as a racists, [...]phobic, etc. It’s quite remarkable. But Cofnas is correct that the milquetoast Lefties helped pave the way with the endless proselytizing against racism. Many mainstream tv programs beginning in the early 70s (e.g., “All in the Family”, etc.) attacked racism. Archie Bunker (the main character in “All in the Family”) starts out as an unrepentant racist (albeit not remotely a vicious one) and by the end of the show he has adopted a Jewish girl and gives her a Star of David necklace as a gift. (Not sure you can blame this on John Locke. Lol)
Demographics are on Aporia’s side. Also, I think we will have 100k readers in our first five years.
-- Matt
Rufo and Hanania are missing the core of the issue. The morality that exists enables and empowers leftist philosophers and activists, which translates into the law. Both Rufo and Hanania are talking about the second-order effects of egalitarian morality, which stems from Christianity. I am sure it's easier to sell to a right-wing conservative audience that Wokeness is all the result of either nefarious Marxists (which plays to Rufo's right-wing conspiratorial biases) or legal machinations of "Big Government" (which plays to Hanania's anti-government libertarian biases), both of which are acceptable explanations within the mainstream right, instead of the true and real explanation, that being Christian morality.
Imagine going on Fox News and saying that Wokeness is caused by Christian morality; they'd never let you back on, not to mention the fact that you would be swarmed by right-wing religious nuts calling you a "cringe atheist" and a libtard. You would be persona non grata even in many of the more intelligent parts of the right.
On the matter of destroying the taboo against hereditarianism and group differences, I think most of that will not come down to the facts. After all, the studies have been known to exist for generations, and ultimately, people, even including elites, are not driven mostly by empirical reality. As you said, when facts collide with morality, morality is the one that wins. First and foremost, changing morality is key. The questioning, challenging, and deconstruction of those base assumptions is and should be the first attack; the facts will come in a close second. That will be an immense task, and you're going up against two millennia of Christian assumptions.
The question we should be asking is: What is the great utopian appeal of defecting and leaving behind egalitarian moral assumptions and social conditioning? Can a better world be created through the acceptance of these facts? Offering a better story than the egalitarian utopianism of our elites will be key to sewing doubt and disillusionment and ultimately defection.
I am religious and many studies show a relationship between Christianity and human capital formation. However, you are right. Nietzcheans dislike Christianity because it promotes a radical form of egalitarianism that validates people on the basis on their humanity rather than on their achievement. The Greco-Roman world esteemed people based on status and achievement being a person did not impute dignity. Human dignity is not a bad concept, but the implication is that it leads people to have similar expectations for all groups.
As a Nietzschean myself, I would argue that the problem is not Christianity per se, but the decline of Christianity. Woke is a kind of zombie Christianity, the Christianity you have when you no longer believe in God. Belief in God redeems Christian values, without it you are left with woke nihilism.
I make a similar point here: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/35/4/four-reasons-why-heterodox-academy-failed
Thank you for elucidating what I was thinking but struggling to put to words!
You won't be able to offer a better deal than egalitarian utopianism. The appeal of egalitarianism has a psychological leveling of the people who, if you were honest with yourself, are better than you in some way. Taken to its logical extreme, at some point everyone will be just as happy, rich, pretty, and talented, nobody will be above you.
Nobody...above you...not even God?
I'd argue the "Christian assumptions" need to be spelled out pretty clearly. Christ's kingdom is not of this world (what does that mean?), perhaps postmillennialism is heretical.
You make a compelling case but I think you’re missing a discussion on the perils of your own position.
When the average person hears about hereditarianism they will apply such views to all members of whatever group without regard to individual differences within that group. This is the massive threat that leads to despicable outcomes as bad as the ones we are seeing today. It seems to me that even more fundamental than a rejection of the role of heredity is an inability to treat individuals as individuals rather than as members of a group. A society that fully accepted hereditarianism without concurrently and fundamentally embracing individualism to avoid such pitfalls will degrade into the kind of racism we all deplore.
Agreed.
We should all start with the assumption that membership in a group does not fully define a person. Nor should anyone mistreat someone just because some is a member of a demographic group.
Groups are about distributions, and we should always keep the focus on the individual.
you make a lot of good pts, including about my endorsers, but, some rejoinders
- steven pinker is partisan democrat, but a centrist, not a liberal (he is a classical liberal). probably in many ways his beliefs would be 'ordoliberal'
- carlos bustamante is a republican. he obv did not want to advertize that when he was deep in academia, but it's well known
i guess i'll get some right-wing endorsements. there are plenty of fans of my work on the right like michael anton. my readership actually tilts a bit right, but is pretty diverse
Pinker actually self-IDs as a "liberal Democrat" (e.g., https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/10/27/steven-pinker-scrut/)
fair enough, but the bulwark self-IDs as a right-wing publication
Excellent piece. However, you missed a critical point - the right's inability to engage controversial right-wing thinkers. Paul Gottfried and Walter Block are yet to be interviewed by people posing as dissidents. How can you say that you are radical when you don't engage people who were cancelled before wokism became ubiquitous? Also, why are right-leaning intellectuals positing that wokism is embedded in Marxism, when Marxist scholars are arguing that Cultural Marxism is an incoherent concept? Why are conservative intellectuals commenting that the far-right is Christian when it is a Nietzchean movement?
Aren't you just describing the symptoms of stupidity?
No, I don't think so. Like your article said there is an unwillingness to confront controversial ideas on the right. I don't believe that this inability is rooted in stupidity, probably some of these anti-PC people are not conservative or even eccentric, but they are using the fallacies of identity politics to launch new enterprises. I sent a column on IQ to a leading publication and the editor responded that it was interesting, but it never got published. I have a podcast and I have interviewed several mainstream Professors and people like yourself, but I don't see people with a bigger audience engaging interesting people. My youtube channel dabbles in some wild ideas, but it has earned the respect of establishment figures. When you have the clout that some of these people have you can interview anybody, but they refuse to go beyond saying that identity politics is corroding the United States. Look, I started my podcast, because I was not please with the conversations on the right. Eric Voegelin is a crucial thinker in the present environment because he wrote on gnosticism and there are parallels between gnosticism and identity politics. Nobody is talking about Voegelin. Immigration is good because of Europeans and some people from East Asia. Not all groups are equally productive. Usually, I am elated when writers are offered positions at think tanks. But I know many elegant writers who are not employed at think tanks because they are white and not obsessed with racism.
James Lindsay talks about Voegelin at length.
There are plenty of controversial right-wing thinkers who are engaged with. They just tend to be either exceptionally pandering to the very dumbest kookery of the simpleton right (like Beck or Carlson or Jones or Limbaugh), or so abrasive that they have a hard time maintaining orthodoxy and keeping people on their side (like Coulter or Schlichter).
The kook-feeding complex is a sympton rather than the disease, though. The Right in America, and the broader Free World, is still a very unfriendly place to be smart. The IQ gap is real, but an embrace and evangelization of the truth about it being hereditary is the only path the Right has to escape being the Camp of the Dumb.
I remain amused, at the very smart people who believe they can wish reality to be what they want.
Evolution is not a moral process. Inequality, genocide, rape, are all by-products of its design. When we peer over the ledge of our construction, we shouldn't expect to see a friendly face.
This is an outstanding analysis of the origins and causes of Woke ideology. Everyone who is concerned about their influence should read it.
I took my time reading this because it was exceptional, but I'd add that on top of being stupid, right wingers are also just cruel. You'd need to be a callous and morally stunted person to not want to strive for equality if you believe that all groups are equal in ability. Left-wingers have a stronger moral compass which allows them to see inequality and injustice, but it often backfires when they're not able to see that some inequalities and injustices might have non-deliberate causes(i.e. they're part of nature).
Thanks for writing this. It amazes me that excellent conservative thinkers like Glenn Loury still can’t bring themselves to admit to the painfully obvious truth of hereditarianism.
Very interesting and thorough, and largely agree that developments like formal philosophy and law are naturally derivative of changing social attitudes and beliefs. There are two assertions of which I'm not completely convinced. Maybe you can change my mind.
The first is the implicit assumption that intelligence is responsible for the majority of variation in group outcomes. As you write, the debate between 'conservatives' and your camp hinges upon whether intelligence is largely determined by culture or genes. Yet even if one accepts that intelligence is largely hereditary, it still remains unshown that outcomes like crime, absolute measures of poverty, infant mortality, etc., are uniquely caused by one's intellect. Seems more intuitive to me that social circumstances (e.g. family composition, behavior of peers) and resource provision (e.g. top-notch schools and hospitals) would have more causal power on these outcomes than intelligence. Indeed, the hyper-focus on intelligence only seems well-suited to explain scalar measures of individual achievement, especially those at the top end of the distribution (i.e. MATHCOUNTS contest results, FAANG engineer job hires), rather than measures of deprivation like those above.
The second is perhaps more relevant to this specific article -- your contention that 'hereditarianism' needs to be widely promoted in elite circles. Notwithstanding that this may result in a hyper-fixation on intelligence by the Right (rather than foci on social or material factors that institutions can actually solve ... see above), 'race realism' advocacy seems like a poison pill right now. You write that "Rufo’s strategy of creating a counter-elite won’t work unless left-wing elites start defecting to the right on scale" -- yet these defections will never happen in the first place by formally introducing race realism into public debate. If anything, it'll push centrist liberal-types leftward again and get you uninvited to every Georgetown/Upper West Side dinner party along the way.
Aside from the plan's strategic flaws, it seems hard to square widespread elite acceptance of 'race realism' with multiracial democracy. If, as you say, Locke was wrong and certain groups of people are fated to be more intelligent than others, why should we confine ourselves to a Lockean political system where every adult can vote? Shouldn't the highly intelligent groups dictate a disproportionate amount of political affairs (de jure, not just de facto)? More importantly, what do you tell the groups of people who, by virtue of their race and upbringing combined with predominant 'hereditarian' thought, have internalized feelings of inferiority or impotence? How do you dissuade them from antisocial behavior, rampant crime, and conflict? The reality is that times in the West are good right now (as they have been for at least 79 years), so much so that elites are willing to accept the costs of weird 'wokism' in order to avoid the horrors of a world that swallows what some might call the 'race realist red-pill.'
The destruction of merit and the expanding pollution of the signals of competence are incompatible with the maintenance of a complex technological society.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
As the presumption that folk are diversity hires spread, folk will rely more and more on stereotypes, as they become more accurate than formal signals of competence.
DEI is currently generating commissars and inquisitors (aka diversity officers) and the equivalent of Test Act affirmation oaths (diversity statements). Much of the West is also engaging in migration policies of remarkably destructive stupidity.
You cannot sustain complex, technological and free societies on the basis of toxic lies.
The problem essentially amounts to the fact that it starts with the "costs of tokenism" and it ends in ideological insanity and dysgenic demographic replacement.
There just isn't a very good "stopping point" for egalitarian logic. Even if there are some points where people would be happy to hypocritically rest, the logic of the whole thing invites ideological entrepreneurs to push things further.
And so we get this pattern of push until resistance, rest, push again. And each time things move further in one direction. At some point they move so far that its no longer "the price of doing business."
> a Lockean political system where every adult can vote
I don't believe Locke advocated that.
I was too busy to comment on this at the time, but I Tweeted a response now.
https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1752152146185691394
Great job on identifying the many problems with Rightoid epistemic culture. However, I think that they are even more intractable than you imply, and that the most prospective approach is to try to creatively route around them, as opposed to spending decades more trying to convince people who have no interest in being convinced.
"The Conservative States of America would most likely be a middle-income country that squanders its national budget on hunting down abortion doctors and erecting Pyramid of Giza-scale Ten Commandments monuments."
To me, this labels you as a bad faith actor motivated by anti-Christian bigotry, and disinclines me to trust anything else you say because of it. If you want to sway people on your own side, you shouldn't start by insulting them with crass caricatures. But then again, maybe the whole point is that you don't want to speak to anyone but your fellow atheists, and would rather that all us stupid backwards Christians just shut up and go away. Alienating the religious seems like an awful strategy for pushing back against leftism, but then again, I'm not an atheist, so I'm probably just too stupid to understand it.
Yes. His article is filled with all sorts of stuff like this. I wonder if he's ever left campus, or talked to a human . . . ever?
Excellent piece. Agreed on the criticisms of Rufo and Hanania and the diagnosis as well.