I had already been troubled by Molyneux since 2007. In many of his podcasts, he would be quick to manipulate his callers, attempting to get them to re-interpret relatively minor slights on the parts of their parents as abuse. He would then urge, with the utmost seriousness, that they disown their parents and siblings.
That remains a concern for me, but I want to address something else. Molyneux increasingly calls for separation among races and promotes the eugenicist ideas of Richard Herrnstein's (1) that IQ is the main determinant of people's productivity or violent tendencies, (2) that genetics, including racial background, is a significant factor influencing IQ, and therefore (3) one's race-related genetic background influences the degree to which someone is economically productive or has violent criminal tendencies. This argument is used by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve to rationalize new restrictions on immigration. It is the old, early-twentieth-century eugenics in a new guise. And Molyneux is advancing this.
At the 0:01:26 mark of his YouTube video "The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis," Molyneux asserts,
Looking at human beings as one species is not biologically valid. We are a variety of subspecies -- politically, definitely ethnically, sometimes gender, in terms of IQ, in terms of culture. These produce differences that are physical but hard to remediate [remedy?] as you get older. So we are a cluster of genetics getting ready to reproduce their own particular genetics.
Throughout this blog post, the boldface is emphases I have added.
At the 0:22:47 mark of the same video, he says,
And all of this [saving Europe from destruction] requires that the IQ can be raised. The [average] IQ of a lot of these countries [that Muslim immigrants are from] is 85. That is a full standard deviation below the [average] IQ of Europe. Now, if there's any genetic component to that, and I believe that there is -- nobody knows for sure; it's just a belief, but it's a belief with quite a bit of data and we're just about to put out an interview with Dr. Jason Richwine about this -- but if there's any genetic components, or if the culture is so insular that it's equivalent to genetics in the transmission of low intelligence, then you cannot run a high-IQ society with low-IQ people. [ . . . ]
Now, if there are genetic components to the low IQ of the people coming in [to the West, from non-Western countries], I will tell you exactly what's going to happen, and it's really obvious. And if it is genetic or equivalent to genetic -- their low IQ -- I can tell you exactly what's going to happen: they're gonna fail. These immigrants are going to fail, and they're not gonna just fail a little bit; they're gonna fail hard. You are importing a radicalized, low-IQ population into a high-IQ society, and capitalism pays for intelligence. That's what it does; you get paid for your intelligence. And so you are importing a huge bunch of people into Europe, who are going to fail. They're not staying on welfare because they're lazy; they're not. That's like saying somebody with an IQ of 80 hasn't applied to graduate school because they're [sic] lazy. No! They're doing what is economically the best option for them. . . . But you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy. Now, because no one can talk about IQ and no one can talk about any potential genetic relationship between ethnic communities and IQ, what that means is that the only way that anyone will ever explain the failures of these Africans in European society -- you know as well as I do -- how is anyone going to explain that? . . . [Mockingly, here:] White racism.
Near the end of his video, "The Impending Collapse of Western Civilization," Molyneux touts racial separatism as a solution to what he judges to be the self-destruction of the welfare state.
From the 0:32:45 mark:
When you have a largely homogeneous society -- right, let's say Haiti; Haiti has a lot of blacks and so on, right? -- if there's a big change in society, say, Haiti runs out of money, or, as you said, right, New Zealand ran out of money [some joke about The Hobbit and 'Peter Jackson money bombs'] -- if you have a largely ethnically homogeneous society, when the shit hits the wall an people gotta change, there isn't really that much in-fighting. There's a sense of, 'OK, we've all got to pull together. We all kind of have the same color eyes and there's no point turning on each other, because we all kind of got into this together, and so we've got to pull together to get out of it together.'; When you have an ethnically homogeneous society, when the shit hits the wall, you don't dissolve into massive race-baiting wars, which is a problem that happens because skills and abilities have not been distributed evenly by Mother Nature among various ethnicities, and what that means is that when the shit hits the wall, it hits some ethnicities a lot harder than others, you get endless screams of 'racism!';. This is one fundamental reason why America is having a hard time solving these problems. If you cut spending, which [racial] community is it going to hit the hardest? Hint: it's not Korean. If you cut spending in America, it's the black community it will hit the hardest.
The 0:35:05 mark:
This is another reason why multi-ethnic societies is a problem. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if all ethnicities acted the same, roughly. . . . The Germans came over, the Irish came over, and they kind of ended up acting pretty much the same after a certain amount of time -- a generation or two. But the problem is that among the blacks and the Hispanics, they don't end up acting the same as the white population or the Asian population, and the white population doesn't even act as well as the Asian population in terms of murder rates and income and unemployment and so on and single motherhood and family stability and so on. So we all need to turn Japanese; that's my first point. [Joke.] My second point is that when the shit hits the wall and the government runs out of money, it doesn't end up affecting ethnicites in the same way.
The 0:37:17 mark:
Because you've got the Racist-in-Chief [President Obama] currently manning the helm, and the media, of course, compliant, and willing to scream 'racist' at anyone who points out basic fact-based differences between ethnicities, you've got a problem. You can't deal with the situation until Obama's out, or until people understand ethnicities in America and all around the world tend to act differently collectively -- individuals are always different -- but collectively ethnicities around the world tend to act differently. They tend to have different incomes, they have different rates of marital stability, they have different rates of criminality, they tend to have different rates of accumulations of assets, they have different levels of education. Go on and on and on. Until people accept that and say, "OK, if we cut spending, government spending, it's going to affect the black community the worst, it's going to affect the Hispanic community the second worst, it's going to affect the white community the third worst, and I think Asians will heave up a giant sigh of relief at not being taxed with a giant suction hole through the butt'; Until these facts are either dealt with, or until people give up race-baiting -- I'm not sure which one I consider more likely -- trying to deal with these problems is a real challenge. And because you have a Race-Baiter-in-Chief in charge of the White House, the Republicans, I think, have been very loathe to cut spending, because it will hit the black community and you've got this giant klaxon who will amplify it through the mainstream media to the point where society will probably hit a revolution.
I am familiar with the argument that people have an easier time getting along when they're all the same ethnicity; I think there might be an empirical basis for that descriptive evaluation. What worries me, though, is Molyneux repeatedly conveying that as long as there's a welfare state, different ethnicities pretty much should just give up trying to live together. And when he says human beings are not all one species, that isn't him being facetious; that part is intended to be taken seriously.
There is no delicate way to put this: the degree to which people follow and transmit Molyneux's race rhetoric is the degree to which they imperil Western society.
UPDATE from April 21, 2017: Upon further gathering of data, I retract part of the above sentence, the part following the semicolon: "I am familiar with the argument that people have an easier time getting along when they're all the same ethnicity; I think there might be an empirical basis for that descriptive evaluation" (emphasis added). As I have written in the newer post over here, Patrick Sturgis and his team have found that, adjusting for financial deprivation and everything else being equal, an increase in ethnic diversity in a neighborhood does not contribute to a loss of trust among that neighborhood's denizens. This whole time, Robert D. Putnam and Frank Salter were wrong to proclaim that ethnic diversity causes social turmoil -- and so was Molyneux in citing them to advance his agenda.
