Deranged Derogation Toward Single Moms from Alt-Right Propagandists Stefan Molyneux and Onar Åm

Stuart K. Hayashi

Stefan Molyneux on one of his better days...

The alt-right propagandists Stefan Molyneux and Onar Åm have made campaigns where they have dehumanized single mothers, in general, in an especially disturbing fashion. Many figures on the Religious Right have expressed discomfort with single mothers in general -- including mothers who have custody over children following a divorce -- as these Religious-Right figures cite single motherhood as a breakdown of what they call the traditional family. However, Stefan Molyneux and Onar Åm are not merely uncomfortable with this; they have taken this to a frighteningly ugly level.

I do think that, everything else being equal, most children would prefer to have their parents stay together and raise them as a team. I am not one to say that fathers are useless or obsolete, that men are no better than sperm donors. Ceteris paribus, I believe that, as a general rule, it's good for a child to be raised by both her father and mother simultaneously; having them together makes it easier for them to balance responsibilities.

But I must part ways with Stefan Molyneux and Onar Åm in that I don't think that, in every case other than the mother being widowed, single motherhood is necessarily wrong. I cannot say that it is always wrong for parents to divorce. Sometimes it is the case that one spouse is abusive and it's better for the non-abusive parent to raise the children alone. There are also cases where neither parent is fundamentally at fault but, due to their having become incompatible with one another, it's best for the children that the two parents live separately.  (I don't always take the mother's side in a custody dispute; either mother or father could be the more abusive side in a relationship.)


Stefan Molyneux's Grievances Against Mothers
In various podcasts he did from 2006 to 2010, Stefan Molyneux spoke extensively of his continuing resentment toward his own mother, who raised him single and who had a long string of boyfriends whom Molyneux calls "low-rent, idiotic boyfriends." Molyneux projects this rage upon single mothers as a whole, proclaiming that women, in general, prefer "assholes" over truly nurturing male partners (ostensibly because Molyneux's mother consistently chose "assholes," those "low-rent, idiotic boyfriends"). Hence, Stefan Molyneux proclaims that if a woman marries an abusive man, has a child with him, and then divorces the abusive husband to protect herself and their children from him, then this is still largely the fault of the woman. The reason why it is still largely her fault, proclaims Molyneux, is that a truly responsible and moral woman would have refrained at the outset from partnering with an "asshole."  If a woman is ethical, Molyneux asks rhetorically, she wouldn't have shacked up with an abusive man, would she?

Joe Rogan provides a reply to Molyneux that happens to be knowledge common to everyone but Molyneux and his followers: in many cases where a person falls for and commits to an abusive partner, it is seldom obvious from the beginning that the partner is abusive. Normally in the dating process, the abusive person is able to hide most of the abusive qualities. It is after one has come to trust and commit to an abusive and manipulative person, that the abusive and manipulative person feels safer about exhibiting his or her abusive qualities; once there is commitment and children in the picture, there is less of a risk of the abusive partner facing reprisal. This dynamic is at play in the very relationship between Molyneux and his fans: initially, Molyneux's fans are seduced by his voice and seeming confidence; it's only after disowning their parents and siblings, and then joining Molyneux's cult, that the fans come to confront the fact that they were seduced by a highly manipulative man.

Molyneux would have you believe that if you fall in love with a man who is not obviously abusive, have children with him, and then endure the man's abuse during the marriage, somehow you are the bad guy if you finally divorce the scoundrel and raise your children without him. After all, says Molyneux, if you weren't such an evil whore, you wouldn't have fallen for a Molyneux-esque manipulator in the first place. Thus, Molyneux subjects us to this tirade, which tells us more about his own psyche than that of single mothers:

Single moms are terrible, terrible parents as a whole. Statistically, there is no single better predictor of a negative or terrible outcome for a child than if he was raised by a single mother -- it’s worse than being in a [racial] minority, it’s worse than being poor, it’s worse than living in a disadvantaged neighborhood. The single most negative factor for a child’s outcome is to be raised by a single mother. Single moms are terrible, terrible, terrible parents. They consume massive amounts of resources. They’re entitled, they tend to clamor for more [resources], and their offspring tend to cause a lot of social problems. They have much higher rates of delinquency, crime, drug addiction, abuse characteristics, promiscuity, and single mothers reproduce like bacteria in a petri dish because they produce children who tend to become single mothers as well. Basically, they are a blight and plague upon society, which is why, until the welfare-state society put a huge amount of resources into trying to prevent the formulation of single-mother households...

Now, it could be true that single dads are equally toxic to children, but there are so few of them, that hasn’t really been studied. But single motherhood is the single most dangerous environmental toxin for children to be around, so she [any hypothetical single mother] is not a great mom, because a great mom has a father for her children. That is called being a great mom. What you found is a woman who has had sex with a man who is bad as a parent. She has chosen the wrong guy to have children with, because there is really only a couple of possibilities -- don’t talk to me about widows; widows are functionally the same as dual parents when it comes to how their children turn out -- a single mom means someone who is not married or [is] divorced, and not cohabitating with the father of her child. 

So either it’s a "great woman" who chose a really bad man, in which case she can’t be a great woman, because she chose to have children with a really bad man, thus exposing those children to the environmental toxin known as single motherhood; or she’s a really terrible woman who chose a terrible man, in which case, hey, if you get involved with her, there’s going to be a creepy violent ex floating around who’s going to be really angry you’re the "new dad" to his difficult children; or she is a terrible woman who chose a great guy, in which case he can’t be that great a guy because he had kids with a terrible woman. Basically she’s just a very bad decision-maker.

And why is that? Well, um, because if you have kids and married, your IQ is about 101, which is above average. If you’re divorced or separated, 97.8; and if you’re unmarried your IQ is a whoppingly low 93.6 -- that’s for men. For women, it is pretty much the same. Married women: 101.3. Divorced/separated: 98.7. Unmarried women: the same as unmarried men who are parents -- 93.6. So a good reason not to date a single mom is that they’re not very smart, which is why they’re single moms to begin with. And given that intelligence has a significant genetic component, that means that her kids, and any kids you have with her, are likely to be a little bit below the curve as a whole. There are exceptions -- I myself was raised by a single mother [whom Stefan Molyneux has made no secret of despising personally] [Stuart added the boldface to emphasize particular statements of Molyneux's; the italicized parts indicate where Molyneux placed emphasis as he spoke].

Molyneux goes as far as pronouncing that if you don't have a husband, it is your moral duty to give up your children to adoption. Why? Molyneux answers, "If you don't have a husband -- if you chose the wrong guy [with whom to have children] -- to keep the child is abusive, almost always."



For such reasons, Molyneux dogmatically asserts, as if this is some Categorical Imperative, "Society is currently dying on the altar of single motherhood. Children need a father. . . . If you just married some completely unrepentant crazy, you’re putting your needs above your future children’s needs." No, Molyneux: when a sane person marries an unrepetant crazy, it's usually because it wasn't obvious by the wedding day that the partner would be revealed as an unrepentant crazy. (If this were obvious, no one would be beguiled by the manipulative propaganda of Stefan Molyneux and Onar Åm in the first place.) And, for that reason, there are cases where, everything else being equal, children would be safer being raised by their mother alone than they would be if stuck in the same household with both the mother and the father.


What Do the Data Evince About Molyneux's Claims?
Molyneux's assertion, "Statistically, there is no single better predictor of a negative or terrible outcome for a child than if he was raised by a single mother," contradicts the findings of scholars who have studied the phenomenon scientifically. Howard University psychology professor Ivory Toldson explains,

...as a single variable, household composition [single-mother household vs. two-parent household] carries little weight and appears to serve as a proxy for more serious issues, such as teenage pregnancy and incarcerated parents. In analyses, a myriad of co[-]variants (e.g. parents' education and parent practices) nullify the effects of household composition on academic progress cited in the previous section. For example, in my analysis of the High School Longitudinal Survey, a black student from a two-parent household with just one parent who dropped out of high school was three times more likely to repeat a grade in school than a student from a single-parent household where the primary caregiver had an associate's degree or higher.

Citing Christopher Jencks and Sarah McLanahan, a Washington Post piece by Emily Badger notes,

Here McLanahan and Jencks are clear: None of these findings mean that children would necessarily be better off if their biological parents married. 

That's because children of unmarried moms are more likely to have a father in prison, or who's unemployed, or who sells drugs or abuses his partner. "Furthermore," McLanahan and Jencks write, "even when a child’s absent father is a model citizen, the mother often has problems that marriage cannot solve." She has less education than married moms, or she's more likely to have mental health challenges.

Adds Katie Roiphe in the New York Times, "And Professor McLanahan’s findings suggest that a two-parent, financially stable home with stress and conflict would be more destructive to children than a one-parent, financially stable home without stress and conflict."

It's not so much that an increase in the rate of single motherhood is the primary driver contributing to poverty and crime in low-income neighborhoods.  Rather, it is more so that poverty and crime in low-income neighborhoods contribute to the likelihood that a female resident of that neighborhood will end up as a single mother.  One might argue credibly -- that is, not argue in Stefan Molyneux's manner -- that there is a positive feedback mechanism at work, where the poverty and crime contribute to the increase in the prevalence of single motherhood, and then the increase in the prevalence of single motherhood, in turn, makes it likelier for the next generation to fall victim to poverty and crime.  But the point here is that Molyneux said, point blank, that single motherhood is the main factor causing all of this -- "The single most negative factor for a child’s outcome is to be raised by a single mother" -- and the data contradict that. It is definitely not a factor as strong as Molyneux would have us believe: University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen points out that between 1990 and 2011, as Washington, D.C.'s rate of single-mother households remained steady, the rate of murder, rape, and other violent crimes sharply decreased.


Onar Åm, His Demographic-Winter Rhetoric, and His Slurs About Single Mothers
Given that there is a bigoted clique in Norway that claims to be Objectivist and yet reveres Stefan Molyneux instead, it is no surprise that a thought leader of this clique, Onar Åm, echoes Molyneux's dehumanizing generalizations about single mothers.

As I once did, many Objectivists mistake Onar Åm for being a writer sympathetic to Objectivism; he is actually a eugenicist who repeatedly cites racist pseudoscientists Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton about IQ (for info on the racism and eugenics of Lynn and Rushton, see this). Consequently, the same Liberalistene-endorsed and crankish Norwegian alt-right anti-immigration page, "Libertinius," which approvingly recommended Stefan Molyneux's eugenicist videos, has from 2011 to 2015 created whole shrines to Onar Åm and his pontifications. For years "Libertinius" went on touting Onar's eugenicist blog as "Norway's best blog" (shrines also here, here, and here). Nor is it surprising that Onar Åm cites back the Stefan Molyneux-boosting "Libertinius" page that flatters him this way (here, here, here, and here).

Consistent with the same eugenics promoted by Stefan Molyneux and Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton, this Onar Åm pushes the Demographic Winter/White Genocide scare, a trope of eugenicist rhetoric that I explained in detail here. The Demographic Winter/White Genocide narrative goes, All the low-IQ rabble out there [people who make this argument usually mean poor people in Third World countries] are out-breeding people on our side, and it's really people on our side who need to catch up at least; therefore, people on our side have a duty to have more children, as our children will be better for the human race than all those low-IQ riffraff.

As I showed here, Stefan Molyneux pushes that Demographic Winter/White Genocide trope and endorses white nationalist Richard Spencer besides. Onar Åm peddles his own version of this, as you can see in the enclosed photo from late 2016. Of special note is the evaluation that Onar Åm throws in of single mothers:

The second and fourth paragraphs toe the Demographic Winter/White Genocide eugenicists' party line.  But the third paragraph injects venom that even many eugenicists would wish to avoid:

The number[-]one cause of social ills today is the single mother.  If you could choose between being born to a single mother and having cancer, you should probably choose cancer.

I know people who were raised by single mothers; no one says that that is easy or that the absence of another parent is not felt. I also know people who were raised by abusive fathers who wished their mothers would divorce and get them out of the environment the abusive father created. And I have known people who have contracted from, and died of, cancer. Onar Åm's slur about single mothers is foolish at best.  As one well-known Objectivist scholar put it to me, Onar's slur is "disgusting."

By the way,  Onar Åm actually cribbed that line about "cancer" from then-Alt-Lite-superstar Milo Yiannopoulos, who "asked [sic]" his fans whether they would rather their child "have feminism" or "have cancer." As Milo put it, "It is easy to compare feminism’s effect on women to leukemia. It often affects the young, and once it appears it quickly spreads throughout the entire bloodstream. On the other hand, whenever you see leukemia patients in commercials for charities, the kids are always so cute… Have you EVER heard of a cute feminist?"  Not only is Onar Åm too much of an unimaginative hack to come up with own insults toward his opponents, but he pitifully picked an insult that was trite to begin with.

Note that although the third paragraph slurs against single mothers, the second intends to reproach childless women.  It seems that one cannot win with Onar Åm -- he castigates you as having failed as a woman if you die childless, but he also faults you if you have children and raise them single (as he said, he considers you to be worse than a malignant tumor).  What, then, is left?  The implication is that, for Onar Åm, the only women who can live fulfilling lives are those who marry, have children, and never divorce -- in other words, the only women who escape his condemnation are those who conform to a "traditional" (circa 1950s) model of domesticity.

That is entirely inconsistent with Onar Åm's alleged inspiration, Ayn Rand, who said, "The choice to have children or not is morally optional." That a woman is capable of having children does not obligate her to "commit spiritual suicide by making procreation" into a "primary goal," regarding oneself as a "stud-farm animal." That's the opposite of what Onar Åm said -- that it is your duty to have children and that, if you die childless, he considers you a failure, a waste of DNA (but at least not a single mom, right?😑).

Let's go back to previous post where I touched on this. On behalf of eugenics in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that

the [First World] man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people.

Onar Åm agrees not with Ayn Rand on this but with the well-known statist -- and this is not accidental.  Theodore Roosevelt's rhetoric here is informed by the eugenicism that was the inspiration behind the same Pioneer Fund propaganda of Richard Lynn whom Onar Åm has repeatedly cited to bolster his claims about IQ and the "health" of the nation.


Please Stop Reinforcing Stefan Molyneux, Onar Åm, and the Rest of Their Bigot Brigade
One would hope that such callousness on Onar Åm's part is a mere fluke, a rare and momentary lapse of judgment.  But such hope is in vain.  July 22, 2011 was the day on which Anders Breivik murdered other Norwegians.  First Breivik bombed a government building and then he opened fire on adolescents attending a socialist party gathering.  After he heard about the bombing, but before he heard about the shooting, Onar Åm told this to his fans:

News flash:  Terror attack in Oslo, near the government. 8 people are reported injured.  Let's hope that they were tax bureaucrats and not innocent people.

As you can see, 14 people, such as Onar's sycophant Anders Amdal Taftø, clicked "like" on that. Only one Norwegian libertarian reproached Onar Åm for his callousness and, perversely, it was that Norwegian libertarian who ended up apologizing to Onar. After the news came out about Breivik shooting those adolescents at the socialist party assembly, that Norwegian libertarian, still angry with Onar, demanded to know if Onar approved of that as well. Onar replied that he did not, because adolescents are still minors and cannot be held responsible for attending a socialist party gathering. Then Onar added pointedly that he still wishes violent death on Norwegians who work for the government because, as far as he is concerned, they have it coming to them.

I don't agree with Religious-Right conservatives such as Kay S. Hymowitz in the crude and condescending manner whereby they paint single mothers with a broad brush.  But even Kay S. Hymowitz exercises some tact and considerateness; most conservative commentators still know better than to let on to the uninitiated that they harbor contempt for single mothers in general.  That tact is absent from Stefan Molyneux and Onar Åm -- the unmitigated and pathological hostility comes through.  Those who continue to go along with Stefan Molyneux or  Onar Åm as if this sort of fanaticism is acceptable, ought to mull over whether this alt-right bigotry is really something they want to live with.



On July 4, 2017, I added the paragraphs about how Onar Åm also expressed disdain for the childless, implying that the only option for women which could escape his disapproval would be for them to have children and remain married to the same man unconditionally.  July 4 is also when I pointed out that that actually contradicts Ayn Rand's position on the subject.  On July 7, 2017, I added the observation that Onar Åm's talking point about the alleged duty of women to have children and never divorce sounds just like Theodore Roosevelt's statement, which was also a consequence of Roosevelt's belief in eugenics.

Which University Department in the USA Was the First to Spread Anti-Capitalist Propaganda? You Might Be Surprised...

Stuart K. Hayashi

Source:  Wikipedia Commons.

We have heard the horror stories about left-wing propaganda being disseminated through universities, where now there are “safe spaces” and where student try to shout down guest speakers with whom they disagree. We know about the shabby manner in which Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers and the Ayn Rand Institute's Elan Journo have been treated. According to a 2005 study by Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern, the most consistently left-wing university discipline is sociology, where Democrats outnumber Republicans thirty to one. The most right-wing discipline is economics, where Democrats outnumber Republicans only three to one.

Given all this, you might wonder how this trend of political indoctrination began. Can you guess which university department in the United States was the one that galvanized this trend of professors trying to push their students' political opinions leftward? Was it in a humanities department? Was it in the liberal arts? Was it at a law school? No. It was at a business school -- in fact, the first-ever business school, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Moreover, this was largely a direct consequence of what the Wharton School’s founder, Joseph Wharton, had explicitly intended, even if, had he lived on to 1919, he might have conceded that the faculty had grown too zealous in denouncing commerce and industrialists per se.

This is probably a surprise to people who are not Objectivist, or to Objectivists who have not attended business school. As someone who studied business on both the undergraduate and graduate level, I can tell you about the contents of most of business school. The programs convey something along these lines:

Back in the Gilded Age, when the robber barons ran roughshod over everyone, people held onto their antiquated notion that a for-profit business is rightfully controlled by its stock-holders. Today, we have a more enlightened view: the for-profit business should actually do the bidding of its stake-holders. And who are the stake-holders? Everyone in society except the stock-holders!

Then the instructor takes out a web chart identifying the separate stake-holding constituencies. The stakeholders include “labor unions,” “consumer activists” (such as Ralph Nader and Michael Moore), and “the environment.”

When a student myself I was under the impression -- perhaps it was wishful thinking on my part -- that when industrialists established the first business schools, their main intention really was to teach students the skill of making a profit peaceably. I imagined that what must have happened was that, around the late 1960s or so, hippie-dippie Marxians infiltrated all of academia, and that that is the reason why business schools are paradoxically so anti-capitalist today. But no. That business schools would proselytize of the need for government control to suppress laissez faire was actually the explicit intention of the industrialists who started them. Had these industrialists been able to come back and hear what was being espoused, they might well declare that in their left-wing preaching too many instructors have come to abuse their pedagogical authority. Still, what is presently being espoused is merely the logical extension of the statist doctrines that these industrialists themselves had injected into the curricula.



Why Joseph Wharton Wanted His Not-for-Profit Business School to Replace the Nineteenth Century’s Burgeoning For-Profit “Commercial Colleges”
Education on how to become a successful businessperson is something that began long before the establishment of business schools. Throughout the nineteenth century, there were two avenues whereby someone could acquire knowledge of how to operate a commercial concern.

The first avenue was the one taken by the very man who started the first business school, Joseph Wharton. That would be apprenticeship. If human learning is primarily inductive, then it makes sense that one mostly “learns by doing.” The conventional avenue was the one Wharton took -- he apprenticed at the accounting firm, then called a “counting house,” of Waln and Leaming.

The second avenue was what were called for-profit “commercial colleges,” which were distinct from today’s business schools. As Caitlin Rosenthal explains in the Newsday,

In the late 19th century, the variety and availability of for-profit education skyrocketed.... Commercial colleges offered practical instruction in bookkeeping, penmanship, stenography and surveying. They operated mock bank offices and stock exchanges, teaching clerks to prepare the many notes and financial instruments that greased the wheels of the growing economy. Future steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie attended night school at a commercial college to learn bookkeeping. John D. Rockefeller studied accounting, penmanship and banking at Folsom’s Commercial College in Cleveland, which survives today as Chancellor University.

I think that sounds quite good. As bookkeeping and accounting are the languages of business, it is logical that an institution focused on teaching students the art of commerce would focus on these two skills. But, according to Caitlin Rosenthal, a recurring complaint was that commercial colleges were not uniform in quality, and the best ones were vastly superior to the worst. As far as I am concerned, that is to be expected. It is just human nature that not every party will perform as skillfully as others. Once you learn you are not getting the best service from one party, you stop purchasing that party’s services and you seek out a better one.

Still, iron industrialist Joseph Wharton had other reasons for objecting to commercial colleges. He complained that commercial colleges were insufficient because they only instructed a man on the basics of profit-making, and there had to be more to doing business than that. Wharton had wanted to establish a school that would help businesspeople obtain the same sort of professional prestige as doctors and lawyers.  He surmised that for businesspeople to reach that vaunted status, they must also become masters of civic engagement. For that reason, elaborates Wharton School research associate Steven A. Sass, Wharton “quite justifiably, complained” that the for-profit commercial colleges “trained men to become clerks, not business leaders.”

As is too frequent for people, especially businesspeople, Joseph Wharton assumed that if there was some nonviolent problem plaguing society, then the one solution would be for the State to intrude and initiate the use of force to alter people’s peaceful behavior. For that reason, as was common, Wharton concluded that being civically engaged is nearly synonymous with demanding more governmental intrusions into people’s private and peaceful affairs. Going along with many other Pennsylvanian industrialists in this period, Wharton was staunchly protectionist, and he was distressed by the idea that so many people outside of Philadelphia were not. The economics professors of Boston, for instance, were much more sympathetic toward free trade, and Joseph Wharton wanted to rectify that. One of the first items on the agenda, then, was for Wharton to specify that because a true business leader prioritizes the well-being of the nation of the whole above his own petty cost-cutting, the students of his business school be inundated with appeals regarding America's need for tariffs.

He thus wrote a letter to the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, explaining that he would be willing to provide a substantial endowment on the condition that it start a new school in his name, one for the teaching of finance and political economy and which made it a point to impart his understanding of civics to the pupils.

In the matter of commercial education there was formerly a system of instruction practiced in the counting-houses of the old-time merchants which may fairly be compared to the system of apprenticeship to trades. Comparatively few examples of this sort of instruction remain, nor is their deficiency made good by the so-called Commercial Colleges, for however valuable may be the knowledge which they impart it does not suffice to fit a young man for the struggle of commercial life, for wise management of a private estate, or for efficient public service. . . .

Evidently a great boon would be bestowed upon the nation if its young men of inherited intellect, means, and refinement could be more generally led so to manage their property as, while husbanding it to benefit the community or could be drawn into careers of unselfish legislation and administration.

As the possession of any power is usually accompanied by taste for its exercise, it is reasonable to expect that adequate education in the principle underlying successful business management and civil government would greatly aid in producing a class of men likely to become pillars of the State, whether in private or in public life. . . .

These considerations, joined to the belief that one of the existing great Universities, rather than as an institution of lower rank or a new independent establishment, should lead in the attempt to supply this important deficiency in our present system of education, have led to the suggestion of the project herewith submitted for the establishment of a School of Finance and Economy as a Department of the University which you now control, and which seems well suited to undertake a task so accordant with its general aims. . . .

To commemorate a family name which has been honorably borne in this community since the foundation of the city, I desire that the School shall be called "The Wharton School of Finance and Economy." [Emphases added.]

Elsewhere Wharton mentioned that economics professors who described the benefits of free trade were a “fungus...which healthy political organisms can hardly afford to tolerate.” On that basis, writes Steven Sass, Wharton made sure that within his own educational institution “he dealt firmly with this piece of college foolery.”



The Normalization of Civic Indoctrination at the University Level
Around this same time was the emergence of what came to be called the German Historical School. As chancellor of the unified Germany, Otto von Bismarck established a managed economy where the State organized members of various industries into cartels. Bismarck also established the first Social Security system and remarked that he was not bothered that anyone might think that this made him a socialist. Such German intellectuals as Georg Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich List, and Francis Lieber, all became influential arguing that the well-being of the social collective must supersede any rights of the individual in the individual’s peaceful pursuit of profit and self-interest. Many American intellectuals, such as John Dewey, visited Germany at this time and were impressed. Some of them attended the University of Halle and were taught by Johannes Conrad. Upon returning to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, these American intellectuals decided to adapt the German system to the U.S. political system. These American intellectuals are called the German Historical School by today’s historians; they were also the founders of USA’s political Progressive movement, voicing agreement with the Grangers and the Populists who came before them and joining their public campaign against railroad builders and other "robber barons."

This trend of the university being employed as a vehicle for anti-capitalist crusading preceded the Russian Revolution by more than a decade; all this was going on before the professors became enamored with Marxism. Indeed, it was not that they fell in love with Marxism and then started the anti-capitalist indoctrination. Rather, they had already received anti-capitalist indoctrination and that is what made it easier for them to embrace Marxism when they came upon it later. As the anti-capitalist indoctrination preceded the popularity of Marxist-Leninism and was largely inspired by nineteenth-century Germany, the trend that continues today of left-wing indoctrination on campus is less Marxian than it is Bismarxian.

Joseph Wharton just loved the phenomenon of American intellectuals adopting the statist philosophy coming out of Halle -- these sorts of American instructors were exactly what he sought. He wanted the business leaders of tomorrow to be imbued with the same sort of civic spirit as Germany's statists. Their conspicuous protectionism especially didn’t hurt them in his eyes.  Hence, among the Wharton school’s first hires was Robert Ellis Thompson to teach political economy. According to Steven Sass of Wharton, Robert Ellis Thompson promulgated an early version of “Third Worldism” and Dependency Theory -- he said that free trade is evil because it allows rich countries like the USA to exploit the poor countries and keep them poor. As Steven Sass summarizes,

In his second line of attack on free international trade, Thompson sounded much like a modern "third-world" critic of the market economy. He argued that such commerce generated an ugly tributary system rather than an ongoing exchange among equals. According to his reading of economic history, trade accelerated the division of the world into what we today call "core" and "periphery" areas, with all the wealth, power, and skilled industry, all the extensive division of labor, concentrated in the core. . . . These shattered [poor] nations of the periphery, Thompson concluded, could now obtain industrial products only from the core, in exchange for huge amounts of toil and raw materials.

Quoting Robert Ellis Thompson himself, “The rich nation becomes richer, for a time at least, richer by the exchange; the poor nation permanently poorer.”

The Wharton School became even more politically radical upon hiring Edmund James and Simon Patten, respectively its first director and Wharton’s eventual economics chairman, both of whom had been Professor Johannes Conrad’s students in Germany. Patten considered civic engagement to be so much of a greater priority than moneymaking that, starting in 1899, he had this business school teach courses on Social Work. In fact, Simon Patten , Edmund James, and the Wharton School of Business itself were major contributors in establishing Social Work as an academic discipline.

Together with Richard T. Ely, with whom they had taken classes from Johannes Conrad in Germany, Simon Patten and Edmund James founded the American Economic Association . At first it might seem that the AEA was organized for the purpose of helping objective scholars and scientists share objective data with one another. But to quote from a document that Simon Patten and Edmund James wrote together, the AEA’s real mission was to “combat the widespread view that our economic problems will solve themselves and that our laws and institutions, which at present favor individual instead of collective action, can promote a better utilization of our material resources.” Here, they brazenly acknowledge that they are trying to use an association within academia to advance what is really their ideological opinion.  They were especially intent on trying to discredit the writers Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, the latter of whom was a professor of sociology at Yale University, on account of Spencer and Sumner holding reputations for defending the constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman model of government.

All the while this was going on, Joseph Wharton affirmed his approval, especially due to Patten’s adamant protectionism. Writes Steven Sass, “Patten’s defense of the tariff gratified the school’s founder [Joseph Wharton].”

Scott Nearing was a student of Patten’s at Wharton, and then became an instructor himself. As explained by Thomas C. Leonard in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers (and in a paper he makes available online here about how the "social Darwinism" label has historically been a package deal that Richard Hofstadter used to conflate free-marketers with eugenicists), Ely and Patten and Nearing were all politically Progressive eugenicists who favored statutory increases in the minimum wage, and they stated explicitly that they wanted this wage increase imposed for eugenicist purposes. They presumed that southern and eastern Europeans were genetically and racially inferior to the WASPs making up the majority of the USA’s population, and the problem was that these southern and eastern Europeans insisted on migrating to the USA to seek employment. This, said Patten and Nearing and Ely, resulted in these immigrants marrying each other and having kids on U.S. soil or, even worse, marrying native-born WASPs and having mixed-race children. Either way, the conclusion was that the immigrants were polluting the USA’s gene pool. These immigrants made up for the lack of skill by agreeing to work for low pay. They would then learn on the job and gain skills, and then move on to compete against native-born WASPs in higher-paying trades. Ely and Patten and Nearing pointed out what they considered to be the minimum wage's virtue:  that if it was high enough, it would price these immigrants out of the market, obstructing them from finding any occupation.

The Wharton School is not embarrassed that its purpose has always been civic indoctrination. The history I am currently presenting comes mostly from The Pragmatic Imagination: A History of the Wharton School, 1881–1981 by Steven Sass. The book itself was published by the University of Pennsylvania -- the Wharton School’s home -- and, as I mentioned earlier, the author was a Wharton research associate when this was written and published.

Eventually, while teaching at the nation’s first university business school, Scott Nearing proclaimed, “private enterprise capitalism has created a distribution system that was unethical and anti-social.”

It was not until around 1919, years following Joseph Wharton’s death, when the school’s businessman trustees admitted that Simon Patten and Scott Nearing had gone too far, and that a business school’s main purpose should be to teach students, ya know, how to make money. In his history of Wharton, Steven Sass writes disapprovingly of how the trustees got rid of Nearing and replaced Patten with a new dean, Emory R. Johnson. Then, according to a disappointed Sass, dean Johnson had the nerve to decide that the business school should place less emphasis on political science and Social Work and more emphasis on . . . business. The Wharton School would not go on disappointing Steven Sass forever, though. Once Joseph Willits assumed the role of dean, he brought in Professors Rexford Tugwell and Simon Kuznets and Lawrence Klein. Tugwell would go on to be a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust. As for Kuznets and Klein, they were instrumental in persuading important people in the U.S. government to adopt Keynesian economics; Klein was a pioneer when it came to arguing in mathematical form for Keynesianism.



Thus Leaving Us Where We Are Now...
Throughout the country, other universities would open their own business schools, modeling themselves after Wharton. Not surprisingly, the template of Progressive political activism was copied in those business schools as well. As most of these universities were tax-funded, it became more and more difficult for the for-profit commercial colleges to compete. Hence, despite their proliferation throughout the nineteenth century, being able to help the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Sr., they went into decline. Thanks to the efforts of John Sperling and Carl Barney, for-profit universities have made something of a resurgence in the early twenty-first century. It probably won’t surprise you that while attending business school, I heard many business professors speak condescendingly of the entire idea of for-profit colleges. It is fitting that, much as with the founder of the Wharton School, they don’t much appreciate competition.



On December 5, 2017, I revised some of the phrasing and grammar.

Stefan Molyneux's Go-To Source on 'r/K Selection Theory' Also a Race Eugenicism Propagandist

Stuart K. Hayashi

Another instance of a purveyor of white supremacism and eugenics promoted by the Libertinius page and Stefan Molyneux.

UPDATED IN SEPTEMBER OF 2017 (Notes on the Revisions from September Are on the Bottom)

If you have been reading this blog regularly, you have probably noticed my series exposing Stefan Molyneux's propaganda for eugenics and government-imposed racial segregation. In his propaganda, Stefan Molyneux frequently cites a self-published book titled The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics by Michael Trust, then calling himself "Anonymous Conservative." You can read a 29-page summary by Michael Trust/Anonymous Conservative himself over here.  What I have written in this blog post should not be misconstrued as a review of the book. Rather, it is a review of Molyneux's repeated citations of it and also of Michael Trust's online writings to supplement the book's theme.

 Yes, r/K Selection Theory is a model that biologists have consulted for explaining different routes that different types of species take to procreate. Unfortunately, some racist eugenicists -- who now call themselves "race realists," "White Identitarians," and explainers of "Human Bio-diversity (HBD)" -- misapply r/K Selection Theory to their asinine stereotypes about different human demographics.



What r/K Selection Theory Really Is
r/K Selection Theory has two models for how different types of species transmit their genes from one generation to the next. r-selected species go by this particular route: the mother sires many hatchlings at once -- in broods of twelve or thirty or even hundreds -- and there is a highly mortality rate among these offspring. These spawn hatch out of eggs completely able to take care of themselves. Lizards are r-selected.  Species that are r-selected are normally fish, amphibians, and reptiles.

By contrast, K-selected species are able to procreate at a later stage in their life cycle, and they have few babies at a time, on account of so much physical energy being devoted to providing resources in the brain development of the baby.   K-selected creatures are born highly vulnerable and must be raised by their parents before they are able to fend for themselves as adults. Large placental mammals are K-selected. In comparison with r-selected species, the K-selected have offspring much later in their life cycle.  That the K-selected have babies later in life, and fewer of them in number, whereas the r-selected sire many more offspring during the breeding season, is of special interest to the neo-eugenicist movement.



Propagandists' Misapplication of r/K Selection Theory to Score Political Points
According to his own promotional material for the book, Michael Trust/Anonymous Conservative proclaims that r/K Selection Theory is applicable to human society in that some demographics of human beings behave as an r-selected species whereas other demographics behave as K-selected, and he classifies them according to his stereotype views of the sort of people who hold particular political views.

First, he says that rabbits are the quintessential r-selected species.  That is misleading, as rabbits don't sire as many offspring per breeding season as, say, a lizard.  Lizards are the strong example of the r-selected model.  Anyhow, Michael Trust/Anonymous Conservative continues that left-wing people are similar to rabbits in that they are r-selected, and then he attaches this stereotype view that left-wing people are all mooches on welfare who only consume resources. After all, we hear the stereotype about young single (black) mothers on welfare having more and more babies to collect bigger checks. On account of agreeing with stereotypes in that broad category, eugenicist pseudo-Objectivist Onar Åm snipes, "If you could choose between being born to a single mother and having cancer, you should probably choose cancer." By contrast, continues the alt-right misapplication of r/K Selection Theory, right-wing people place greater value on a stable environment. Because they are more responsible, they have fewer children and tend to postpone sex until they have reached a time in their lives where they are able to take care of children.

The real point, as can be discerned from the online summaries the author supplied, is that this is Michael Trust's way of saying that left-wing people are bad guys and right-wing people are the good guys; that's pretty much it. 😑

That Michael Trust/Anonymous Conservative fails at science does not stop cranks from citing him to bolster their cases for having the State forcibly obstruct immigrants from poor countries from entering the United States, other rich Anglophone countries, and Western Europe. Together with Bill Whittle, Stefan Molyneux has made Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics his go-to book to cite -- that is, when he is not citing the Pioneer Fund directly. Here is his video "The Truth About Gene Wars: r/K Selection Theory [P1]," which itself is cited by some very seedy characters (more about that below).


Note the dopey "CONFIDENTIAL" label on the thumbnail.


Citing Michael Trust/Anonymous, Stefan Molyneux says this applies to dark-skinned people from poor countries, whom he calls low-IQ cultures.  And remember that Molyneux mostly attributes a person's IQ to his race-related genetics, unable to change his own IQ by will, which means Molyneux obfuscates the distinction between "race," which is unchosen and which a person cannot change, versus cultural customs, which are chosen and which people can choose to change.  Molyneux declares, "Low-IQ cultures -- you know you can argue that they're r-selected as we've talked about in [the] 'Gene Wars' [video]." Then he twirls his head around and says, "They just have kids and have kids and have kids and have kids and have kids and have kids and have kids and have kids. And that's just the nature of the beast. This is one of the reasons why the countries remain poor other than the IQ -- they just breed like crazy."



What's Wrong With This Misapplication of r/K Selection Theory
Michael Trust's and Stefan Molyneux's characterizations are insipid for several reasons.

 Firstly, the stereotypes about left-wing people and right-wing people barely apply. Many rich people who have very few children and who have those children late in life -- allegedly conservative in their domestic lives -- are politically left-wing; Bill Gates is an example.

Secondly, an entire species is either r-selected or K-selected; the purpose of the model is not to say that some members of a particular species are r-selected whereas other members of that same species are K-selected.   Michael Trust and Stefan Molyneux would have you believe that blacks, left-wingers, and black left-wingers are all r-selected.  That is insipid on its face.  If they were r-selected, then their babies would not have to be raised by anyone; the babies would be completely able to fend for themselves.  They would also be hatching out of eggs out of enormous litters; that is, an r-selected woman would sire an entire brood of twelve or thirty or a hundred hatchlings at once.

Thirdly, I don't want people to come to the fallacious conclusion that the nascent discipline of evolutionary psychology/sociobiology is about promoting old-fashioned eugenics or racism. The luminaries of evolutionary psychology have an open letter explaining that "race realism"/"Human Biodiversity" is inapplicable to what they study; evolutionary psychology is a discipline that should not be confused with this political propaganda.



It's the Foolish Citation of This Misapplication That's "Breed[ing] Like Crazy"
Michael Trust is not the first person to misapply r/K selection theory for a right-wing statist (yes, statist, not laissez-faire) agenda. He was preceded in this by the explicitly racist eugenicist J. Philippe Rushton, who served as president of the eugenicist Pioneer Fund until his death in 2012. This is the same J. Philippe Rushton uncritically cited by Onar Åm -- the same Onar Åm whom the Libertinius page enshrined for years (more about the Libertinius page below) -- to promote his own eugenicist arguments. Indeed, Anonymous Conservative follows in Rushton's tradition in more ways than simply misunderstanding and abusing the prestige of r/K Selection Theory.

Yet, in spite of the obvious foolishness of Molyneux's video, the longtime plagiarizing Norwegian Libertinius page -- run by the likes of Kjetil Knausgård and hailed by the likes of Emil Christopher Solli Melar and Tore Rasmussen and Carlo Nerberg and the rest of Norway's "Liberalistene" circle -- took the initiative to laud the insipid Molyneux video as part of the xenophobic and bigoted campaign that the Libertinius page had been running since 2014.

The "Denne MÅ dere se!" on the top means "This YOU MUST SEE!" Then "Libertinius" follows up with "Sosialisme ødelegger menneskets arvemateriale.😟" That means, "Socialism destroys human inheritance.😟" That's the usual eugenicism that has come to be expected of those who are influenced by Molyneux. Socialism can be justly blamed for many ills, but this misapplication of r/K Selection Theory says less about socialism than it does Michael Trust, Stefan Molyneux, and the Kjetil Knausgård-run page that made it a point to boost their bigotry.



Michael Trust Has the Same Talking Points As Stefan Molyneux on Race and Immigration
Amazon.Com lets us take a sneak peak inside the book over here. Right below the cover is the page with the usual legal disclaimers. Mr. Trust provides us his URL so that we can obtain more information about his works: www.anonymousconservative.com

The URL www.anonymousconservative.com is underlined in red on the bottom. Click on this image to see a larger version with the text more clearly visible.

All right, let's take a look at [www.anonymousconservative.com]. This shouldn't surprise you at this juncture: on this website Michael Trust, the not-so-anonymous Anonymous Conservative, makes the same eugenicist claims about race and IQ that his ideological student, Stefan Molyneux, does:

Migrants From Muslim And African Nations Are Mentally Retarded
I love this link. It rates the IQ’s of various nations. It is a guaranteed SJW [Social Justice Warrior] trigger all by itself [he means it offends people who pride themselves on being politically correct and left-wing]. . . .

According to it, at an IQ of 68, the average Somali is well into the mildly mentally retarded range. Given the fact that the smart Somalis who throw the Somalian IQ curve are probably smart enough to meet their needs and be comfortable in Somalia, I would imagine the migrants are well into the moderate to severely mentally retarded stage. I mean if you look around a country of imbeciles, and feel like you are holding the shit end of the stick, you aren’t going to be the Einstein of the group. . . . Equatorial Guinea doesn’t even make it into the sixties, and that is the average, propped up by the smart Guineans. You know it is the losers and the morons who are flooding into the west. What are their IQ’s? 40? 35? What are they going to do in the first world beyond eat newspaper and find creative places to defecate that nobody would ever think of? No wonder they are all shitting on top of the toilet seats in Europe. ...once resources grow scarce, society begins to tighten its purse strings, and the third world scum begin to victimize the innocent, the urge to purge will be undeniable. I only hope the purge includes all the SJWs [pro-immigration, left-wing Social Justice Warriors] who fought to import all these migrants at the same time.

Note the blog post's convenient failure to acknowledge that when the living standards of formerly impoverished people improve, there is a corresponding increase in the IQ scores of their children and grandchildren.  As late as the mid-1970s, Chinese-Americans scored, on average, IQ scores lower than the average for white Americans.  That changed by the late 1990s.   This indicates that a particular "race's" average IQ, in relation to the average for whites or any other "race," can change over the course of mere decades, as opposed to millennia, and is not confined primarily to genetics.

And then Anonymous Conservative/Michael Trust has this follow-up:

When Resources Are Free -- Importing Retards Edition
Think allowing low IQ third worlders to travel here on their own dime is a bad idea? [No, it's not a bad idea at all. --S.H.] Now we’re going to pay their travel costs...

We are paying the travel costs to reimport these mental retards and psychos. . . .

Rabbits [here, Michael Trust/Anonymous Conservative means left-wing people, as Michael Trust/Anonymous Conservative misleadingly cites rabbits as the great example of an r-selected species] are actively seeking to import two types of individuals. Psychos who will enter into conflict with real Americans, thus degrading the competitiveness of real Americans, and mental retards and idiots who will never pose any threat to the r-selected liberal’s status in the country. . . . [However, Michael Trust/Anonymous Conservative here offers what he considers a silver lining:]  Once resources snap back and people begin wanting to win out over others who are seen as taking our “stuff,” the desire to import retards and imbeciles will abate significantly.

Actually, people from poor countries coming to the USA peaceably on their own dime, and supporting themselves after that, is a wonderful phenomenon that already occurs and should continue.



Conclusion
Never let it be forgotten how the "Libertinius" page of Kjetil Knausgård promoted Stefan Molyneux's racist misuse of r/K Selection Theory. Indeed, this gesture is consistent with the larger trend of the sycophantic circle revolving around Onar Åm and the Libertinius page promoting bigoted xenophobia for years.  For an explanation of how foolish this misapplication is, you can see the YouTube video "The Alt Right Is Too Dumb for Sex."




On Sunday, September 17, I added the screen shot of the horrendous Libertinius page promoting Stefan Molyneux's disgusting pseudoscientific video, and I elaborated more on that. I also made it clearer that r-selected species are fish, amphibians, and reptiles, whereas placental mammals, including humans, are K-selected. And I embedded the "The Alt-Right Is Too Dumb for Sex" video that makes that very point.  On September 18, 2017, I added the point about the average IQ of East Asian-Americans, in relation to the average for white Americans, changing.  On September 18 I also added the "have kids and have kids" quotation from Stefan Molyneux. On January 26, 2018, I embedded and linked to a re-upload of "The Alt-Right Is Too Dumb for Sex."