Video with the proof, 4 1/2-minute-cut
Video with the proof, extended version (7 minutes, 32 seconds)
2-minute cut that can be embedded in a tweet
The YouTube vlogger, cult leader, and white-supremacist demagogue Stefan Molyneux is at it again. His claims about his recent past are contradicted by the very same archives and recordings that, being as insufferable as he is, he insisted on making about himself.
Commentators such as pseudoscience debunker Jeff Holiday have pointed out that Molyneux has been going around saying that human beings are not all one species. To say that different “races” or ethnicities of humans are not the same species is inaccurate. The scientific definition of species is a population of lifeforms that are able to breed with one another and produce fertile offspring. Human beings are able to breed a horse with a donkey to produce a mule, for example, but all such mules are sterile. From the condition of mules, we can ascertain that horses and donkeys are separate species. By contrast, a black person and white person can have children together, and their mixed-race children can also grow up to have children of their own. That is how we know that all human beings are the same species.
Molyneux’s False Denial
On November 8, 2019, Molyneux uploaded a video wherein he announced he would refute misconceptions about him that his detractors disseminate, making special mention of the “writers” among them. He said that a quotation of his — the one about humans not all being the same species — was repeated out-of-context by his detractors in order to make it sound as though he believed not all humans were literally the same species, biologically. He maintains in this video that of course he knows better — implying that none of his Freedomain Radio podcasts convey such illiteracy about biology.
He begins, “It’s time to push back against the nonsense that’s written out there on the internet about me.” And what is this nonsense? “This is a quote that’s ascribed to me, and yeah,” — he chuckles — “it sounds pretty bad, and the quote is this: ‘I don’t view humanity as a single species...’ This is how the quote goes. ‘I don’t view humanity as a single species...’ And what does that mean? Now, the first thing you’ll note is it ends with a dot-dot-dot [ellipse]. That means, of course, it is an incomplete thought, and that’s your first context you may not be getting the full picture of what I’m talking about.” With respect to those who quote his denial that human beings are all one species, he adds that “this is put forward as some sort of racist statement. But where is it coming from?”
He goes on that the quotation is from a podcast he did in 2014, stopping to mention that it is telling that someone would have to comb through an episode that old to implicate him in his racism. Molyneux says that as though he were not regularly promoting racism over the past year. He goes on that the podcast in question was about whether there would be a criminal justice system in his ideal anarchist society. He then proceeds to play audio snippets of that episode, where Molyneux discusses violent criminals with the caller.
The Molyneux from November 2019 states that when he said in 2014 that he does not view humanity as all one species, it was merely metaphorical talk to emphasize how vastly different the psychology of a violent criminal is from a law-abiding citizen. He would have the viewer believe he was comparing the violent criminal to say, a lion, whereas the victim is the zebra the lion hunts down. In this video, Molyneux puts it to the viewer that he had not conveyed that he literally believed human beings could not all be the same species in a biological context.
Upon the end of the audio recording, the November 2019 Molyneux proclaims, “Okay, so we’re talking about the predator-prey relationship between violent, destructive, rapey, murderous criminals, and the general population. Now, I don’t say humanity is not a single species, ‘cause that would be biologically and factually incorrect.”
He goes on to pose to the viewer, “So have I said anything about race? Of course not.” No, he was merely “using an analogy of predator-prey relationships to describe crime and punishment in human society. And that’s it. There’s nothing about race in this at all. [Emphasizing, even more smugly than usual:] So you can see the motives of the people who write this kind of stuff [facts that do not flatter Molyneux]” (emphasis his). He ends by urging his viewers to share this video on social media, so as to disabuse his detractors of their misconceptions about him. He declares sternly, “These are the facts. This is my actual word. This is my actual voice.”
This is what the text description for the video says on YouTube,
What did I mean in 2014 when I said: "I don't view humanity as a single species..."?
Am I biologically illiterate?
Is the statement somehow racist?
You'll be truly shocked at the TRUE FACTS behind my words...
In the November 2019 video, Molyneux says he is well aware that the definition of species is members of a population that are able to procreate and produce progeny that are also fertile. Hence, we are to believe that the answer to “Am I biologically illiterate?” is a resounding no, Molyneux has not, in his time as a podcaster, said anything so biologically illiterate.
Here is a fact that Molyneux neglected to mention: the podcast episode whose audio Molyneux played for the audience was not the only episode in which he said human beings are not a single species.
The Reality
He also made that statement in an episode that he first uploaded onto his Freedomain Radio website on September 30, 2015, available over here. He also uploaded a video of that onto YouTube on Monday, October 19, 2015. YouTube Corporate has since removed that video for its racist contents, as you can see here and here (since Molyneux specifically denied his humanity-is-not-one-species remark was not in the context of racism, we will have to get into that further below). However, the video version of that podcast remains available. The very same day, Molyneux also uploaded the video onto Vimeo, where he gave it the same title that he gave it on YouTube. It is “The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis” at vimeo.com/142910233 .
Rather convenient for anyone wishing to check on what Molyneux meant by his statement, it is relatively early in this hour-long video. Within the first two minutes, Molyneux prefaces his infamous quotation by saying that not all human brains are physiologically alike — they have differences not only in degree but in kind. “We don’t all have sort of one sole brain that is roughly equivalent across the, I mean, there are differences in intelligence, right? There’s a bell curve of intelligence. There’s difference in ethnic levels of success on IQ tests.”
As a follow-up to that, Molyneux states, “And so, looking at human beings as one species is not biologically valid.”
That sentence is immediately followed by this explanation, which strongly evinces that Molyneux indeed did not know or care what is the definition of species. “We are a variety of subspecies: politically, ethnically sometimes, definitely in terms of gender, in terms of IQ, uh, in terms of culture. These produce physical brain differences that are very hard to remediate when you get older.”
First, it is clear that Molyneux did mean it in a biological context, literally, when he said human beings are not all one species. Secondly, as an example of human beings not all being one species, he cited people varying “ethnically” — that is, in terms of race. Thirdly, by talking about males and females as being separate “subspecies,” he made plain that when he recorded that video, he really did not know the definitions of species or subspecies. What he has been consistently advocating for years is severely “biologically illiterate.” Molyneux finally learning the definition of species over five years later does not substantiate his becoming biologically literate since then: he continues promoting the racist pseudoscience of “human biodiversity” and “race realism” that actual biologists identify as biological illiteracy.
Later in the very same video where Molyneux says “looking at human beings as one species is not biologically valid,” Molyneux airs a conclusion about race that he derived from this premise about people differing “ethnically” as a sign of humans not being all one species. “That conclusion, stated at the 0:28:19 timestamp on Vimeo, goes, Screaming ‘racism’ at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent — screaming ‘racism’ at people because Asians are collectively shorter — is insane.”
Note the conflation there. On average, men of Japanese ancestry are shorter than Caucasian men. That is not the same as saying, as Molyneux has in other videos, that there are congenital psychological differences between whites and blacks relating to intelligence. He has gone as far as proclaiming that a difference in average IQ scores, which he believes is mostly genetic, lead black men to be more predisposed toward violence than whites.
Conclusion
The facts are these. In November of 2019, Molyneux uploaded a video onto YouTube declaring that when he previously said human beings are not all one species, he did not mean it literally in a biological context and his saying that was not connected to anything about differences about human races. Yet, when he made that statement in his “Death of Europe” podcast episode, he did say it in a biological context, conveying that this was to be taken literally. Moreover, immediately upon saying that, he continued that humans not all being one species had implications for differences between ethnic groups.
Please watch the videos of this, below (the 4 1/2-minute one if you are pressed for time).
Molyneux, for once, put it best: “These are the facts. This is my actual word. This is my actual voice.”
Video with the proof, 4 1/2-minute-cut
Video with the proof, extended version (7 minutes, 32 seconds)
2-minute cut that can be embedded in a tweet
Added subheadings on Tuesday, April 7, 2020.
