Lately I have blogged about a foolish video apologia for white-nationalist cult leader Stefan Molyneux on the part of right-wing YouTube vlogger Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. Molyneux put out a tweet dishonestly denying that he has advocated eugenics and white nationalism. Sargon approvingly cited the tweet and took it at face value, as if it were proof that there was nothing to those accusations. You can actually see montages on YouTube that show that Molyneux indeed has a record of promoting eugenics and whitewashing white nationalism. Molyneux has gone as far as saying that “freedom has a eugenics component to it inevitably.” You can see those montages and my blogging about them over here.
Although the denial of Molyneux’s eugenicism and white nationalism was the main topic of Sargon’s video, Sargon did touch on something else that warrants concern. Sargon disapprovingly read out loud a tweet pointing out Molyneux’s long record of pressuring his followers to disown their siblings, parents, and close friends merely for disagreeing with Molyneux’s ideological advocacy. Molyneux was especially known for this practice between 2006 and 2014; we have not heard as much about it since then. Dismissing the tweet about Molyneux’s treatment of his followers, Sargon pronounces, “I think those accusations are probably somewhat overstated, aren’t they? And this, I think, is something that happened a long time ago. And I think it would be fair if we were to ask him his positions on these times now.”
Someone would come away from that statement of Sargon’s with the impression that Molyneux’s practice of dividing families is something that is long past. As I have blogged before, urging his fans to disown their parents and longtime friends over disagreements with him is something that Molyneux has done publicly at least twice since 2017. As of this writing, Molyneux has not shown any contrition over what he has done.
Below are three different cuts of the same montage of Molyneux performing this manipulation in recent years.
There is one cut that is two minutes long and can therefore be embedded in a tweet. Editing it down that short meant cutting out parts of Molyneux’s sentences, though. For the complete sentences, you can watch the 20-minute cut. If you watch the longest cut, you must have some patience for Molyneux’s many ramblings tangents.
15-minute cut
20-minute cut (less of Molyneux’s tangents have been cut out)
2-minute minute that can fit in a tweet (a lot of editing, with some interjections edited out of the sentences; for the complete sentences, watch and hear the 20-minute version)
See also: In November of 2019, Molyneux did an entire video falsely denying he ever said, and meant in a biological context, that not all human beings are the same species. For a montage disproving Molyneux’s denial (which, again, comes in a two-minute cut and a longer cut), go here.
Last month, the quasi-nationalist YouTube vlogger “Sargon of Akkad” (Carl Benjamin) did a video for his sister channel, Akkad Daily, where he launched a defense of white nationalist cult leader Stefan Molyneux, whose podcast he once did an interview for. Because Molyneux used the MailChimp marketing software for sending out his white nationalist e-mail newsletter, Nandini Jammi, cofounder of the activist campaign Sleeping Giants, alerted the MailChimp company of the uses to which Molyneux was putting its platform. Not wanting its brand associated with the white nationalism, MailChimp ceased providing service to Molyneux. In protest against MailChimp’s decision, Sargon denied in his video that Molyneux had done anything wrong at all, proclaiming, “...I do not agree that Stefan Molyneux is even a white nationalist.”
Early in the Akkad Daily, video, Sargon shows this tweet where Molyneux delivers what anyone who has been following his career for the past five years will be able to spot as obvious lies. Molneux’s tweet pronounces,
I oppose eugenics as an egregious State violation of the non-aggression principle.
I have interviewed 17 leading scientists on human intelligence - including leftists: http://www.fdrurl.com/IQ
I am not a “white nationalist”
1. I oppose eugenics as an egregious State violation of the non-aggression principle.
2. I have interviewed 17 leading scientists on human intelligence - including leftists: https://t.co/OaUVYOXaYW
Point 2 of Molneux’s is dubious. The link in his tweet is one that goes to a playlist of seventeen videos, but two of the videos are with the same interviewee (Kevin Beaver), which means “17 scientists” is not even the correct numeric figure. Before sending out the tweet, Molyneux did not even bother to count the people on his own list. One of them, Nicholas Wade, is not a Ph.D. scientist but a well-known science writer whose education goes no farther than a bachelor’s degree in natural science.
Moreover, two of the interviewees — James Flynn and Eric Turkheimer — contradict Molneux’s claims and have, subsequent to those interviews, identified Molneux’s claims as charlatanism. The main interviewee listed whom Molyneux cites in his claims about race and IQ is Charles Murray, and Eric Turkheimer directly contradicts him here and here, strongly implying that the very same talking points of Charles Murray repeated by Molyneux are racist. With respect to James Flynn, following his interview with Molyneux, he directly called Molyneux a hack and a waste of time: “I wouldn’t think of going within a mile of him if he talked. These people [Molyneux and his minion Lauren Southern] are just coattail-hangers. They don’t have anything new to contribute to the debate...” In the tweet, Molyneux cites Turkheimer and Flynn as if they corroborate his propaganda. In actuality, they disprove it, and yet Molyneux continues name-checking them under the pretense that their findings are consistent with his racism.
As for four of Molyneux’s interviewees in particular — Charles Murray, Linda Gottfredson, Helmuth Nyborg, and Jason Richwine — the work for which they are best-known is not well-respected anywhere in the academic community except for a very insular and discredited circle I will discuss further below.
Points 1 and 3 of Molyneux’s tweet are outright lies, though the dishonesty of Point 3 is more obvious. Since late 2015 this blog has cataloged the evidence of Molneux’s support for white nationalism. However the term eugenics remains much more obscure than “white nationalism.” For that reason, eugenics requires a deeper explanation.
The point on eugenics is of interest to me for several reasons. First, long before I heard of Molyneux, I was already interested in the topic of the ethical ramifications for eugenicist theory. I had taken an interest in the topic because I wanted to see where it did or did not apply to a possible medical procedure in the future where parents engineer the embryos of their children, immunizing them against inheritable diseases or even adding enhancements in aptitudes. More pertinent to the topic at hand, though, throughout February this Stefan Molyneux has, as in the above tweet, ludicrously talked of eugenics as if it were a practice he has never advocated.
What Was, and Is, Eugenics?
Eugenics studies formally began in the late 1800s by Sir Francis Galton, a fellow scientist and cousin to Charles Darwin. Galton had noticed that many accomplished people came from the same family. He suspected that so many of members of the same family being so skilled and accomplished had less to do with their having grown up under the same environmental conditions than with their each having inherited those traits biologically. Sir Francis theorized that if (rich) people with the most “desirable” physical biological traits had children with one another, that would result in even “better” children. Sir Francis named his own theory eugenics. Eu- is Greek for “good”; eu-genics means “good seeds/origins/genes.”
Always connected to eugenics was a personality trait that was of special importance to Sir Francis, one that he considered to be inborn rather than the result of conditioning or one’s own choices. That trait was intelligence. Ironically, for all of his own brain power, Sir Francis himself was unable to devise a method that he found satisfactory in quantifying intelligence. The purported solution to Sir Francis’s problem would come from an unlikely source. And there was another gap in his theory that had to be filled.
Besides their blood relations and their mutual interest in biological inheritance, Galton had something else in common with Darwin. Although both of them correctly inferred that there must be some sort of mechanism by which one generation transmits its biological traits to the next, neither Galton nor Darwin could identify what that mechanism was.
That task was left to a quiet Benedictine monk named Gregor Mendel. It was Mendel who, through his experiments on pea plants, discovered the mechanism of the gene, and who discovered the principles behind dominant and recessive alleles. Although Mendel mailed his monograph to Darwin for comment, Darwin tragically never opened it, apparently occupied by other matters going on in his life. Hence, Darwin went to his grave not having this valuable piece of information that would further integrate his theory.
Mendel’s discoveries could easily have been lost to history if his writings were not discovered by three scientists of the early twentieth century who were tackling similar problems — Carl Correns, Hugo de Vries (who coined mutation), and Erich von Tschermak. Providing a further integration was William Bateson, who coined genetics.
Despite the two gaps in his theory that the respective works of Mendel and Binet would fill for him, Sir Francis went ahead with his eugenicist movement, undaunted. Deciding that his theory should be applied in practice, Sir Francis proposed that some governmental body should determine which people possessed the most desirable physiological traits, and then pay them taxpayer funds to incentivize them to breed with one another. In this suggestion, Sir Francis introduced an idea that is common in — though not a requirement for — eugenics advocacy. That idea is that the government should intervene in human interactions that will increase the likelihood that people will have children possessing the most “socially desirable” inborn traits, especially above-average intellectual ability.
As Sir Francis failed in developing a plausible measure of intellectual ability, the French psychologist Alfred Binet worried about children. He noticed that some children had learning disabilities. This made him worry that the longer these disabilities remained unidentified, the more these children would fall behind in their development. He needed a method to identify which children were struggling with their learning. It was for that reason that he devised the IQ test.
Whereas Sir Francis conceived eugenics as the perfect rationalization for his desire to elevate his own class and marginalize others, he had failed where Alfred Binet succeeded. The IQ test that would be the salvation to Sir Francis’s theory was originally developed with the intention of lifting up the very same people whom Sir Francis and other eugenicists were working hard to marginalize.
Once they had learned of the discoveries of Mendel and Binet, it was the task of Sir Francis’s successors in leading the eugenics movement — such as mathematician Karl Pearson in the United Kingdom and biologist Charles Davenport in the United States — to incorporate Mendel’s genetics and Binet’s IQ test into Sir Francis’s overall social movement. Once this integration was performed, the movement of eugenicism had developed two main planks.
1.Theory: Free will is nonexistent at worst and unimportant at best. Free will was so unimportant to eugenicists that they did not even acknowledge it, saying that in the philosophic question over what made an adult who she is, and gave her the character she has, could only be a question of nature versus nurture — an idiom derived primarily from phrases Sir Francis Galton himself had used in writing on eugenics. In eugenics theory, the main factor in causing someone to be different from everyone else — the main factor causing her behaviors and choices — is inborn biology.
Incorporating Mendel’s discoveries into eugenics, the theory is that if someone is more successful at business or military operations than other people, it was because of his genetics. Eugenicists would not simply say this person has superior genetics and leave it at that, however. Eugenicist theory is also collectivist. What matters is the collective. In eugenicist theory, this person with allegedly superior genes is duty-bound to transmit those superior genes to future generations.
2.Practice: Agreement with the theory above was sufficient to make someone a eugenicist, but most eugenicists went further. Eugenics was not merely supposed to be descriptive; most eugenicists expected this discipline to be prescriptive as well. As they saw it, it was not sufficient that people be free to choose to marry and have children with whom they want. Such choices were “selfish” in that people who married and had children were making such choices without consideration for how such choices affected the gene pool of the wider society at large [see page 157 over here].
For this reason, the second plank of eugenics is that some genetics-savvy third party — which was usually the government, but did not always have to be — would have to intervene on people’s private fertility choices and provide them guidance. This guidance would come in the form of reminding romantic couples that in their choices with whom they had children or even interacted at all, their personal happiness must not be prioritized over actions that would provide a net benefit to their germlines and race as a whole.
A play in a 1913 issue of The Fortnightly Reviewattributes this to Sir Francis’s eugenicist protégé, Karl Pearson: “As far as the elementary principles of right and wrong are concerned, what in the world can they be if they are not what is or is not expedient for society? What is social is moral, and what is social is right, and there is no safe definition of right beyond that.”
More briefly, eugenicism is defined by two beliefs. First is that genetics, not environmental conditioning or your own choices, is most decisive in determining your actions and personality traits, including those that distinguish you from others. Second is that rather than leave people alone in whom they meet, marry, and have children with, there has to be a third party that can oversee these activities. This third party must discourage some pairings and births and approve others. All of this is for the alleged well-being of some social collective.
Note that all those planks can be believed by people of any race or ethnicity. Therefore, a person can try to apply eugenics to any race or ethnicity, or even all of them at once. The famous writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, urged that black families practice eugenics for the betterment of genes among blacks. For these reasons, someone can theoretically be a eugenicist without being a white supremacist. However, it is not an accident that eugenics is often associated with white supremacism. Beginning with Sir Francis himself, most eugenicists have been white and have conflated alleles associated with white skin with superiority. If one made a Venn diagram where one circle was “eugenicists” and the other was “white supremacists,” the point of overlap between the two circles would overtake the “eugenicist” circle almost completely. It would leave but a tiny sliver to account for eugenicists who were not also white supremacists.
It is true that Mendel’s discoveries concerning alleles can greatly conflict with white supremacists’ premises. Mendelian genetics itself shows how genetics conflicts with the idea of “race,” “race” and skin color being much more superficial than genetics — literally. Because the genes for dark skin, dark irises, and dark hair are dominant, whereas light skin, blue irises, and blonde hair are recessive, the child of a black man and blonde woman will usually have dark skin. This leads many white supremacists to think of the child as being more “black” than “white.” Yet the geneticist recognizes that whatever the child’s outward appearance — “phenotype” — a look at the child’s genetics, genotype, shows the mixed-race child is not any more closely related to his father than he is to his mother.
But racism is not about rationality but rationalization. It is less concerned with science than having a veneer of scientific respectability to reinforce its preconceived conclusions. For that reason, eugenics has mostly been used as an intellectual tool of white supremacists.
Eugenics As the Originator of the Racist and Anti-Immigrationist Talking Points That Molyneux Uses
There are two main methods whereby eugenicists can shape a society’s gene pool to their liking. The first, “positive eugenics,” involves the eugenicist third-party rewarding the “right people” for procreating, thereby reinforcing and encouraging more of that behavior. That is consistent with Sir Francis’s first eugenicist policy proposal. Again, this third party does not always have to be the government.
In the 1980s millionaire optometrist Robert Klark Graham, inventor of the shatterproof eyeglasses material that would pave the way for polycarbonate glasses lenses, privately founded the Repository for Germinal Choice. This was a sperm bank where, initially, both the men donating the sperm and the women receiving it would have to have higher-than-average IQs. (Graham’s failure to attract enough people led to him lowering his standards later.) Graham was explicitly inspired by the eugenicist propaganda of the Pioneer Fund (more about that below) and he was directly helped by three known eugenicists — Garrett Hardin, who coined “the tragedy of the commons”; Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Hermann Müller; and William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor. The last of those three was explicitly a white supremacist as well. As the sperm bank was a wholly voluntary matter, it was an example of private institutions enacting positive eugenics, the private sperm bank being the third party.
The second method, “negative eugenics,” is more well-known. As suggested by the name, negative eugenics is involves the eugenicist third-party taking action to discourage or prevent particular people, those deemed undesirable, from being able to procreate and transmit their “inferior” genes to future generations. The most well-known and horrifying means of doing this was mass murder. The Third Reich outright murdered people of ethnicities it deemed defective. Another method was for state governments in the USA to impose compulsory sterilization of people they judged unfit — mostly epileptics and other persons with psychiatric disorders and low IQs.
In a February video where he disingenuously denies ever having any sympathies for eugenics, Stefan Molyneux pretends that murder and compulsory sterilization were the only forms of negative eugenics that governments employed. Molyneux conspicuously omitted mention of two other violent method that governments employed to “protect” the white population from being polluted and “replaced” by allegedly genetically sub-par races. The first of these was miscegenation laws — ordinances and statutes penalizing interracial marriages. This is of interest in that Molyneux has repeatedly direly cautioned his audience against interracial couplings. The second method was immigration restriction. For multiple reasons — not just because this immigration restriction is something that Molyneux has long advocated, and on the basis of the original eugenics movement — this omission of the role eugenics has historically played in the enactment of immigration restrictions is very convenient for Molyneux.
An organization that played an especially role in the eugenics movement, not merely in the USA but even in Germany under the Third Reich, was an American not-for-profit called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund was founded in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, the heir to a vast textile fortune. The aims of the Pioneer Fund were then explicitly eugenicist and racist. Even this early in the organization’s history, it was already developing a racist theory that, with some minor alterations, Molyneux would be approvingly repeating from 2015 onward.
Latching onto Alfred Binet’s IQ test, the Pioneer Fund scholars noticed that IQ was a stronger predictor than other factors in predicting how financially successful someone would be in life, and that, on average, some “races” scored higher on IQ tests than others. There is a lot of evidence that someone’s IQ is strongly influenced by the level of living standards under which that person grew up. Anticipating that that might become the accepted explanation for disparities in IQ scores between people, the Pioneer Fund sought to convince the public that inborn genetics, especially genetics relating to skin color, was the primary driver of IQ.
Among the recommendations the Pioneer Fund made for public policy was the restriction of immigration into the United States on the basis of race, genetics, and IQ. Just as many members of the Alt-Right do today, eugenicists associated with the Pioneer Fund, such as Madison Grant and Charles Davenport, bemoaned the influx of impoverished immigrants into the USA who were of ethnicities they considered culturally and genetically different from themselves. Foreshadowing the very same rhetoric from today’s Alt-Right, they predicted that these ethnic-alien immigrants would come to the USA and reproduce.
Either these alien immigrants would marry native-born WASPs, which would produce hybrids the eugenicists considered a net decline in quality for the population, or the ethnic aliens would keep to themselves in their own enclaves and ghettos, having too much sex, and eventually out-breeding the native-born WASP population. As today’s Alt-Right screams about a great replacement of whites causing a “white genocide”, the eugenicists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proclaimed that a failure on the part of native-born WASPs to obstruct the immigration of these impoverished aliens would lead to the replacement of the native-born WASPs. Eugenicists referred to this as the WASPs’ own “race suicide.”
However, the impoverished immigrant ethnicities the original eugenicists feared most were not the exact same ethnicities about which Stefan Molyeux and his Alt-Right cronies howl today. Whereas Molyneux and the Alt-Right of today demagogue against Latinos, Arabs, and Africans, the fashionable fears of the 1920s were directed toward another set of ethnicities. Eugenicists had already barred the immigration of Chinese people through the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and, with eugenicist Theodore Roosevelt successfully pressuring the Japanese government in 1907 to take on the task of preventing its own Japanese citizens from migrating to the continental USA (but not Hawaii, then a U.S. territory). With Asian immigration restricted, eugenicists turned their ire toward people who are usually considered white today: southern and eastern Europeans.
It was the immigration of these people that was restricted in the Immigration Act of 1924. This law, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, imposed national origin quotas that were explicitly racist and eugenicist in intention. The quotas favored immigration from northern and western European Protestants and curbed immigration from southern and eastern European Catholics and Jews.
Here we find an interesting irony in Molyneux’s white-nationalism advocacy. Molyneux has twice praised Poland as a model for other white nationalists to follow. Of his trip to Poland, Molyneux first said disingenuously, “First of all, I’ve always been skeptical of the ideas of white nationalism, of identitarianism, and white identity.” Then, to the extol the virtues of what he considers to be a whites-only society, he continued, “However, I am an empiricist, and I could not help but notice that I could have peaceful, free, easy, civilized, and safe discussions in what is essentially an all-white country.” In another video, he pronounced,
You know, I go to Poland — what is it, 99-percent white? I don’t need any security. The streets are incredibly clean. Crime is almost nonexistent. Nobody gets called a racist. There’s no talk of white privilege. No identity politics. No endless diversity-nagging. You know, I’ve spoken against white nationalism, but I’m an empiricist. I’m an empiricist! I went to the country. I saw how it was like. . . . I’ve spoken out against white nationalism, but I’m am empiricist. I’m listening. I’m listening to my experiences. Can’t argue with the facts. Can’t argue with the reality.
Yet this same Molyneux praises the very same national origin quotas that the original eugenicists championed and enacted, national-origin quotas that were finally removed in 1965 with the Hart-Celler Act. (Contrary to Molyneux and his followers, the Hart-Celler Act was not the huge opening up of the borders they call it. The national-quotas were replaced by the current visa system, which places caps on the number of visas issued to each country. No more than 7 percent of the recipients of visas each year can come from the same country, but, because Mexico adjoins the USA, over 23 percent of visa applications understandably come from Mexico. This disparity, which anti-immigrationists such as Stephen Miller and Rep. Tom Cotton refuse to rectify through any liberalization, is a major reason why so many people have to resort to immigrating covertly.)
In misrepresenting the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as some anarchic opening up of America to all the nonwhites of the world, Molyneux mourns the repeal of the openly-eugenicist national origin quotas. He tells one caller, “First of all, America from 1925 to 1965 had a virtual moratorium on immigration. And, by the way, it was in fact one of the more prosperous times — if not the most prosperous times — in American history.” In calling this duration such a prosperous time, Molyneux overlooked that the Great Depression fell in the middle of it. He likewise snivels to Peter and Anita calling in from Sweden,
Sweden decided in 1975, with no public consultation, to become a multicultural nation in the same way America decided — the Democrats in 1965, with no public consultation, and with specific lies told to the public about the effects of these policies — changed the Immigration Act to cut off immigration from Europe [big lie from Molyneux] and open it up to the Third World, to decide to become a multicultural nation.
Here is the irony in that: unlike Molyneux, the crafters of the Immigration Act of 1924 not only did not praise Poles for their whiteness, but did not even consider Poles to be white. They reviled Poles as congenitally penurious people who would pollute the gene pool of the United States if they migrated here and had children here. The consequence of the same national-origin quotas that Molyneux defended, reports the New York Times, was that in the USA, “the arrival of Italians and Poles fell by 90 percent” in 1924. As Daniel Okrent discloses, “There were more than 3.5 million Jews in Poland in 1939. Under the National Origins law, the 1939 quota for the entire nation allowed only 6,524 Poles, Jews and non-Jews alike, to enter the United States legally.”
Of special note here was how the Pioneer Fund and its major backers, such as Madison Grant and Charles Davenport, strongly supported the restrictions against Polish immigrants, especially those who were trying to come as refugees from Naziism. The Pioneer Fund’s complicity in this historical travesty extends far beyond its success in preventing the Third Reich’s victims from finding refuge. The Pioneer Fund’s contributions to the Third Reich’s power were much more direct, even friendly.
During the 1930s, American scholars financed by the Pioneer Fund, including Grant and Davenport, communicated directly with “race scientists” of the Third-Reich government: Hans K. F. Günther, Erwin Bauer, Fritz Lenz, and Eugen Fischer. (Yes, someone named Eugen was an expert on eugen-ics.) These were not racists who merely happened to live in Germany when Adolf Hitler was chancellor. They were employed directly by the Third Reich government for the stated purpose of advancing the Aryan race at the expense of Jews, Roma people, and any other ethnicity the Nazis disliked. As his employees, they ultimately answered to the Führer himself. In Europe, the Third-Reich race scientists cited the experts of the Pioneer Fund. In turn, the Third Reich sent its propaganda movies about its eugenics program to the Pioneer Fund, and the Pioneer Fund got these films shown throughout the United States in high school science classes and even churches. In the duration of the thirties and up until U.S. entry into World War II, the Pioneer Fund provided apologetics in America for the Third Reich’s eugenicist measures.
It was only when Americans confronted the atrocities the Third Reich committed, taking eugenics to its only possible conclusion, that the discipline of eugenics in general fell into a well-earned disrepute throughout the Western world. This was not, however, the end of the Pioneer Fund itself, which underwent a re-branding. Henceforth, the Pioneer Fund and its adherents had to discard the term eugenics, which had deservedly gained a negative stigma. Moreover, on account of the civil rights movement, white supremacism had gained a deserved stigma as well. Henceforth, advocates of the Pioneer Fund’s propaganda would refer to it as “race realism” and the science of “human biodiversity.” But while its self-designations had changed, the Pioneer Fund’s overall mission had not. It had to become more covert in its methods for promulgating eugenics and white supremacism.
Now being more discreet, the Pioneer Fund had to make its racist argument through indirect means. It did this by stressing average IQ. The argument arrive by means of syllogisms deduced from shaky premises. This is the first syllogism, which is stated explicitly.
Differences in living standards are caused by differences in IQ.
The “races” have differences in living standards.
Therefore, the “races” having different living standards is caused by differences in IQ.
Once that syllogism is accepted, Pioneer Fund cronies introduce the next premise: Differences in IQ are a factor that is biologically inborn and immutable.
When, in the privacy of your mind, you apply that new premise to the above syllogism, this is the next syllogism you are to deduce, one that the Pioneer Fund is relatively careful about not making too blatant.
Differences in IQ are a factor that is biologically inborn and immutable.
The “races” having different living standards is caused by differences in average IQ.
Therefore, the “races” having different living standards is caused by a factor that is biologically inborn and immutable.
This is a roundabout method for saying that insofar as there are unequal living standards between members of different races, this is mostly explained by inborn, congenital differences between those races, differences that no public policy can rectify. Because he is less clever than most people associated with the Pioneer Fund, Stefan Molyneux has stated openly his reason for choosing this set of syllogisms as his explanation for poverty among nonwhites in the West. You can hear him give that reason in this 1 minute, 12-second-long clip video:
1 minute, 12 seconds
Molyneux assumes that if he rejects this eugenicist rationalization for unequal living standards between ethnic groups, the only alternative is the accept the popular left-wing idea that the poverty of blacks and Latinos relative to whites is mostly explained by pervasive systemic and institutionalized racism toward nonwhites. This is a type of racial inequality that, convenient for his demagoguery, Molyneux conflates with an accusation that whites generally hate nonwhites and generally choose to act toward them out of malice.
This demonstrates how, as much as he touts himself as a genius, Molyneux possesses a weak and uncreative imagination. The situation is more complex. Even after slavery and Jim Crow have been vanquished, they have made such a powerful difference the circumstances of many people that even with slavery and Jim Crow gone, their geographic, political, and psychological after-effects can continue to have an impact. And though Molyneux and many other white supremacists talk about welfare payments as if those are the only governmental program that can discourage or impede entrepreneurship among nonwhites, Richard Rothstein and his book The Color of Law provide much more plausible explanations for how governmental programs have deprived many blacks and Latinos of access to the same capital markets that are more accessible to whites.
As an example, the New Deal and the Truman administration subsidized affordable housing for whites to an extent far greater than what was done for blacks and Latinos. And insofar as later government programs from the Lyndon Johnson administration onward have attempted to help blacks and Latinos catch up, the benefits that white families had already received decades earlier were “grandfathered” in and had a better chance to perpetuate themselves.
In any case, as I have argued before, the Pioneer Fund syllogisms that Molyneux has adopted and propagated are based on faulty assumptions. It is true that IQ is a better predictor than many other variables when it comes to predicting who will have high living standards as an adult. But, as psychologist Gena Gorlin has pointed out to Yaron Brook, this is not because IQ is a good predictor in its own right. Rather, IQ is a weak predictor, and it is rated a better predictor than the other variables because those others are even weaker.
Moreover, though living standards and IQ correlate, it does not follow that an ethnic group starts off with a high average high IQ while in poverty, and then grows prosperous. Rather, rises in average IQ for an ethnic group follows that ethnic group’s rise in living standards. In a flimsy attempt not to appear racist, Molyneux and the Pioneer Fund propagandists stress that East Asians, on average, score higher on IQ tests than whites and are often richer than whites. But, contrary to their insinuations, it is not the case that East Asians having a higher average IQ than whites was the default.
The same James Flynn whom Molyneux had interviewed, only for him later to express disgust toward Molyneux, has looked at the historical administering of intelligence tests to Asian-Americans. Flynn found that when the data are standardized, as recently as 1975, Chinese-Americans had a lower average IQ score than white Americans. Those of East Asian descent began to outpace white Americans in average IQ only subsequent to their having outpaced white Americans in terms of average wealth.
Subsequent to World War II, and among several others, four scholars connected to the Pioneer Fund and its race-realism propaganda rose to prominence. Those four are Charles Murray, Linda Gottfredson, Helmuth Nyborg, and Jason Richwine. As you will recall, these four are among the “17 scientists [sic; 16 interviewees]” whom Molyneux cited in his tweet as if they prove he is not a eugenicist or racist.
It is thus interesting to note how, in their eugenicism, Molyneux and the Pioneer Fund are parasitic off of two scientists in particular who probably would have abhorred their aims. First is Gregor Mendel, who was reputedly a gentle soul whose quiet life was in great contrast to the aggressive domination that Molyneux and the Pioneer Fund seek over nonwhites. Second is Alfred Binet, who devised the IQ test as only a means of helping children who were marginalized. It is easy to imagine that Binet would have hated how his invention is used, by bigots, who could not equal his achievement, in their attempt to perpetuate the marginalization of the sort of vulnerable people whom he had sought to help.
Conclusion: Sargon’s Convenient Denial of the Message Molyneux Has Routinely Spouted for the Past Four Years
As in his February 2020 video, Molyneux can unconvincingly deny as much as he wants that he ever promoted eugenics. In reality, his propaganda about race and IQ, and against impoverished immigrants, comes from an organization that was openly eugenicist from its founding to World War II. And it is from an organization that, until the war, partnered with the Third-Reich government in openly eugenicist advocacy.
Assisting Molyneux in that denial is Sargon of Akkad. Sargon concludes his January 2020 apologia for Molyneux by proclaiming his doubt that Molyneux ever spoke well of eugenics or white nationalism. To anyone who identifies Molyneux as the eugenicist and white natinonalist that he is, Sargon challenges, “When did he say that? Where’s the clip? Where’s the quote? Like, prove what you have asserted.”
Sargon, challenge accepted. Below are the clips of Molyneux. Molyneux has explicitly announced his evaluation that white nationalism makes good points that are gaining his sympathy. And although, at the start of this year, Molyneux has dishonestly claimed never to have voiced support for eugenics, there was a time, when he first started promoting the Pioneer Fund’s propaganda about race and IQ, where he was more honest and let it slip that he knew that this is all eugenics. Then more openly favorable toward the topic, Molyneux told Bill Whittle that as much as he may deny that he is talking eugenics, he still believes that “freedom has a eugenics component to it inevitably.”
4-minute, 44-second cut
6-minutes, 39-second cut
2-minute cut, which can be embedded in a tweet
Postscript: The Freedomain Cult Splitting Up Families
In that same pro-Molyneux video, by the way, Sargon tries to downplay the notion that Molyneux should face any culpability for his long history of pressuring his fans to disown their parents, siblings, and longtime friends if these people do not agree with ideological points Molyneux has espoused. This is a practice Molyneux has started at least as early as 2006, and he received much more attention for it in 2014, when he lost a major portion of his anarchist following. It was then that the major ideological focus of Molyneux’s podcast stopped being “anarcho-capitalism” and instead “race realism.”
Of Molyneux’s emphasis on trying to split families apart, Sargon says, “I think those accusations are probably somewhat overstated, aren’t they? And this, I think, is something that happened a long time ago. And I think it would be fair if we were to ask him his positions on these things now.”
Although Molyneux received the most attention for this practice in 2014, it does not mean it has stopped. Rather, it has continued in more recent years. As I have blogged before, Molyneux has done this at least twice publicly since 2017. Below are two long montages showing this, and a greatly-edited two-minute version that can be embedded in a tweet.
15-minute cut
20-minute cut (less of Molyneux’s tangents have been cut out)
2-minute cut that can fit in a tweet (a lot of editing, with some interjections edited out of the sentences; for the complete sentences, watch and hear the 20-minute version)
On Thursday, July 16, 2020, I shortened the sentences and changed the grammar a bit.
I could eat something that kills me. But, for the most part, I eat to live. Eating is for survival.
I can use language to tell a lie. But one relies on language to tell the truth and to learn it in conceptual detail. More than not, language is the tool for learning and transmitting the truth.
I can use my imagination to indulge in, and transmit, delusions. But all deductions rely on imagination; rational decision-making relies on imagination. Imagination is the tool for comprehending and living in reality.
