The Honolulu Star-Advertiser Published My Letter to the Editor
Stuart K. Hayashi
Back in the year 2006, Pablo Wegesend, Reid Ginoza, and I issued a warning to Hawaiʻi in the letters-to-the-editor sections of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, before the latter newspaper purchased the former. The warning had to do with the construction of the government-controlled rail system being shoved down everyone’s throat. We warned of the threat of eminent domain being exercised to seize private land for the rail system. My focus was on the chances of citizens being expropriated of their private residences.
For the most part, we find that our warning has come true. The one difference here is that it is not a private residence being taken but instead the site of the Takaras’ family business, Service Printers Hawaii. The specific agency confiscating the land is the one directly in charge of the rail system, HART (the Honolulu Authority on Rapid Transportation). The Friday, November 17, 2023, Honolulu Star-Advertiserran this news as its front-page story. It prompted me to write yet another letter to the editor, which was published on Tuesday, November 21, 2023.
The official Twitter account of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser even sent out a tweet quoting from my letter and linking to the Web version of it.
OPINION: "(HART) invoked eminent domain to dispossess the Takara family of land on which their family business has stood for 59 years. ... That downplays the real issue: freedom and consent versus coercion." ⤵️ https://t.co/okRconMw9a
In the letter, two words I regret are “59 years.” The business was started in 1964 but, upon rereading the Friday article, Mr. Takara said the business was a tenant of the land for “43 years.” Instead of “for 59 years,” I should have said “for decades.”
The Newest Letter
This is what I had sent to the paper:
November 17’s front-page story, “HART Board Approves,” shows HART has no heart.
HART invokes eminent domain to dispossess the Takaras of land on which their family business has stood for 59 years. Rationalizations for eminent domain always mention payment to the victims. That downplays the real issue: freedom and consent versus coercion. Eminent domain is ultimately backed by armed force. Enforcing it in L.A. in 1959 had armed officers literally drag a widow, Aurora Arechiga, from her home.
People assume cities need eminent domain. In January I e-mailed development officials of Carson City, Nevada, about this. They informed me that although the city can enact it, at the time they knew of no instance of Carson City actually exercising eminent domain in its history.
During these holidays, ponder whether slogans about “the greater good” are justification enough, and if passively condoning eminent domain’s brutality is what we truly want.
The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) invoked eminent domain to dispossess the Takara family of land on which their family business has stood for 59 years. Rationalizations for eminent domain always mention payment to the victims. That downplays the real issue: freedom and consent versus coercion. Eminent domain is ultimately backed by armed force. Enforcing it in Los Angeles in 1959 had armed officers literally drag a widow, Aurora Arechiga, from her home.
People assume cities need eminent domain. In January, I emailed development officials of Carson City, Nev., about this. They informed me that although the city can enact it, at the time they knew of no instance of Carson City actually exercising eminent domain in its history.
During these holidays, ponder whether slogans about “the greater good” are justification enough, and if passively condoning eminent domain’s brutality is what we truly want.
Stuart K. Hayashi Mililani
With sixteen reader comments underneath the online version, this letter of mine was the second-most-commented-upon letter to the editor of the day. First-place was the one about the Second Amendment, at thirty Web comments.
The next day, the Star-Advertiser published yet another letter denouncing HART’s callous violation of the Takaras’ rights. This one came from Charlene Aoki.
The Letter From 2006 Below is my letter of warning back in 2006. There are two different versions of it.
Pablo Wegesend raised an important concern in his Jan. 28 letter to the editor, but we have yet to see anyone address it.
Wegesend said, “With all the talk about light rail, there is one question that needs to be answered: Who’s going to be forced out of the way to make room for light rail infrastructure?”
Good point. What assurance do we have that the City [and] County of Honolulu won’t exercise eminent domain after selecting a route for the fixed-rail system? I find the very idea that the city might have to resort to condemning people’s houses far more unsettling than any increase in the general excise tax.
We shouldn’t rest easy until the City [and] County publicly promises us, in this newspaper’s op-ed pages for everyone to read, that it won’t forcibly confiscate anyone’s private land when the time comes to construct the rail.
Eminent Domain Don’t Seize People’s Homes for Transit
What assurance do we have that the City [and] County of Honolulu won’t exercise eminent domain after selecting a route for the fixed-rail system? I find the very idea that the city may have to resort to condemning people’s houses over this far more unsettling than any increase in the general excise tax.
We shouldn’t rest easy until the city publicly promises us, in this newspaper’s op-ed pages for everyone to read, that it won’t forcibly confiscate anyone’s private land when the time comes to construct the rail.
If this project requires the seizure of people’s homes, then perhaps it wasn’t such a terrific idea after all.
Stuart K. Hayashi Mililani
As a follow-up to my own, Reid Ginoza had his own March 17, 2006, letter to the editor published over here.
Yes, in 2006, I said, “We shouldn’t rest easy until the City [and] County publicly promises us, in this newspaper’s op-ed pages for everyone to read, that it won’t forcibly confiscate anyone’s private land when the time comes to construct the rail.”
We know what has happened since then. With the rail project, the city government is on the very unscrupulous path of which we had warned. It should reverse course before it hurts innocent people even more than it already has.
When most people say the word monster, they usually do so as a synonym for “ugly” and “evil.” But if you have glanced upon the drawings I have put on the World Wide Web, you have probably noticed that I don’t share that perspective. I draw monsters because they are beautiful and good. And yet this time I did decide to draw a phenomenon I consider to be ugly and evil.
The specific image of “being burned at the stake” is metaphorical, but — in the greater abstract — government-inflicted violence toward undocumented immigrants is something happens literally. Governmental decree is ultimately enforced at gunpoint, and that applies to deportations. Deportations are carried out by armed federal agents; this is armed force just as when a mugger sticks you up.
Between 2010 and 2016 the U.S. Border Patrol agents fired bullets into 33 would-be immigrants, ending their lives. In 2014, James Tomsheck, the chief of internal affairs at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was fired by the agency for having investigated 28 of those deaths and ascertaining that at least seven of them were likely under circumstances where deadly force on the Border Patrol’a part was unjustified. That trend continued into the Trump administration. On May 23, 2018, Claudia Patricia Gómez González — a 19-year-old Guatemalan — got into an altercation with a border agent in Rio Bravo, Texas, and was shot dead as well.
And, once the immigrant has been deported, the violence does not end for him or her. In too many deportation cases, border agents are knowingly sending immigrants back to environments dominated by gang warfare and high murder rates. Steven Sacco writes,
One study found that between January 2014 and September 2015 eighty-three deportees who were sent back to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were murdered after their return. They were people fleeing the killers who eventually took their lives. People like José Marvin Martínez, who fled violence in Honduras and made it to the U.S. when he was 16, but was deported and four months after his forcible return was shot to death. Or Juan Francisco Diaz, also deported back to Honduras, where he too was murdered a few months later. Or Giovanni Miranda, who, after spending most of his life in the U.S., was deported to El Salvador to be murdered in front of his wife and son in June 2015. Or Edgar Chocoy, 16, who ran away from a gang to the U.S. only to be murdered by that same gang seventeen days after he was deported back to Guatemala in 2004. Or an unnamed teenager who was shot to death hours after being deported back to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Moises, 19, was murdered after he was deported to El Salvador. And there are too many more names we’ll never know.
What’s more, the number of deportees delivered directly to their killers does not include those who survive attempted murder or other violence because of their deportation — a number no one knows. Isais Sosa, who was 19 when the Los Angeles Times covered his story in 2014, survived being shot by a gang days after his deportation. The 19 year old daughter of Dora Lina Meza fled to the U.S. from the same gang that, after she was deported back home, raped her at gun point. After Juan Ines Alanis was deported he was kidnapped and held for ransom while his fingers were smashed with a hammer.
Governmental action, as it is backed by violent threats, is justified when it is in retaliation against some party having initiated the use of force against a person or her private property. But most undocumented immigrants are peaceful, having violated no laws unrelated to their having arrived into the USA without a license (and such licenses, visas, are ridiculously difficult to come by, involving even more red tape than what small businesses have to face). These undocumented immigrants are individuals who must be judged on an individual basis. As observed by the family of murder victim Mollie Tibbetts, to paint undocumented immigrants in general as violent is demagoguery and scapegoating; that is the witch hunt.
It is for this reason that I don’t say “Politicians are the real monsters.” That would be employing monster as a pejorative and a reproach, which I am not about to do. Monsters, such as the one created by Victor Frankenstein and the titular Beast from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, are weird outcasts — and that is how undocumented immigrants are still too often treated. Now, as before, someone must stand up for the weird outcast.
I keep hearing the cliché, from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and alt-righters alike, that if a large number of new people enter the workforce -- often immigrants or people still in foreign countries but are hired by U.S. firms -- they will try to out-compete one another for jobs, either dragging down wages or causing massive unemployment. This cliché comes from T. Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, and a socialist named Ferdinand Lassalle (Lassalle coined night watchman state as a pejorative). I point out Jean-Baptiste Say -- the most pro-capitalism of all of the classical economists -- refuted this misconception with Say's Law of Markets. When I do this, anti-immigrationists call me a leftist. But someone who cites this Marxist cliché about "dragging down wages" has no business accusing anyone of leftism.
Stefan Molyneux and other critics of liberalized immigration policies are fond of citing Australian anthropologist Frank Salter and Bowling Alone author Robert D. Putnam in proclaiming that immigration should be restricted. It is on the grounds, they say, that when immigrants pour into a neighborhood that had previously been ethnically homogeneous, the new heterogeneity fosters more social distrust among everyone in the long run. Molyneux and other opponents of immigration even go on to say that Robert Putnam and Frank Salter prove that if you live in a diverse neighborhood, such a circumstance even reduces your trust in people of your own ethnicity.
The argument is: if I, a man of Japanese ancestry, dwell in a neighborhood where everyone is of pure Japanese ancestry, we will all get along fine. However, if we live in a mixed neighborhood, with blacks and whites and Latinos and Pacific Islanders living near me, I am going to mistrust all of them. Worse, this diversity will cause me to distrust other people of Japanese ancestry.
Molyneux quotes Putnam as saying that "it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."
Although both Salter and Putnam make similar arguments, I should clarify that their political positions should be distinguished from one another. Putnam is quite mainstream and comes across as being more politically center-Left. By contrast, Salter is an unreconstructed ideologue for the alt-right. Citing the famously racist Murray N. Rothbard, Frank Salter proclaims,
Unrestricted migration would harm Australia’s national interests in ways documented by scholars in economics, sociology and related disciplines. Much of the harm is predictable from what is known about the dysfunctions of diversity. ...one can add to Rothbard’s excellent reason for defending the cultural integrity of nations. All the benefits of relative homogeneity (and thus of assimilation and prudent immigration) documented above belong to nations, not to multi-ethnic states. . . . This is what Rothbard was getting at.
But, as Kenan Malik notes, data contradict Putnam, Salter, and those who cite them to vilify liberalized immigration, such as Molyneux.
More recent research has...questioned [Robert Putnam's] conclusions. The latest such study, led by Patrick Sturgis, director of Britain’s National Centre for Research Methods, investigated the relationship between diversity and trust within London. It discovered the opposite relationship to Putnam. Once the researchers had allowed for social and economic deprivation, they found that “ethnic diversity is ... positively related to social cohesion, with significantly higher levels of cohesion evident as ethnic heterogeneity increases.”
A helpful explanation of this matter was written by Shikha Dalmia, which appeared inThe Week and also inReason.
My friend Pablo Wegesend summarized to me the likely explanation for what is going on: when people in a neighborhood have grown accustomed to ethnic homogeneity within it, an influx of ethnically different people can easily disturb them. Even in their own community, they feel culture shock, and their general level of trust in others happens to wane. However, the children in the neighborhood aren't as set and rigid in their idea of what is normal or abnormal for the neighborhood, and therefore have an easier time adjusting to the increasing level of diversity. Once those children are grown up, the relatively new diversity -- regarded as so alien and threatening by the older generation -- is considered normal by the younger generation. And among this younger generation, neighborly trust is maintained.
My island home is definitely not free of any or every form of ethnic tension, but the growing normalization of diversity would plausibly explain what is still a relatively high level of mutual trust among people in ethnically diverse Hawaii.
At the end of my first major blog post about Stefan Molyneux's fanaticism, on November 29, 2015, I wrote, "I am familiar with the argument that people have an easier time getting along when they're all the same ethnicity; I think there might be an empirical basis for that descriptive evaluation." Today I retract that; there was not even an adequate basis for making any concessions to Molyneux's demagoguery on this count. On this conclusion, Putnam was erring at best, while Salter and Molyneux have put forth this falsehood as part of their attempt to rationalize their bigotry.
On January 20, 2018, I added the links to Shikha Dalmia's essay and I mentioned the idea that even if the older people in a neighborhood, accustomed to the waning homogeneity, grow more distrustful, the younger generation can be more accustomed to the relatively new diversity and therefore continue to feel trust in other people in the community.
NOTE: On February 18, 2017, I made some significant changes to this essay upon learning that in 2006, Milo Yiannopoulos had been walking around in public with Nazi paraphernalia. This includes his wearing a Nazi Iron Cross necklace. One might make the excuse that Milo Yiannopoulos had adopted the Nazi persona in his early twenties just to be "edgy," but that is still pathological and not to be encouraged. I am sad to say that I have known people who, in their twenties, repeatedly "joked" about admiring Nazis or wishing they could have been Nazis. Without exceptions all of these people had -- and still have -- self-hatred issues. Even if we try to be charitable and try to assume that Yiannopoulos's Nazi persona from his twenties was just some poorly-though-out youthful indiscretion and not done out of malice, it's still a horribly unhealthy sign. And that, as of this writing, Yiannopoulos is still whitewashing neo-Nazis such as Richard Spencer, indicates that the pathology is not "long passed."
In an earlier draft, I said that Yiannopoulos was "Alt Lite," meaning that he whitewashes white supremacists but does not go as far as saying that he is one of them himself. Upon learning about Yiannopoulos actually going around praising Hitler and Naziism -- even allegedly in jest -- I have to revise that. Yiannopoulos might not merely be alt-lite; he might be in the same category as Richard Spencer after all.
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No, Dummy, It's Not OK to Punch Richard Spencer Over His Racist Speech
Richard Spencer is the neo-Nazi who famously coined alt-right. You may recall that in January, as Spencer was being recorded on video, some terribly misguided vigilante punched him as he was speaking. For the record, that was wrong and the hooligan should face assault charges. Spencer's propaganda is vicious -- indeed, evil -- but, as of this writing, it is still no more than speech. No matter how evil someone is -- even if people acting on his advocacy does great harm -- violence against that person cannot be justified until and unless that person himself is behaving violently.
The reason is that even if someone advocates something truly evil, such as racism, through his speech, people are still free to avoid him or counter him by using their own speech to expose what is wrong with what he advocates. Conversely, if someone is imposing his will through violence, then he is at the point where you cannot reason with him and you cannot simply avoid him; as long as someone chooses to act violently he can only be answered with force in kind.
One should not be "rationalist" about this and assume that I am saying that you cannot strike a violent party until and unless it has landed the first blow. If a party demonstrates a long-term plan to enact violence upon you, you are right to call the police to apprehend that party prior to any blow being landed. If, for example, someone like Charles Manson were plotting your murder, you would right to call police upon that party before any physical altercation broke out.
Richard Spencer indeed poses a threat to the republic in advocating his racism, but as long as that remains speech, the threat Spencer poses remains an indirect one. On the contrary, when that vigilante punched him, that vigilante gave everyone probable cause to be concerned that that same vigilante might direct similar violence upon them; by throwing that punch, the vigilante made a concrete demonstration of how physically dangerous he is, and thus poses a more direct threat upon others. Violence against those who advocate Richard Spencer's brand of neo-Nazism cannot be justified until there is concrete evidence that those neo-Nazis are planning an act of violence upon person or private property, or if one has proof that they are already engaging in such violence. At that point, one is called upon to bring such evidence to the police (here is my explanation why a free republic requires that citizens leave retaliatory force to the police and do not become vigilantes).
The same principle applies to scheduled speeches that are supposedly to be delivered by Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos's sleazy antics did not justify the riots and vandalism at Berkeley; and those who riot out of purported protest against him are behaving as fascists.
Yes, Stefan Molyneux Fans, Richard Spencer Is a Neo-Nazi
Now that I have made that clear, it's important to acknowledge that Richard Spencer really is a neo-Nazi and that, to the extent that people swallow his propaganda, he indeed poses a danger. As a matter of course, people act upon their beliefs. If they believe what Richard Spencer espouses, they will ultimately call for governmental initiations of the use of force upon innocent people -- the likeliest innocent victims will be of dark-skinned "races."
In the very video where Richard Spencer gets punched, right before the fist lands on his face, he is in the middle of denying that he is a neo-Nazi. "Neo-Nazis hate me," he insists. Later on Twitter, however, he tweeted this out. Under the guise of being tongue-in-cheek (as if a white member of an anti-immigration circle calling him- or herself a Nazi is sooo amusing), he is implicitly acknowledging the association of him with neo-Nazism:
If you want to see for yourself the sort of racism that Richard Spencer promotes, you can go to the white nationalist propaganda website he owns and operates, called Radix Journal. It has some mentions of Ayn Rand you might find interesting. One of them is a piece titled "Ayn Rand's Curious Bloodlust," which goes out of its way to denounce the Ayn Rand Institute and, of course, Jews in general. It bemoans, "Faith, racial pride and even loyalty to one’s family if it isn’t based on selfishness were also judged harshly by Rand." Interesting how it threw in "racial pride" between "faith" and "loyalty to one's family" as if it's equally uncontroversial, is it not?
You can also check out "What's Wrong with Libertarianism?" authored by Richard Spencer himself. In that piece, he heaps hostility upon Gary Johnson while, of course, praising Murray N. Rothbard, Hans Hermann Hoppe, and Lew Rockwell. More interesting than that, though, is what you find in the comments section from Spencer's alt-right fan base. "Albionic American" uses the triple-parentheses (((echo)))) for "Ayn Rand" at least twice, and proclaims the need to "restrict women's franchise and sexual freedom, and instead enforce a benevolent but strict patriarchy."
That is Richard Spencer and the ideological company he keeps.
Milo Yiannopoulos: Open Scorn for the Left, Respect for Richard Spencer's Sleaziness
It is concerning that some people who call themselves Objectivists express admiration for Milo Yiannopoulos. From the summer of 2015 to January 2016, I would have told you that I thought Yiannopoulos was not exactly in the alt-right, as being alt-right means going as far as Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux: stating explicitly that different "races" have biologically innate behavioral differences and therefore the State must intervene to keep them apart. I would have told you that instead Yiannopoulos is a leading figure in what is called the alt-lite: people who do not state explicit agreement with the eugenics but go out of their way to provide a moral sanction to the alt-right, treating the alt-right as just another opinion and admonishing people to respect it as a legitimate hypothesis worthy of consideration and respect in a pluralistic republic. While members of the alt-lite aren't the ones fervent enough to stick their necks out and say all the racist rhetoric bluntly, they remain fellow travelers who provide encouragement to the more explicit racists and reinforce their antics.
Yet, upon learning on February 18, 2017, that Yiannopoulos actually has a history, going back over ten years, of hinting to people of some sort of sympathy for Naziism, Yiannopoulos might not be just alt-lite; he might really be alt-right and in the same camp as Richard Spencer.
As "proof" of Yiannopoulos opposing the alt-right, some of his fans quote him saying, "White nationalism is not the answer" and his saying that he doesn't agree with how white nationalists are trying to counter the political Left's collectivism with their own. But this gesture is merely perfunctory on his part. You can tell someone's real priorities by his actions. Looking at Yiannopoulos's actions -- as I have done since the autumn of 2014, back when I was following the Gamergate controversy and when Yiannopoulos was then well-known only among those who knew about Gamergate -- allows one to see that while Yiannopoulos heaps nothing but disrespect upon anyone and anything he misconstrues as leftist (such as free-marketers who stand up for the transgendered), he presumes that the alt-right's racism must be paid respect and that its central tenets can only be, at worst, and as-of-yet-unproven hypothesis.
Yiannopoulos came out as the preeminent alt-lite apologist for the alt-right with the essay "An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right," which Yiannopoulos's former friend Cathy Young accurately describes as "a whitewash, full of far-fetched arguments and misleading claims that consistently downplay this movement’s ugly bigotry." "Establishment Conservative's Guide" introduces Richard Spencer and the alt-right as follows:
There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence. . . . The alternative right are a much smarter group of people -- which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright. . . .
The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2012, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.
Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism.
Note the question-begging presumptions that Yiannopoulos has in those paragraphs: the large group of people who disagree with the alt-right's members -- which he misidentifies as "Left" -- "hates them so much" for no better reason than that the alt-right figures are "smarter." If you compare Richard Spencer and his alt-right cronies to skinheads -- which makes sense, given that white supremacism, and their support for the idea of having a government separate "races" by force, are what the two categories share in common -- then Yiannopoulos is quick to dismiss you as behaving "idiotically." By contrast, Yiannopoulos has no sharper barb for Spencer and his alt-right cronies than "All of these websites have been accused of racism," which is a far cry from Yiannopoulos admitting the obvious: these websites "have been accused of racism" for a solid reason: a reading of these websites demonstrates that these websites blatantly advocate racism.
After a quick and perfunctory admission, "Anything associated as closely with racism and bigotry as the alternative right will inevitably attract real racists and bigots," he goes on to attempt to minimize this. What Yiannopoulos would have us believe are the very few true racists and bigots in the alt-right "are the people that the alt-right’s opponents [merely] wish constituted the entire movement" (emphasis added). He disingenuously assures readers "there's just not very many" real racists in the alt-right, "no-one [in the alt-right, definitely not Richard Spencer] really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right."
Were it the case that it was unlikely for real racists to achieve anything in the alt-right, then it would have been unlikely for Richard Spencer to achieve anything in the alt-right. Yet Yiannopoulos already identified Richard Spencer as the alt-right's thought leader.
He gave a "speech" that simply amounted to the arbitrary sentence "Feminism is cancer." There was no equivalent "The alt-right cancer." He told one left-wing student, "Fuck your feelings." He did not say "fuck" to the feelings of Richard Spencer's ilk (and the racist pseudoscience promoted by Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux end up amounting to nothing more than a sprawling rationalization for their own feelings, those feelings being prejudices and unproductive hostility). The implication of Milo Yiannopoulos's public antics has consistently been that he regards Richard Spencer and the alt-right as having the moral high ground over anyone they consider "Left," including moderate Democrats and even Yiannopoulos's former friend, Reason magazine writer Cathy Young.
Yiannopoulos's apologia for Richard Spencer and the alt-right is not some new affectation he adopted to sell books. It goes back at least as far as 2006, when he was in his early twenties. Back then, Milo was calling himself "Milo Andreas Wagner." He wore a Nazi Iron Cross necklace out in public.
In 2009, Yiannopoulos uploaded this image -- supposedly "jokingly," of course.
I learned about those images from this blog post, which chronicles still other instances -- all taking place prior to 2014 -- of Yiannopoulos expressing some sort of anti-Semitism, often rationalizing that being Jewish precludes him from being anti-Jewish.
The main excuse for Yiannopoulos, naturally, is that all of these were mere "jokes" in crude taste. For an explanation as to why that excuse fails to mitigate concerns over the pathology of the crude "joker," read this blog post of mine.
Of course, if we find that Yiannopoulos is at least as favorable to white supremacism as Richard Spencer is, that would still not exonerate the Berkeley riots from moral condemnation. What I said about violence still applies: if Yiannopoulos has yet to initiate the use of actual physical violence, then those who rioted against him demonstrate themselves to be a greater direct physical threat to others than does Yiannopoulos himself.
Now, to the degree that Yiannopoulos is ambiguous about whether or not he realizes that Richard Spencer is a real racist -- and, remember, Yiannopoulos mendaciously asserts that real racists are rare in the alt-right -- that gives Yiannopoulos some weaselly wiggle room whereby he can maintain some plausible deniability about whether he condones Richard Spencer's propaganda specifically. But Stefan Molyneux -- with whom Yiannopoulos exchanged accolades in an online video interview -- is less ambiguous: Molyneux's apologia and whitewashing of Richard Spencer's racism advocacy is much more direct.
Stefan Molyneux's Excuses for Richard Spencer's "White Homeland" to Exclude Nonwhites
Since the autumn of 2015, Stefan Molyneux -- once most famous as the leader of a cult that was purportedly about anarchy -- has become most famous as an online apologist and propagandist for Donald Trump (it does not appear that the cult has disbanded, though). You might have seen my prior critiques of Molyneux's advocacy of eugenics, white supremacism, and government-enforced racial segregation. As an apologist for Trump, Molyneux has also found it necessary to make excuses for some of the unsavory characters who have been manipulating Trump (sometimes even Vladimir Putin). For that reason, Molyneux took it upon himself to make an entire video to rationalize, as purely justified, various disturbing behaviors on the part of Trump's chief strategist, former Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon. To his credit, conservative commentator Glenn Beck has remained critical of Trump, Bannon, Breitbart News, and the alt-right. Beck pointed out that by catering to the alt-right, Steve Bannon and Breitbart News were elevating and reinforcing the white supremacist agenda of Richard Spencer. On this point, Molyneux decided that defending Steve Bannon against Glenn Beck naturally compelled him to defend Richard Spencer as well. The result is Molyneux delivering mind-bending rationalizations for Richard Spencer's racism.
First, Molyneux approvingly cites Richard Spencer's dishonest comparison of his own agenda to the establishment of Israel. Richard Spencer says that his desire for purely white countries -- which block nonwhites from entry -- is simply to have an "ethno-state" that is to white Christians what Israel is to Jews, and therefore what he promotes is no more objectionable than is present-day Israel. Molyneux announces that he shares in that evaluation completely. As I've explained before, that comparison is misleading. More than a fifth of Israel's population is gentile; this includes Arabs. Over 16 percent of Israel's population is Muslim. According to Israeli law, these non-Jews are to be treated with the same rights and freedom as Jewish citizens. And, yes, as of this writing Israel is accepting orphaned child refugees from Syria.
Secondly, Molyneux resorts to pedantry to distract his audience from the fact that the general thrust of Glenn Beck's criticism of Richard Spencer remains correct. Glenn Beck faults Richard Spencer for advocating that the State intrude upon people's private decisions on whether to have children or not; Beck is concerned about white supremacists calling for the compulsory sterilization of nonwhites. Molyneux replies that Richard Spencer is not calling for compulsory sterilization but is only advocating that tax money be spent to subsidize upper-middle-class whites to have more children, which means that Richard Spencer is benign and that governmental intrusion upon private families' choices is OK. (And this same Stefan Molyneux still calls himself an anarchist.😑 )
Here is the essay of Richard Spencer's that Stefan Molyneux quotes and defends. Richard Spencer says,
We are undergoing a sad process of degeneration. We will need to reverse it using the state and the government. You incentivize people with higher intelligence, you incentivize people who are healthy to have children [Spencer is demanding that the State do this 'incentivization,' and Molyneux approves] . . . .
Today, contraception and birth control are nothing less than a curse [when used by upper-middle-class white couples]! Those with the foresight to engage in 'family planning' [he means upper-middle-class white couples] are exactly the kind of responsible, intelligent people who should be reproducing. And increasingly, middle-class White families are so over-burdened with taxation and the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education that they don't feel they can afford children [you see? --S.H.]. This is not only a dysgenic catastrophe but a moral one as well.
On the other hand, individuals with low innate intelligence or even criminal personalities [Spencer means blacks and Latinos] -- those who should be limiting their reproduction -- can't be bothered to purchase a condom.
Molyneux approvingly quotes Richard Spencer as saying that because nonwhites are out-competing the white population in terms of out-breeding whites, the solution is for Western governments to manipulate white citizens into having more children as a means of catching up to nonwhites and matching them (as if this is some contest). Molyneux would then have his audience believe that this is not racist; this self-proclaimed anarchist does not even acknowledge how statist an intrusion that is. (This fretting over how white people in rich countries are not having enough children, in competition with nonwhites in poor countries, was started by the first eugenicists in the late 1800s, and this scare was revived in the 1990s. A moderate version of it is called "demographic winter" and the more fanatical version involves the alt-right screaming about "white genocide" in the West. For my deconstruction of this nonsense, read this post.)
Molyneux says of Richard Spencer, "He is making an argument based on facts. And you can agree or disagree." If you don't approve of this, "you would need to find arguments or counter-facts; Richard Spencer would be open to any counterfactual arguments that came his way [lie]." Molyneux's ultimate assessment of Spencer's white nationalism is, "It's not racism if you're pointing out empirical facts about ethnic differences. It's just facts. You hate facts, I guess, if you're on the Left [translation: by 'Left,' Molyneux means everyone who doesn't swallow his rhetoric on race]."
Below, you can watch the excerpt from Molyneux's Steve Bannon apologia that makes excuses for Richard Spencer:
Stefan Molyneux Floats Proposition That "This Battle Has Moved Beyond Words"; Richard Spencer Approves
Richard Spencer apparently recognizes an ideological ally when he sees one, as he has taken to retweeting Stefan Molyneux's propaganda.
This is one I find quite noteworthy:
That tweet contains an excerpt from the ending of Stefan Molyneux's video "Anti-Milo Yiannopoulos Rioters Burn UC Berkeley | True News," FDR Podcast 3581. The video purports to be about the riots of misguided people in Berkeley to shut down one of Milo Yiannopoulos's "speeches." Molyneux turns on the crocodile tears and talks as if the Berkeley rioters are representative of everyone in the country who disagrees with the racial fanaticism he preaches. The Americans who disagree with Stefan Molyneux's fanaticism and his calls for State-imposed racial segregation, by means of immigration bans based on IQ and race, number in the hundreds of millions, vastly outnumbering the Berkeley rioters. But Molyneux talks to his audience as if the Berkeley riot is the fundamental essence of the entire rest of the world, the big bad world that rejects his cultish doctrine. For that reason, between crocodile tears, Molyneux almost-whispers,
Maybe the time for arguments is passed. Maybe this battle has moved beyond words. Perhaps my job is over. Perhaps I have failed or the world has failed. Perhaps I am done. For ten years I've been saying '[That's] not an argument' [to anyone who disagrees, even when -- especially when -- they do give real counterarguments]. Tonight, perhaps, it has been made clear there are no more arguments to be made.
It would be great if, by that, Molyneux meant he was finally folding up this dishonest operation, taking all his propaganda off the Web, and finally making a living off of some work that is actually constructive and psychologically healthy. But Molyneux is not giving up. What, then, does he mean that "there are no more arguments to be made"? Since he is not giving up on trying to push his racial separatism, what is meant by "the time for arguments is passed" and "this battle has moved beyond words"? To what is he referring?
Ayn Rand -- the same Ayn Rand whom Stefan Molyneux's pal, Richard Spencer, despises -- gave some insight. The same Leonard Peikoff denounced in Radix Journalexplains in The Ominous Parallels, "There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent’s brain an argument -- or a bullet." Molyneux is floating the idea to his cult audience that his making persuasive appeals (that is, trying to convince people by reason that his racism is correct 😑) is no longer a viable option, and, therefore, if his cult audience is to have its way, it must have some other recourse. But what other recourse is left? Ayn Rand -- the one Richard Spencer reviles -- notes in "The Comprachicos," "When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements."
Molyneux is floating the proposition to his cult audience that maybe he should stop with trying to reason other people into, well, his thoroughly irrational racial segregationism. If Molyneux and his audience come to conclude that that is the case, then pushing their own agenda, their own cause, would require that they go through with that one other recourse. Richard Spencer retweeted that monologue because that is the exact direction that he would push the Molyneux cult toward. And should the day come when Richard Spencer and the Molyneux cult decide that "this battle has moved beyond words" and that they will fight with their fists, then, yes, you will be justified in punching them back.
Conclusion
Yes, Richard Spencer is a neo-Nazi. Yes, Milo Yiannopoulos has done his part to normalize Richard Spencer's bigotry and to demonstrate his own pathological obsession with Nazi iconography. And Stefan Molyneux has made an unambiguous apologia for that bigotry; one cannot pretend that Molyneux is "only joking" about this.
Executive Summary Here is a 46-minute video montage demonstrating that Stefan Molyneux parrots and cites the anti-Semite conspiracy theories of Kevin MacDonald, praised as an ally by David Duke himself. The first 8 1/2 minutes allow Kevin MacDonald to explain his deranged conspiracy theories about Jews. From the 8:34 mark onward, the video flips back and forth between MacDonald and Molyneux. First it lets MacDonald explain more of his conspiracy theories. Then it switches to Molyneux repeating those same talking points about Jews, in general, engaging in shadowy plots against "white Christians." At the 18 minute, 12 second mark, Molyneux cites MacDonald by name.
Molyneux: Spreading Bigotry Against Jews, Too
I have previously written about Stefan Molyneux's citation of the Pioneer Fund's antiquated eugenicist pseudoscience to provide a scientific veneer for his bigoted pronouncements about blacks, Latinos, and Arabs. While listening to some of his podcasts I got a whiff of anti-Semitism about Molyneux as well, but the anti-Semitism was not as overt as the out-and-out hostility toward the aforementioned ethnic categories. Yet looking further into this I have discovered that my suspicions about the anti-Semitism are confirmed . . . and more virulent than I had anticipated. Molyneux parrots conspiracy theories about Jews most infamously propagated by retired Californian psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, a proven anti-Semite and close associate of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. As MacDonald wrote on his own website on July 1, 2016,
I have been appearing on the David Duke radio show as a regular guest, every two weeks or so, for quite a while. This was a difficult decision at first, but I am very comfortable with it. . . . After watching David Duke’s videos and reading his writings, I decided that I agree with the vast majority of what he is saying.
And Molyneux cites MacDonald by name in disseminating this paranoid propaganda, as if MacDonald is a scrupulous academician and reliable source of information.
David Duke starts a Skype interview with MacDonald by introducing him as "my good friend and an incredible academic" -- no ironic pun intended with incredible. Unsurprisingly, MacDonald himself cites dubious sources, as in the case of MacDonald citing, as a credible source, J. Philippe Rushton, the known eugenicist and white supremacist who in his lifetime led the Pioneer Fund (one of the few remaining eugenics thinks-tanks in the USA). As you can see here, as of this writing David Duke has interviewed MacDonald over twenty times. Why does David Duke cherish MacDonald so much? It is because of MacDonald writing pseudo-scholarly works to provide the illusion of academic credibility for his conspiracy theories about Jews. The main video where Molyneux cites and repeats MacDonald, "The Truth About Immigration: What They Won't Tell You!," had been uploaded onto YouTube seven months prior to MacDonald becoming a regular guest on David Duke's podcast. Still, by that time -- July 2014 -- MacDonald had already been well-known for his propaganda against Jews.
First I will describe MacDonald's conspiracy theories. Once done with that, I will go over how Molyneux largely repeats them -- again, citing MacDonald by name -- and modifies them only slightly.
1.MacDonald insists both (a) communism and (b) the activist campaign for liberalizing immigration laws are conspiracies concocted by Jews. As of this writing, I haven't yet heard MacDonald say that the push for more open immigration is necessarily a communist conspiracy. Rather, MacDonald seems to be saying that initially Jews invented communism as a conspiracy but then, decades into it, lost interest in communism, despite remaining mostly on the political Left (he also derides the allegedly right-wing neo-conservatism of the Kristol family as a Jewish conspiracy). After having squeezed all they could get out of communism, MacDonald continues, Jews then cooked up a new conspiracy: lobbying for more open immigration into the United States and Western Europe.
2. MacDonald says that Jews advocating any ideological position is indeed a conspiracy because Jewish intellectuals who profess to believe sincerely in any political viewpoint are lying; they are masking their actual exploitative endgames. MacDonald says that a disproportionately large percentage of the early advocates of communism were Jewish, that a large portion of the advocates of open immigration are Jewish, and that the postwar advocates of neoconservatism are mostly Jewish. That evaluation is not very controversial. The Jerusalem Postquotes Yaron Brook making a similar observation about how various competing philosophic movements often have Jewish leaders. Indeed, Ayn Rand came from a Jewish family and so did many early students of the Objectivist philosophy. I won't be surprised if MacDonald says Objectivism is another Jewish conspiracy.
What is inflammatory is MacDonald's accusation concerning intent. MacDonald says that when a large number of Jewish intellectuals argue for any ideological viewpoint -- be it socialism, neo-conservatism, or libertarianism -- those Jewish intellectuals are, perforce, not sincere in agreeing with what they are saying. Rather, MacDonald continues, this is a ruse -- ruse is the exact word he employs -- to mask what Jews really want. Regardless of whether Jewish intellectuals are arguing for capitalism or socialism, says MacDonald, Jews are only trying to gain political and/or economic power for Jews at the expense of the gentiles around them, especially Christians of Western European descent. That is, if a Jewish intellectual argues for free trade, he does not genuinely believe that free trade will benefit gentiles; this is just a ploy whereby Jews can manipulate and exploit those gentiles. Likewise, MacDonald continues, if Jewish intellectuals argue that the U.S. federal government should liberalize immigration from Mexico, then the Jewish intellectuals are merely trying to manipulate Mexicans for their own ends, mostly to the material detriment of non-Hispanic gentiles.
3. MacDonald says Jews, communism, and the liberalization of immigration laws are all linked, since both communism and open immigration are Jewish conspiracies. Again, I don't know of MacDonald saying that open immigration is a communist conspiracy. He sounds like he is saying that communism was an earlier Jewish conspiracy and then, as Jews were losing interest in communism, they eased into the newer conspiracy that is immigration liberalization. As MacDonald puts it on the white nationalist website VDare (cited on Stormfront),
In my research on Jewish involvement in shaping immigration policy, I found that the organized Jewish community has been the most important force favoring unrestricted immigration to the U.S. In doing so, the various entities involved have consistently acted to further their own perceived collective interests—interests that are arguably in conflict with those of the majority of Americans.
4. MacDonald condemns the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as a left-wing elite Jewish globalist conspiracy. MacDonald talks first about the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and then the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. The Johnson-Reed Act established national quotas for immigration on bases that were explicitly eugenicist and explicitly racist. By MacDonald's own admission, the argument for the bill was that southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans were genetically, racially, and culturally inferior to the native-born majority of Americans at the time, who mostly descended from people of western and northern Europe. Of course, many of those Eastern Europeans blocked from immigrating were Jews. MacDonald says that there wasn't much good reason for native-born Americans to fear gentiles from Eastern Europe, but that they were indeed right to want to keep Eastern European Jews out of the USA.
The national origin quotas favored immigrants from Western Europe over those from Eastern Europe, allowing for a larger number of people from Great Britain to enter the USA than, say, those from Poland. However, MacDonald bemoans, this system was undermined by efforts of left-wing elitist Jewish (globalist) activists (elite is exactly the word he uses) who lobbied for a more liberalized system of immigration. According to MacDonald, left-wing (globalist) Jews wanted more "Third World immigration" (that is, immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America) coming into the USA because it would do more to make Western-European-descended Christians a minority. Moreover, continues MacDonald, left-wing (globalist) Jews could form a political "coalition" with activists from these other ethnic groups and then it would be more difficult for Western-European-descended Christians to gang up on them.
Then MacDonald wails that the (globalist) Jewish activists succeeded with the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which Ted Kennedy championed. MacDonald says that Ted Kennedy assured (racist) doubters that the bill was OK because it would not change the demographics of the country (that is, WASPs would maintain a majority). Then MacDonald points out that over the past half-century the demographics have indeed changed. MacDonald therefore insists that Ted Kennedy very consciously chose to lie, as it was his conscious intention to alter the racial makeup of the country, and that it was the globalist Jewish lobby that very decidedly put him up to it.
We are to believe from MacDonald that by removing the explicitly racist national origin quotas, the Hart-Celler Act made it easy for dark-skinned people from poor countries to enter the USA, opening the floodgates for a barbarian horde. In reality, MacDonald's characterization of the Hart-Celler Act as near-anarchic deregulation is misleading. The Hart-Celler Act created the present system, which says that to immigrate to the USA for the long term, you may do so to seek higher education (student visas), work (H-1B visas), or reunite with family members (family reunification visas). While the explicit national origin quotas are gone, there remain caps on the number of visas that can be issued per country. Since Mexico adjoins the continental USA, it is not surprising that 30 percent of visa applications come from Mexico. Yet no more than 7 percent of all visas issued annually can go to Mexican nationals.
If you are a Mexican who is a spouse or minor child of a permanent U.S. resident, you will have to wait an average 6 years to obtain a family reunification visa -- and that's one of the categories with one of the shorter waiting periods. If, as a Mexican, you are the sibling of a U.S. citizen, the estimated waiting time for a visa is 16 years (see the first page of this PDF). Moreover, H-1B work visas are accessible almost exclusively to persons who hold university degrees (as Melania Trump's case reminds us, a rare exception is made for fashion models). Since impoverished people in impoverished countries still mostly have to farm for their food, they rarely ever scrimp together the resources needed to obtain university educations. For that reason, contrary to MacDonald's disingenuous claims, the present system created by the Hart-Celler Act still stacks the deck against (dark-skinned) penurious people from the "Third World." The 1965 law did not unleash any type of mass migration.
In any case, MacDonald's points here are (a) the national origins regime from 1924 to 1965 was wonderful, (b) everything went to hell from 1965 onward when the Hart-Celler Act allowed for a barbarian horde of non-white people to flood into the USA, (c) this is the result of a left-wing elite Jewish globalist plot, and (d) this happened because Ted Kennedy let himself be a pawn of this left-wing elite Jewish globalist plot.
5. MacDonald condemns Jews (not particular individuals who happen to be Jewish, but Jews in general) as hypocrites.This is a favorite talking point of Stefan Molyneux and other anti-Semites, such as Ann Coulter (see here and here), and these anti-Semites apparently adopted it from MacDonald. The talking point is as follows: most Jews in Western Europe and the English-speaking countries argue for more liberalized immigration into the countries of their present residence (MacDonald doesn't want to admit that the United States is the home country of a Jewish-American). MacDonald (and then Molyneux after him) particularly takes offense at Jewish intellectuals who stand up for the rights of Mexicans to enter the USA peaceably and who have expressed revulsion at Donald Trump's proposal to build an enormous wall to keep them out. MacDonald says that Jews who argue for liberalizing immigration are hypocrites, because the state of Israel itself has border walls to keep out enemy troops from Hamas, and Israel itself has restrictive immigration laws.
That is whacking at a tremendous straw man. First, Israel remains officially at war against Hamas, Syria, and other adjoining states. A legitimate purpose of national borders is to repel military threats. By contrast, the United States is not in a state of war against Mexico, and undocumented Mexicans who enter the USA for work are not military threats. Even if a Mexican acted in consistency with the bigoted stereotypes -- even if that Mexican came to the USA fully intending to benefit from welfare and to put his children into taxpayer-funded government schools, that still would not be an act of war against the United States. The comparison between Israel's border walls against Hamas and Trump's proposed border wall against Mexico therefore fails.
Secondly, the Israel-policy-makes-Jews-all-hypocrites assertion fails to make a distinction between Jews and the Israeli government. It's sad that something so obvious has to be explicated: a Jew doesn't have to agree with every policy of the Israeli government. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute, originally from Israel, for instance, has mentioned that he is not happy about Israel's border walls.
I am not Jewish but, for what it's worth, should there come a day when military hostilities cease -- and that would be very good -- there won't be any worthwhile reason for Israel to maintain the border walls.
Anyhow, Stefan Molyneux "adapts" these same talking points from MacDonald, citing him by name, and the differences between Molyneux's version and MacDonald's are merely superficial.
1.-2.Molyneux agrees that communism is a conspiracy concocted by Jews. Says Molyneux,
Communism doesn't particularly come from the Greek, Roman, Western, Enlightenment tradition [true --S.H.]; it generally comes from Jewish tradition [highly misleading claim; communism, as with other forms of collectivism, is a systematized codification of collectivist traditions that go back to the days of hunter-gatherer clans, predating all these other cultures --S.H.]. Certainly, of course, the founders of communism were Jews [misleading; Karl Marx came from a Jewish family but denounced Jews as selfish capitalists --S.H.]. Jews were less than 2 percent of the Russian population but were more than 50 percent of the leaders of the Communist Party, and, of course, a lot of them were in charge of concentration camps and so on, later on under the Soviet regime [note Molyneux's conspicuous insistence on using the term "concentration camps" and saying that Jews ran them --S.H.].
Whereas an important part of MacDonald's conspiracy theories is that he says that Jews are seldom sincere in expressing any political convictions, I have yet to hear Molyneux say that explicitly. Nonetheless, MacDonald's other accusations -- particularly about Jews obsessing over domination of gentiles -- remain crucial to Molyneux's accusations in the "Truth About Immigration" video. When you look at Molyneux's typed-up source notes, the reference for Molyneux's announcement that Jews ran concentration camps in the Soviet Union is none other than an essay by Kevin MacDonald called "Stalin's Willing Executioners: Jews As a Hostile Elite in the USSR," which is a review of a book by Yuri Slezkine titled The Jewish Century.
3.Molyneux, like MacDonald, says that Jews, communism, and immigration liberalization are all connected, though he does not phrase this exactly in the same way that MacDonald does. Molyneux is more roundabout in trying to put these together. We remember that Molyneux said that communism is predominantly Jewish. Then he says that immigration restriction from 1924 to 1965 was indeed wise and well-justified because Eastern Europeans were communist agents, and when such communist agents entered the USA, they would commit terrorism, espionage,and other acts of violence. Hence, says Molyneux, it was good for the U.S. federal government to ban from the United States any immigrant who might potentially be a communist agent. Since Molyneux said previously in the same video that communist agents were predominantly Jewish, the deductive conclusion the audience is to draw from this is that Molyneux believes that the U.S. federal government was right to block Jewish immigrants in particular.
This, he insists, "was a justified fear, given how rapidly communism had spread throughout the world." Unfortunately, he adds, there was "Jewish opposition" to legislation that very reasonably tried to ban Eastern European Jews who might turn out to be communist agents. But, Molynuex goes on, U.S. Congressman John Rankin laudably pushed back against these Jews.
In attempt to maintain some plausible deniability about whether he agrees fully with this opinion, Molyneux conspicuously employs the "passive voice" in proclaiming:
So there is this concern -- and the degree to which this is valid is certainly arguable -- there is this concern in the minds of a lot of Christian Americans, and this was of course the case in Germany[!!] as well, there was this concern that communism equals Judaism and when communists, a.k.a. Jews, get in power, then a lot of Christians are not long[-lived] for this world, so this is sort of what he [John Rankin] is talking about, and this is all vanished from history [bowdlerized and scrubbed by a politically-correct globalist cabal] and not because it's entirely false. Again, the degree of [Jewish] influence is arguable; we'll talk about more facts [sic] here, but I guess Christians aren't quite as good at telling stories [as allegedly conspiring Jews are].
In this particular video, Molyneux does not repeat MacDonald precisely in proclaiming that Jews lobbied for the Hart-Celler Act primarily to undermine white gentile culture. However, like MacDonald, Molyneux does say that Jews favoring the Hart-Celler Act wanted to get more Jews in particular into the USA. Moreover, Molyneux does repeatedly state that a left-wing globalist conspiracy is pushing for liberalization of immigration in order to undermine white Christian culture in the West (not using the word Jew in that isolated context). And since Molyneux also says that left-wing people who argue for liberalizing immigration are predominantly Jewish, one is to deduce that Molyneux is intimating that this supposed left-wing elite globalist conspiracy to maintain power through "importing"dark-skinned immigrants from "the Third World" is indeed a conspiracy orchestrated by Jews. After conveying that he considers multiculturalism to be synonymous with immigration liberalization, Molyneux says, "Jews, through communism, promote multiculturalism -- and, of course, multiculturalism is promoted by non-Jews, of course [sic; the repetition of of course is Molyneux's] as well -- and this causes problems within the host countries," that is, countries receiving dark-skinned immigrants.
4.Starting here, Molyneux repeats all of MacDonald's favorite talking points about the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act's eugenicist quotas, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act supposedly opening up the USA to "Third World immigration," and of Ted Kennedy lying about demographic change on behalf of a globalist (Jewish) cabal.
5. Here Molyneux repeats the talking point about how any Jew who stands up for Mexican immigrants and against Donald Trump's proposed border wall is a hypocrite on account of Israeli policies.
Final Notes
Molyneux's denunciations of Jews go back more than a decade. On April 9, 2005, he said that
mental health has always been defined in social terms – a combination of sustained relationships and productive work. In other words, a popular Auschwitz guard with a long marriage is the very definition of mental health. Moral considerations do not form the basis of mental heath – a compliant Nazi is considered more ‘healthy’ than an outcast one. This form of ‘social ethics’ is largely due to the Jewish influence over psychology. It would be hard for a Jew to say that individual morality is more important than social acceptance, since to be ‘Jewish’ is to automatically place the authority of the group over the conscience of the individual – just as Christians, socialists, Muslims and soldiers do.
MacDonald says "major anti-Jewish movements throughout history have been the result of real conflicts of interest. . . . I wrote a book called The Separation and Its Discontents. It deals with various anti-Semitic movements, anti-Jewish movements. All of them were deeply involved with Jewish domination [over non-Jews] of one kind or another."
Molyneux agrees that Israel is all about Jewish domination over Palestinians and Arabs of neighboring states:
What is often described as a civil war between Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine was, in fact, little more than an ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by Zionists. ...if the horrors committed by the Nazis continue to live on in the minds of the Jews, how can we expect the Palestinians to forget what was done to them? I'm not equating the Jews with the Nazis [obvious lie] but, from the standpoint of the victims, there are obvious similarities.
It is not a mere suspicion that Molyneux is interested in disseminating anti-Semite propaganda. He repeats conspiracy theories about Jews, conspiracy theories transmitted by David Duke acolyte Kevin MacDonald, and Molyneux cites this same Kevin MacDonald repeatedly.
Again, here is the 46-minute montage where you can hear Stefan Molyneux and his anti-Semite conspiracy-theorist source speak for themselves.
UPDATE from Tuesday, November 22, 2016: Stefan Molyneux repeatedly makes the disingenuous claim that Richard Spencer's explicitly eugenicist white nationalism is no worse than Zionism. He says Israel is an "ethno-state" for excluding gentiles. What renders the claim so mendacious is that Israeli statutes are not about exiling gentiles, such as Arab Muslims, and Israel is more diverse than Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer would have people believe. See the follow-up posting refuting Molyneux over here.
Over the past few years I have grown increasingly concerned about a dangerous collectivist movement that has taken at least two forms in the West. The more moderate -- but still misguided -- wing of this movement has generally used the term demographic winter to describe what it has been fighting. The more militant and obviously dangerous wing of the movement has another name for the scourge that the movement purports to be combating: white genocide. The more militant wing is more openly eugenicist, while the more moderate wing seems to be peopled mostly by right-wing Catholics. Initially that seems strange because, since Sir Francis Galton coined eugenics in the late nineteenth century, Catholic writers have generally voiced opposition to the eugenics movement (actually, they were mostly only against "negative eugenics," as will be explained below). However, this blog post will explain what purportedly anti-eugenicist right-wing Catholics who shout "demographic winter!" have in common with the more explicitly eugenicist nationalists shrieking about "white genocide!"
Essentially, what both wings have in common is that they are fretting over high-IQ people in wealthy countries (translation: mostly white people) having too few children. When, in wealthy countries, you find that the average rich (white) couple has fewer than two children, it means that if the trend endures, the long-term result will be "depopulation" for these rich (white) people: their population will shrink. Both the Catholic "demographic winter" people and the more openly racist eugenicist "white genocide" people sound the alarm over the "depopulation" of this demographic, admonishing their fellow members of the (white) upper class to have more and more children.
The eugenicist "white genocide" people then provide another sinister component to this: whereas the right-wing Catholic "demographic winter" people usually avoid bringing up race explicitly and refrain from admonishing other demographic groups to stop having children, the eugenicists add that there is the additional problem of impoverished low-IQ (generally nonwhite) people having too many children in the West, and Western governments ought to implement state powers to halt that process.
In this blog post I will first explain how it was the original nineteenth-century eugenics movement that first cited biological science, in the modern era, to promote the idea that upper-class (white) people in wealthy countries are morally obligated to have more children. I will then explain how, despite Catholic writers long having a reputed (somewhat inaccurately reputed) antipathy to eugenics, right-wing Catholics in the West have, since the late twentieth century, revived some of the old eugenicist arguments for the ends of the Religious Right (which, supposedly, are not really compatible with eugenicist ends). Finally I will talk about, since the 1990s, nationalist eugenics movements have regained popularity and are pushing the "upper-class (white) people have a duty to breed" arguments once again. I think that the nationalist eugenicists' cause has been aided by the fact that right-wing Catholics -- purportedly the opponents of eugenics -- have revived this idea that was first given prestige in the late 1800s and early 1900s by the first generation of eugenicists.
For the first part, I will have to explain "miscegenation," the distinction between phenotype and genotype, and the distinction between "positive eugenics" and "negative eugenics."
PART ONE: EUGENICISTS OF THE LATE 1800S AND EARLY 1900S
One Need Not Be a White Supremacist to Be a Eugenicist, But Eugenics and White Supremacism Do Frequently Go Together
I should clarify that people can impose eugenicist government policies without being white supremacists. For example, many psychologists (not merely eugenicists) argue that particular mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, are genetically inheritable. Throughout the early 1900s, eugenicists argued that for the good of mankind, people carrying particular inheritable medical conditions, including a susceptibility to psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder and epilepsy and depression, should be forcibly sterilized by state governments. As governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson had his state government forcibly sterilize many white women on these eugenicist grounds. Eugenicists claimed that such policies were humanitarian in the long run, for the reason that future generations would be spared of the pain that these conditions inflict. If the Chinese government decided enacted a policy of compulsory sterilization on sufferers of bipolar disorder, epilepsy, and depression on the Chinese citizenry, such a policy would not be white supremacist but it would nonetheless be eugenicist.
Still, much of the eugenics movement from the late 1800s to the twentieth century has indeed been associated with white supremacism, and for intellectuals to associate, mentally, eugenics and white supremacism together is justified. As I have previously discussed, white supremacists proclaim that there are discrepancies in average IQ score between different ethnic groups (true), proclaim that race-related genetics accounts for somewhere between 40 percent and 80 percent of IQ (dubious), proclaim that an ethnic group's genetically induced average IQ causes that ethnic group to be generally economically productive or generally criminally violent (dubious), and therefore proclaim that one's race, on average, ultimately causes one to be economically productive or criminally violent (dubious). Thus, when someone starts talking about IQ and genetics and race, you are not unreasonable in preparing yourself to hear this talk followed by some racist recommendations about what government policies -- especially immigration policies -- should be.
In Practice, Racist Eugenicists Care More About Phenotype Than Genotype
Although racist eugenicists claim to be concerned about genetics, their discussions of the social ramifications of race mixing demonstrate such racist eugenicists are more concerned about phenotype than genotype. Genotype refers to the genes you carry -- genes that are not necessarily expressed. Phenotype refers to particular genes being expressed. I shall explain.
Some genes are dominant and some are recessive. The genes for dark skin are dominant. Therefore, if a blonde-haired, blue-eyed person has a child with someone of African descent, the resulting child will possess and transmit genes from both parents but will almost always be dark-skinned and have brown eyes. The distinction between genotype and phenotype can be explained with the example of white people who have brown eyes.
Suppose the letter B represents a gene for eye color that a white person receives from one parent. Upper-case B represents the gene for brown eyes. A lowercase b represents the gene for blue eyes. Suppose Mike received, from each parent, a gene for brown eyes. His genotype would be represented by the code BB. One B comes from Mike's mother and the other B comes from his father. Amanda received, from each parent, a gene for blue eyes. Her genotype would be associated by the code bb, one b coming from her mother and one b from her father. If Mike and Amanda have a child together, there is a zero-percent chance of the child having blue eyes, as the brown-eye B gene is dominant over the blue-eye b gene. However, their brown-eyed child will still carry the gene for blue eyes. The child, a girl named Laura, has the genotype Bb. Genotypically, Laura carries the gene for blue eyes. Phenotypically, all we see is that she has brown eyes; it is not obvious, simply from looking at her, that she carries the gene for blue eyes.
Now suppose that Laura has a child with a brown-eyed man named Wally. Wally is similar to Laura in that Wally, too, had one blue-eyed parent with the genotype bb and a brown-eyed parent with the genotype BB. Although neither Laura nor Wally is blue-eyed, as they both carry the blue-eye gene, there is a 25 percent chance of having a blue-eyed child. That blue-eyed child would have the genotype bb, one b coming from Laura and the other coming from Wally. They have a 75 percent chance of having a brown-eyed child. If one B comes from Laura and another B comes from Wally, that child (we will call him Ray) will have the genotype BB and it will be impossible for Ray to have a blue-eyed child, despite both of his parents carrying the gene for blue eyes. It would be impossible for Ray to have a blue-eyed child even if he has blue-eyed siblings with the bb genotype. It is still possible for Laura and Ray to have a brown-eyed child who carries the blue-eye gene, though -- a fifty percent chance, with one B coming from one parent and one b coming from the other parent.
Suppose, though, that Laura divorces Wally and marries a blonde-haired, blue-eyed man named Craig. Craig has the genotype bb. In this case, when they have a child, there is half a chance the child will be blue-eyed (with a b from each parent) and half a chance the child will be brown-eyed (with the B necessarily coming from Laura). Whatever the child's eye color, there is a 100-percent chance of that child carrying the gene for blue eyes.
I bring this up because present-day white-supremacist eugenicists fear that even through completely nonviolent means, blonde-haired, blue-eyed people can go extinct. This would happen through what the late-nineteenth-century eugenicists called miscegenation. That refers to interracial sex resulting in mixed-race children. Imagine that, for some reason, every unattached person in Denmark who is blonde-haired and blue-eyed decided only to have children with a black partner with the genotype BB (and not a dark-skinned person who still had a blonde, blue-eyed parent, as that person would be phenotypically dark-skinned but still genotypically part-Caucasian). If every blonde-haired, blue-eyed person in Denmark chose, by his or her own volition, only to have children with African-descended people with the BB genotype, there would be nothing violent or coercive about it, but white-supremacist eugenicists would still lament this. They would call this the "extinction" of Aryan white people and they would even call it the "genocide" of white people. Of course, on the genotypic level, this would not be the extinction of blonde-haired, blue-eyed people, the dark-skinned mixed-race children that resulted from these interracial pairings would still carry the genes for blonde hair and blue eyes, even if those genes went unexpressed for generations.
Consider, for instance, that the gene for red hair first developed in Africa; there are still African tribes carrying the gene for red hair. The gene for red hair is recessive, though, and thus it wasn't expressed until people settled in northern Europe and only lighter-skinned, lighter-eyed people survived and reproduced. Even if redheads are rare among blacks, it doesn't mean that the gene for red hair is extinct among African blacks; there are still African blacks today who carry that gene and will transmit it to future generations.
This is why I think that white-supremacist eugenicists are being misleading when they say they care about genetics; they actually care more about which genes you physiologically express, which is phenotypic, than the genes that you carry, which is genotypic. This point will be important in a section below.
Positive Eugenics Versus Negative Eugenics
I also have to explain the difference between "positive eugenics" and "negative eugenics." Positive eugenics refers to measures -- which can be either private or state-enacted -- by eugenicists to encourage the "right" sort of people, meaning people who are allegedly genetically superior, to have children and thereby bless future generations with these superior genes. Sir Francis Galton, who coined eugenics, recommended that once the people with the "superior" genes were identified, the State pay them tax money to reward them for having more children. This was to incentivize the "right" people to have more children and transmit their superior genes.
An example of a private effort at positive eugenics was Robert Klark Graham's Repository for Germinal Choice. Graham -- who was not a geneticist but an optometrist who became a multimillionaire by inventing shatterproof eyeglasses -- started a sperm bank that he ran under specific conditions. At first, he said only Nobel Prize winners could donate sperm. The women who received the sperm would have to score well on IQ tests. Of course, this whole effort was premised on the idea that IQ is mostly tied to genetics. After a while, Graham noticed that women with high IQs still disliked the very idea of their children being sired by sperm from wrinkled old men, and they were reluctant to accept sperm from such wrinkled old men, Nobel Prize or not. Graham ended up having to lower the bar, saying that any man with a high IQ could donate sperm to the repository.
The term eugenics more often conjures up images of the brutal measures that characterize negative eugenics. Negative Eugenics refers to violent measures -- most often from the State -- to stop people who are supposedly genetically inferior from burdening future generations with their supposedly inferior genes. The most obvious method whereby eugenicists could stop supposedly inferior people from having children and grandchildren is to murder them, and that is exactly what the Nazis did. And,indeed, it was mostly because of the Nazis that the term eugenics became stigmatized and fell into disrepute. Prior to the Nazis, eugenicists tried other violent methods -- other forms of "Negative Eugenics" -- to discourage the "wrong" sort of people from siring children. One of those methods was the aforementioned state governments enacting compulsory sterilization. White-supremacist eugenicists also encouraged nonwhites to have abortions, and the Religious Right often says that Margaret Samger started Planned Parenthood because she was a white-supremacist eugenicist who wanted to cause blacks to go extinct by encouraging black mothers to abort. In order to have her ideas heard at all, Margaret Sanger did give very unfortunate lip service to eugenics and even to the Ku Klux Klan, which were still very powerful political movements in the 1920s. However, most of the Religious Right's accusations about Margaret Sanger being a white supremacist and eugenicist are misleading, as you can learn about here.
Restricting Immigration From Poor Countries As Negative Eugenics
Finally, germane to the present controversies is immigration control. Ancestors of eugenicists in Western Europe and the United States generally came from northern and western Europe and they were Protestant. Not only did the eugenicists of the late 1800s and early 1900s consider the Japanese and the Chinese and blacks to be racially inferior; they even thought that of Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe, whom they thought of as a dark-skinned and inferior races. The dark-skinned "riffraff" depicted in this racist cartoon from the year 1900 are supposed to be southern and eastern Europeans.
Actual newspaper editorial cartoon from 1900; the man in the upper left-hand corner is President William McKinley, whom many eugenicists derided as being too friendly toward immigrants and insufficiently eugenicist.
The eugenicists of the early twentieth century correctly observed that whether or not these impoverished people could enter the United States was a matter of life and death for them. Once eugenicists such as Henry Goddard established the national origins quotas (which would be repealed in 1965 and replaced with the presently existing visa system), it was the case that if anyone entered the United States in the absence of the federal government's permission, armed force would be applied to this person (and that continues under the present system). Eugenicists recognized then, explicitly -- as many border-enforcement "hawks" continue to recognize implicitly -- that if government force successfully kept these poor people from poor countries from reaching a freer and wealthier nation, these people would most likely die in their countries of origin from starvation, civil war, or some other byproduct of the poverty and political repression that they had attempted to flee.
To the extent that the U.S. federal government succeeded in obstructing Lithuanians from their goal of entering the USA, those Lithuanians usually died in Lithuania at a much younger age than they would have had they been able to enter the USA. Likewise, to the degree that federal agents presently succeed in obstructing South Americans in their efforts to enter the USA, those South Americans die at a much younger age than they would otherwise, and for reasons similar to the Lithuanians of a century back.
Today's "immigration skeptics" generally understand that but fear saying that out loud. By contrast, the eugenicists of 1916 were much more explicit. They thought that when poor would-be immigrants from poor countries died earlier as a result of being prevented entry into the USA, that was euthanizing racially inferior, dark-skinned people, and thankfully stopping them from polluting the USA's gene pool. These are the reasons why immigration restrictions count as a form of negative eugenics.
Even If You Do Not Advocate Negative Eugenics Through the State, You Can Still Be a Eugenicist
Many eugenicists were enthused over both positive eugenics and negative eugenics. However, it was possible for someone to reject negative eugenics and merely be interested in positive eugenics. The inventor Alexander Graham Bell considered the possibility that some cases of deafness were inheritable, and he thus developed an interest in studying eugenics. The more he heard of negative eugenics, though, the more offended he became at the brutality of it, and he left the eugenics movement. Moreover, when Robert Klark Graham was running his sperm bank, his emphasis was on positive eugenics; it is entirely possible for someone tho run such a sperm bank without advocating that the State violate people's rights through negative eugenics. Still, in hobnobbing with Garrett Hardin, who did recommend negative eugenics, Graham did seem to offer a tacit sanction to negative eugenics.
I bring this up because even if someone eschews advocacy of violence-imposed negative eugenics but still exhorts people with the supposedly supreme genes to procreate, that still counts as positive eugenics. Yes: in effect, when you proclaim that the "right" sort of people are morally obligated to have children, that is indeed eugenics.
The present immigration visa system has been unable to stop all entrants from poor countries, though, and the eugenicist measures of the first half of the 1900s likewise failed to stop all dark-skinned entrants from the poor countries. That was cause for worry for the eugenicists. First, if Lithuanian couples entered the USA and had children withing the USA, then the population of pure-blood Eastern Europeans within the USA would grow, and then the Eastern European people might eventually outnumber the WASPs, whom the eugenicists considered more "native." Worse, thought the eugenicists, some native-born WASPs might actually marry some dark-skinned immigrants and have children with them. As the eugenicists had already begun to understand how some genes are dominant and others are recessive, they had already feared miscegenation; they feared that if a rich WASP female had a child with a dark-skinned immigrant, the resulting children would be of a stock inferior than what would have resulted had the rich WASP female had instead married and had children with another native-born WASP.
"White Genocide" Is the New "Race Suicide"
The eugenicists feared that once the dark-skinned people entered the United States, the dark-skinned people would outbreed the WASPs, regardless of whether dark-skinned people married native-born WASPs or stuck to marrying other dark-skinned people. Upon sounding the alarm over this, eugenicists fretted over the supposed failures of native-born WASPs to counteract this trend. First, as stated before, eugenicists abhorred the fact that some affluent native-born WASPs married and had children with these dark-skinned "alien" people. Secondly, the eugenicists expressed disgust at how some native-born WASPs refrained from having any children at all.
The eugenicist sociologist Edward Alsworth "E. A." Ross referred to both phenomena as race suicide -- that is, the self-destruction of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And even if it weren't for the dark-skinned "alien" population breeding like crazy, the fact that too many native-born WASPs decided to remain childless was a sin in and of itself; Ross believed it was a sort of self-imposed destruction of the WASP population. This term race suicide is a precursor, from almost exactly a century ago, to the equally hysterical term the alt-right has adopted in recent years: white genocide. Both phrases, starting with a one-syllable word and ending in a three syllable word containing the suffix -cide, refer to the supposed death of the white race -- a death which can occur through nonviolent means if whites either do not have children or if they do have children with dark-skinned people.
President Theodore Roosevelt agreed with E. A. Ross and thus adopted the phrase race suicide. As one means of enacting negative eugenics to prevent nonwhites from polluting the U.S. gene pool, he arranged what he called a "Gentlemen's Agreement" with Japan. He persuaded the Japanese government to enact its own laws to obstruct Japanese citizens from emigrating to the contiguous U.S. states. (This did not apply to Japanese emigration to Hawaii, which was a U.S. territory at this point but not a state. That is how my Japanese ancestors were able to migrate to a U.s. territory that eventually won its statehood.) That Theodore Roosevelt was able to lean on the Japanese government itself to stop Japanese people from migrating to the continental USA, allowed Theodore Roosevelt to shift blame. If anyone told him that it was cruel for Japanese people to be restricted by law from coming to the USA, Theodore Roosevelt could reply -- rather disingenuously -- that such cruelty was not his responsibility but all the fault of the Japanese government.
However, Theodore Roosevelt also had choice words for his fellow WASPs who either were having children with dark-skinned people or just plain not having children, as such people contributed to the white Anglo-Saxons' race suicide. On May 16, 1908, he exhorted to the white women of the Methodist Episcopal Church to do their duty and have children for the good of the white race: "...we must condemn the [wealthy white] woman who, from cowardice or coldness, from selfish love of ease or from lack of all true womanly quality, refuses to do aright her great and all-essential duties of wifehood and motherhood." On May 18, 1902, he wrote to Marie Van Horst:
...you touch upon what is infinitely more important than any other question in this country -- that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial. ...the [rich white] 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 [white] race, and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people.
This sort of thinking is the basis for the "demographic winter" scare being raised by right-wing Catholics such as Jennifer Roback Morse, despite Catholicism's reputed repudiation of eugenics. Something has to be said about that.
Right-Wing Catholics Are on the Opposite Side of Eugenicists Who Would Happily Demand That Nonwhites Be Aborted?
Ever since the eugenics movement began in the late 1800s, such Catholic writers as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc denounced the eugenics movement in general and negative eugenics legislation in particular. It might therefore initially seem that right-wing Catholics who have criticized eugenicism have taken a classical-liberal laissez-faireist position on this issue. To conclude that right-wing Catholics have voiced objection to eugenicism on some classical-liberal laissez-faireist basis, though, is to misunderstand the position of politically right-wing Catholics like Jennifer Roback Morse.
The right-wing Catholic position on such reproductive issues as abortion, contraception, and compulsory sterilization, is that the fetus's life belongs to God and not to the woman carrying the fetus. Therefore, goes this reasoning, when it comes to what a woman does with her uterus and other reproductive organs, the party that should decide what the woman does with her reproductive organs is not to be the woman herself but God. As God will not speak directly to this woman, God's word on the matter is to be interpreted by Catholic church authorities; they speak for God, and they say that preservation of the fetus trumps the woman's authority over her own body.
Such right-wing Catholics therefore urge that the State forcibly punish any party that might assist the woman in terminating the fetus; allegedly, a woman desiring to terminate a fetus inside her must not be in a state of mind where she holds contractual capacity; the fact that she would want to terminate the fetus must mean she is not being competent, and therefore a party that would assist her in terminating the fetus must be preying upon someone who is not in a position to offer consent. Moreover, the right-wing Catholic position is usually that it is also proper for the State to enact measures to discourage contraception.
Thus, white-supremacist eugenicists and right-wing Catholics are not truly on opposite sides of this issue. Suppose a very poor, teenage Ecuadorian girl learns she is pregnant;she is still in the first trimester. Because she is very poor and young, she concludes that if she carried the fetus to term, she could not, in her present state, give the child all the care and amenities that a child deserves. She therefore seriously considers an abortion, weighing the options. At this point, the white-supremacist eugenicist will hope that the Ecuadorian girl chooses abortion. If the Ecuadorian girl has the baby and they move to the United States, believe the eugenicists, the Ecuardorians' inferior genes will cause her children to be criminally violent and economically unproductive, and they will impose an economic burden and criminal-justice burden on the USA's native non-white population. If the State did something to encourage or compel the Ecuadorian girl to abort the fetus, the white-supremacist eugenicist would not be too sorry about that.
By contrast, the right-wing Catholic will immediately decide that, regardless of the Ecuadorian girl's circumstances, she is necessarily morally obligated to carry the fetus to term. That is God's will. And if the Ecuadorian girl considered going to a clinic for an abortion in this first trimester, the right-wing Catholics would wish that the State would prosecute the clinicians criminally for terminating the fetus, which they call a murder of a person.
Superficially, it may seem that the white-supremacist eugenicist and the right-wing Catholic are on opposite sides. The white-supremacist eugenicist would prefer the State to encourage the nonwhite girl to abort the fetus, whereas the right-wing Catholic would prefer that the State obstruct the nonwhite girl from aborting the fetus. What the white-supremacist eugenicist and right-wing Catholic have in common is that they want their own will imposed on the girl through governmental means. Neither of these sides countenance that the decision is rightfully the Ecuadorian girl's alone.
When white-supremacist eugenicists advocate negative eugenics to discourage nonwhites from having children, the opposite route is not to call for the State to obstruct nonwhites from obtaining the abortions they seek. Those are both statist impositions. The real pro-freedom position is to let the woman decide whether she will or will not remove something from her own body.
At any rate, we see:
The modern exhortation that rich (white) people in rich (white-majority) countries are duty-bound to have children -- supposedly for scientific reasons -- comes from the early twentieth-century eugenics movement.
If someone makes this exhortation but refrains from recommending negative-eugenics measures openly, that does not preclude that person from basing the exhortation on eugenics. The exhortation is still consistent with the goals of positive eugenics.
That Catholic writers have traditionally criticized eugenicists from the late 1800s does not preclude right-wing Catholics from making recommendations that align with the goals of white-supremacist eugenicists. That is what we see in the case of right-wing Catholics' propaganda documentaries about "demographic winter."
Moreover, while the word eugenics deservedly fell into disrepute after World War II, the ideas behind eugenics never completely went away, even though those ideas, too, were looked up with more suspicion. Eugenics continued to be promoted by an American think tank called the Pioneer Fund. Over the past forty years, important figures linked to the Pioneer Fund, who have promoted eugenics, have included the late J. Philippe Rushton (1943-2012, who served as the Pioneer Fund's president) and Richard Lynn, coauthor of IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
PART TWO: A RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA DOCUMENTARY CONTINUES THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S CRUSADE AGAINST "RACE SUICIDE"
"The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter"
Right-wing Catholics have continued Theodore Roosevelt's crusade against "race suicide" by producing a two-part documentary titled The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter. I think that many people involved in this project, such as Jennifer Roback Morse (a free-market libertarian turned apologist for the Religious Right's efforts to use the State to impose its own ideas about reproduction and the proper structure of the family) and traditionalist Kay Hymowitz, would say that this documentary and its goals are consistently anti-eugenicist. And I think if they said as much, they would sincerely believe that.
However, that would be because they are thinking only of negative eugenics; the documentary's message does not actually contradict positive eugenics. Moreover, there is a section near the end of Part One of the documentary that gives lip service to a favorite talking point of "immigration skeptics" -- a talking point very dear to the white-supremacists of the alt-right. By giving lip service to this talking point, Part One of The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter actually does lend reinforcement to the case that today's white-supremacist eugenicists -- members of the alt-right -- are trying to make in their online propaganda.
The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter does not aim to try to discourage nonwhites from having children, and, in that respect, the right-wing Catholics behind this movie are distinct from both the original wave of eugenicists and today's alt-right eugenicists. However, the point of the movie is indeed to exhort rich (white) people in rich (white-majority) countries to have more children, forgoing contraception and forever abstaining from any resort to abortion. That is not in conflict with positive eugenics.
Of course, the right-wing Catholics behind this documentary are well-aware that most people are under the false impression that we are in imminent danger of "overpopulation." They recognize that if they argue that rich (white) people in rich (white-majority) countries have a duty to have children, that exhortation will immediately be met with the reply, "What are you talking about? That is exact opposite of what we should want, since we are being threatened by a crisis of overpopulation!" The first half of Part One of The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter goes over how environmentalists such as Paul R. Ehrlich (who was interviewed for this movie) created the overpopulation scare. The documentary then cites accurate information in refuting this trumped-up scare. None of that is objectionable to a laissez-faire liberal.
However, Part One of The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter then must make its case about why rich (white) people in rich (white-majority) countries bear some duty to rear children. Therefore, it then begins to deliver very dubious utilitarian arguments about why there is a need for the present generation of child-bearing age (Generation Y/the Millennials) to consider itself duty-bound to have children. The documentary correctly points out that as the baby-boomers and Generation X retire and try to collect Social Security and Medicare, the Social Security system is in danger of going bankrupt. That is accurate, and this shows why Social Security and Medicare should be phased out gradually, with the younger generation being able to opt for private retirement accounts.
As The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter is Religious-Right propaganda and actually not sympathetic to laissez faire, the documentary does not countenance the privatization of Social Security and Medicare as an option. Instead, the documentary tries to convince the audience that the solution is for Millennials to have children for the purpose of "saving Social Security and Medicare." Allegedly, if Millennials have lots of children and expect those children to be economically productive, that will create a lot of wealth that these young people will put into the Social Security system, thereby keeping it solvent for when members of Generation X retire.
At this point, the documentary decides to address what might be considered "alternative solutions" to the supposed problem -- "alternatives" to exhorting the younger generation to have more kids.
The documentary says that Western European countries are also recognizing that their welfare systems are soon to experience catastrophic budget shortfalls. Then the documentary says that because the Heads of State of Western European countries are reluctant to ask their native populations to overcome the budget shortfalls by having more children, these Western European governments have attempted to offset the budget shortfalls by relaxing immigration rules. The documentary alleges that Western European governments believe that if they relax immigration rules, resulting in more poor immigrants from poor countries coming into Western Europe, those poor immigrants will work very hard and put more wealth into government coffers, thereby saving the welfare state.
Anne Sward Hansen narrates the movie, "In summary, as populations begin to age, care of the elderly [through Social Security] will become increasingly difficult for younger generations. So an already difficult decline in human capital will be compounded for the next shrinking generation of workers. And as long as fertility rates remain below the replacement level [that is, a couple should have at least two children so that when both members of the couple die, there are still at least two new persons alive to replace them], this situation -- by definition -- becomes worse over time." Then she intones ominously, "There are still other unexpected consequences of fertility decline." One of the supposed negative unintended consequences is: immigration.
Lip Service to Anti-Immigration Talking Points
The movie cuts to University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers saying, "When it is so low -- the number of babies being born -- that we don't have enough workers [putting money into governmental welfare coffers] that induces immigration to move into the country to bring new workers to fill the gaps left over by too few native children being born."
At that point, alt-right anti-immigration racists laugh derisively, as they insist that immigrants from poor countries are a net drain on government coffers. The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter refrains from making that particular point, but it does make two points that are friendly to the views of alt-right anti-immigration racists.
First, The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter presumes that it is indeed proper for a government to use force to restrict peaceful immigration if it means protecting "native customs" from contamination by outsiders. The documentary proclaims that if many Third-World immigrants coming into Germany results in Germany's residents peaceably discarding German traditions, that would be a travesty. Ostensibly, that would be such a travesty that the documentary judges that preventing this tragedy is sufficient grounds for Germany to initiate the use of force by restricting peaceful immigration.This documentary receives no objection from the alt-right racists on that point.
What population growth there still is in Europe has partly been from people living longer but predominantly from immigration. . . . The result of massive immigration in Germany, as well as in virtually all rich countries, is that immigrant cultures are projected to become the majority by 2050. [So?--S.H.] Consider how the composition of society will change in the United States over time. By 2050, the vast majority of the United States population will be Hispanic. Already half of the City Council in Brusssels is comprised of recent immigrants or their children. [So? Incidentally, the movie cites Mark Steyn's book America Alone for this figure; we will get to him below. --S.H.] The immigrant population of cities like Rotterdam[, the Netherlands,] is 40 percent, and the most common boy's name in Amsterdam is Mohammed [of course, the audience is expected to interpret that news as bad necessarily]. Europe's native populations are actually disappearing at astonishing rates.
Then the movie cuts to Kay Hymowitz saying, "We are all immigrants here [in the United States]. That's very, very different in a place like Germany or France, where there is a 'German identity' and it's almost impossible for people there to think of somebody from Turkey, say, as being a German, because there is a German -- shall we say? -- a kind of 'German blood' [!!! --S.H.] And the outsider simply is an outsider. They [sic] do not have the immigrant society that we have always had, and so they are trying to deal with a very, very new environment" (boldface added).
Then the movie goes to Yale University economist Larry Jacobs, who says, "So what's going to happen is you've got a Europe needing these workers. They're going to come in from Muslim countries, from Africa, from Asia, and you're going to end up with a situation -- a potentially explosive situation [meaning violence], if they're not assimilated into the culture. You'll see certain [native Western European] cultures disappear. It's entirely possible that, you know, the French -- if you use the projections -- the French will disappear. There will be no native-born Frenchmen that come from the traditional French population."
Let us translate what Kay Hymowitz and the movie are saying. It is the case that there are landholders and employers in France and Germany who consent to immigrants from Africa and Asia staying on their land. And there are people from Africa and Asia who choose voluntarily to emigrate to France and Germany. However, that might mean that there may come a day when the majority of people living in France and Germany might make choices that involve discarding what Kay Hymowitz and the films' makers judge to be beautiful native European traditions. That idea is so abhorrent that this means it is bad for rules on peaceable immigration rules to be relaxed. To the degree that people fall for that argument, it means that government force shall continue to be inflicted upon people who migrate peacefully. Moreover, Hymowitz rather creepily insists that rather than let people voluntarily move in or out of Germany by their own choosing, it is important that the majority of people on German soil be of "German blood"(!). Blood and soil.
Secondly, says the documentary, poor people from poor countries are just generally violent and prone to terrorism. The documentary sounds the alarm that poor people from poor countries are now outnumbering the native-born (white) people in many Western European neighborhoods, and this will result in more criminal violence and terrorism being imposed on (native-born white) Western Europeans. Sound familiar? It should, because that was a favorite argument of the late nineteenth-century's white-supremacist eugenicists and it is presently a favorite argument of alt-right anti-immigration racists.
Immigration is disparaged both by people who fret about "overpopulation," such as John Tanton and Garrett Hardin, and by people fretting about "depopulation." Tough break!
If The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter ended right there, alt-right racists could praise the propaganda movie without reservation, but then the movie begins to make points that do not sit well with the alt-right racists. The movie claims that even poor nonwhite countries are experiencing "depopulation."
Where This Propaganda Documentary Doesn't Agree With Most Anti-Immigrationists
Anne Sward Hansen narrates, "There is actually a far bigger problem than immigration [note that the film's makers assume that the audience agrees that immigration is a 'problem' at all--S.H.]. Consider that [poor] developing countries -- the main source of immigration -- are themselves experiencing fertility decline." The movie then cuts to one of the experts interviewed, Philip Longman, saying, "Mexico has experienced an incredible birth dearth. The decline in fertility in Mexico is without precedent in world history. . . . Americans have this vision that there will always be Mexicans trying to come across the border, and that we need some huge wall to keep them out. Well, be careful what you wish for, because, not only in Mexico but throughout Latin America, we're seeing dramatic declines in fertility."
Then the movie cuts to demographer Dowell Myers providing figures on this. Myers even goes as far as to complain that a result of the decline in fertility in Mexico means that it has fewer "potential immigrants to send [sic; immigrants send themselves] to the U.S. We have been dependent on Mexican workers but we might not get those workers in a decade."
In a point that will surely rankle Mark Steyn (more about him below), the narration by Anne Sward Hansen says disapprovingly, "Some are very surprised to learn even Middle Eastern populations -- the other major source of European immigration -- are experiencing fertility decline."
That definitely conflicts with what anti-immigrationists love to say about nonwhites from poor countries. As Stefan Molyneux likes to say of nonwhites in poor countries as he waves his head around in circles, "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. . . . They breed like crazy."
Alt-right anti-immigrationists would be befuddled as to how Dowell Myers or anyone else could say that fewer immigrants from Mexico coming into the USA would be unfortunate. The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter then goes on to say that even if we assume that all immigrants from poor countries are completely peaceful and engaged in no crime or terrorism, there would still not be enough of them to make up for the budget shortfalls and save the Western European welfare state. The documentary therefore proclaims that there is no way for the welfare state to be saved except for Millennials to commit to having lots of children -- if each couple shot for having more than two children, that would just be great.
All of Part Two of The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter is about how you need to have children to make your life meaningful. It says if you do not have children, you are just selfish and it blames "individualism"for this scourge -- yes, it uses the word individualism as a pejorative.
How Those Who Proclaim Your Duty to Have Children Are Anti-Individualism
Bruce C. Hafen of BYU Law School, interviewed sympathetically in Part Two, proclaims, "Trying to speak to the change [fertility decline] that has occurred in the last of thirty or forty years, we have seen what I would call an anti-marriage revolution. In the U.S., it's best understood as you look at the history of the no-fault divorce movement, which led to a skyrocketing increase in the divorce rate, which has leveled off a little but not much, and a big increase in unmarried cohabitation. . . . All of that happened on the tide of a big individual rights movement, which started off for very good reasons in the civil rights movement and addressed issues that needed to be addressed, addressed about women, but then there were some extremists who took the individual rights theory way too far."
University of Texas sociologist Norval Glenn adds in the movie, "And I think the growth of individualism -- which everybody agrees has happened in this country in recent years, everybody agrees it's happened in most modern societies if not all -- I think this is really the main reason marriages have become less stable."
Anne Sward Hansen then narrates, "Individualism would eventually emerge as a single unifying theme" when it comes to explaining this horrendous demographic winter.
University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus blames individualism and capitalism: "There you butt up against postmaterialist society. We love our things [belongings], we love consumption, we love the self, and those things are not consonant with love of children, love of family, love of things that are beyond the self. . . . I'm a sociologist. All around me I see social norms, social processes -- things that involve more than just me. Organizations, institutions. Trying to convey that to a generation that has not been socialized to think of anything outside of themselves, making claims upon them, is a real challenge."
Yale economist Larry Jacobs chimes in that as members of the population grow older, they have fewer children, "they focus more on themselves, and you see ultimately a nation that stops having babies."
Narrator Hansen gives the filmmakers' conclusion: "Ultimately the rise in individualism has meant the decline of both fertility and families. . . . In looking for causes of fertility decline, we have learned that various social mega-trends, including cultural changes towards individualism and away from family life, seem to be at the foundation."
Kay Hymowitz summarizes, "I would say that there really is a conflict at the heart of our culture, between marriage and its unchosen involuntary obligations -- that's on the one hand -- and on the other hand, our individualism."
Alt-right anti-immigration racists who see Part One will most definitely protest the documentary's contention that poor countries full of nonwhite people are experiencing depopulation. Alt-right racists proclaim that this is absolutely untrue and, if it were true, that would be good news, and yet The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter treats that as if it is bad news.
Still, the right-wing Catholics behind the documentary were still pandering to "immigration skeptics"
in implying that rights-violating immigration restrictions are justified when they "preserve culture" by discouraging the native population from voluntarily discarding native traditions; and
scaremongering about how a horde of nonwhite immigrants will outnumber a native (white) population that is too complacent and too selfish to recognize its duty to breed. (Again, sound familiar?)
And, over the past ten years, the old eugenicist argument -- that "we" are being threatened by poor nonwhite immigration populations out-breeding "us" -- has become more and more popular among figures on the political Right, despite this eugenicist argument being originated by political Progressives like E. A. Ross and Theodore Roosevelt.
By the way, both Stefan Molyneux and this Demographic Winter movie are incorrect in their proclamations that the social conservatism of a Western country positively correlates with its birth rate. Demographic Winter: The New Economic Reality purports that a Western country becoming more Christian would increase its birth rate and yet, as Kerry Howley notes in Reason magazine, it is Italy -- more Christian than northern Europe -- that has one of Europe's lowest birth rates. And while Stefan Molyneux repeatedly pontificates that white Western women taking on careers contributes to the lowering of their birth rates, the truth is that Sweden and Norway, which have among the highest workforce participation rates for women, correspondingly have among the highest fertility rates.
PART THREE: "WE" HAVE TO OUT-BREED "THEM," AND YET "THEY" ARE OUT-BREEDING "US"
The Mainstream Right Reviving Theodore Roosevelt's Demagoguery About "Race Suicide"
You can observe this phenomenon every time a figure on the political Right frets about how nonwhite immigrants in ghettos are having too many children whereas "we" richer native-born whites are falling behind in that regard. The result, fret the anti-immigrationist rightists, is that nonwhites will be able to overpower and outvote "us."
In 2006, John Gibson -- who was then an anchor of the Fox News Channel --seemed to be airing this view, although a quick sentence fragment gave him some plausible deniability. He warned that
half of the kids in this country under five years old are [ethnic and racial] minorities. By far the greatest number are Hispanic. Know what that means? In twenty-five years the majority population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, Hispanics are having more kids than others, notably the ones Hispanics call gabachos -- white people -- are having fewer. Now in this country European-ancestry people -- white people -- are having kids at the rate that does sustain the population. It grows a bit. That compares to Europe where the birth rate is in the negative zone. They're not having enough babies to sustain their population. Consequently, they're inviting in more and more immigrants every year to take care of things, and those immigrants are having way more babies than the native population. Hence, Eurabia. Why aren't they having babies? Because babies get in the way of a comfortable and prosperous modern life. . . . The Euros in particular can't be bothered with kids. . . . To put it bluntly, we need more babies. ..civilizations need population to survive. ...[Sex for] procreation, not recreation.
He began the segment with, "Do your duty: make more babies."
The crack about "Eurabia" indicates Gibson's fear of Middle East-descended people having children in Western Europe. However, on the matter of Hispanics, he says, "So far we're doing our part here in America, but Hispanics can't carry the whole load. The rest of you, get busy. Make babies!" If we interpret this statement charitably, we might interpret this as meaning that Gibson does not object to Hispanics in the USA having more children than other whites. Still, there are mainstream right-wingers who are more overt in expressing their dismay at nonwhites having children in the West.
Contrary to what is said in The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter, Mark Steyn sounds the alarm in his Wall Street Journalop-ed "It's the Demography, Stupid," that, as far as Western Europe and the English-speaking countries should be concerned, people of Middle Eastern descent are definitely having too many children. He proclaims that Muslim immigrants are entering the West and having children, basically breeding a Muslim terrorist army that cannot be matched by native-born Westerners, as native-born Westerners refrain from having as many children.
Steyn's fulminations are puerile. In reality, if one is worried about Middle Eastern immigrants and their children becoming radicalized, it would make sense to communicate with them and educate them about the dangers of radicalization. In lieu of weighing that as an option, Steyn dismisses such people as psychologically unreachable, and propounds that either immigration from Muslim be restricted, white non-Muslims in the West have more children, or that both of these courses be followed.
In a follow-up blog post, "It's Still the Demography, Stupid," Steyn proclaims, "The western world [Steyn actually means white people in the West] is going out of business because it's given up having babies. The 20th century welfare state, with its hitherto unknown concepts such as spending a third of your adult lifetime in 'retirement,' is premised on the basis that there will be enough new citizens to support the old. But there won't be. . . . Enter Islam [actually, immigrants who call themselves Muslim], which sportingly volunteered to bear the children we couldn't be bothered having ourselves, and which kind offer was somewhat carelessly taken up by the post-Christian west." He concludes that white European women "got groped and raped by coarse backward 'migrants'" as the one logical consequence of this. In this vein, Stefan Molyneux puts out tweets fretting that in Western countries, Muslims -- on average -- have approximately one more child per household than non-Muslims do.
And although Mark Steyn is in Canada and not the United States, he puts forth the usual ignorant pontificating about undocumented Mexican immigrants inside the United States. In "The Trumping of Party," Steyn says, "...as every functioning society understood until two generations ago, immigration has to benefit the people who are already here. ...there are too many unskilled Mexican peasants flooding into a country with ever diminishing social mobility and no hope of economic improvement without a credential that requires taking on a quarter-million dollars in debt" (emphasis Steyn's). In this same blog post, he conflates the situation of undocumented Mexicans in the USA with radical jihadists in Europe, as if they are just about equally menacing. After all, says Stefan Molynex, the extent to which the USA refrains from banning brown-skinned immigrants, it is "the demographic suicide of the United States."
Back in the USA, Bill O'Reilly warned John McCain on his Fox News Channel program,
The New York Times wants open borders. They want all the 12 million illegal people who will be legalized to bring in their extended families, not just wives and children, but moms and dads, brothers and sisters. This would lead to, by my calculation, 40 and 50 million foreign nationals being absorbed into the United States in the next 12, 13 years. That would sink the Republican Party, I believe, because we'd have a one-party system and change -- pardon the pun -- the whole complexion of America. . . . Do you understand what the New York Times wants and what the Far Left want? They want to break down the white Christian male power structure -- of which you are a part, and so am I -- and they want to bring in [sic; a Mexican immigrant adult chooses to bring him- or herself into the USA; no one else decides that for him or her --S.H.] millions of foreign nationals to basically [split infinitive] break down the structure we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So you gotta cap that with a number.
O'Reilly means a quota, ignorant of the fact that there is already a quota capping the number of visas issued to Mexicans annually, and it's precisely because that number is so low that Mexicans have been entering the USA without visas for decades.
O'Reilly also repeated this sentiment -- even some of the same phrases -- on his radio program.
Ann Coulter
But the commentator most famous in the United States for touting the they're-outbreeding-us-and-are-taking-over hysteria is Ann Coulter. In an interview as fawning as the one he did with known white separatist Jared Taylor, Molyneux approves as Ann Coulter propounds, "Well, those are people [immigrants] bringing particular cultures [translation: nonviolent customs] with them [into the United States]. It has taken centuries to create the freest, most prosperous, fairest societies in the world [she means the West], and there have been lots of studies about this, as you know -- especially out of Samuel Huntington, some professors at Harvard, at UCLA, you never hear about this -- so that the Left can go on persuading Americans and I suppose Canadians and British and so on, that American culture is the worst culture in the world, and sooner we replace ourselves [with immigrants] the better off we are."
like this mass immigration of peasant cultures to America... What is being brought in [observe the dehumanizing passive-voice 'brought in' for immigration; in actuality, an adult immigrant is the only one choosing to bring him- or herself into the USA--S.H.] whether it is from India, Asia, Arab cultures, all of Latin America are extremely peasant cultures. Thus this massive child rape, gang rape, drunk driving [on the part of immigrants in the West]... That's why Democrats are bringing these people in: [...]they are also used to block voting. That's what they do. . . . If we dump millions upon millions of people from backward cultures as different from ours as possible -- incredibly poor -- not only are you getting just a shocking 'war on women'... Why do Democrats want it? Because, post-1970, immigrants are voting 8 to 2 for the Democrats.
Breitbart Newsquotes her saying, "The American people [she means right-wing native-born white people, not native-born Hispanics who vote Democrat] are being out-voted. We can't win anything. If immigration, legal and illegal...continues the way it has been going, we are looking at 100 years of President Obamas, and an entire Supreme Court of Ruth Bader Ginsbergs." If only she could persuade "a few more white people to vote Republican," then what she considers the national crisis shall "solve itself."
In this spirit, U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) tweeted out a photo of himself with Geert Wilders, proclaiming, "Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end."
The Alt-Right Racist Eugenicists
The term that the alt-right has come up with for this alleged danger is "white genocide." The first time I heard this term, it was on Twitter. At first I thought that everyone using this term was participating in some tasteless prank from 4chan or 8chan. The term is overblown, as the anti-immigration propagandists throwing it around say that there does not have to be a mass killing of white people for "white genocide" to occur. Simply many nonwhite people immigrating into Western Europe is "white genocide." If native-born white Europeans adopt peaceable customs from non-Western countries and voluntarily discard native customs, that contributes to "white genocide." If blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans marry and have children with dark-skinned immigrants, that contributes to "white genocide" -- and what Theodore Roosevelt called the WASPs' "race suicide." If blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans refrain from having children, that contributes to "white genocide" -- and what Theodore Roosevelt said is their "race suicide."
Stefan Molyneux spent much of the period from 2006 to 2010 breaking up families. He told the young listeners of his podcast that because their parents were not anarchists, it meant their parents and siblings were abusive and ought to be disowned. Yet, at present, Molyneux frequently delivers homilies about how today's young people have a duty to marry and have children. Since then, what has changed? First, back in the days when Molyneux was most visibly breaking up families, he and his wife did not yet have a child. Moreover, this change in emphasis is not necessarily an internal contradiction on Molyneux's part. The idea is that the way that children were normally raised in the late 1960s and early 1970s was corrupt and abusive, but it would be good for you to marry and have children under the condition that you raise your children according to the specifications that Molyneux provides. Thus, Molyneux is not inherently opposed to the family unit; he merely wants you to be part of the right kind of family unit: a family unit that follows his teachings.
The premier neo-Nazi in the USA, Richard Spencer, also promotes the 'white genocide" argument. Stefan Molyneux approvingly quotes from this essay by Spencer, saying,
We are undergoing a sad process of degeneration. We will need to reverse it using the state and the government. You incentivize people with higher intelligence, you incentivize people who are healthy to have children [Spencer is demanding that the State do this ‘incentivization,’ and Molyneux approves] . . . .
Today, contraception and birth control are nothing less than a curse [when used by upper-middle-class white couples]! Those with the foresight to engage in ‘family planning’ [he means upper-middle-class white couples] are exactly the kind of responsible, intelligent people who should be reproducing. And increasingly, middle-class White families are so over-burdened with taxation and the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education that they don’t feel they can afford children [you see? –S.H.]. This is not only a dysgenic catastrophe but a moral one as well.
On the other hand, individuals with low innate intelligence or even criminal personalities [Richard Spencer, like Stefan Molyneux, means blacks and Latinos] -- those who should be limiting their reproduction -- can’t be bothered to purchase a condom.
Molyneux proclaims that Richard Spencer, "is making an argument based on facts. ... Richard Spencer would be open to any counterfactual arguments that came his way." That is the dishonesty we have previously seen from Molyneux; Spencer has already dismissed the myriad data contradicting his assertions. Molyneux gives this, his overall evaluation of Spencer's white-genocide rhetoric: "It's not racism if you're pointing out empirical facts about ethnic differences. It's just facts. You hate facts, I guess, if you're on the Left," the definition of Left here being stretched to include anyone and everyone not taken in by this race rhetoric.
Here you can listen to the excerpts of Stefan Molyneux's "The Untruth About Steve Bannon" video where Molyneux quotes and defends Richard Spencer's recitation of the white-genocide talking points:
CONCLUSION
There is no way around it: no matter how much someone claims to sympathize with Objectivism, if that person goes around shouting that people have a moral duty to bear children, that is collectivist. Moreover, it is in the eugenicist tradition, especially if it is involves making the case that "our" enemies are out-breeding us and therefore we must have more children so that "our" side will have more troops to fight them in some multi-generational struggle.
If a creepy man comes out of the woodwork to insist that Objectivists have a duty to stop being so selfish and to have children, his allegiance might actually be to the eugenics of the Pioneer Fund. Ask him for his opinions on the racist eugenicism of J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn.
Raising a child is an enormous responsibility; undertaking this responsibility involves a thorough self-analysis of whether one is at the point in one's life where one has the resources and ability to make a good job of it. For various reasons -- sometimes for reasons beyond one's control -- it may be the case that there is never a point in a person's life where he or she has the means to undertake this task. Regardless of what the creepy man or anyone else says, whether you should or should not have children is up to you. People outside of a woman's household -- people who do not love this woman -- have no business telling her what she ought or ought not to do with her own reproductive organs.
On February 11, 2017, I added the portion about Stefan Molyneux's apologia for neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. The information on Italy having among the lowest birth rates, despite being one of the most religious European countries, and of Sweden and Norway having both high fertility rates and high female-workforce-participation rates, was added on Sunday, March 26, 2017. The sentence about Stefan Molyneux sending out tweets about Muslims having more children than non-Muslims in the West was added on Friday, April 21, 2017. The quotation from Stefan Molyneux about "the demographic suicide of the United States" was added on April 27, 2017. On July 10, 2017, I added the infographics quoting Theodore Roosevelt.
