Lately I have blogged about a foolish video apologia for white-nationalist cult leader Stefan Molyneux on the part of right-wing YouTube vlogger Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. Molyneux put out a tweet dishonestly denying that he has advocated eugenics and white nationalism. Sargon approvingly cited the tweet and took it at face value, as if it were proof that there was nothing to those accusations. You can actually see montages on YouTube that show that Molyneux indeed has a record of promoting eugenics and whitewashing white nationalism. Molyneux has gone as far as saying that “freedom has a eugenics component to it inevitably.” You can see those montages and my blogging about them over here.
Although the denial of Molyneux’s eugenicism and white nationalism was the main topic of Sargon’s video, Sargon did touch on something else that warrants concern. Sargon disapprovingly read out loud a tweet pointing out Molyneux’s long record of pressuring his followers to disown their siblings, parents, and close friends merely for disagreeing with Molyneux’s ideological advocacy. Molyneux was especially known for this practice between 2006 and 2014; we have not heard as much about it since then. Dismissing the tweet about Molyneux’s treatment of his followers, Sargon pronounces, “I think those accusations are probably somewhat overstated, aren’t they? And this, I think, is something that happened a long time ago. And I think it would be fair if we were to ask him his positions on these times now.”
Someone would come away from that statement of Sargon’s with the impression that Molyneux’s practice of dividing families is something that is long past. As I have blogged before, urging his fans to disown their parents and longtime friends over disagreements with him is something that Molyneux has done publicly at least twice since 2017. As of this writing, Molyneux has not shown any contrition over what he has done.
Below are three different cuts of the same montage of Molyneux performing this manipulation in recent years.
There is one cut that is two minutes long and can therefore be embedded in a tweet. Editing it down that short meant cutting out parts of Molyneux’s sentences, though. For the complete sentences, you can watch the 20-minute cut. If you watch the longest cut, you must have some patience for Molyneux’s many ramblings tangents.
15-minute cut
20-minute cut (less of Molyneux’s tangents have been cut out)
2-minute minute that can fit in a tweet (a lot of editing, with some interjections edited out of the sentences; for the complete sentences, watch and hear the 20-minute version)
See also: In November of 2019, Molyneux did an entire video falsely denying he ever said, and meant in a biological context, that not all human beings are the same species. For a montage disproving Molyneux’s denial (which, again, comes in a two-minute cut and a longer cut), go here.
Last month, the quasi-nationalist YouTube vlogger “Sargon of Akkad” (Carl Benjamin) did a video for his sister channel, Akkad Daily, where he launched a defense of white nationalist cult leader Stefan Molyneux, whose podcast he once did an interview for. Because Molyneux used the MailChimp marketing software for sending out his white nationalist e-mail newsletter, Nandini Jammi, cofounder of the activist campaign Sleeping Giants, alerted the MailChimp company of the uses to which Molyneux was putting its platform. Not wanting its brand associated with the white nationalism, MailChimp ceased providing service to Molyneux. In protest against MailChimp’s decision, Sargon denied in his video that Molyneux had done anything wrong at all, proclaiming, “...I do not agree that Stefan Molyneux is even a white nationalist.”
Early in the Akkad Daily, video, Sargon shows this tweet where Molyneux delivers what anyone who has been following his career for the past five years will be able to spot as obvious lies. Molneux’s tweet pronounces,
I oppose eugenics as an egregious State violation of the non-aggression principle.
I have interviewed 17 leading scientists on human intelligence - including leftists: http://www.fdrurl.com/IQ
I am not a “white nationalist”
1. I oppose eugenics as an egregious State violation of the non-aggression principle.
2. I have interviewed 17 leading scientists on human intelligence - including leftists: https://t.co/OaUVYOXaYW
Point 2 of Molneux’s is dubious. The link in his tweet is one that goes to a playlist of seventeen videos, but two of the videos are with the same interviewee (Kevin Beaver), which means “17 scientists” is not even the correct numeric figure. Before sending out the tweet, Molyneux did not even bother to count the people on his own list. One of them, Nicholas Wade, is not a Ph.D. scientist but a well-known science writer whose education goes no farther than a bachelor’s degree in natural science.
Moreover, two of the interviewees — James Flynn and Eric Turkheimer — contradict Molneux’s claims and have, subsequent to those interviews, identified Molneux’s claims as charlatanism. The main interviewee listed whom Molyneux cites in his claims about race and IQ is Charles Murray, and Eric Turkheimer directly contradicts him here and here, strongly implying that the very same talking points of Charles Murray repeated by Molyneux are racist. With respect to James Flynn, following his interview with Molyneux, he directly called Molyneux a hack and a waste of time: “I wouldn’t think of going within a mile of him if he talked. These people [Molyneux and his minion Lauren Southern] are just coattail-hangers. They don’t have anything new to contribute to the debate...” In the tweet, Molyneux cites Turkheimer and Flynn as if they corroborate his propaganda. In actuality, they disprove it, and yet Molyneux continues name-checking them under the pretense that their findings are consistent with his racism.
As for four of Molyneux’s interviewees in particular — Charles Murray, Linda Gottfredson, Helmuth Nyborg, and Jason Richwine — the work for which they are best-known is not well-respected anywhere in the academic community except for a very insular and discredited circle I will discuss further below.
Points 1 and 3 of Molyneux’s tweet are outright lies, though the dishonesty of Point 3 is more obvious. Since late 2015 this blog has cataloged the evidence of Molneux’s support for white nationalism. However the term eugenics remains much more obscure than “white nationalism.” For that reason, eugenics requires a deeper explanation.
The point on eugenics is of interest to me for several reasons. First, long before I heard of Molyneux, I was already interested in the topic of the ethical ramifications for eugenicist theory. I had taken an interest in the topic because I wanted to see where it did or did not apply to a possible medical procedure in the future where parents engineer the embryos of their children, immunizing them against inheritable diseases or even adding enhancements in aptitudes. More pertinent to the topic at hand, though, throughout February this Stefan Molyneux has, as in the above tweet, ludicrously talked of eugenics as if it were a practice he has never advocated.
What Was, and Is, Eugenics?
Eugenics studies formally began in the late 1800s by Sir Francis Galton, a fellow scientist and cousin to Charles Darwin. Galton had noticed that many accomplished people came from the same family. He suspected that so many of members of the same family being so skilled and accomplished had less to do with their having grown up under the same environmental conditions than with their each having inherited those traits biologically. Sir Francis theorized that if (rich) people with the most “desirable” physical biological traits had children with one another, that would result in even “better” children. Sir Francis named his own theory eugenics. Eu- is Greek for “good”; eu-genics means “good seeds/origins/genes.”
Always connected to eugenics was a personality trait that was of special importance to Sir Francis, one that he considered to be inborn rather than the result of conditioning or one’s own choices. That trait was intelligence. Ironically, for all of his own brain power, Sir Francis himself was unable to devise a method that he found satisfactory in quantifying intelligence. The purported solution to Sir Francis’s problem would come from an unlikely source. And there was another gap in his theory that had to be filled.
Besides their blood relations and their mutual interest in biological inheritance, Galton had something else in common with Darwin. Although both of them correctly inferred that there must be some sort of mechanism by which one generation transmits its biological traits to the next, neither Galton nor Darwin could identify what that mechanism was.
That task was left to a quiet Benedictine monk named Gregor Mendel. It was Mendel who, through his experiments on pea plants, discovered the mechanism of the gene, and who discovered the principles behind dominant and recessive alleles. Although Mendel mailed his monograph to Darwin for comment, Darwin tragically never opened it, apparently occupied by other matters going on in his life. Hence, Darwin went to his grave not having this valuable piece of information that would further integrate his theory.
Mendel’s discoveries could easily have been lost to history if his writings were not discovered by three scientists of the early twentieth century who were tackling similar problems — Carl Correns, Hugo de Vries (who coined mutation), and Erich von Tschermak. Providing a further integration was William Bateson, who coined genetics.
Despite the two gaps in his theory that the respective works of Mendel and Binet would fill for him, Sir Francis went ahead with his eugenicist movement, undaunted. Deciding that his theory should be applied in practice, Sir Francis proposed that some governmental body should determine which people possessed the most desirable physiological traits, and then pay them taxpayer funds to incentivize them to breed with one another. In this suggestion, Sir Francis introduced an idea that is common in — though not a requirement for — eugenics advocacy. That idea is that the government should intervene in human interactions that will increase the likelihood that people will have children possessing the most “socially desirable” inborn traits, especially above-average intellectual ability.
As Sir Francis failed in developing a plausible measure of intellectual ability, the French psychologist Alfred Binet worried about children. He noticed that some children had learning disabilities. This made him worry that the longer these disabilities remained unidentified, the more these children would fall behind in their development. He needed a method to identify which children were struggling with their learning. It was for that reason that he devised the IQ test.
Whereas Sir Francis conceived eugenics as the perfect rationalization for his desire to elevate his own class and marginalize others, he had failed where Alfred Binet succeeded. The IQ test that would be the salvation to Sir Francis’s theory was originally developed with the intention of lifting up the very same people whom Sir Francis and other eugenicists were working hard to marginalize.
Once they had learned of the discoveries of Mendel and Binet, it was the task of Sir Francis’s successors in leading the eugenics movement — such as mathematician Karl Pearson in the United Kingdom and biologist Charles Davenport in the United States — to incorporate Mendel’s genetics and Binet’s IQ test into Sir Francis’s overall social movement. Once this integration was performed, the movement of eugenicism had developed two main planks.
1.Theory: Free will is nonexistent at worst and unimportant at best. Free will was so unimportant to eugenicists that they did not even acknowledge it, saying that in the philosophic question over what made an adult who she is, and gave her the character she has, could only be a question of nature versus nurture — an idiom derived primarily from phrases Sir Francis Galton himself had used in writing on eugenics. In eugenics theory, the main factor in causing someone to be different from everyone else — the main factor causing her behaviors and choices — is inborn biology.
Incorporating Mendel’s discoveries into eugenics, the theory is that if someone is more successful at business or military operations than other people, it was because of his genetics. Eugenicists would not simply say this person has superior genetics and leave it at that, however. Eugenicist theory is also collectivist. What matters is the collective. In eugenicist theory, this person with allegedly superior genes is duty-bound to transmit those superior genes to future generations.
2.Practice: Agreement with the theory above was sufficient to make someone a eugenicist, but most eugenicists went further. Eugenics was not merely supposed to be descriptive; most eugenicists expected this discipline to be prescriptive as well. As they saw it, it was not sufficient that people be free to choose to marry and have children with whom they want. Such choices were “selfish” in that people who married and had children were making such choices without consideration for how such choices affected the gene pool of the wider society at large [see page 157 over here].
For this reason, the second plank of eugenics is that some genetics-savvy third party — which was usually the government, but did not always have to be — would have to intervene on people’s private fertility choices and provide them guidance. This guidance would come in the form of reminding romantic couples that in their choices with whom they had children or even interacted at all, their personal happiness must not be prioritized over actions that would provide a net benefit to their germlines and race as a whole.
A play in a 1913 issue of The Fortnightly Reviewattributes this to Sir Francis’s eugenicist protégé, Karl Pearson: “As far as the elementary principles of right and wrong are concerned, what in the world can they be if they are not what is or is not expedient for society? What is social is moral, and what is social is right, and there is no safe definition of right beyond that.”
More briefly, eugenicism is defined by two beliefs. First is that genetics, not environmental conditioning or your own choices, is most decisive in determining your actions and personality traits, including those that distinguish you from others. Second is that rather than leave people alone in whom they meet, marry, and have children with, there has to be a third party that can oversee these activities. This third party must discourage some pairings and births and approve others. All of this is for the alleged well-being of some social collective.
Note that all those planks can be believed by people of any race or ethnicity. Therefore, a person can try to apply eugenics to any race or ethnicity, or even all of them at once. The famous writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, urged that black families practice eugenics for the betterment of genes among blacks. For these reasons, someone can theoretically be a eugenicist without being a white supremacist. However, it is not an accident that eugenics is often associated with white supremacism. Beginning with Sir Francis himself, most eugenicists have been white and have conflated alleles associated with white skin with superiority. If one made a Venn diagram where one circle was “eugenicists” and the other was “white supremacists,” the point of overlap between the two circles would overtake the “eugenicist” circle almost completely. It would leave but a tiny sliver to account for eugenicists who were not also white supremacists.
It is true that Mendel’s discoveries concerning alleles can greatly conflict with white supremacists’ premises. Mendelian genetics itself shows how genetics conflicts with the idea of “race,” “race” and skin color being much more superficial than genetics — literally. Because the genes for dark skin, dark irises, and dark hair are dominant, whereas light skin, blue irises, and blonde hair are recessive, the child of a black man and blonde woman will usually have dark skin. This leads many white supremacists to think of the child as being more “black” than “white.” Yet the geneticist recognizes that whatever the child’s outward appearance — “phenotype” — a look at the child’s genetics, genotype, shows the mixed-race child is not any more closely related to his father than he is to his mother.
But racism is not about rationality but rationalization. It is less concerned with science than having a veneer of scientific respectability to reinforce its preconceived conclusions. For that reason, eugenics has mostly been used as an intellectual tool of white supremacists.
Eugenics As the Originator of the Racist and Anti-Immigrationist Talking Points That Molyneux Uses
There are two main methods whereby eugenicists can shape a society’s gene pool to their liking. The first, “positive eugenics,” involves the eugenicist third-party rewarding the “right people” for procreating, thereby reinforcing and encouraging more of that behavior. That is consistent with Sir Francis’s first eugenicist policy proposal. Again, this third party does not always have to be the government.
In the 1980s millionaire optometrist Robert Klark Graham, inventor of the shatterproof eyeglasses material that would pave the way for polycarbonate glasses lenses, privately founded the Repository for Germinal Choice. This was a sperm bank where, initially, both the men donating the sperm and the women receiving it would have to have higher-than-average IQs. (Graham’s failure to attract enough people led to him lowering his standards later.) Graham was explicitly inspired by the eugenicist propaganda of the Pioneer Fund (more about that below) and he was directly helped by three known eugenicists — Garrett Hardin, who coined “the tragedy of the commons”; Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Hermann Müller; and William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor. The last of those three was explicitly a white supremacist as well. As the sperm bank was a wholly voluntary matter, it was an example of private institutions enacting positive eugenics, the private sperm bank being the third party.
The second method, “negative eugenics,” is more well-known. As suggested by the name, negative eugenics is involves the eugenicist third-party taking action to discourage or prevent particular people, those deemed undesirable, from being able to procreate and transmit their “inferior” genes to future generations. The most well-known and horrifying means of doing this was mass murder. The Third Reich outright murdered people of ethnicities it deemed defective. Another method was for state governments in the USA to impose compulsory sterilization of people they judged unfit — mostly epileptics and other persons with psychiatric disorders and low IQs.
In a February video where he disingenuously denies ever having any sympathies for eugenics, Stefan Molyneux pretends that murder and compulsory sterilization were the only forms of negative eugenics that governments employed. Molyneux conspicuously omitted mention of two other violent method that governments employed to “protect” the white population from being polluted and “replaced” by allegedly genetically sub-par races. The first of these was miscegenation laws — ordinances and statutes penalizing interracial marriages. This is of interest in that Molyneux has repeatedly direly cautioned his audience against interracial couplings. The second method was immigration restriction. For multiple reasons — not just because this immigration restriction is something that Molyneux has long advocated, and on the basis of the original eugenics movement — this omission of the role eugenics has historically played in the enactment of immigration restrictions is very convenient for Molyneux.
An organization that played an especially role in the eugenics movement, not merely in the USA but even in Germany under the Third Reich, was an American not-for-profit called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund was founded in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, the heir to a vast textile fortune. The aims of the Pioneer Fund were then explicitly eugenicist and racist. Even this early in the organization’s history, it was already developing a racist theory that, with some minor alterations, Molyneux would be approvingly repeating from 2015 onward.
Latching onto Alfred Binet’s IQ test, the Pioneer Fund scholars noticed that IQ was a stronger predictor than other factors in predicting how financially successful someone would be in life, and that, on average, some “races” scored higher on IQ tests than others. There is a lot of evidence that someone’s IQ is strongly influenced by the level of living standards under which that person grew up. Anticipating that that might become the accepted explanation for disparities in IQ scores between people, the Pioneer Fund sought to convince the public that inborn genetics, especially genetics relating to skin color, was the primary driver of IQ.
Among the recommendations the Pioneer Fund made for public policy was the restriction of immigration into the United States on the basis of race, genetics, and IQ. Just as many members of the Alt-Right do today, eugenicists associated with the Pioneer Fund, such as Madison Grant and Charles Davenport, bemoaned the influx of impoverished immigrants into the USA who were of ethnicities they considered culturally and genetically different from themselves. Foreshadowing the very same rhetoric from today’s Alt-Right, they predicted that these ethnic-alien immigrants would come to the USA and reproduce.
Either these alien immigrants would marry native-born WASPs, which would produce hybrids the eugenicists considered a net decline in quality for the population, or the ethnic aliens would keep to themselves in their own enclaves and ghettos, having too much sex, and eventually out-breeding the native-born WASP population. As today’s Alt-Right screams about a great replacement of whites causing a “white genocide”, the eugenicists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proclaimed that a failure on the part of native-born WASPs to obstruct the immigration of these impoverished aliens would lead to the replacement of the native-born WASPs. Eugenicists referred to this as the WASPs’ own “race suicide.”
However, the impoverished immigrant ethnicities the original eugenicists feared most were not the exact same ethnicities about which Stefan Molyeux and his Alt-Right cronies howl today. Whereas Molyneux and the Alt-Right of today demagogue against Latinos, Arabs, and Africans, the fashionable fears of the 1920s were directed toward another set of ethnicities. Eugenicists had already barred the immigration of Chinese people through the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and, with eugenicist Theodore Roosevelt successfully pressuring the Japanese government in 1907 to take on the task of preventing its own Japanese citizens from migrating to the continental USA (but not Hawaii, then a U.S. territory). With Asian immigration restricted, eugenicists turned their ire toward people who are usually considered white today: southern and eastern Europeans.
It was the immigration of these people that was restricted in the Immigration Act of 1924. This law, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, imposed national origin quotas that were explicitly racist and eugenicist in intention. The quotas favored immigration from northern and western European Protestants and curbed immigration from southern and eastern European Catholics and Jews.
Here we find an interesting irony in Molyneux’s white-nationalism advocacy. Molyneux has twice praised Poland as a model for other white nationalists to follow. Of his trip to Poland, Molyneux first said disingenuously, “First of all, I’ve always been skeptical of the ideas of white nationalism, of identitarianism, and white identity.” Then, to the extol the virtues of what he considers to be a whites-only society, he continued, “However, I am an empiricist, and I could not help but notice that I could have peaceful, free, easy, civilized, and safe discussions in what is essentially an all-white country.” In another video, he pronounced,
You know, I go to Poland — what is it, 99-percent white? I don’t need any security. The streets are incredibly clean. Crime is almost nonexistent. Nobody gets called a racist. There’s no talk of white privilege. No identity politics. No endless diversity-nagging. You know, I’ve spoken against white nationalism, but I’m an empiricist. I’m an empiricist! I went to the country. I saw how it was like. . . . I’ve spoken out against white nationalism, but I’m am empiricist. I’m listening. I’m listening to my experiences. Can’t argue with the facts. Can’t argue with the reality.
Yet this same Molyneux praises the very same national origin quotas that the original eugenicists championed and enacted, national-origin quotas that were finally removed in 1965 with the Hart-Celler Act. (Contrary to Molyneux and his followers, the Hart-Celler Act was not the huge opening up of the borders they call it. The national-quotas were replaced by the current visa system, which places caps on the number of visas issued to each country. No more than 7 percent of the recipients of visas each year can come from the same country, but, because Mexico adjoins the USA, over 23 percent of visa applications understandably come from Mexico. This disparity, which anti-immigrationists such as Stephen Miller and Rep. Tom Cotton refuse to rectify through any liberalization, is a major reason why so many people have to resort to immigrating covertly.)
In misrepresenting the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as some anarchic opening up of America to all the nonwhites of the world, Molyneux mourns the repeal of the openly-eugenicist national origin quotas. He tells one caller, “First of all, America from 1925 to 1965 had a virtual moratorium on immigration. And, by the way, it was in fact one of the more prosperous times — if not the most prosperous times — in American history.” In calling this duration such a prosperous time, Molyneux overlooked that the Great Depression fell in the middle of it. He likewise snivels to Peter and Anita calling in from Sweden,
Sweden decided in 1975, with no public consultation, to become a multicultural nation in the same way America decided — the Democrats in 1965, with no public consultation, and with specific lies told to the public about the effects of these policies — changed the Immigration Act to cut off immigration from Europe [big lie from Molyneux] and open it up to the Third World, to decide to become a multicultural nation.
Here is the irony in that: unlike Molyneux, the crafters of the Immigration Act of 1924 not only did not praise Poles for their whiteness, but did not even consider Poles to be white. They reviled Poles as congenitally penurious people who would pollute the gene pool of the United States if they migrated here and had children here. The consequence of the same national-origin quotas that Molyneux defended, reports the New York Times, was that in the USA, “the arrival of Italians and Poles fell by 90 percent” in 1924. As Daniel Okrent discloses, “There were more than 3.5 million Jews in Poland in 1939. Under the National Origins law, the 1939 quota for the entire nation allowed only 6,524 Poles, Jews and non-Jews alike, to enter the United States legally.”
Of special note here was how the Pioneer Fund and its major backers, such as Madison Grant and Charles Davenport, strongly supported the restrictions against Polish immigrants, especially those who were trying to come as refugees from Naziism. The Pioneer Fund’s complicity in this historical travesty extends far beyond its success in preventing the Third Reich’s victims from finding refuge. The Pioneer Fund’s contributions to the Third Reich’s power were much more direct, even friendly.
During the 1930s, American scholars financed by the Pioneer Fund, including Grant and Davenport, communicated directly with “race scientists” of the Third-Reich government: Hans K. F. Günther, Erwin Bauer, Fritz Lenz, and Eugen Fischer. (Yes, someone named Eugen was an expert on eugen-ics.) These were not racists who merely happened to live in Germany when Adolf Hitler was chancellor. They were employed directly by the Third Reich government for the stated purpose of advancing the Aryan race at the expense of Jews, Roma people, and any other ethnicity the Nazis disliked. As his employees, they ultimately answered to the Führer himself. In Europe, the Third-Reich race scientists cited the experts of the Pioneer Fund. In turn, the Third Reich sent its propaganda movies about its eugenics program to the Pioneer Fund, and the Pioneer Fund got these films shown throughout the United States in high school science classes and even churches. In the duration of the thirties and up until U.S. entry into World War II, the Pioneer Fund provided apologetics in America for the Third Reich’s eugenicist measures.
It was only when Americans confronted the atrocities the Third Reich committed, taking eugenics to its only possible conclusion, that the discipline of eugenics in general fell into a well-earned disrepute throughout the Western world. This was not, however, the end of the Pioneer Fund itself, which underwent a re-branding. Henceforth, the Pioneer Fund and its adherents had to discard the term eugenics, which had deservedly gained a negative stigma. Moreover, on account of the civil rights movement, white supremacism had gained a deserved stigma as well. Henceforth, advocates of the Pioneer Fund’s propaganda would refer to it as “race realism” and the science of “human biodiversity.” But while its self-designations had changed, the Pioneer Fund’s overall mission had not. It had to become more covert in its methods for promulgating eugenics and white supremacism.
Now being more discreet, the Pioneer Fund had to make its racist argument through indirect means. It did this by stressing average IQ. The argument arrive by means of syllogisms deduced from shaky premises. This is the first syllogism, which is stated explicitly.
Differences in living standards are caused by differences in IQ.
The “races” have differences in living standards.
Therefore, the “races” having different living standards is caused by differences in IQ.
Once that syllogism is accepted, Pioneer Fund cronies introduce the next premise: Differences in IQ are a factor that is biologically inborn and immutable.
When, in the privacy of your mind, you apply that new premise to the above syllogism, this is the next syllogism you are to deduce, one that the Pioneer Fund is relatively careful about not making too blatant.
Differences in IQ are a factor that is biologically inborn and immutable.
The “races” having different living standards is caused by differences in average IQ.
Therefore, the “races” having different living standards is caused by a factor that is biologically inborn and immutable.
This is a roundabout method for saying that insofar as there are unequal living standards between members of different races, this is mostly explained by inborn, congenital differences between those races, differences that no public policy can rectify. Because he is less clever than most people associated with the Pioneer Fund, Stefan Molyneux has stated openly his reason for choosing this set of syllogisms as his explanation for poverty among nonwhites in the West. You can hear him give that reason in this 1 minute, 12-second-long clip video:
1 minute, 12 seconds
Molyneux assumes that if he rejects this eugenicist rationalization for unequal living standards between ethnic groups, the only alternative is the accept the popular left-wing idea that the poverty of blacks and Latinos relative to whites is mostly explained by pervasive systemic and institutionalized racism toward nonwhites. This is a type of racial inequality that, convenient for his demagoguery, Molyneux conflates with an accusation that whites generally hate nonwhites and generally choose to act toward them out of malice.
This demonstrates how, as much as he touts himself as a genius, Molyneux possesses a weak and uncreative imagination. The situation is more complex. Even after slavery and Jim Crow have been vanquished, they have made such a powerful difference the circumstances of many people that even with slavery and Jim Crow gone, their geographic, political, and psychological after-effects can continue to have an impact. And though Molyneux and many other white supremacists talk about welfare payments as if those are the only governmental program that can discourage or impede entrepreneurship among nonwhites, Richard Rothstein and his book The Color of Law provide much more plausible explanations for how governmental programs have deprived many blacks and Latinos of access to the same capital markets that are more accessible to whites.
As an example, the New Deal and the Truman administration subsidized affordable housing for whites to an extent far greater than what was done for blacks and Latinos. And insofar as later government programs from the Lyndon Johnson administration onward have attempted to help blacks and Latinos catch up, the benefits that white families had already received decades earlier were “grandfathered” in and had a better chance to perpetuate themselves.
In any case, as I have argued before, the Pioneer Fund syllogisms that Molyneux has adopted and propagated are based on faulty assumptions. It is true that IQ is a better predictor than many other variables when it comes to predicting who will have high living standards as an adult. But, as psychologist Gena Gorlin has pointed out to Yaron Brook, this is not because IQ is a good predictor in its own right. Rather, IQ is a weak predictor, and it is rated a better predictor than the other variables because those others are even weaker.
Moreover, though living standards and IQ correlate, it does not follow that an ethnic group starts off with a high average high IQ while in poverty, and then grows prosperous. Rather, rises in average IQ for an ethnic group follows that ethnic group’s rise in living standards. In a flimsy attempt not to appear racist, Molyneux and the Pioneer Fund propagandists stress that East Asians, on average, score higher on IQ tests than whites and are often richer than whites. But, contrary to their insinuations, it is not the case that East Asians having a higher average IQ than whites was the default.
The same James Flynn whom Molyneux had interviewed, only for him later to express disgust toward Molyneux, has looked at the historical administering of intelligence tests to Asian-Americans. Flynn found that when the data are standardized, as recently as 1975, Chinese-Americans had a lower average IQ score than white Americans. Those of East Asian descent began to outpace white Americans in average IQ only subsequent to their having outpaced white Americans in terms of average wealth.
Subsequent to World War II, and among several others, four scholars connected to the Pioneer Fund and its race-realism propaganda rose to prominence. Those four are Charles Murray, Linda Gottfredson, Helmuth Nyborg, and Jason Richwine. As you will recall, these four are among the “17 scientists [sic; 16 interviewees]” whom Molyneux cited in his tweet as if they prove he is not a eugenicist or racist.
It is thus interesting to note how, in their eugenicism, Molyneux and the Pioneer Fund are parasitic off of two scientists in particular who probably would have abhorred their aims. First is Gregor Mendel, who was reputedly a gentle soul whose quiet life was in great contrast to the aggressive domination that Molyneux and the Pioneer Fund seek over nonwhites. Second is Alfred Binet, who devised the IQ test as only a means of helping children who were marginalized. It is easy to imagine that Binet would have hated how his invention is used, by bigots, who could not equal his achievement, in their attempt to perpetuate the marginalization of the sort of vulnerable people whom he had sought to help.
Conclusion: Sargon’s Convenient Denial of the Message Molyneux Has Routinely Spouted for the Past Four Years
As in his February 2020 video, Molyneux can unconvincingly deny as much as he wants that he ever promoted eugenics. In reality, his propaganda about race and IQ, and against impoverished immigrants, comes from an organization that was openly eugenicist from its founding to World War II. And it is from an organization that, until the war, partnered with the Third-Reich government in openly eugenicist advocacy.
Assisting Molyneux in that denial is Sargon of Akkad. Sargon concludes his January 2020 apologia for Molyneux by proclaiming his doubt that Molyneux ever spoke well of eugenics or white nationalism. To anyone who identifies Molyneux as the eugenicist and white natinonalist that he is, Sargon challenges, “When did he say that? Where’s the clip? Where’s the quote? Like, prove what you have asserted.”
Sargon, challenge accepted. Below are the clips of Molyneux. Molyneux has explicitly announced his evaluation that white nationalism makes good points that are gaining his sympathy. And although, at the start of this year, Molyneux has dishonestly claimed never to have voiced support for eugenics, there was a time, when he first started promoting the Pioneer Fund’s propaganda about race and IQ, where he was more honest and let it slip that he knew that this is all eugenics. Then more openly favorable toward the topic, Molyneux told Bill Whittle that as much as he may deny that he is talking eugenics, he still believes that “freedom has a eugenics component to it inevitably.”
4-minute, 44-second cut
6-minutes, 39-second cut
2-minute cut, which can be embedded in a tweet
Postscript: The Freedomain Cult Splitting Up Families
In that same pro-Molyneux video, by the way, Sargon tries to downplay the notion that Molyneux should face any culpability for his long history of pressuring his fans to disown their parents, siblings, and longtime friends if these people do not agree with ideological points Molyneux has espoused. This is a practice Molyneux has started at least as early as 2006, and he received much more attention for it in 2014, when he lost a major portion of his anarchist following. It was then that the major ideological focus of Molyneux’s podcast stopped being “anarcho-capitalism” and instead “race realism.”
Of Molyneux’s emphasis on trying to split families apart, Sargon says, “I think those accusations are probably somewhat overstated, aren’t they? And this, I think, is something that happened a long time ago. And I think it would be fair if we were to ask him his positions on these things now.”
Although Molyneux received the most attention for this practice in 2014, it does not mean it has stopped. Rather, it has continued in more recent years. As I have blogged before, Molyneux has done this at least twice publicly since 2017. Below are two long montages showing this, and a greatly-edited two-minute version that can be embedded in a tweet.
15-minute cut
20-minute cut (less of Molyneux’s tangents have been cut out)
2-minute cut that can fit in a tweet (a lot of editing, with some interjections edited out of the sentences; for the complete sentences, watch and hear the 20-minute version)
On Thursday, July 16, 2020, I shortened the sentences and changed the grammar a bit.
Video with the proof, extended version (7 minutes, 32 seconds)
2-minute cut that can be embedded in a tweet
The YouTube vlogger, cult leader, and white-supremacist demagogue Stefan Molyneux is at it again. His claims about his recent past are contradicted by the very same archives and recordings that, being as insufferable as he is, he insisted on making about himself.
Commentators such as pseudoscience debunker Jeff Holiday have pointed out that Molyneux has been going around saying that human beings are not all one species. To say that different “races” or ethnicities of humans are not the same species is inaccurate. The scientific definition of species is a population of lifeforms that are able to breed with one another and produce fertile offspring. Human beings are able to breed a horse with a donkey to produce a mule, for example, but all such mules are sterile. From the condition of mules, we can ascertain that horses and donkeys are separate species. By contrast, a black person and white person can have children together, and their mixed-race children can also grow up to have children of their own. That is how we know that all human beings are the same species.
Molyneux’s False Denial
On November 8, 2019, Molyneux uploaded a video wherein he announced he would refute misconceptions about him that his detractors disseminate, making special mention of the “writers” among them. He said that a quotation of his — the one about humans not all being the same species — was repeated out-of-context by his detractors in order to make it sound as though he believed not all humans were literally the same species, biologically. He maintains in this video that of course he knows better — implying that none of his Freedomain Radio podcasts convey such illiteracy about biology.
He begins, “It’s time to push back against the nonsense that’s written out there on the internet about me.” And what is this nonsense? “This is a quote that’s ascribed to me, and yeah,” — he chuckles — “it sounds pretty bad, and the quote is this: ‘I don’t view humanity as a single species...’ This is how the quote goes. ‘I don’t view humanity as a single species...’ And what does that mean? Now, the first thing you’ll note is it ends with a dot-dot-dot [ellipse]. That means, of course, it is an incomplete thought, and that’s your first context you may not be getting the full picture of what I’m talking about.” With respect to those who quote his denial that human beings are all one species, he adds that “this is put forward as some sort of racist statement. But where is it coming from?”
He goes on that the quotation is from a podcast he did in 2014, stopping to mention that it is telling that someone would have to comb through an episode that old to implicate him in his racism. Molyneux says that as though he were not regularly promoting racism over the past year. He goes on that the podcast in question was about whether there would be a criminal justice system in his ideal anarchist society. He then proceeds to play audio snippets of that episode, where Molyneux discusses violent criminals with the caller.
The Molyneux from November 2019 states that when he said in 2014 that he does not view humanity as all one species, it was merely metaphorical talk to emphasize how vastly different the psychology of a violent criminal is from a law-abiding citizen. He would have the viewer believe he was comparing the violent criminal to say, a lion, whereas the victim is the zebra the lion hunts down. In this video, Molyneux puts it to the viewer that he had not conveyed that he literally believed human beings could not all be the same species in a biological context.
Upon the end of the audio recording, the November 2019 Molyneux proclaims, “Okay, so we’re talking about the predator-prey relationship between violent, destructive, rapey, murderous criminals, and the general population. Now, I don’t say humanity is not a single species, ‘cause that would be biologically and factually incorrect.”
He goes on to pose to the viewer, “So have I said anything about race? Of course not.” No, he was merely “using an analogy of predator-prey relationships to describe crime and punishment in human society. And that’s it. There’s nothing about race in this at all. [Emphasizing, even more smugly than usual:] So you can see the motives of the people who write this kind of stuff [facts that do not flatter Molyneux]” (emphasis his). He ends by urging his viewers to share this video on social media, so as to disabuse his detractors of their misconceptions about him. He declares sternly, “These are the facts. This is my actual word. This is my actual voice.”
What did I mean in 2014 when I said: "I don't view humanity as a single species..."?
Am I biologically illiterate?
Is the statement somehow racist?
You'll be truly shocked at the TRUE FACTS behind my words...
In the November 2019 video, Molyneux says he is well aware that the definition of species is members of a population that are able to procreate and produce progeny that are also fertile. Hence, we are to believe that the answer to “Am I biologically illiterate?” is a resounding no, Molyneux has not, in his time as a podcaster, said anything so biologically illiterate.
Here is a fact that Molyneux neglected to mention: the podcast episode whose audio Molyneux played for the audience was not the only episode in which he said human beings are not a single species.
The Reality
He also made that statement in an episode that he first uploaded onto his Freedomain Radio website on September 30, 2015, available over here. He also uploaded a video of that onto YouTube on Monday, October 19, 2015. YouTube Corporate has since removed that video for its racist contents, as you can see here and here (since Molyneux specifically denied his humanity-is-not-one-species remark was not in the context of racism, we will have to get into that further below). However, the video version of that podcast remains available. The very same day, Molyneux also uploaded the video onto Vimeo, where he gave it the same title that he gave it on YouTube. It is “The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis” at vimeo.com/142910233 .
Rather convenient for anyone wishing to check on what Molyneux meant by his statement, it is relatively early in this hour-long video. Within the first two minutes, Molyneux prefaces his infamous quotation by saying that not all human brains are physiologically alike — they have differences not only in degree but in kind. “We don’t all have sort of one sole brain that is roughly equivalent across the, I mean, there are differences in intelligence, right? There’s a bell curve of intelligence. There’s difference in ethnic levels of success on IQ tests.”
As a follow-up to that, Molyneux states, “And so, looking at human beings as one species is not biologically valid.”
That sentence is immediately followed by this explanation, which strongly evinces that Molyneux indeed did not know or care what is the definition of species. “We are a variety of subspecies: politically, ethnically sometimes, definitely in terms of gender, in terms of IQ, uh, in terms of culture. These produce physical brain differences that are very hard to remediate when you get older.”
First, it is clear that Molyneux did mean it in a biological context, literally, when he said human beings are not all one species. Secondly, as an example of human beings not all being one species, he cited people varying “ethnically” — that is, in terms of race. Thirdly, by talking about males and females as being separate “subspecies,” he made plain that when he recorded that video, he really did not know the definitions of species or subspecies. What he has been consistently advocating for years is severely “biologically illiterate.” Molyneux finally learning the definition of species over five years later does not substantiate his becoming biologically literate since then: he continues promoting the racist pseudoscience of “human biodiversity” and “race realism” that actual biologists identify as biological illiteracy.
Later in the very same video where Molyneux says “looking at human beings as one species is not biologically valid,” Molyneux airs a conclusion about race that he derived from this premise about people differing “ethnically” as a sign of humans not being all one species. “That conclusion, stated at the 0:28:19 timestamp on Vimeo, goes, Screaming ‘racism’ at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent — screaming ‘racism’ at people because Asians are collectively shorter — is insane.”
Note the conflation there. On average, men of Japanese ancestry are shorter than Caucasian men. That is not the same as saying, as Molyneux has in other videos, that there are congenital psychological differences between whites and blacks relating to intelligence. He has gone as far as proclaiming that a difference in average IQ scores, which he believes is mostly genetic, lead black men to be more predisposed toward violence than whites.
Conclusion
The facts are these. In November of 2019, Molyneux uploaded a video onto YouTube declaring that when he previously said human beings are not all one species, he did not mean it literally in a biological context and his saying that was not connected to anything about differences about human races. Yet, when he made that statement in his “Death of Europe” podcast episode, he did say it in a biological context, conveying that this was to be taken literally. Moreover, immediately upon saying that, he continued that humans not all being one species had implications for differences between ethnic groups.
Please watch the videos of this, below (the 4 1/2-minute one if you are pressed for time).
Molyneux, for once, put it best: “These are the facts. This is my actual word. This is my actual voice.”
Video with the proof, 4 1/2-minute-cut
Video with the proof, extended version (7 minutes, 32 seconds)
Lana Lokteff in her racist propaganda video “Why They Want to Replace White People”
Most professed fans of Ayn Rand’s are familiar with her having said in her essay “Racism” that the eponymous pathology “is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” But a disturbing number of white supremacists who claim to be loyal Objectivists, or at least to be deeply influenced by Ayn Rand’s thought, seem not to have taken Rand to heart, flagrantly ignoring Rand’s elaboration of those words. I am referring to the white supremacists who demand that Western governments restrict immigration of dark-skinned people from poor countries, often on the rationalization that such dark-skinned people are perpetually violent barbarians, and increasingly on the rationalization that these dark-skinned people are trying to “replace” native-born whites. These white supremacists who claim to be carrying Ayn Rand’s mantle simply deny, contrary to what their actions have made blatant, that they are racist and that they engage in the very actions that Rand’s essay identified as racist. And especially confounding is that this clique of white supremacists claims to be urging its bans on nonwhite immigrants in the name of . . . individualism. o_O
Among the racists who claim to be influenced by Ayn Rand, the twisted reasoning goes something like this: based mostly on cultural conditioning, or maybe even inborn biology or both biology and conditioning, nonwhites — mostly blacks, Arabs, and Latinos, but the racists can include people from India and other parts of South Asia too — are programmed to be collectivist. Sure, these racists aver, there might be some nonwhites who are individualistic, but they are unusual and therefore unimportant in the final analysis — the majority is what matters. By contrast, the only ethnic group capable of producing individualists in a sufficiently large number, these racists believe, is white people.
Then, continue the racists, nonwhite immigrants just vote for politicians who give them more tax-funded welfare payments. You could point out to these racists that in U.S. federal elections, the only immigrants who can vote are naturalized citizens, and that this rule applies in most of the USA’s state and municipal elections as well. But the racists just reply with made-up stories fromBreitbart News and The Gateway Pundit about how undocumented immigrants and green card holders all illegally vote anyway. And, as the racists stress increasingly, the dark-skinned immigrants are instrumental to a nefarious plot to “replace” the native-born whites. Thus, say the racists, whites should learn to stereotype nonwhites in general as congenital, programmed collectivists, and should demand that the State use its guns to discourage and reduce such immigration from nonwhites. Favorite slogans circulating among this crowd include “Numbers matter; demographics matter” and “demography is destiny.” The racists then conclude by saying that believing and urging all this on the masses is what it means to be a great individualist(!!!).
These racists are not honest actors. But, for the benefit of any young person who might be confused by all this, I will try to explain how this racist pseudo-individualism is self-refuting.
“Individualism” Versus “Collectivism” — What Those Terms Actually Mean
Collectivism is the idea that holds that among human beings, the proper unit to be judged and acted upon is not the individual but some grouping of human beings. In contrast to collectivism is individualism — the recognition that the individual is the unit that acts, is to be acted upon, and to be judged. Essential to individualism is the recognition of free will — that it is only the individual who ultimately makes and enacts choices, and that it is therefore by one’s choices that one is to be evaluated and held accountable.
When it comes to judging someone’s character and moral standing — and especially when it comes to how the law is to treat a noncombatant in a peacetime context — the focus is to be on that person’s actions, which are almost always chosen. And, no matter how much an adult may be influenced by other people, her ultimate choice is, on a fundamentally physiological level, up to her alone in the privacy of her own mind. (If someone is mentally ill, mentally challenged, a minor, inebriated, or otherwise lacking in contractual capacity, one would still be on shaky grounds in denying that such a person’s actions are subject to his or her choices. When some condition impairs a person’s contractual capacity, that person still retains some modicum of choice in thoughts and actions.) Even when a law court recognizes that some forcibly inflicted form of harm was not consciously chosen — a drunk driver might have accidentally struck a pedestrian — choice is recognized. The drunk driver did not consciously choose to hit the pedestrian, but the drunk driver did choose to partake in a series of actions that made the hitting of the pedestrian a very likely outcome.
Human individuality and the faculty for choice are corollaries — to condemn a whole ethnic group as congenitally violent, dismissing the capacity for individual choice and dissension within the ethnic group as nonexistent or existentially unimportant, is to reject in practice the very concept of human individuality.
One can be an individualist and properly judge many people as a group . . . provided that one judges everyone in that group insofar as all members of that group are unanimous in each having directly chosen to partake in the same action. For example, it would be very collectivist for a European to denounce all Americans, or Americans in general, for Donald Trump becoming President of the United States and imposing his pathology. That would be unfair to individuals, as not all American individuals supported Donald Trump — he did not even win the popular vote. However, it would not contradict individualism to make a disapproving judgment about everyone who, knowing of his clamor for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border to keep Latinos out of the USA, supported Donald Trump for President . . . qua their role as Trump supporters.
To say that it’s proper to make a negative moral judgment about Trump supporters is not to assume that these people engage in cruelty in every waking moment. It is not to say they don’t love their children and grandchildren. It is not to say they always cheat their customers in their business dealings. It is not to deny that they ever did anything nice for anyone nonwhite. But it is to say, properly, that all Trump supporters did something unethical when they pledged to support Donald Trump for President — unethical because it has terrible consequences that were and are being imposed forcibly on those who didn’t support Trump, and because Trump’s own actions in public made it obvious long before November 2016 that his becoming President would yield such adverse consequences.
Hence, an individualist would not necessarily reproach all Trump supporters in their role as parents or accountants, but an individualist would properly reproach all Trump supporters in their role as Trump supporters.
Yes, an individualist can morally judge everyone in a group to the extent that the judgment is only on the action directly chosen by everyone in that group. And an individualist doesn’t go farther than that. An individualist doesn’t judge individuals according to actions they didn’t take (someone tacitly enabling and reinforcing another’s pathology is not really inaction, but a tacit action), and definitely doesn’t demand that the police exercise government force on individuals for actions of which they had no part.
What all forms of collectivism have in common is the attempt to elide that distinction. Collectivism is the attempt to evaluate individuals and hold them as being bound to chosen actions over which those individuals had no say, based on those individuals’ affiliation to some group when that group affiliation is not directly pertinent to the chosen actions. The collectivist feels comfortable ignoring distinctions in differing, or even contrasting, chosen actions among members of the same superficial grouping, as the collectivist presumes that it is only the superficial grouping that matters as a unit, not the distinct individuals. To wit, collectivism presumes that persons’ affiliations in groups beyond their own choosing are of greater significance than the persons’ own choices. (And it is self-contradictory to proclaim that one recognizes choices but that we should concede that every person having been born into a group not of her own choosing is the factor that informs and therefore determines her own choices. Such “pre-set choices” are a contradiction in terms, and the assertion is again to downplay the role of individuals’ choices.)
To summarize, the collectivist attributes a particular decision to an entire group of people when not every individual within the group personally decided to go with it; the individualist attributes such a decision to an entire group of people only as far as each individual within the group in fact made that decision for him- or herself.
Well-Known Variants of Collectivism
In civics discourse, the most common variant of collectivism exercised is based on political geography — the attempt to bind people together by law, as if they are acting as a single unit when they in fact are not, because all these people reside in a particular geographic area over which a single central governmental body holds jurisdiction. As I have explained before, that is Hobbesian Social Contract Theory. That is the notion that even if you withheld any conscious support for — or even vocally opposed — some tax or statute over peaceable actions and private property, the very fact that you occupy the same geographic territory as the majority that supported that tax or statute renders you of the same collective unit as those supporters, which somehow means that you did implicitly consent to that tax or statute with the majority after all.
Perhaps Amy, Rick, and I are all native-born citizens in City X. Amy and Rick are part of the majority that votes to impose a tax on the consumption of sugary soft drinks. I vote against that and loudly argue against it. According to the collectivism of Hobbesian Social Contract Theory, because Amy and Rick and I all passively fall into the same grouping — we were all born as citizens in City X — somehow I do ultimately implicitly consent to the soft-drink tax, notwithstanding my painfully obvious actions to the contrary.
Collectivism is also found in calls for a forcible redistribution of wealth and incomes by the State. The collectivism is specifically in the redistributionist’s refusal to distinguish how one individual’s choices differs from another’s — and the concomitant refusal to acknowledge that, to the extent that they operate peaceably in laissez-faire conditions, two adults having unequal wealth is the logical and just result of those two people having peaceably made choices different from one another’s. Mark Zuckerberg is billions of dollars richer than I am, but that doesn’t mean he stole that money from me or victimized me.
The absence of resentment, on my part, against Zuckerberg when Zuckerberg is enormously wealthier than I am should not be misconstrued as any belief on my part that Zuckerberg’s life or work is inherently more valuable than my own. It is simply the recognition that, inasmuch as parties are free and peaceful, the number of parties that willingly paid money to Zuckerberg for advertising space on his website greatly exceeds the number of people who willingly pay money to me for services that I offer. The individualist recognizes that Zuckerberg and I having ended up in different financial strata is simply Zuckerberg and I each facing the peaceable consequences of our own respective choices.
When a proponent of government wealth redistribution demands that the State rectify this inequality by forcibly taking some of Zuckerberg’s wealth and handing it to me, it places emphasis on Zuckerberg and me being in the same group superficially — we are both in the collective category of “Americans” or “humans” — while downplaying the fact that Zuckerberg and I are individuals who each made his own individual choices and are facing the repercussions thereof.
Indeed, the wealth redistribution is the attempt to use force to override the facts (1) that Zuckerberg and I embarked on dissimilar sequences of choices and (2) Zuckerberg and I peaceably accumulating vastly different quantities of wealth is logically inseparable from our having made different choices and trying to manage the consequences of those choices.
The whole purpose in coming to a decision and executing it is to experience the results of that decision. The choice itself cannot be divorced from its results (including its unforeseen consequences and the consequences that are considered a byproduct less important than the main goal that the choice was to reach). To call upon the government — which means the government’s guns — to obstruct someone from experiencing the peaceable consequences of her peaceable choices is to obstruct her freedom to make such choices. As far as government-imposed redistributions of wealth are concerned, the State employing its force of law to undo some of the personal financial gain someone reaped as a result of her peaceful choices is to impinge on her very freedom to make such choices. A governmental initiative to redirect Zuckerberg’s wealth to me, based on the premise that our common humanity overrides our freedom to experience the fruits of our respective choices, is thus a denial of individuality and a virulent manifestation of collectivism. In briefer terms, what is prioritized is the alleged social collective —“Society as a whole” — and the individual’s freedom of choice is reduced, sacrificed.
I know that many readers will find it unfair of me to attribute the disparity in wealth between billionaires and myself mostly to a benign difference in our choices, as many of these billionaires were born into much more advantageous circumstances from the outset — they had a “head start” over me — and no one chooses to be born into either a privileged set of circumstances or a disadvantageous one. As many other readers might consider it too long a digression from the main topic of this particular post if I rebut the “head start” objection in this post here, you can check out my rebuttal to that objection in this other blog post.
And, as Rand said, the crudest collectivism is racism. If persons A and B are of the same skin color, speak the same language, or grew up practicing most of the same ethnic customs, they are still individuals — and if person A partakes in an action that person B did not, then an individualist does not judge, directly reward, or forcibly punish person B for what person A did. Yet too many white supremacists, who claim to be individualists inspired by Ayn Rand, do just that.
What Makes It the Crudest Collectivism
José Inez García Zárate was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who made terrible choices that killed Kate Steinle. Jorge Garcia was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who did not inflict violence on Kate Steinle or anyone else, but was deported nonetheless. An individualist recognizes that José and Jorge are both individuals with free will, who made their own choices — even if they’re both named García — and therefore José’s actions have no bearing on Jorge’s moral standing or worthiness of remaining in the USA.
Yet I have heard white nationalists — real name: collectivists — cite the example of José Inez García Zárate to proclaim that Jorge Garcia and all other undocumented Mexican immigrants are violent and should be deported at gunpoint. As with forcible wealth redistribution, we find in Jorge’s deportation that the alleged good of the collective — the native-born white majority — is prioritized as the individual’s freedom of choice is reduced, sacrificed. It is immaterial to these collectivists that José Inez García Zárate killed someone and Jorge Garcia did not — as far as the collectivists are concerned, those two men fall into the same inessential categories of ethnicity and country of birth, and therefore José’s actions should influence how Jorge is to be judged and treated by law enforcement.In their interpretation, José and Jorge having superficial and unchosen commonalities proves José’s wrongdoing to be Jorge’s as well. To the collectivist, the very quality that determines the individual’s identity — the individual’s choices — is dismissed as irrelevant.
In the “Racism” essay, Ayn Rand’s words explain what I explained above: racism “means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions...” and that “a man’s convictions, values and character are determined” by circumstances “beyond his control. . . . Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice...” The citation of the José/Kate Steinle case to condemn Latino migrants in general is based not on the individualism of Ayn Rand but on collectivist presumptions. Such presumptions, Ayn Rand notes, are a “quest for the unearned. ...a quest for automatic knowledge — for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment.”
That is what the racist pseudo-Objectivists are doing when they dismiss Jorge Garcia as inhuman on the basis of José Inez García Zárate’s actions — too lazy to bother to evaluate dark-skinned immigrants as individuals, they apply their canned opinion of José Inez García Zárate to other Latino immigrants. These racists can say all they want that they were inspired by Ayn Rand and “We’re not racist” — but, by Ayn Rand’s judgment, they are.
In an exercise of such racism, Milo Yiannopoulos proclaims,
You’re constantly telling us white people are the source of all evil, that white people have all this stuff to apologize for. Well you know what? We’re not that bad. We did some pretty good stuff. We did Mozart, and Rembrandt, and Descartes, and Beethoven, and Wagner, and we went to the stars, we explored the oceans, we built Western civilization.
Can’t white people be proud of what white people have done?
The idea of Milo’s rant there is that because Milo and Mozart are both white, Mozart’s accomplishments are also Milo’s — never mind that Milo didn’t make the choices that Mozart made.😑 “We [white people] did Mozart,” Milo says. No, the opera Don Giovanni was not composed by “white people” in general; it was composed by Mozart. Period.
In her own lifetime Ayn Rand saw this sort of psychological parasitism in which Milo engages, and she brought it up in the “Racism” essay:
...the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her material grand-uncle was a state senator and that her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off the mediocrity of another)... — all these are samples of racism.
This reminded me of a rather disturbing boast I received online from an old man-baby who claimed (and, apparently, still claims) to be Objectivist. He spun this long yarn about how his ancestors were great Scotsmen, as if that said anything about him — and the implication was that of course it did. Sure enough, years later I learned he was delivering tirades online about Arabs and Mexicans, eventually going as far as castigating legal immigrants from India, arriving in Silicon Valley as engineers, for being “invaders.”
But the individualist judges a whole group of people insofar as the group’s members are classified together specifically according to their each having chosen to take the very action that the individualist is judging. As adopting and propagating collectivism in general and white supremacism in particular is an action chosen by individuals, it is consistent with individualism to denounce all white supremacists in their role of adherents to, and practitioners of, racism.
This is why Rand identified racism as the crudest form of collectivism. At least in the cases of wealth redistributionism and Social Contract Theory, these fallacies have some superficial plausibility to them. With racism, the sleaziness is harder to overlook. When a racist praises what he holds to be the collective achievements of people of his own skin color, it is plain that the racist is trying to take credit for celebrated actions he himself did not perform. And even more baldly ugly is how, in casting aspersions upon everyone in general from other “races,” white supremacists apply their dehumanizing prejudgments to individuals about whom they know nothing.
White Supremacists Presenting Their Collectivism As Individualism
I think that what I said above about individualism versus collectivism, with respect to skin color and “race,” is common sense. Yet I found it necessary to explicate because it escapes the comprehension of the clique of white supremacists who call themselves loyal defenders of Ayn Rand’s legacy. The phenomenon was of particular curiosity to me because the racist clique sounds intent on foisting the idea that native-born whites in general are individualists whereas nonwhites in general are collectivist, and the racist clique oddly seems not to notice that anyone who puts forth such a notion is directly contradicting himself.
The internal contradictions in the racist pseudo-Objectivists’ delusions are so numerous that I have lost count of them. The most obvious one is that because people of other skin colors have volition just as you do, you can’t be an individualist as you stereotype those people and deny their capacity for individual choice, which is to deny their individuality. To the extent that you issue sweeping and stigmatizing ethical judgments about members of a population on account of traits that are out of their control, you expose your own hypocrisy when you accuse those same people so disapprovingly of all being collectivists.
This internal contradiction is very apparent in the likes of white supremacist Stefan Molyneux who, by his own efforts, is still often mistaken for someone sympathetic to Ayn Rand’s viewpoint. Molyneux contradicts himself in statements mere minutes apart from one another in the same video — the one I discussed before, where he infamously tells a caller that people who disagree with Molyneux politically don’t deserve to be protected from mass shootings. Molyneux tells the caller that he should think of himself, first and foremost, as simply a member of a “tribe.” Then, establishing that the tribe is more important than the individual, Molyneux says that this tribe must revile “collectivism.”
Still posturing as the defender of individualism and enemy of collectivism, Molyneux propounds in a later video,
...the end [waning influence] of religion in the West had more to do with “I don’t want to be told what to do, I don’t want to have any rules, I don’t want to have any [unchosen] obligations, and I don’t want to have any need for sacrifice.” And the reality is that to maintain a civilization, it requires vigilance; it requires sacrifice, and it requires that you be passionately in love with something much larger than your mere mortal existence.
Gainsaying Ayn Rand, and similar to the totalitarians whom she fled, Molyneux demands the individual be sacrificed for the ostensive benefit of the collective. He even says, “I can’t judge any individuals. [ . . . ] No, it’s [social] patterns. I don’t care about individuals; I do care about ideologies. You can’t judge individuals; you can judge ideologies” — ideologies allegedly programmed into people by their skin color, cultural conditioning, or both.
And recently I came across a white supremacist who is even more explicit than Molyneux in this bizarre narrative about how whites, as a collective, are programmed to be individualist whereas nonwhites are programmed to be collectivist. It is Lana Lokteff of Red Ice TV. This was a YouTube podcast that started off being about UFOs and the paranormal but eventually came to be about the much more far-fetched pseudoscience that is “race realism.” As of my typing this, this channel has over 315,000 subscribers on YouTube. Fittingly enough, Red Ice TVinterviewed Molyneux back in 2012 when Red Ice was still about UFOs — this occasion, in retrospect, shows us a moment when Molyneux and Red Ice were only starting to bridge into explicit racism.
In her video “Why They [Who?! Being Openly Anti-Semitic, She Usually Means Jews] Want to Replace White People,” Lana Lokteff pronounces at the 5:10 timestamp, “White people are rebellious and independent — a blessing but, right now, a curse. We don’t like being told what to do. We aren’t collectivists or easy to control like some others.” White people don’t like being told what to do? Someone should inform Lana that her friend Stefan considers that a detriment caused by the erosion of Christianity’s influence.
Then, consistent with Alex Jones’s paranoia about industrialization and biotech companies, at the 5:49 timestamp, Lana goes into what sounds like self-parody: “White people don’t always drink the toxic Kool-Aid: the chemicals [like H2O?!], GMOs, bad food, vaccines, etc. We shop at health food stores, eat organic, making a soft kale, making dependency on Big Pharma a bit more challenging.”
The alleged “defense” of white people by Lana Lokteff and the other racists is that they see white people, in general, as . . . collectively individualistic.😳 Molyneux has been explicit about this before. Citing the racist known as Anonymous Conservative (Michael Trust), Stefan Molyneux tells a sycophantic Bill Whittle, “if you drill down into the biology, you can see physiological differences between collectivists and individualists — between the r’s [r-selected people] and the K’s [K-selected] — which go a long way toward explaining why reason doesn’t work.”
White Supremacists Claiming Not to Believe That Race-Related Genetics Determines Behavior, But That Skin Color Is a Valid Proxy for Sizing Up Someone’s Cultural Influences —And, With Them, Someone’s Character
It is embarrassing that I have to explain something so basic to the racists: some whites are individualist and some whites are collectivist; some nonwhites are individualist and some nonwhites are collectivist. This is caused not by their skin color or even by the culture into which one was born; it is the culmination of one’s own choices. In some societies, the collection of customs — the culture — can be more encouraging of individualism or collectivism than in other societies. To dispute racists like Molyneux who conflate culture with skin color, customs themselves are chosen actions and therefore subject to change, and thus an individualist recognizes that a person’s character has more to do with her own choices than do the customs with which she was raised.
That brings us to a favorite rationalization of the racists. Some of them still insist that they do not agree with Molyneux that the genes associated with someone’s skin color concomitantly program someone to have specific customs, to be more violent or more economically productive than other people from other continents. These racists say they are ultimately concerned about culture, not genetic programming, but that someone’s skin color does indeed convey to them essential information about his cultural background and thus the likelihood of his being collectivist and violent.
According to these racists, because almost all nonwhites are collectivist, and because almost all individualists are white, someone’s skin color and country of origin are indeed reliable proxies in ascertaining who has been culturally conditioned into individualism versus who has been culturally conditioned into being collectivist. And, they conclude, this rule of thumb should be applied in law, with immigration policy in white-majority countries being consciously crafted to prevent nonwhites — presumed collectivists —from becoming the West’s demographic majority.
Again, as Ayn Rand noted, this epistemological approach is disgraceful in its laziness, being an attempt to short-cut through “the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment” — which takes place on a case-by-case basis — in order to pretend that one has arrived at a legitimately “automatic evaluation of men’s characters...” And in demanding that armed law officers of Western countries enforce such an approach, these racists would impose, at gunpoint, the fatal consequences of their own laziness upon impoverished nonwhites who seek entry into the West simply for a better life.
The proposition that immigration officials can properly discriminate against immigrants by “race,” with “race” being used to guess who comes from a “good culture” and who does not, is of course just another flimsy excuse for the racists to write off individuals as worthless when they know nothing about those individuals except their skin color and country of origin. The racist, being intellectually lazy, considers that to be a sufficient quantity of information when he calls for the State to apply force against other persons. Hence their empty-headed slogans “Numbers matter; demographics matter” and “demography is destiny.”
These white supremacists should stop pretending to agree with, or understand, Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Rand grew up in a culture that she considered to be primitive, collectivist, and violent. If she agreed with these racists — if she agreed with their slogans about demography being destiny — then she would not have come out an individualist in spite of the culture that conditioned her. And it definitely contradicts her when the racists proclaim that law enforcement should target dark-skinned individuals for actions that were not theirs, based on those dark-skinned individuals being the same ethnicity and coming from the same country as someone else violent — Ayn Rand was of the same ethnicity and country of origin as people who were violent.
In proclaiming that the cultural conditioning of dark-skinned people is all that concerns them and should concern everyone, these racists still deny the faculty of individual choice — the faculty that helped Ayn Rand rise above all that.
As what makes you an individual distinct from everyone else is the series of choices you have made in your life, it is also self-contradictory for these racists to pronounce that what makes them individualistic is that the wider social collective around them — the culture — molded them into being such. They believe that what makes someone an individualist is that he passively soaked in such “individualism” from the collective of “the culture” around him — not being primarily something he actively had to choose for himself to contemplate and implement, regardless and often in spite of the nearby cultural influences. In presuming that someone’s philosophic individualism is caused by a collective and not that individual’s own personal choices, even here they attempt to minimize the individual’s capacity for choice and autodidacticism.
When they propound that everyone passively developed into a philosophic individualist or collectivist according to his or her cultural upbringing, these racists are not merely presuming collectivist nonwhites to be passive drones that are predominantly shaped by forces external to their conscious selves — the “culture”-shouting racists even implicitly presume that of the people they call white-skinned individualists. These racists pose as individualists as they conspicuously give short shrift to the agency of the individual — even the very agency of the people they call individualists. Hence, these racists do not comprehend or practice any philosophy of individualism.
These racists keep shouting the word culture, but make it all too evident that they don’t know what it means. When they pontificate that individualists and collectivists alike are mostly the products of “culture,” they take “culture” as some primary — a Jehovah-like First Cause — that actively shapes all human beings who, individualist and collectivist alike, cannot help but be psychologically passive in the face of this “culture.” In reality, it is the individual’s faculty of volition that is primary. Human beings, individualist and collectivist alike — and of every “race” — are the ones actively exercising choices affecting the culture, either keeping aspects of it the same or changing them.
And the white supremacists make a sneaky partial admission of this when they blare that, instead of passively adopting the native supposedly-individualist culture of the West, nonwhite immigrants actively opt to convert Western culture into something more collectivist. But the white supremacists only acknowledge that these nonwhite immigrants can act on “the culture,” rather than it always being “the culture” acting on them, when it involves the accusation that any cultural change initiated by the nonwhite immigrants can only be in the direction of converting an individualistic culture into something more collectivist. The white supremacists take it for granted that it cannot happen in the other direction — of nonwhite immigrants affecting the culture in such a manner that individualism becomes more tolerated or even celebrated.
The white supremacists do not concede that these nonwhite immigrants, being psychologically active, are also capable of learning the importance of individualism on their own, possibly exploring aspects of individuality that too few native-born whites have considered. Ayn Rand wasn’t an immigrant from a primitive and collectivist foreign culture who passively assimilated into native-born white culture; having come from a primitive and collectivist foreign culture, she was the immigrant who taught new ideas concerning individualism to the native-born whites who had previously assumed they already knew everything there was to know about individuality. Likewise, the white supremacists would profit from considering that, instead of it always being immigrants from India or Honduras who should learn individualism from native-born whites, there could be a case where native-born whites might learn some new insight involving individualism that was thought up by such an immigrant from India or Honduras. Yet, for the ostensive benefit of what the racists deem to be “white culture” — their favorite collective — the racists would have the State sacrifice actual individuals at gunpoint.
And just so we are clear, if you say you want to ban (nonwhites) because of “culture” you are really banning them because of race, because you are assuming that they are all the same on the basis of ethnic origin. You’re not fooling anyone.
Conclusion
It is not that individualists are predominantly “made” by “the culture” in which they were reared — it is that individualists largely make themselves and then remake the culture. I have come across racists mindlessly repeating Andrew Breitbart that “politics is downstream from culture” — but these racists are loath to admit that culture itself is downstream from individuals’ choices. Among whites and nonwhites alike, individuals are less the product of their “culture” than their “culture” is the product of those individuals’ choices. That is why a woman who spent her childhood in a backwoods Czarist Russian Orthodox village and who endured Soviet indoctrination can emerge from such a cultural background as the preeminent author on the topic of individualism.
I anticipate that some of the racists might want to protest, “No, my having become a philosophic individualist indeed largely came from my own choices, often in defiance of the pressures of the culture in which I grew up.” Such a racist should consider that the same is possible of would-be immigrants from Africa or Latin America — the same would-be immigrants he has already dismissed as hopeless and deserving of nothing more than armed federal agents obstructing their entry into the West.
Ayn Rand stated it herself in a letter to someone who was neither white nor from a Western cultural background: “there will always be men who will respond to a philosophic truth in every country on earth.”
That is worth repeating. She did not say “there will always be men who respond to a philosophic truth . . . as long as they’re whites in a white-majority country with a Western Christian background.” She said there will always be men who respond to a philosophic truth in every country on earth. And if such people are being oppressed by their governments to the point where they are starving or at risk of being murdered, and therefore are trying to seek a safer and freer life in the West, it would be a travesty to Ayn Rand — and for the rest of us — if armed government agents block them from the same lifesaving freedom to which Ayn Rand escaped.
On Tuesday, May 7, 2019, I added the paragraphs about Ayn Rand saying “there will always be men who will respond to a philosophic truth in every country on earth.” On Friday, July 19, 2019, I embedded the tweet from Adam Serwer and the YouTube video from Yaron Brook. On Monday, January 27, 2020, I added the quotation and link from Stefan Molyneux wherein Molyneux tells a credulous Bill Whittle that ideological collectivists and ideological individualists are physiologically different from one another.
