Poor Nathan Cofnas! He told the truth about Arday and brought down one of the greatest academic frauds of our time, and not even the Queen of the TERFs will have him.
I’ve actually been getting jealous of all the Nathan hate. At least someone sent me this, informing me that I was “catching strays,” as the kids say.
We should all applaud Nathan’s bravery. But the fact that he has become the face of the anti-Arday movement has something to teach us about the fundamental, unbreakable nature of the race/IQ taboo, which people seem to have trouble understanding correctly.
In the two and a half years since I wrote “Shut Up about Race and IQ,” it seems that every other taboo enforced by the left has become weaker, including the one on open racism. This is the culture of the Based Ritual. You’ll find major conservative figures arguing that women should be housewives, vaccines don’t work, authoritarians like Franco were great, and we should deport 100 million imaginary people. On the trans issue in particular, there was a major vibe shift that began the moment Elon took over Twitter, which I predicted would happen at the time. But race and IQ remains forbidden territory. Sure, Trump may refer to Somalis as “low IQ” and that can titillate the racists, but the only people who focus on group differences in intelligence and make it regular to their messaging are generally figures who remain fringe.
Free speech was enough to make trans activists into laughingstocks. But you got your free speech to talk about race and IQ, and here we are still seeing the race science crowd making the exact same arguments as they’ve been making since at least the 1960s without getting anywhere.
Why does there remain a sense among people across the political spectrum that this taboo must be maintained, or at least is not worth fighting against? Most standard explanations are unconvincing. For example, in the top comment to my article on race science, someone noted that “most normies would find hereditarianism more palatable if they understood that the bell curves overlap.” A famous writer messaged me after publication and said that she liked the piece while making a similar point.
This is a strange argument. Of course people understand overlapping bell curves. If I tell someone that I met a woman who was taller than me, people don’t respond “Impossible! That would mean overlapping bell curves. I thought all men must be taller than all women. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
You can think of a thousand other examples. “Some kids are more mature than adults.” Not a difficult statement to accept.
If anything, people understand overlapping bell curves too well. Women are able to beat up men on TV much more often than they can in real life. Audiences love a story of the triumph of a protagonist who supposedly couldn’t accomplish something based on their group characteristics, but then overcame obstacles to succeed. And a lot of people seem to not understand that if groups differ on average, then there are likely to be massive disparities at the extremes of the distribution, which is again a case of expecting bell curves to overlap too much.
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Cofnas’ whole “So I’m a racist just because I think IQ is heritable?” routine irks me. He’s a racist because he believes people should value people of their own race more than others and that races shouldn’t mix. That has nothing to do with his empirical views.
As someone who generally agrees with Steve Sailer, I take Mr. Hanania's warnings seriously. But he too should be careful. When he writes, "We see in opposition to Indian immigration in particular that a lot of people just want to hate," he is being simplistic. "Hate" is among the most overused words of the censorious left, so it is disappointing to see him using it this way. It is possible, far short of hate, to generally not feel comfortable with certain types of people, to find their ways annoying and so forth. By writing of "hate" to clobber anti-immigrationists, Mr. Hanania takes the extreme case for the norm, which of course makes arguing against it much easier for him.