Yes, going by what Elon is doing on X, we can assume that anti-vaxx and election denial are also about to be consensus positions among American elites.
This analogy does not stand. The reason people don't accept anti-vaxx / election denial is that these ideas are not true. Hereditarianism meanwhile is true, and the reason people refuse to accept the idea is the taboo surrounding it.
Elon tweeting something to his 100M followers is not going to make a false idea true, but it will make a taboo idea substantially less taboo.
Breaking the taboo is the only thing necessary for the hereditarian revolution to win.
Richard, I have seen several videos/interviews where you discuss political-science concepts about "why hereditarianism" will nor help society. But I have not seen where you cite a webpage listing the Scientific EVIDENCE resources [for example that prove that the black/white IQ bell-curve mismatch in USA and on Earth is/not caused by genetics.
Here is one video/scientist to be listed and evaluated:
Musk also infamously tweeted "You have said the actual truth" in reply to an anti-Semitic tweet blaming Jews for fomenting hatred against whites, which is the kind of anti-Semitic thesis upon which you focused your intellectual and academic career in the past.
Presumably you think people who hold such views are awful, and I believe you have suggested that they are in the past.
Wouldn't this support Hanania's argument in the post that people who appear to be enthusiastic about race and IQ differences like Musk tend to be awful in general?
Jason, I have seen several videos/interviews where you discuss political-science concepts about "why hereditarianism" will help society. But I have not seen where you cite a webpage listing the Scientific EVIDENCE resources [for example that prove that the black/white IQ bell-curve mismatch in USA and on Earth is caused by genetics.
Here is one video to be listed and evaluated in that resources webpage:
You'll notice that affirmative action is taking a whomping lately at the hands of the Trump Administration ,and there isn't, so far, much pushback. A little understood reason for this is that in 2026, few Americans recognize how big the IQ gap is between blacks and whites (and, especially, between blacks and Asians). It's been taboo to talk about the data for so long that almost nobody knows the real numbers anymore
Many Americans now assume that affirmative action in elite institutions is fairly marginal, that, say, 20% of the blacks at Harvard are there due to affirmative action.
So, they reason, we could get rid of affirmative action at Harvard and the percentage of black students might drop from 10% to 8%. So, what's the big deal! Now, all 8% of the blacks at Harvard know they got in legitimately based on their high IQs and strong work ethics! It's a win-win (except for the small number of blacks currently being let into Harvard on racial preferences).
Cofnas pointsout that Harvard's internal numbers suggest that if Steven Pinker's plan for Harvard to admit solely on academic merit, then only 0.7% of Harvard undergrads would be black. He extrapolates, reasonably, that that means under purely meritocratic hiring, Harvard's black share of its faculty would fall toward (but never quite get to) zero percent.
Cofnas haters hate this revelation more than anything else. They constantly cite this datapoint from Harvard's own deposition in the SFFA Supreme Court case as an obviously racist hallucination Cofnas dreamed up out of the blue because he hates blacks.
But, maybe, a few of the brightest onlookers will realize that Cofnas is just citing facts. At super-elite institutions like Harvard, the race gap in IQ is so big way out at the right tail of the bell curve that racial preferences are the only way to get even just a few percent blacks into Harvard's student body and, especially, faculty.
I've long joked that they should make a sequel to Nic Cage's "Book of Secrets." In that second National Treasure movie, Cage's treasure hunter steals the President's Book of Secrets which reveals who shot JFK, what happened at Roswell, etc.
It should be called "National Treasure: Ivy League Presidents' Book of Secrets." When Cage finally gets his hands on the Harvard president's padlocked book of secrets, it turns out to be a dog-eared first edition of "The Bell Curve."
It's clear that Ivy League presidents understand how big the race gap in test scores is and that nobody has a solution for it other than racial preferences for blacks. But, ironically enough, THEY CAN'T TELL ANYBODY. It's widely considered Nathan Cofnas-level racism to reveal that blacks need affirmative action to have even low single digit percentage representation in ultra-elite organizations.
For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed in affirmative action for thee but not for me. She needed the smartest law clerks. So, only 1 of her 159 clerks, Paul Watford, was black.
But few know facts like that anymore because race realism has been so demonized. So, affirmative action is currently in really big trouble because it is considered racist to point out how much blacks need it.
In Malaysia, there is like 90% quota for majority group on the grounds that they are genetically backward. Mahathir Mohamad wrote a book making this claim explicitly in the 70 s and late went on become PM and expanded the quota.
Chinese in Malaysia control north 70% private economy, despite apartheid level action them in government contracts and sector. Hard to keep high g people down, fanatics egalitarians can make anything work.
You read his dissertation and his best articles? It's really not hard to tell that Steven Pinker is worthy of being a Harvard professor but Jason Arday isn't worthy of being a Cambridge professor.
That’s motte and bailey. Arday was an obvious fraud. You can laugh at how credulous everyone surrounding him was, but you can’t argue that he represented black excellence.
Isnt Arday a very egregious example?. I'm talking abiut the thousands of scholars who are not plagiarists and whose scholarly output meets baseline standards of quality.
Take Claudine Gay as an example. While a plagiarist (at a much lower degree than Arday), she was a real academic, but her academic output was mediocre on objective measures: low number of papers and books. And she conducted no ground-breaking research. "Revealing" that black participating in elections where there's a black candidate is not work that justifies a spot in a top University, because nobody would call that new and innovative.
Very true about Gay. But aside from the plagiarism, could one argue that Gay was simply living up to the standards of her discipline? If that's the case, it's the system that's broken.
I heard more than one person note that Arday was simply sitting at the table that was set before him. Now for an academic in say, pediatric oncology, the table set before them is quite different in terms of expectations and standards.
I can't help but think of an old saying: don't hate the player - hate the game.
I think there is a few disparate lines of argument int this sphere, which are all true to different degrees:
1. The Age of Hitler theory, which posits that the post-WWII world order morality is primarily centered around being maximally anti-Nazi, the ultimate evil. Being maximally unlike something else, though, is actually not that easy. You can start out, for example, being a Churchillite conservative, and think yourself safe, since these are literally the people who had beaten the actual Nazis. But it's pretty easy to find an opening in their believes where they are more similar to Nazis, like Imperialism or Racism, and advocate for moving away from these beliefs. This explains the consistent shift into one particular direction, which we now call "left", and woke is merely one possible state after repeating this process over and over for decades. It doesn't even need to be the most extreme variation. IMO the smashing success of civil rights would also not have been possible in the same way without this background.
2. The cooperatist/coalitionist hypothesis for morality. In short, morality is an evolutionary adaption to facilitate the creation and stability of large coalitions, which then can beat up smaller coalitions. This was historically still limited by information transmission speed and mobility, though, so the quest usually was to get some kind of locally maximal coalition depending on the geography. In modern times, there are basically no such limits, so you're crippling yourself for no reason if your ideology is not capable of fundamentally including anyone from anywhere. You can currently see this very well in action; If I join any broadly left-leaning (purely values-based) org in my country, this sets me up for success in the international elite all across the world, they have connection anywhere. On the other hand with right-leaning (often partially group-based or at least biased) orgs, I'm at best getting a benefit with only the local elite, or in the worst case just shoot myself in the foot since those are themselves internationalists. It should be obvious that "race realism" is a massive hindrance to making world-spanning connections, people are bound to be offended. This is completely independent of it being wrong or right.
3. Finally, plain prosocial bias. I'm myself a geneticist in medical science and I regularly encounter unpopular truths: For example, I've had a non-western patient data set where I just wanted to test for hidden relations, only to find out that the average person was inbred roughly on the level of endemic cousin marriages. This was not terribly surprising to anyone who knew anything about the culture, and was probably a major reason why that population had mysterious problems with inheritable diseases. But do you think I published anything about it? Lol no, just good ol' "a variant in gene XXX has been found to be associated ...". Weird that this population had frequent problems with a recessive variant causing major disabilities, completely impossible to explain!
Cofnas focus on civil rights isn't entirely wrong, but rather limited.
If Derrick Bell’s views are any indication, woke was brewing for decades. He could have embraced Sowell’s cultural explanation but, as a typical black intellectual, he may have been disinclined to blame his own people (although Sowell is, in essence, blaming whites for inculcating a Southern culture among blacks) for the stalled progress/disparities he saw and blamed institutional racism. (I’ll bet he even saw cultural explanations as a cover for racism.)
Social media allowed the CRT folks to take center stage but they were there all along.
This is a very impressive article that makes you rethink a topic on which seemingly everything has already been said.
You did, however, overlook the significance of the revolution in identifying human genetics. Denial will become increasingly difficult. David Reich published an article in Nature this year regarding genetic changes associated with intelligence, which he observed in human skeletons over a long period of time.
The question here is what role geneticists will play in elite discourse as this continues. They may continue to pretend their research has nothing to do with real-world race/ethnicity (as Reich did in his book; see also the comment here by an alleged geneticist, about inbreeding in some ethnicities). If they do publicly draw the ever-more-obvious conclusions, they may provide the racialist voice in academia that Hanania says may be necessary, or they may simply be banished by the woke true-believers. (Reich said in his book--in (I think) 2017, so long before his most recent research--that there might be race differences in psychological traits but they probably wouldn't tend to confirm historical stereotypes or current disparities; for this public denunciation of race-realism, he was still the target of condemnation by a number of academics outraged that he would even consider the idea of race being important.)
For David Reich's true beliefs, see the chapter in Fleet Street woke hack Angela Saini's 2019 book "Superior" in which she interviews Reich and he demolishes the politically correct premise of her book. I quoted their dialogue at length in the end of my review of Saini's book:
The timeline is not a problem for Cofnasism. Race realism falling out of favor in the 30s directly lead to the civil rights movement in the 60s, a 30-year lag.
The civil rights movement's transformation into wokism was forestalled for decades by the idealistic belief that the current state of B-W inequality was only a temporary affair. Once we equalized the opportunities available to blacks and whites, they would become equal.
50 years later, when it became clear that no such equality was happening, people started reaching for systemic racism explanations.
The mid-20th century led to wokeness. You can say we lived in a post-racial society from the 1980s to c. 2010, but modern wokeness came, and those intellectual currents had been brewing for decades based on the assumption of blank slatism. You grant cultural lag for other ideas/technologies yet discount it for this? This period was not a stable equilibrium.
The strongest argument against Cofnas is that the average person is too stupid to accept race realism without becoming cruel racial bigots, which was the argument Coleman Hughes made in his recent interview with him. Hughes also proposed culture as an alternate third explanation, as you propose here. But that argument has been made and has slowly but surely been losing.
Race realism should be treated as an information hazard: true but damaging for social stability. The only conceivable way wokeness can be greatly neutered is if the moral obsession with equality subsides. Wokeness recedes if equal outcomes are no longer a sacred moral demand.
What exactly is Hughes' definition of "cruel racial bigotry?" I assume he doesn't say because it would close the door to speical treatment and entitlements. For instance, was redlining cruel you might ask? Well, is forced integration cruel to white property owners? Or white students bussed into dangerous and dumbed-down schools? Obviously, Hughes doesn't think so.
If redlining was a way of predicting which neighbourhoods were heavily salted with house-buyers likely to default on their mortgages, and avoiding them, it's just sensible risk management by banks. And bussing of school children away from neighbourhood schools seems like the craziest social policy experiment ever, looking back on it during the years when I was a parent of schoolchildren (which I wasn't when it was introduced.) Especially when we know that the black students brought their "culture" with them, not just their genes.
The regulation of redlinig led to the Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977:
The CRA required federal banking regulators to evaluate whether banks were meeting the credit needs of the communities where they operated, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. A bank’s CRA record could affect its ability to open branches, merge, or acquire another bank.
Attempting to close the "housing gap" eventually led to the Subprime Crisis.
Consider American views of racial differences in sports vs. racial differences in intelligence. Americans are much saner on the former than the latter.
Everybody more or less knows that blacks are faster on average than whites and Mexican mestizos are slower than whites.
It's occasionally talked about: Barack Obama several times praised David Epstein's HBD book "The Sports Gene" as one of his favorites.
It's considered stupid to deny it, and nobody starts massive national programs to move white baseball players from third base to rightfield or from safety to cornerback.
On the other hand, it's not talked about all that much either, in large part because it's so obviously relevant to the IQ question: if races can evolve to differ in sports abilities, why can't they evolve to differ in intellectual abilities?
So, we have a situation in which we don't shoot ourselves in the foot over race differences in sports, but constantly do self-destructive racist anti-white craziness over race differences in intelligence.
In exercise physiology, sports genetics, and evolutionary anthropology, there are distinctly "Africa-only" neuromuscular profiles. The continent exhibits significant regional divergence in muscle fiber composition, metabolic pathways, and biomechanics—most prominently the contrast between West/Central African populations (sprint and power adaptations) and East African populations (aerobic endurance adaptations). Populations from West Africa (and their diaspora in the Americas and Europe) have well-documented adaptations optimized for short-burst power, explosive acceleration, and anaerobic output.
A. Muscle Fiber Type & Cellular Physiology
Type II (Fast-Twitch) Muscle Fibers: Studies examining muscle biopsies (e.g., Bouchard et al., Ama et al.) have found that individuals of West African ancestry tend to have a higher average baseline proportion of Type IIa and Type IIx (fast-twitch, glycolytic) skeletal muscle fibers compared to Type I fibers.
Anaerobic Enzyme Activity: Muscle tissues exhibit higher activity of enzymes responsible for rapid, non-oxygen-dependent energy breakdown, such as:
Phosphofructokinase (PFK) (rate-limiting enzyme in glycolysis).
Creatine kinase (rapid ATP regeneration from phosphocreatine).
Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) (converting pyruvate to lactate during maximal exertion).
B. Key Genetic Variant: ACTN3 (The "Sprint Gene")
alpha-Actinin-3 Protein: This protein is expressed exclusively in the Z-disc of fast-twitch muscle fibers, providing structural stability during high-velocity, forceful contractions.
Allele Distribution: The functional allele (R577R) is found at its highest global frequency in Sub-Saharan and West African populations:
~98–99% of West Africans carry at least one functional R allele.
The null mutation (577X, which prevents production of the protein and shifts muscle toward endurance efficiency) is nearly absent in West Africa (<1%), whereas it occurs in ~18% of Europeans and ~25–30% of East Asians.
Before the internet, people came of age by socially internalizing a nuanced, somewhat contradictory, wide web of social attitudes through in person transmission. In the 1950s, the same parent that might have said 'the races do not differ in intelligence' might have also subtly sneered a little bit over the idea of universities hiring more black professors. The internet flattens this nuance and transmits social norms through text and speech meant for a wide audience. Therefore, we have seen a gradual process where social truths (relating to race, gender, etc) that used to be implicit and tacitly transmitted now have to be explicitly stated and argued for to get passed on from generation to generation.
This is an extremely interesting essay, but I have a big problem with the statement: "[Cofnas is] the figure staking out the most right-wing claims on the causes of group disparities." Scientifically, using 21st century genetic evidence, Cofnas's claim about causes of group disparities is simply true, not right wing. Hanania can justifiably call his political views right wing but the claim that genetic variation is a major cause of racial group disparities cannot be called "right wing." Given 21st century genetic evidence. that claim is simply and clearly scientifically true. Perhaps talking about the claim is right wing, but the claim itself is not right wing.
In Malaysia, there is like 90% quota for majority group on the grounds that they are genetically backward. Mahathir Mohamad wrote a book making this claim explicitly in the 70 s and late went on become PM and expanded the quota.
Chinese in Malaysia control north 70% private economy, despite apartheid level action them in government contracts and sector. Hard to keep high g people down, fanatics egalitarians can make anything work.
Let’s suppose that Cofnas is right about genetics causing IQ gaps, but that society rejects it (and perhaps you’re right that it always will). How do you then see things going? Take admissions to medical school. Are these on merit? If so, there will be glaring racial disparities, and you can’t expect society not to notice and not to ask about them. What do you reply?
Or do you think medical-school admissions should match population fraction? This (if Cofnas is right) would lead to competence being linked to racial identity. Again, you can’t expect society not to notice or ask about this. So what would you tell them?
“If so, there will be glaring racial disparities, and you can’t expect society not to notice and not to ask about them. What do you reply?”
The whole point of the article is that this will be explained by the cultural differences theories. These theories will be allowed because people like Cofnas and other race realists will absorb all the attacks from leftists which will leave cultural differences as the moderate option.
I am summarising the article at this point but Hanania argued that why cultural differences theories declined in the 2010s was because the last few race realists where ejected elite institutions, but since race realism has made a slight comeback (Hanania argues that only a small presence is necessary) cultural differences theories will return and this is all thats required to defeat wokeness.
Summarising: To defeat wokeness you do not need elites or the population to accept race realism but instead you need to protect race realists existence in elite institutions. In order for the cultural differences theories to be non-taboo. Since it’s relatively moderate compared to race realism. Then cultural differences theories can be used to restrain wokeness.
Ok, so, in the above scenario, the proffered (though wrong) explanation is cultural differences. But then people will want the unequal outcomes (supposedly) caused by those cultural differences to be eliminated. So they’ll continue blaming the culture of what they see as the group in the wrong, the one they see as causing those differences, namely “whites”. So this will continue wokism. In short, I just don’t see society these days, looking at admissions to Harvard and medical school and everything else and seeing that they are wildly skewed, and just saying “it’s ok, it’s cultural differences, and so it doesn’t need fixing”.
When I hear the term "cultural differences" I don't think of white racism as the "cultural difference" to be fixed. Rather, it's whatever cultural diseases suffered by the black population, especially the underclass black population, that are keeping them back is for *them* to fix for themselves. Where this argument breaks down is that most black people aren't in the underclass, with an obviously sick highly dysfunctional culture. Even though this culture is aped by many black people above the underclass, and you could see this aping as keeping them back too, it doesn't explain why achievement by blacks of better class is still suboptimal. Unfortunately their culture seems to be fine. Perhaps they really are just dull.
This is actually more dangerous because the true culturally underclass blacks aren't even applying to medical school, much less getting in. Rather it's the dull but diligent strivers who look like they should be given a shot at medical school because under blank slate you don't accept that they really are dull, so you give them a spot over a much smarter Jewish or Indian applicant.
I agree with you on how I would interpret “cultural differences” as causing IQ gaps; my above comment was about how the woke interpret this suggestion. So I’m not at all convinced that we can arrive at societal “peace” without any role for genes (whatever that is) being known and accepted. As a more general stance, I think that basing policy on falsehoods is always going to produce problems.
PS Good to read a Leslie MacMillan comment again 😀
Hey! I wondered if it was you. Cheers! (I don't know what happened to my terminal "n". Maybe that's part of the involution in Shakespeare's last stage of life: " . . . sans n". And Garp's father lost his terminal "p"....terminally.)
Thanks for clarifying. Yes, if you develop social policy around a lie, it won't work, and then the recriminations fester.
Americans have a particular squeamishness about this. Unfortunately all their freed slaves became their neighbours, instead of staying mostly out of sight in the Caribbean island sugar colonies.
If you ever persuade the majority of people to adopt the genetic explanation, the material difference (if one were proven to exist) would just be empowering the Left to use even more resources to address the gap through things like gene editing; after all, the whole basis for Marxism is a material analysis, so proving a genetic difference wouldn't be the win you think it would be (and in fact may degrade the position of race realists (read that be in quotes because I'm copying your parenthesizing for fun) this world even more). Even someone like JF would agree with what I'm saying.
The smartest thing to do if you actually want to advance real anti-black goals would be to adopt the cultural position regardless of your belief in genetics. This is because just as there would be no end to the discussion in case genetics were the actual cause, there would be no end to the influence you could exert as time marches on. Whether you're right or wrong, there's a chance society converges to at least your aesthetic preferences eventually just by virtue of there being a chance your side learns to play the subtle influence game better and better. Forcing the Left to accept genetics means there's a definite theoretical end point to the disparities for the reasons described in the previous paragraph, at which point you really have no argument for oppressing or segregating them based on competence (which is what most of your focus is on now). Remember, your actual aversion to them is rooted in them being too different, too ugly, and too easy to used as reasons to elicit feelings like guilt and frustration in you, not their stupidity. The least you could do is to keep your eyes on the actual prize.
In exercise physiology, sports genetics, and evolutionary anthropology, there are distinctly "Africa-only" neuromuscular profiles. The continent exhibits significant regional divergence in muscle fiber composition, metabolic pathways, and biomechanics—most prominently the contrast between West/Central African populations (sprint and power adaptations) and East African populations (aerobic endurance adaptations). Populations from West Africa (and their diaspora in the Americas and Europe) have well-documented adaptations optimized for short-burst power, explosive acceleration, and anaerobic output.
A. Muscle Fiber Type & Cellular Physiology
Type II (Fast-Twitch) Muscle Fibers: Studies examining muscle biopsies (e.g., Bouchard et al., Ama et al.) have found that individuals of West African ancestry tend to have a higher average baseline proportion of Type IIa and Type IIx (fast-twitch, glycolytic) skeletal muscle fibers compared to Type I fibers.
Anaerobic Enzyme Activity: Muscle tissues exhibit higher activity of enzymes responsible for rapid, non-oxygen-dependent energy breakdown, such as:
Phosphofructokinase (PFK) (rate-limiting enzyme in glycolysis).
Creatine kinase (rapid ATP regeneration from phosphocreatine).
Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) (converting pyruvate to lactate during maximal exertion).
B. Key Genetic Variant: ACTN3 (The "Sprint Gene")
alpha-Actinin-3 Protein: This protein is expressed exclusively in the Z-disc of fast-twitch muscle fibers, providing structural stability during high-velocity, forceful contractions.
Allele Distribution: The functional allele (R577R) is found at its highest global frequency in Sub-Saharan and West African populations:
~98–99% of West Africans carry at least one functional R allele.
The null mutation (577X, which prevents production of the protein and shifts muscle toward endurance efficiency) is nearly absent in West Africa (<1%), whereas it occurs in ~18% of Europeans and ~25–30% of East Asians.
I don't think I know what racism really is anymore. It used to be if you didn't lionize Martin Luther King and condemn Sir John A Macdonald (Canada's first Prime Minister) you were a racist. Now if you don't see the first as a full-of-shit grifter and the latter as a guy working in a political reality to get a new country off the ground, you are resorting to cartoon comic-book reasoning.
I guess I'm probably a racist, then, since I do subscribe to race realism and its corollary "black fatigue" (and, in Canada, aboriginal fatigue.) I do know that I don't care anymore if some leftist calls me a racist. My response is, "So? Your point?" That's the nice thing about being retired and un-fireable.
The Australian Human Rights Commission provides one of the clearest definitions of racism...
"Racism is the process by which systems and policies, actions and attitudes create inequitable opportunities and outcomes for people based on race. Racism is more than just prejudice in thought or action. It occurs when this prejudice whether individual or institutional is accompanied by the power to discriminate against, oppress or limit the rights of others."
The first sentence of Mr. Hanania expresses the racist idea that "...inherent racial differences in intelligence..." is at the heart of racism.
The fact that white America does have the power to "discriminate against, oppress or limit the rights of others" and it IS practiced and it IS systemic (albeit at a reduced rate since the 1960'-70') is what my opinion is based on.
Why should I care what the Australian Human Rights Commission says about anything? It's a quango whose prestige and budget rises the more things it can deem racist and the more cases it can prosecute against Australians.
So, you resort to attacking the messenger instead of actually trying to comprehend and address the message.
Why should I care what you say, or Mr. Hanania or anyone else for that matter. Only closed minded people react with such ridiculousness.
I cited the Australian Human Rights Commission, because I do not plagiarize and their definition of racism is as spot on as any I have seen.
The message in that definition is not easily refuted.
I suspect that your mindset is firmly in the right wing territory. Dismissive of a very real issue and attempt to smear and demonize an organization whose goal is to analyze and promote and protect human rights that are universal.
Clearly there isn’t just a linear track from 1920 to 2020. You certainly know about the mass riots, crime wave, and social upheaval during the late 60’s/70’s. The clear model is that elites work themselves and the public into a kind of revolutionary mood but then get burnt out on it due to their applied methods to achieving the utopian aim not working and coming with a lot of negative side fallout. That they don’t change their mind on the underlying issue, and because the activist academics and teachers pass down their version of reality to another generation of youths, means that the frenzy repeats.
Remove race and talk about the genetic nature of IQ and the down stream effects of IQ on life outcomes (Read: Class). This is the hereditarianism that wins.
Look poor whites that stay poor are poor because they are dumb. Smart, even average people dont stay poor. Poor people of all races tend have and cuase all the same problems in society. A smart poor might never become well off becuase they are starting at a disadvantage but they wont stay poor. This is true off all people. Do we think a poor but smart black or Hispanic person is staying poor? Of course not.
Confas would do much better to just talk about the nature of iq being genetic, it being massively important to life outcomes, focusing on meritocracy over dei. Meritocracy isnt cost free but if we can make the system as obviously meritocratic as 100 meter sprint or as close as humanly possible to that I think the trade offs can be mitigated.
Knowledge of IQ and race has made me a much stronger proponent of meritocracy not less.
That is the hereditarianism that is not quite right. We talk a lot about IQ differences between races because we understand IQ and its correlates fairly well. However, it is not true that IQ 85 whites and IQ blacks are that similar. They have quite different rates of illigitimacy, violent crime and since IQ 85 whites tend to have higher IQ relatives, they tend to conform more to IQ 100 cultural norms. Likewise, IQ 100 blacks have much higher crime rates, much lower rates of producing children that also average to 100 IQ and they have many more low IQ extended family members that can cause them problems.
Im aware of all that, but thats a non starter in the current environment, addressing class iq even though 85 iq white is not the same as an 85 iq black still gets far closer to issue than going with a less abstract and more concrete reality.
Also as social structures fade the behaviors of 85 iq whites are converging to the behavior of 85 iq blacks.
The real red pill is that lower iq people need strong social structures or they flounder. Thats why liberalism has been corrosive to the conservative rust belt and its now facing issues with opioids & drugs more generally as well as single motherhood; while lib areas aren't seeing those same issues. The second the socially enforced guard rails came off those communities started to flounder and we are seeing convergence of behavior to other groups.
In the sense I support ubi or something like ubi over plethora of social programs.
In general welfare is good money after bad but I net out as looking as a form of societal lubricant that keeps the lower class from not becoming overly destructive.
Smart poors given ubi (or something like ubi) will be able leverage to get out faster.
Also with regard to bright kids I support some pretty radical policy to relocate them out of slums, make work jobs for there parrents, and getting them into better schools and environments where they can flourish. Imagine the effect if poor women knew having smart kid might be a ticket out of a slum/trailer park, what kind of mate choices might they make?
With some effort on her part sure. We are talking about a generational endeavor here. But such a woman with some effort to improve them selves could certainly attract a mate better than whats on offer in a slum/trailer park.
Keep in mind men arent as class focused, so she has better odd dating up than a comparable man.
The welfare structure as it exists now doesnt really incentivize wise mate choice.
One must be careful when discussing things like black family breakup and criminality directly to IQ differences. The black family was extremely strong through 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow, with divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births actually lower than white families. The sexual revolution, welfare, decline in Christianity, and the new wave of drugs ended that in a couple of generations. So it wasn’t JUST intelligence; it was a society that rewarded bad behavior *combined* with lower IQ in a population that led to the black family destruction. You can see it happening to more than 2/3 of black families and 1/3 of white families.
Once you see *that*, return to the chart at the bottom of p. 279 and understand not the phenomenon itself (which was caused by the philosophical changes mentioned above), but why this social disaster hits American Blacks more than American Whites. The destruction of the family is not caused by intelligence differences, but the *disparity* is fully explained by intelligence (and the related impulsivity among those with lower intelligence) differences.
The problem with blaming black culture for low black IQ is that that sounds extremely racist.
African-Americans love "The Culture."
Lots of non-black people around the world love The Culture.
Telling blacks that The Culture is why they get low test scores and why they shoot each other so much is a non-starter.
No, the only acceptable explanation for why blacks aren't rich is because whites are innately evil, and white use their hereditary racist evilness to PLUNDER blacks of their deserved wealth.
To Nathan Cofnas, that sounds a little too reminiscent of 1933-1945 thinking about Jews plundering Aryans. He says that obviously nonwhites aren't strong enough yet to do much about this thinking, about demographics are changing over time, so it's time to worry.
I think you're wrong. Many viable culture-based arguments could be made, but these just are satisfying enough anymore to the post-Fuentes Right. The genetic argument actually seems to give these individuals a visceral sense of pleasure. The state of X should be enough evidence of this.
It just seems to me people who obsess about this stuff specifically want to make assumptions about individuals based on group data. It strikes me the same way as clumate change obsessives. Its probably real and impactful but the people obsessed with it in the fashion Cofnas obsesses over IQ almost always like it for its ideological utility to attack capitalism or whatever. And people can smell that a mile away and would rather be empirically simplistic than associate with people that cant hide their resentment. Especially when the policy fixes allaged to flow from.a fact risk more harm than good.
Elon Musk just tweeted a video of me talking about race differences. The Hereditarian Revolution is happening.
Yes, going by what Elon is doing on X, we can assume that anti-vaxx and election denial are also about to be consensus positions among American elites.
This analogy does not stand. The reason people don't accept anti-vaxx / election denial is that these ideas are not true. Hereditarianism meanwhile is true, and the reason people refuse to accept the idea is the taboo surrounding it.
Elon tweeting something to his 100M followers is not going to make a false idea true, but it will make a taboo idea substantially less taboo.
Breaking the taboo is the only thing necessary for the hereditarian revolution to win.
Richard, I have seen several videos/interviews where you discuss political-science concepts about "why hereditarianism" will nor help society. But I have not seen where you cite a webpage listing the Scientific EVIDENCE resources [for example that prove that the black/white IQ bell-curve mismatch in USA and on Earth is/not caused by genetics.
Here is one video/scientist to be listed and evaluated:
Genetics and Intelligence Robert Plomin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lev8dGnxvdw
Musk also infamously tweeted "You have said the actual truth" in reply to an anti-Semitic tweet blaming Jews for fomenting hatred against whites, which is the kind of anti-Semitic thesis upon which you focused your intellectual and academic career in the past.
Presumably you think people who hold such views are awful, and I believe you have suggested that they are in the past.
Wouldn't this support Hanania's argument in the post that people who appear to be enthusiastic about race and IQ differences like Musk tend to be awful in general?
Was Elon not doing this before?
Jason, I have seen several videos/interviews where you discuss political-science concepts about "why hereditarianism" will help society. But I have not seen where you cite a webpage listing the Scientific EVIDENCE resources [for example that prove that the black/white IQ bell-curve mismatch in USA and on Earth is caused by genetics.
Here is one video to be listed and evaluated in that resources webpage:
Genetics and Intelligence Robert Plomin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lev8dGnxvdw
Cofnas might wind up saving affirmative action.
You'll notice that affirmative action is taking a whomping lately at the hands of the Trump Administration ,and there isn't, so far, much pushback. A little understood reason for this is that in 2026, few Americans recognize how big the IQ gap is between blacks and whites (and, especially, between blacks and Asians). It's been taboo to talk about the data for so long that almost nobody knows the real numbers anymore
Many Americans now assume that affirmative action in elite institutions is fairly marginal, that, say, 20% of the blacks at Harvard are there due to affirmative action.
So, they reason, we could get rid of affirmative action at Harvard and the percentage of black students might drop from 10% to 8%. So, what's the big deal! Now, all 8% of the blacks at Harvard know they got in legitimately based on their high IQs and strong work ethics! It's a win-win (except for the small number of blacks currently being let into Harvard on racial preferences).
Cofnas pointsout that Harvard's internal numbers suggest that if Steven Pinker's plan for Harvard to admit solely on academic merit, then only 0.7% of Harvard undergrads would be black. He extrapolates, reasonably, that that means under purely meritocratic hiring, Harvard's black share of its faculty would fall toward (but never quite get to) zero percent.
Cofnas haters hate this revelation more than anything else. They constantly cite this datapoint from Harvard's own deposition in the SFFA Supreme Court case as an obviously racist hallucination Cofnas dreamed up out of the blue because he hates blacks.
But, maybe, a few of the brightest onlookers will realize that Cofnas is just citing facts. At super-elite institutions like Harvard, the race gap in IQ is so big way out at the right tail of the bell curve that racial preferences are the only way to get even just a few percent blacks into Harvard's student body and, especially, faculty.
I've long joked that they should make a sequel to Nic Cage's "Book of Secrets." In that second National Treasure movie, Cage's treasure hunter steals the President's Book of Secrets which reveals who shot JFK, what happened at Roswell, etc.
It should be called "National Treasure: Ivy League Presidents' Book of Secrets." When Cage finally gets his hands on the Harvard president's padlocked book of secrets, it turns out to be a dog-eared first edition of "The Bell Curve."
It's clear that Ivy League presidents understand how big the race gap in test scores is and that nobody has a solution for it other than racial preferences for blacks. But, ironically enough, THEY CAN'T TELL ANYBODY. It's widely considered Nathan Cofnas-level racism to reveal that blacks need affirmative action to have even low single digit percentage representation in ultra-elite organizations.
For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed in affirmative action for thee but not for me. She needed the smartest law clerks. So, only 1 of her 159 clerks, Paul Watford, was black.
But few know facts like that anymore because race realism has been so demonized. So, affirmative action is currently in really big trouble because it is considered racist to point out how much blacks need it.
In Malaysia, there is like 90% quota for majority group on the grounds that they are genetically backward. Mahathir Mohamad wrote a book making this claim explicitly in the 70 s and late went on become PM and expanded the quota.
Chinese in Malaysia control north 70% private economy, despite apartheid level action them in government contracts and sector. Hard to keep high g people down, fanatics egalitarians can make anything work.
Please explain what constitutes meritocratic hiring for faculty when you .don't have an objective measure like you do for student admission?
There is no SAT, GRE, MCAT, LSAT etc for faculty.
You read his dissertation and his best articles? It's really not hard to tell that Steven Pinker is worthy of being a Harvard professor but Jason Arday isn't worthy of being a Cambridge professor.
That’s motte and bailey. Arday was an obvious fraud. You can laugh at how credulous everyone surrounding him was, but you can’t argue that he represented black excellence.
Isnt Arday a very egregious example?. I'm talking abiut the thousands of scholars who are not plagiarists and whose scholarly output meets baseline standards of quality.
Take Claudine Gay as an example. While a plagiarist (at a much lower degree than Arday), she was a real academic, but her academic output was mediocre on objective measures: low number of papers and books. And she conducted no ground-breaking research. "Revealing" that black participating in elections where there's a black candidate is not work that justifies a spot in a top University, because nobody would call that new and innovative.
Very true about Gay. But aside from the plagiarism, could one argue that Gay was simply living up to the standards of her discipline? If that's the case, it's the system that's broken.
I heard more than one person note that Arday was simply sitting at the table that was set before him. Now for an academic in say, pediatric oncology, the table set before them is quite different in terms of expectations and standards.
I can't help but think of an old saying: don't hate the player - hate the game.
I believe Cofnas himself has said he prefers switching to an explicit quota system.
Yes, in a recent interview he suggested that as a possibility.
I think there is a few disparate lines of argument int this sphere, which are all true to different degrees:
1. The Age of Hitler theory, which posits that the post-WWII world order morality is primarily centered around being maximally anti-Nazi, the ultimate evil. Being maximally unlike something else, though, is actually not that easy. You can start out, for example, being a Churchillite conservative, and think yourself safe, since these are literally the people who had beaten the actual Nazis. But it's pretty easy to find an opening in their believes where they are more similar to Nazis, like Imperialism or Racism, and advocate for moving away from these beliefs. This explains the consistent shift into one particular direction, which we now call "left", and woke is merely one possible state after repeating this process over and over for decades. It doesn't even need to be the most extreme variation. IMO the smashing success of civil rights would also not have been possible in the same way without this background.
2. The cooperatist/coalitionist hypothesis for morality. In short, morality is an evolutionary adaption to facilitate the creation and stability of large coalitions, which then can beat up smaller coalitions. This was historically still limited by information transmission speed and mobility, though, so the quest usually was to get some kind of locally maximal coalition depending on the geography. In modern times, there are basically no such limits, so you're crippling yourself for no reason if your ideology is not capable of fundamentally including anyone from anywhere. You can currently see this very well in action; If I join any broadly left-leaning (purely values-based) org in my country, this sets me up for success in the international elite all across the world, they have connection anywhere. On the other hand with right-leaning (often partially group-based or at least biased) orgs, I'm at best getting a benefit with only the local elite, or in the worst case just shoot myself in the foot since those are themselves internationalists. It should be obvious that "race realism" is a massive hindrance to making world-spanning connections, people are bound to be offended. This is completely independent of it being wrong or right.
3. Finally, plain prosocial bias. I'm myself a geneticist in medical science and I regularly encounter unpopular truths: For example, I've had a non-western patient data set where I just wanted to test for hidden relations, only to find out that the average person was inbred roughly on the level of endemic cousin marriages. This was not terribly surprising to anyone who knew anything about the culture, and was probably a major reason why that population had mysterious problems with inheritable diseases. But do you think I published anything about it? Lol no, just good ol' "a variant in gene XXX has been found to be associated ...". Weird that this population had frequent problems with a recessive variant causing major disabilities, completely impossible to explain!
Cofnas focus on civil rights isn't entirely wrong, but rather limited.
If Derrick Bell’s views are any indication, woke was brewing for decades. He could have embraced Sowell’s cultural explanation but, as a typical black intellectual, he may have been disinclined to blame his own people (although Sowell is, in essence, blaming whites for inculcating a Southern culture among blacks) for the stalled progress/disparities he saw and blamed institutional racism. (I’ll bet he even saw cultural explanations as a cover for racism.)
Social media allowed the CRT folks to take center stage but they were there all along.
This is a very impressive article that makes you rethink a topic on which seemingly everything has already been said.
You did, however, overlook the significance of the revolution in identifying human genetics. Denial will become increasingly difficult. David Reich published an article in Nature this year regarding genetic changes associated with intelligence, which he observed in human skeletons over a long period of time.
The question here is what role geneticists will play in elite discourse as this continues. They may continue to pretend their research has nothing to do with real-world race/ethnicity (as Reich did in his book; see also the comment here by an alleged geneticist, about inbreeding in some ethnicities). If they do publicly draw the ever-more-obvious conclusions, they may provide the racialist voice in academia that Hanania says may be necessary, or they may simply be banished by the woke true-believers. (Reich said in his book--in (I think) 2017, so long before his most recent research--that there might be race differences in psychological traits but they probably wouldn't tend to confirm historical stereotypes or current disparities; for this public denunciation of race-realism, he was still the target of condemnation by a number of academics outraged that he would even consider the idea of race being important.)
For David Reich's true beliefs, see the chapter in Fleet Street woke hack Angela Saini's 2019 book "Superior" in which she interviews Reich and he demolishes the politically correct premise of her book. I quoted their dialogue at length in the end of my review of Saini's book:
https://www.takimag.com/article/arguing-against-reality/
Yes: this is more or less what he wrote in his book.
You resist people psychoanalysing your true beliefs, but are happy to inquire Reich's true beliefs.
why this contradiction ?
The timeline is not a problem for Cofnasism. Race realism falling out of favor in the 30s directly lead to the civil rights movement in the 60s, a 30-year lag.
The civil rights movement's transformation into wokism was forestalled for decades by the idealistic belief that the current state of B-W inequality was only a temporary affair. Once we equalized the opportunities available to blacks and whites, they would become equal.
50 years later, when it became clear that no such equality was happening, people started reaching for systemic racism explanations.
Civil Rights movement itself was the result of changing Democratic Party's coalition.
The mid-20th century led to wokeness. You can say we lived in a post-racial society from the 1980s to c. 2010, but modern wokeness came, and those intellectual currents had been brewing for decades based on the assumption of blank slatism. You grant cultural lag for other ideas/technologies yet discount it for this? This period was not a stable equilibrium.
The strongest argument against Cofnas is that the average person is too stupid to accept race realism without becoming cruel racial bigots, which was the argument Coleman Hughes made in his recent interview with him. Hughes also proposed culture as an alternate third explanation, as you propose here. But that argument has been made and has slowly but surely been losing.
Race realism should be treated as an information hazard: true but damaging for social stability. The only conceivable way wokeness can be greatly neutered is if the moral obsession with equality subsides. Wokeness recedes if equal outcomes are no longer a sacred moral demand.
What exactly is Hughes' definition of "cruel racial bigotry?" I assume he doesn't say because it would close the door to speical treatment and entitlements. For instance, was redlining cruel you might ask? Well, is forced integration cruel to white property owners? Or white students bussed into dangerous and dumbed-down schools? Obviously, Hughes doesn't think so.
If redlining was a way of predicting which neighbourhoods were heavily salted with house-buyers likely to default on their mortgages, and avoiding them, it's just sensible risk management by banks. And bussing of school children away from neighbourhood schools seems like the craziest social policy experiment ever, looking back on it during the years when I was a parent of schoolchildren (which I wasn't when it was introduced.) Especially when we know that the black students brought their "culture" with them, not just their genes.
The regulation of redlinig led to the Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977:
The CRA required federal banking regulators to evaluate whether banks were meeting the credit needs of the communities where they operated, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. A bank’s CRA record could affect its ability to open branches, merge, or acquire another bank.
Attempting to close the "housing gap" eventually led to the Subprime Crisis.
Consider American views of racial differences in sports vs. racial differences in intelligence. Americans are much saner on the former than the latter.
Everybody more or less knows that blacks are faster on average than whites and Mexican mestizos are slower than whites.
It's occasionally talked about: Barack Obama several times praised David Epstein's HBD book "The Sports Gene" as one of his favorites.
It's considered stupid to deny it, and nobody starts massive national programs to move white baseball players from third base to rightfield or from safety to cornerback.
On the other hand, it's not talked about all that much either, in large part because it's so obviously relevant to the IQ question: if races can evolve to differ in sports abilities, why can't they evolve to differ in intellectual abilities?
So, we have a situation in which we don't shoot ourselves in the foot over race differences in sports, but constantly do self-destructive racist anti-white craziness over race differences in intelligence.
In exercise physiology, sports genetics, and evolutionary anthropology, there are distinctly "Africa-only" neuromuscular profiles. The continent exhibits significant regional divergence in muscle fiber composition, metabolic pathways, and biomechanics—most prominently the contrast between West/Central African populations (sprint and power adaptations) and East African populations (aerobic endurance adaptations). Populations from West Africa (and their diaspora in the Americas and Europe) have well-documented adaptations optimized for short-burst power, explosive acceleration, and anaerobic output.
A. Muscle Fiber Type & Cellular Physiology
Type II (Fast-Twitch) Muscle Fibers: Studies examining muscle biopsies (e.g., Bouchard et al., Ama et al.) have found that individuals of West African ancestry tend to have a higher average baseline proportion of Type IIa and Type IIx (fast-twitch, glycolytic) skeletal muscle fibers compared to Type I fibers.
Anaerobic Enzyme Activity: Muscle tissues exhibit higher activity of enzymes responsible for rapid, non-oxygen-dependent energy breakdown, such as:
Phosphofructokinase (PFK) (rate-limiting enzyme in glycolysis).
Creatine kinase (rapid ATP regeneration from phosphocreatine).
Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) (converting pyruvate to lactate during maximal exertion).
B. Key Genetic Variant: ACTN3 (The "Sprint Gene")
alpha-Actinin-3 Protein: This protein is expressed exclusively in the Z-disc of fast-twitch muscle fibers, providing structural stability during high-velocity, forceful contractions.
Allele Distribution: The functional allele (R577R) is found at its highest global frequency in Sub-Saharan and West African populations:
~98–99% of West Africans carry at least one functional R allele.
The null mutation (577X, which prevents production of the protein and shifts muscle toward endurance efficiency) is nearly absent in West Africa (<1%), whereas it occurs in ~18% of Europeans and ~25–30% of East Asians.
In recent FIFA world Cup, absolute majority of players in FR and England team were blacks and there wasn't much hoopla about it.
Before the internet, people came of age by socially internalizing a nuanced, somewhat contradictory, wide web of social attitudes through in person transmission. In the 1950s, the same parent that might have said 'the races do not differ in intelligence' might have also subtly sneered a little bit over the idea of universities hiring more black professors. The internet flattens this nuance and transmits social norms through text and speech meant for a wide audience. Therefore, we have seen a gradual process where social truths (relating to race, gender, etc) that used to be implicit and tacitly transmitted now have to be explicitly stated and argued for to get passed on from generation to generation.
This is an extremely interesting essay, but I have a big problem with the statement: "[Cofnas is] the figure staking out the most right-wing claims on the causes of group disparities." Scientifically, using 21st century genetic evidence, Cofnas's claim about causes of group disparities is simply true, not right wing. Hanania can justifiably call his political views right wing but the claim that genetic variation is a major cause of racial group disparities cannot be called "right wing." Given 21st century genetic evidence. that claim is simply and clearly scientifically true. Perhaps talking about the claim is right wing, but the claim itself is not right wing.
In Malaysia, there is like 90% quota for majority group on the grounds that they are genetically backward. Mahathir Mohamad wrote a book making this claim explicitly in the 70 s and late went on become PM and expanded the quota.
Chinese in Malaysia control north 70% private economy, despite apartheid level action them in government contracts and sector. Hard to keep high g people down, fanatics egalitarians can make anything work.
Let’s suppose that Cofnas is right about genetics causing IQ gaps, but that society rejects it (and perhaps you’re right that it always will). How do you then see things going? Take admissions to medical school. Are these on merit? If so, there will be glaring racial disparities, and you can’t expect society not to notice and not to ask about them. What do you reply?
Or do you think medical-school admissions should match population fraction? This (if Cofnas is right) would lead to competence being linked to racial identity. Again, you can’t expect society not to notice or ask about this. So what would you tell them?
“If so, there will be glaring racial disparities, and you can’t expect society not to notice and not to ask about them. What do you reply?”
The whole point of the article is that this will be explained by the cultural differences theories. These theories will be allowed because people like Cofnas and other race realists will absorb all the attacks from leftists which will leave cultural differences as the moderate option.
I am summarising the article at this point but Hanania argued that why cultural differences theories declined in the 2010s was because the last few race realists where ejected elite institutions, but since race realism has made a slight comeback (Hanania argues that only a small presence is necessary) cultural differences theories will return and this is all thats required to defeat wokeness.
Summarising: To defeat wokeness you do not need elites or the population to accept race realism but instead you need to protect race realists existence in elite institutions. In order for the cultural differences theories to be non-taboo. Since it’s relatively moderate compared to race realism. Then cultural differences theories can be used to restrain wokeness.
Ok, so, in the above scenario, the proffered (though wrong) explanation is cultural differences. But then people will want the unequal outcomes (supposedly) caused by those cultural differences to be eliminated. So they’ll continue blaming the culture of what they see as the group in the wrong, the one they see as causing those differences, namely “whites”. So this will continue wokism. In short, I just don’t see society these days, looking at admissions to Harvard and medical school and everything else and seeing that they are wildly skewed, and just saying “it’s ok, it’s cultural differences, and so it doesn’t need fixing”.
When I hear the term "cultural differences" I don't think of white racism as the "cultural difference" to be fixed. Rather, it's whatever cultural diseases suffered by the black population, especially the underclass black population, that are keeping them back is for *them* to fix for themselves. Where this argument breaks down is that most black people aren't in the underclass, with an obviously sick highly dysfunctional culture. Even though this culture is aped by many black people above the underclass, and you could see this aping as keeping them back too, it doesn't explain why achievement by blacks of better class is still suboptimal. Unfortunately their culture seems to be fine. Perhaps they really are just dull.
This is actually more dangerous because the true culturally underclass blacks aren't even applying to medical school, much less getting in. Rather it's the dull but diligent strivers who look like they should be given a shot at medical school because under blank slate you don't accept that they really are dull, so you give them a spot over a much smarter Jewish or Indian applicant.
"When I hear the term "cultural differences" I don't think of white racism as the "cultural difference" to be fixed."
But most other people in 2026 do.
I agree with you on how I would interpret “cultural differences” as causing IQ gaps; my above comment was about how the woke interpret this suggestion. So I’m not at all convinced that we can arrive at societal “peace” without any role for genes (whatever that is) being known and accepted. As a more general stance, I think that basing policy on falsehoods is always going to produce problems.
PS Good to read a Leslie MacMillan comment again 😀
Hey! I wondered if it was you. Cheers! (I don't know what happened to my terminal "n". Maybe that's part of the involution in Shakespeare's last stage of life: " . . . sans n". And Garp's father lost his terminal "p"....terminally.)
Thanks for clarifying. Yes, if you develop social policy around a lie, it won't work, and then the recriminations fester.
Americans have a particular squeamishness about this. Unfortunately all their freed slaves became their neighbours, instead of staying mostly out of sight in the Caribbean island sugar colonies.
If you ever persuade the majority of people to adopt the genetic explanation, the material difference (if one were proven to exist) would just be empowering the Left to use even more resources to address the gap through things like gene editing; after all, the whole basis for Marxism is a material analysis, so proving a genetic difference wouldn't be the win you think it would be (and in fact may degrade the position of race realists (read that be in quotes because I'm copying your parenthesizing for fun) this world even more). Even someone like JF would agree with what I'm saying.
The smartest thing to do if you actually want to advance real anti-black goals would be to adopt the cultural position regardless of your belief in genetics. This is because just as there would be no end to the discussion in case genetics were the actual cause, there would be no end to the influence you could exert as time marches on. Whether you're right or wrong, there's a chance society converges to at least your aesthetic preferences eventually just by virtue of there being a chance your side learns to play the subtle influence game better and better. Forcing the Left to accept genetics means there's a definite theoretical end point to the disparities for the reasons described in the previous paragraph, at which point you really have no argument for oppressing or segregating them based on competence (which is what most of your focus is on now). Remember, your actual aversion to them is rooted in them being too different, too ugly, and too easy to used as reasons to elicit feelings like guilt and frustration in you, not their stupidity. The least you could do is to keep your eyes on the actual prize.
I’m not sure who you mean by “you”, but I for one don’t have “anti-black goals” and nor any desire to “oppress” them.
Corrected Quote: "This (if Cofnas is right) would lead to INcompetence being linked to racial identity."
"race realism" is another way to express (and excuse) racist attitudes.
The absurdity of this statement reveals how clueless this is...
"The problem was that white Southerners loved blacks too much to tell the truth about them."
What a shameful racist screed.
In exercise physiology, sports genetics, and evolutionary anthropology, there are distinctly "Africa-only" neuromuscular profiles. The continent exhibits significant regional divergence in muscle fiber composition, metabolic pathways, and biomechanics—most prominently the contrast between West/Central African populations (sprint and power adaptations) and East African populations (aerobic endurance adaptations). Populations from West Africa (and their diaspora in the Americas and Europe) have well-documented adaptations optimized for short-burst power, explosive acceleration, and anaerobic output.
A. Muscle Fiber Type & Cellular Physiology
Type II (Fast-Twitch) Muscle Fibers: Studies examining muscle biopsies (e.g., Bouchard et al., Ama et al.) have found that individuals of West African ancestry tend to have a higher average baseline proportion of Type IIa and Type IIx (fast-twitch, glycolytic) skeletal muscle fibers compared to Type I fibers.
Anaerobic Enzyme Activity: Muscle tissues exhibit higher activity of enzymes responsible for rapid, non-oxygen-dependent energy breakdown, such as:
Phosphofructokinase (PFK) (rate-limiting enzyme in glycolysis).
Creatine kinase (rapid ATP regeneration from phosphocreatine).
Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) (converting pyruvate to lactate during maximal exertion).
B. Key Genetic Variant: ACTN3 (The "Sprint Gene")
alpha-Actinin-3 Protein: This protein is expressed exclusively in the Z-disc of fast-twitch muscle fibers, providing structural stability during high-velocity, forceful contractions.
Allele Distribution: The functional allele (R577R) is found at its highest global frequency in Sub-Saharan and West African populations:
~98–99% of West Africans carry at least one functional R allele.
The null mutation (577X, which prevents production of the protein and shifts muscle toward endurance efficiency) is nearly absent in West Africa (<1%), whereas it occurs in ~18% of Europeans and ~25–30% of East Asians.
Is DNA "racist"? Is DNA "real"?
Canada feels the same way about aboriginal Indians and writings from the time period express the same gentle condescension.
Racists follow the same playbook in all of history. Nazism is the same.
I don't think I know what racism really is anymore. It used to be if you didn't lionize Martin Luther King and condemn Sir John A Macdonald (Canada's first Prime Minister) you were a racist. Now if you don't see the first as a full-of-shit grifter and the latter as a guy working in a political reality to get a new country off the ground, you are resorting to cartoon comic-book reasoning.
I guess I'm probably a racist, then, since I do subscribe to race realism and its corollary "black fatigue" (and, in Canada, aboriginal fatigue.) I do know that I don't care anymore if some leftist calls me a racist. My response is, "So? Your point?" That's the nice thing about being retired and un-fireable.
I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT RACISM IS ANYMORE!
The Australian Human Rights Commission provides one of the clearest definitions of racism...
"Racism is the process by which systems and policies, actions and attitudes create inequitable opportunities and outcomes for people based on race. Racism is more than just prejudice in thought or action. It occurs when this prejudice whether individual or institutional is accompanied by the power to discriminate against, oppress or limit the rights of others."
The first sentence of Mr. Hanania expresses the racist idea that "...inherent racial differences in intelligence..." is at the heart of racism.
The fact that white America does have the power to "discriminate against, oppress or limit the rights of others" and it IS practiced and it IS systemic (albeit at a reduced rate since the 1960'-70') is what my opinion is based on.
Why should I care what the Australian Human Rights Commission says about anything? It's a quango whose prestige and budget rises the more things it can deem racist and the more cases it can prosecute against Australians.
So, you resort to attacking the messenger instead of actually trying to comprehend and address the message.
Why should I care what you say, or Mr. Hanania or anyone else for that matter. Only closed minded people react with such ridiculousness.
I cited the Australian Human Rights Commission, because I do not plagiarize and their definition of racism is as spot on as any I have seen.
The message in that definition is not easily refuted.
I suspect that your mindset is firmly in the right wing territory. Dismissive of a very real issue and attempt to smear and demonize an organization whose goal is to analyze and promote and protect human rights that are universal.
Did you watch "Little Bird" ? :)
Clearly there isn’t just a linear track from 1920 to 2020. You certainly know about the mass riots, crime wave, and social upheaval during the late 60’s/70’s. The clear model is that elites work themselves and the public into a kind of revolutionary mood but then get burnt out on it due to their applied methods to achieving the utopian aim not working and coming with a lot of negative side fallout. That they don’t change their mind on the underlying issue, and because the activist academics and teachers pass down their version of reality to another generation of youths, means that the frenzy repeats.
How about confas compatiblism?
Remove race and talk about the genetic nature of IQ and the down stream effects of IQ on life outcomes (Read: Class). This is the hereditarianism that wins.
Look poor whites that stay poor are poor because they are dumb. Smart, even average people dont stay poor. Poor people of all races tend have and cuase all the same problems in society. A smart poor might never become well off becuase they are starting at a disadvantage but they wont stay poor. This is true off all people. Do we think a poor but smart black or Hispanic person is staying poor? Of course not.
Confas would do much better to just talk about the nature of iq being genetic, it being massively important to life outcomes, focusing on meritocracy over dei. Meritocracy isnt cost free but if we can make the system as obviously meritocratic as 100 meter sprint or as close as humanly possible to that I think the trade offs can be mitigated.
Knowledge of IQ and race has made me a much stronger proponent of meritocracy not less.
That is the hereditarianism that is not quite right. We talk a lot about IQ differences between races because we understand IQ and its correlates fairly well. However, it is not true that IQ 85 whites and IQ blacks are that similar. They have quite different rates of illigitimacy, violent crime and since IQ 85 whites tend to have higher IQ relatives, they tend to conform more to IQ 100 cultural norms. Likewise, IQ 100 blacks have much higher crime rates, much lower rates of producing children that also average to 100 IQ and they have many more low IQ extended family members that can cause them problems.
Im aware of all that, but thats a non starter in the current environment, addressing class iq even though 85 iq white is not the same as an 85 iq black still gets far closer to issue than going with a less abstract and more concrete reality.
Also as social structures fade the behaviors of 85 iq whites are converging to the behavior of 85 iq blacks.
The real red pill is that lower iq people need strong social structures or they flounder. Thats why liberalism has been corrosive to the conservative rust belt and its now facing issues with opioids & drugs more generally as well as single motherhood; while lib areas aren't seeing those same issues. The second the socially enforced guard rails came off those communities started to flounder and we are seeing convergence of behavior to other groups.
In the sense I support ubi or something like ubi over plethora of social programs.
In general welfare is good money after bad but I net out as looking as a form of societal lubricant that keeps the lower class from not becoming overly destructive.
Smart poors given ubi (or something like ubi) will be able leverage to get out faster.
Also with regard to bright kids I support some pretty radical policy to relocate them out of slums, make work jobs for there parrents, and getting them into better schools and environments where they can flourish. Imagine the effect if poor women knew having smart kid might be a ticket out of a slum/trailer park, what kind of mate choices might they make?
Does a semi-literate woman in a slum or trailer park have much range of mate choice available to her?
With some effort on her part sure. We are talking about a generational endeavor here. But such a woman with some effort to improve them selves could certainly attract a mate better than whats on offer in a slum/trailer park.
Keep in mind men arent as class focused, so she has better odd dating up than a comparable man.
The welfare structure as it exists now doesnt really incentivize wise mate choice.
One must be careful when discussing things like black family breakup and criminality directly to IQ differences. The black family was extremely strong through 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow, with divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births actually lower than white families. The sexual revolution, welfare, decline in Christianity, and the new wave of drugs ended that in a couple of generations. So it wasn’t JUST intelligence; it was a society that rewarded bad behavior *combined* with lower IQ in a population that led to the black family destruction. You can see it happening to more than 2/3 of black families and 1/3 of white families.
Once you see *that*, return to the chart at the bottom of p. 279 and understand not the phenomenon itself (which was caused by the philosophical changes mentioned above), but why this social disaster hits American Blacks more than American Whites. The destruction of the family is not caused by intelligence differences, but the *disparity* is fully explained by intelligence (and the related impulsivity among those with lower intelligence) differences.
The problem with blaming black culture for low black IQ is that that sounds extremely racist.
African-Americans love "The Culture."
Lots of non-black people around the world love The Culture.
Telling blacks that The Culture is why they get low test scores and why they shoot each other so much is a non-starter.
No, the only acceptable explanation for why blacks aren't rich is because whites are innately evil, and white use their hereditary racist evilness to PLUNDER blacks of their deserved wealth.
To Nathan Cofnas, that sounds a little too reminiscent of 1933-1945 thinking about Jews plundering Aryans. He says that obviously nonwhites aren't strong enough yet to do much about this thinking, about demographics are changing over time, so it's time to worry.
I think you're wrong. Many viable culture-based arguments could be made, but these just are satisfying enough anymore to the post-Fuentes Right. The genetic argument actually seems to give these individuals a visceral sense of pleasure. The state of X should be enough evidence of this.
It just seems to me people who obsess about this stuff specifically want to make assumptions about individuals based on group data. It strikes me the same way as clumate change obsessives. Its probably real and impactful but the people obsessed with it in the fashion Cofnas obsesses over IQ almost always like it for its ideological utility to attack capitalism or whatever. And people can smell that a mile away and would rather be empirically simplistic than associate with people that cant hide their resentment. Especially when the policy fixes allaged to flow from.a fact risk more harm than good.