45212
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Live Free or DEI
URL: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/live-free-or-dei-del-valle
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Live Free or DEI The eugenic foundations of the war on woke IT’S A COMMON STORY, banal, even: a child of privilege, an heir apparent, leaves for college to get a good enough education—and maybe have a little fun—before taking over the family business. But the child, away from the nest for the first time, is exposed to new kinds of people, new ways of being. Novel experiences lead to uncomfortable questions. Upon returning home, the child, now an adult, begins to regard their upbringing with contempt, to see the values instilled in them since birth as retrograde, false, maybe even dangerous. R. Derek Black was one such child, and probably the most interesting variation on this theme. Black was a prodigy, building a website at age ten, winning a local election at nineteen, and hosting a popular radio show at twenty-one. The website, KidsStormfront, was an offshoot of Stormfront, the white nationalist forum that Black’s father, Don, launched in 1995. The radio show, first hosted on Stormfront and then later, bizarrely, broadcast by a South Florida radio station with a large Haitian audience, featured interviews with prominent racists, discussions of the links between race and IQ, and tirades about the threat of “white genocide.” The younger Black eventually enrolled at the New College of Florida to study medieval European history, eager to learn more about the forefathers of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Then came the rupture: a student came across the radio show and outed Black as a white nationalist. After a few months of being shunned on campus, Black was begrudgingly invited to a Shabbat dinner by another student who wondered if bigotry could be eroded by kindness and community. Shockingly, it worked. Black disavowed their previous beliefs, enrolled in a PhD program, and recently published a memoir, The Klansman’s Son, in which they came out as trans. For some, Black’s deradicalization is nothing short of a miracle, a testament to the power of diversity and the transformative possibilities of higher education. For white nationalists, what happened to Black is a tragedy. Some Stormfront users still fantasize that the prodigal son will return someday; they see Black as a double agent, a true believer who has infiltrated the enemy in pursuit of justice. But most realize the former prince of Stormfront has strayed too far from the flock and fear their kids could be next. In the decade since Black graduated college, the white genocide conspiracy theory they helped popularize as a teenager has been rebranded as the “Great Replacement,” a term that spilled out of the forums into the mainstream in 2017, after white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, Virginia. Shepherded into ostensibly polite society by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, the Great Replacement theory has picked up prominent adherents, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, erstwhile Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and, of course, Donald Trump. The underlying premise—that a shadowy cabal of elites is flooding the Western world with migrants and installing people of color into positions of power as part of its plot to overtake the white race, or at least to ensure a permanent Democratic majority—is now believed to some degree or another by nearly half of Republican voters, according to national polling. The fears raised by the Great Replacement go far beyond now-familiar resentments over affirmative action or complaints about having to press 1 for English. Among its most committed disciples, the concern is not just that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies encourage colleges and workplaces to relax standards for people of color, or that cities are being overrun by migrants from unfamiliar places—it’s that the differences between white Americans and everyone else aren’t merely cultural but genetic, immutable, and incapable of being assimilated away. From the Fringes While R. Derek Black has spent the past decade warning anyone who will listen about the growing influence of this once-fringe conspiracy theory, the institution that helped Black break away from white nationalism has recently come under attack. Last year, New College was the target of a hostile takeover led by Florida governor Ron DeSantis as part of his broader war on “wokeness.” The small liberal arts school describes itself as a “community of free thinkers”; DeSantis called it a “Marxist commune” and appointed a half dozen of his allies to the school’s board. The new trustees fired New College’s president, dissolved its diversity and equity office, denied tenure to several professors, and recruited a new crop of students to make up for the exodus that ensued: this would be a new New College. “The core curriculum must be grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization,” DeSantis said at the time. Newly appointed trustee Christopher F. Rufo—the conservative activist who, a year later, would lead the campaign to oust Harvard president Claudine Gay— said anyone who didn’t agree with the new ethos was free to leave. The right’s recent embrace of hereditarianism and natalism suggests that eugenic thinking is once again ascendant beyond the fringes. Two months later, Rufo released an eleven-minute video on his Substack responding to the neoreactionary philosopher Curtis Yarvin, who had written a Substack post of his own criticizing the New College takeover, an initiative that is “doomed to fail, and is actually more likely to reinforce progressive cultural power.” This is Rufo’s succinct interpretation of Yarvin’s meandering critique, anyway, which begins with a Lithuanian proverb about an oak tree before eventually concluding that the New College stunt was borne of DeSantis’s desire for attention and campaign donors, rather than a genuine effort to establish a “pillar of authentic Eurocentric learning” in Florida. Rufo, casting himself as a can- do optimist, chastised Yarvin for his “right-wing doomerism.” New College, he declared, was just the beginning. “Even if one accepts Yarvin’s promise of inevitable failure—and I do not—he would be wise to remember the words of Leo Strauss, who, in a critique of Edmund Burke, counseled that principled action, even against immense odds, can yield unexpected results.” Like any good Straussian, Rufo layers his crusade against DEI and critical race theory with implicit meaning. On the one hand, there is the argument he puts forth in media interviews and in his own writing: parents have lost control of their kids’ education. An initially well-intentioned effort to counteract the harms of racism and discrimination has gone too far. Instead of instituting a system of color blindness, we have replaced one form of racial preference with another. This new hierarchy is enforced by a bloated bureaucracy of consultants, advisers, and academics who are paid handsomely—with your tax dollars—to teach white children to hate themselves for the sins of their ancestors. (And were they really sins, anyway?) When those children grow up and enter the workforce, they’re hobbled by preferential hiring practices that favor anyone who isn’t a straight white man—and the victims of these policies, having been subject to a lifetime of indoctrination, believe they deserve it. Rufo’s stated goal is to dismantle this unjust system; to replace the Sisyphean quest for equal outcomes with a fair policy of equal opportunity. There is another message below the surface, however, one which he will hint at and direct his followers toward but will never state in explicit terms himself: the reason equal outcomes are unattainable is that all men are not, as it turns out, created equal. Some people are smarter than others; some are stronger. Some are suited to intellectual pursuits, others to manual labor, and others still to bearing and raising the philosophers and peons of tomorrow. Among the Hereditarians Among the nineteen publications Rufo has promoted to his over ninety-thousand Substack readers is Aporia, a “sociobiology magazine” that claims to champion “ideas for a future worth wanting.” A sampling of its recent headlines includes “Created unequal,” “The Diversity Lie,” “Leftism and Mutation Load,” “Inconvenient Facts about Slavery,” “The Positive Legacy of Empire,” and “You’re probably a eugenicist.” Aporia’s masthead and contributors page are a who’s who of the discredited and aggrieved. Editor Noah Carl was fired from his postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge after the university discovered he was publishing papers in Mankind Quarterly, a journal established in 1961 with funding from segregationists and eugenicist groups. Executive editor Bo Winegard, a former Marietta College assistant professor, claims to have been terminated from a tenure-track position in 2020 for daring to express the heterodox opinion that some races are more intelligent than others. “If it can happen to me, then it can happen to any academic who challenges the prevailing views of their discipline,” he wrote of his termination in Quillette, an online magazine whose fans have described it as a “safe space” for those who feel stifled by PC culture in the academy. “You may disagree with what I believe, say, and write, but it is in everyone’s interests that you support my freedom to believe, say, and write it.” Aporia has indeed supported Winegard’s right to believe and say that white people are smarter than black people (but less intelligent than East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews). In the magazine’s pages, he has championed the concept of “human biodiversity,” which, as he describes it, is the belief that “human populations are likely different in more than superficial ways. Not only do they have different skin colors, hair textures, body structures, and proportion of blood types, they also have different psychological propensities and sensibilities.” As a leader at the magazine, Winegard is often in conversation with others who share his beliefs in broad strokes, even if they disagree on the specifics. Additional Aporia contributors include Lipton Matthews, a Jamaican right-wing commentator who has written for American Renaissance, the white supremacist journal founded by Jared Taylor, a prominent white nationalist; Russell T. Warne, a hereditarian-minded psychologist whose book, one reviewer wrote, “fails to note” that his sources “contradict many of his central assertions” about the links between race and IQ; and Edward Dutton, a “professor of Evolutionary Psychology of Business” at a business school in Poland who has not let his lack of a psychology degree or the university’s lack of a psychology department get in the way of his résumé padding. The fact that these scholars have been relegated to the margins of academia does not discredit Aporia in the eyes of its readers. On the contrary, if our most elite institutions have sacrificed viewpoint diversity and academic inquiry at the altar of DEI, then the ostracization of Aporia’s contributors is proof that they’re doing something right. In his explainer on human biodiversity, Winegard claims that the very real connection between race and IQ does not mean that some people are better than others, just that they’re different. “Human dignity doesn’t require the possession of a 130 IQ, the ability to run a 4.4 40-yard dash, or transcendent beauty,” he writes. “It requires nothing more than being a unique human life. Surely, we can protect and promote this laudable sacred value while also accepting that all humans and all human groups are different, both physically and psychologically.” Prolific right-wing poster Bronze Age Pervert, who has written at length about his belief in a natural intellectual and aesthetic hierarchy, cautions against discussing “facts about racial disparities,” claiming that doing so is “not good at all politically.” But Winegard disagrees. “The problem with attacking progressivism without promoting race realism is straightforward,” he writes: Because race is a conspicuous social fact and because races have different traits and tendencies, race disparities will remain stubborn and salient. Those who notice and discuss disparate racial outcomes are not just mischievous anons, professional racists, or progressive activists. They are normal humans with normal brains, for it takes no special training to notice patterns of variation in racial performance. Progressives have erred by advocating for and instituting “a panoply of race- based policies as ‘restitution’ for the real and imagined sins of dead Europeans,” Winegard writes in a different Aporia essay, because those policies “begin with an erroneous premise, namely that all human populations would have equal outcomes in absence of racial discrimination. The truth is that human populations, like human individuals, do not have equal talents or traits.” If we accept that people aren’t equal, then we must accept that equal opportunity will never lead to equal outcomes. Only then, he and the other hereditarians believe, can we understand the big lie at the heart of DEI, which is the key to discrediting it. Rufo and DeSantis—both of whom have Harvard diplomas, though Rufo’s is from the university’s extension school—often frame their campaigns against DEI as a sort of anti-elite deprogramming regimen. In their telling, DEI is the product of out-of-touch Ivy Leaguers intent on imposing their will on the American heartland. Hereditarians and proponents of human biodiversity are far more honest that the problem with the current state of affairs is not that it privileges one group over another but that it privileges the wrong group. Bronze Age Pervert, for example, lays out a neat taxonomy of the human race: at the bottom are teeming masses of “bugmen,” followed by a smaller class of middle- management types who are loyal to whichever regime is in power. The true elite is small and, in most societies, no longer reigns, despite its members’ innate superiority. “The only ones who survive the modern education ‘whole,’ not to speak of the regime of modern medication, are precisely those in the litter who are born docile,” he writes in his self-published 2018 book, Bronze Age Mindset. BAP would later publish a sequel, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, under his real name, Costin Alamariu. Though they’re united by their belief in the inextricable connection between race, intelligence, and beauty, the hereditarians are not a monolith. Some, like Alamariu, believe that true aristocrats cannot thrive under the tyranny of bugmen. Others maintain that, even with the scourge of DEI, the real elites will always have a competitive edge. “Richer people have better genes,” the pseudonymous writer Cremieux Recueil declares in an Aporia essay titled “Elites are genetically different,” which begins with a long anecdote about the Netanyahu family. According to Recueil, the greatest gift a wealthy couple passes onto their children is not money or property but their genetic makeup. But regardless of what their ideal elite looks like, or internecine disagreements about the best way for them to achieve their rightful dominance, hereditarianism’s various factions are united in their belief in a rightful hierarchy—one that is increasingly subject to usurpation in the form of DEI. While Rufo and his political allies are deliberately coy about the eugenic undertones of their crusade, Aporia’s writers make this connection explicit. In a recent essay on the “diversity lie,” Winegard argues that diversity initiatives are a smokescreen. “Diversity does not mean diversity; it means more status, more resources, more moral praise for non- whites and for the white educated elites who are their allies,” he writes. “We should not allow the rhetoric to obscure the underlying reality: Diversity is largely an instrument to accelerate demographic change and support affirmative action and other equity-based policies.” The goal, Winegard implies, is not a more equitable society but rather a racebent reproduction of the existing social order— the domination of the superior by the inferior. Screen vs. Gene Aporia could be dismissed as a fringe publication with little real-world influence. Most of its editors and contributors appear to publish in few other venues; its audience, too, is limited to the relatively small subset of people who aren’t put off by the idea of identifying as eugenicists. But Aporia’s leadership is increasingly making inroads with the more mainstream far right, joining forces with seemingly unlikely allies in the culture war. Last December, I traveled to Austin for the inaugural Natal Conference, a two-day event in which a coterie of tech rationalists and Christian nationalists came together to solve the problem of America’s declining fertility rate. The gravity of a looming depopulation crisis was enough to encourage the two camps to cast aside their differences on moral matters like abortion and in vitro fertilization—at least for now—and focus on the singular goal of encouraging Americans to have more babies. Speaker Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychology professor at the University of New Mexico and one of the hosts of the Aporia podcast, implored her audience to ignore the “sterilizing memes” that discourage people from having as many kids as possible, such as by claiming that parents must be constantly minding their children or involved in their enrichment in any way. Since most traits are inherited, Fleischman explained, using a pair of twins adopted into different families as an example, genetics are ultimately what determines the kind of adult a child will someday become. “Despite what the culture says,” Fleischman told the audience, winking at a recent fixation on the right, “your genes are way more important than the drag queen story hour.” Other speakers included Michael Anton, whose influential essay “The Flight 93 Election” made an intellectual case for the Trump presidency in September 2016, and far-right megadonor Charles Haywood, whose diatribe on reinstating male- only spaces ended with a call to abolish the Civil Rights Act. Though the NatalCon speakers identified an array of culprits for declining birth rates—from car seat mandates to the toppling of Confederate statues—the overriding implication was that we’re on the precipice of a depopulation crisis because we’ve abandoned what is right, natural, and true. There are only two genders, and they are not equal; there are people with good genes and people with bad genes, and their offspring will have different outcomes because of their differing levels of genetic quality. The conference culminated with a closed-door, off-the-record event for VIP ticket holders, which I did not attend, but which American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor did. The following day, I spoke with Malcolm and Simone Collins— the poster children of the natalist movement’s tech wing—who told me the cultural phenomena that have contributed to the drop in birth rates are clearly laid out in Richard Hanania’s book-length diatribe against the corrosive effects of civil rights legislation, The Origins of Woke. (Reviewing it for The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper called the book “a gateway drug, one that smuggles virulent, pseudoscientific racism into the mainstream by dressing up its poison with occasional moments of serious argumentation.”) The Collinses, once dubbed the “elite couple breeding to save mankind,” conceived all of their children via in vitro fertilization and selected embryos based on polygenic testing that screened for future physical and mental health problems, as well as potential IQ score. A recent Guardian profile of the couple revealed that their parenting style could be described, generously, as old-school: the kids are often unsupervised, left to roam around the family’s unheated home, albeit with iPads strapped to their necks. (At one point in the article, a two-year-old is punished with a slap to the face.) In this way, the Collinses’ four children—and counting, as the couple plans to have at least seven—are a testament to their faith in hereditarianism. Unlimited screen time, after all, is no match for superior genes. Gone to Seed The Collinses’ steadfast belief in the power of their own DNA is not unique among the Silicon Valley set, where large broods are increasingly becoming a status symbol of their own. Elon Musk has twelve known children with three different women. Musk, who reportedly believes in a positive correlation between wealth and IQ, has repeatedly claimed civilization will “crumble” unless “smart” people have more kids. When his children—the ones who still speak to him, that is —invariably grow into wealthy, well-connected adults, their father will surely attribute their privileges to his superior genetic background, rather than their access to his $250 billion fortune. In his explainer on human biodiversity, Winegard claims that the very real connection between race and IQ does not mean that some people are better than others, just that they’re different. Hereditarianism is a perfect myth for the tech elite, whose members are all too happy to see their unprecedented wealth as derived purely from their inborn genius, or who wish to exert an outsize influence on the future in the form of “effective altruism.” But like many other products of Silicon Valley, hereditarianism is an old idea presented as a disruptive innovation to established ways of thinking. Stanford University—the alma mater of many prominent tech founders— was a pioneer in eugenicist thinking. Its first president, David Starr Jordan, recruited professors like sociologist Edward A. Ross, who coined the term “race suicide” to describe the drop in birth rates among Americans of so-called old stock at the turn of the twentieth century. Ross was fired from Stanford in 1900 after delivering a speech, at Jordan’s urging, about the threat Japanese immigrants’ unusually high “fecundity” posed to the “Anglo-Saxon character of American society.” If Quillette had been around at the time, it surely would have published an essay about how Ross had been canceled for daring to express an unpopular truth. Ross’s ouster, however, was not because of what he said but for the impolitic way he said it: Stanford remained a hub for eugenicist research well into the twentieth century. In 1910, the university hired Lewis Terman, who later went on to create the Stanford-Binet IQ test, which was used to identify subjects for Terman’s “Genetic Study of Genius,” several of whom Terman helped get into Stanford— and to back up Terman’s assertions that white children were more prone to genius than their Mexican and black counterparts. While Terman worked on making Stanford a haven for the brightest and whitest, other California eugenicists sought to curtail the reproduction of those whom they believed threatened to lower the national IQ. In the early 1920s, Sacramento real estate developer Charles M. Goethe founded the Immigration Study Commission, an organization dedicated to combating the threat Mexicans and their children posed to the American “seed stock.” Goethe sought to curtail the reproduction of the people he called the “low-powers.” In a pamphlet titled “What Will Your Greatgrandchildren Face?” Goethe, who had no children of his own, argued that unfettered immigration from Latin America would make the U.S. population dumber. Incapable of convincing the federal government to limit immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in the hemisphere, he set his sights on slowing the growth of the Mexican population by other means. In 1922, he mused about eliminating Mexicans “by preventing their reproduction.” Upon his death in 1966, Goethe left more than $25,000 (over $240,000 today) to the Association for Voluntary Sterilization. Compulsory sterilizations, once legal in a majority of states, have largely fallen out of favor. But the right’s recent embrace of hereditarianism and natalism suggests that eugenic thinking is once again ascendant beyond the fringes. Though the eugenicist fervor of the interwar period is often associated with mass institutionalization and forced sterilization, twentieth-century eugenicists were just as concerned with encouraging the reproduction of the genetically gifted as they were with curtailing that of the supposedly “unfit.” Stanford, Malcolm Harris writes in his 2023 book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, was a “positive eugenic project, breeding high-IQ people to produce the next generation of Palo Alto residents.” But according to Rufo, even Stanford has gone woke, succumbing to the tyranny of DEI. Hence the multipronged approach of the neo-eugenicist project: boosting the birth rate, at least among the “right” people; retaking institutions they believe have been usurped by the undeserving; and, once the capture is complete, installing their own progeny in positions of power. Outgunned and Outbred In other words, the fight against “social justice education” and the spread of eugenic thought are mutually reinforcing phenomena. Conservatives’ reconquest of elite institutions and corporate employment is pointless if there’s no one to reap the spoils—one of the darker implications of the right’s recent embrace of natalism. At the Texas natalist conference I attended, many attendees seemed to regard reproduction as another way to own the libs. “The antinatalists are sterilizing themselves,” one speaker bragged. This sentiment is becoming increasingly popular. Recently, Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok, explicitly positioned having more children and fighting woke indoctrination as two sides of the same coin. “We’re going to outbreed the Left,” she posted on X. “Then we’re gonna homeschool or send our kids to private school so they can’t be groomed into becoming activists for leftist causes.” Raichik is as of yet unmarried. If the project to purge educational institutions of wokeness continues apace, maybe she’ll be able to send her hypothetical children to public school without fear that they’ll be convinced, as Black was, to renounce their upbringing and ancestry. Though united by their belief in the inextricable connection between race, intelligence, and beauty, the hereditarians are not a monolith. In their memoir, Black writes that their father believed white nationalism could appeal to “millions of regular middle-class White families” if only it were packaged correctly, presented with a “more gentle, subtle, and positive message” than overt race hatred. This sentiment has been borne out by the normalization of the Great Replacement, which prominent politicians continue to frame as a matter of “election integrity.” Once enough people believed the initial lie, it wasn’t too difficult to convince them that a multiracial cabal of Ivy League-educated elites were the agents of the replacement, and that untold numbers of migrants were coming to this country not only to take our jobs and influence our elections but also to remake America in their image. During a Fox News interview in May, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that Democrats have allowed mass migration to continue in order to “change the outcome of the Census in six years.” If eugenics is going to achieve escape velocity from the fringes, it will almost certainly be in a similarly laundered form. Presented just a bit differently, perhaps as a quest for true meritocracy, a natural reaction to the excesses of the woke left, or even as a solution to the United States’s declining fertility rate, ideas about structuring society to reflect supposedly biological differences in intelligence and ability could become palatable enough to reach a wide audience. The DEI crusade is a convenient vehicle for this kind of thinking in part because its leaders have deliberately described their effort in terms meant to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. The Florida law banning DEI in schools and workplaces was, in actuality, a ban on any instruction that causes people to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” over historical wrongs perpetrated by members of their race—therapeutic language used in service of sanitizing history. This strategy is already paying dividends. During the New College of Florida’s first semester after the DeSantis-led takeover, student athletes replaced gender studies majors, and faculty members who were deemed too far left, or who criticized Rufo’s plans for the university were fired or denied tenure. Conservative professors—including one who wrote a “case for colonialism”—were hired in their place. New College lost more than one-quarter of its students, many of whom transferred to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, which offered to match cost of tuition for the Floridian exiles. Meanwhile, a student who had transferred to New College from a Christian school founded a campus chapter of the conservative youth activist group Turning Point USA. The university that, a little over a decade ago, was instrumental in the deradicalization of R. Derek Black is quickly becoming unrecognizable. And it’s only the beginning. “The story of my life ran through New College, and it freed me,” Black writes in their memoir. “Yet the story of our country also seems to be running through New College.” Hey, one last thing. In a media environment that tolerates tail-chasing, gutlessness, and all kinds of ratfuckery, The Baffler is a rare publication willing to shake the pundit class free of their own worst impulses. We can’t help it. We’re humanitarians at heart. But running a charitable organization of this magnitude requires serious dough, and subscriptions only cover a fraction of our costs. For the rest, we rely on the good will of generous readers like you. So if you like the article you just read—or hate it, and want us to publish more just like it, so you can ridicule us online for years to come—please consider making a one-time donation to The Baffler. $5, $10, $2,000… we’re not picky. Anything helps. Give to The Baffler |
45213
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: silicon valley's fascination with race scientists intensifies...
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45215
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: silicon valley's fascination with race scientists intensifies...
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anyone else feel like they've been transported back to early 20th century Germany? This all is not going to end well. |
Responses:
[45216]
45216
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: silicon valley's fascination with race scientists intensifies...
| I think a lot Palestinians have been feeling that way for about a year now. |
Responses:
None
45214
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: silicon valley's fascination with race scientists intensifies...
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Prayers that there are enough people *willing and able to understand* what's gone on here to make efficient, productive stands against these "hereditarialist" horrors...human beings operating from the evil myth that whites are superior and thus should inherit and receive all good things at the expense of nonWhites *everything*... It's never been true that any one race/ethnicity/religion is superior or special *over any other*... May all those laboring under these (sometimes understandable, very indoctrinated) illusions come to full experiential understanding of *equality*... Any "war on wokeness" is a war against humane, intelligent reason... Thanks for posting this, akira... |
Responses:
None