HBD: Human Biodiversity

Whenever the subject of intelligence testing comes up, especially in the context of racial and ethnic differences in intelligence, or disparate outcomes in education, liberals can always be counted upon for their skepticism towards the entire subject of IQ testing. They will usually claim that the tests are either biased or don't measure anything real - as in "IQ measures the ability to take an IQ test". This is of course ironic, since individual differences in intelligence as measured by IQ testing is the most established and robust finding of modern psychometrics, and liberals constantly proclaim their devotion to science, only inbred conservatives being opposed to scientific findings. 

But liberals become IQ believers when something like this happens: Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice.

Some of the quotes from the article show how a study like this operates. For instance:

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."

I guess smart liberals believe that a mother working outside the home full-time couldn't possibly have any downside for family life, and that their indoctrination of schoolkids in things like environmentalism, global warming, and the essential evilness of America's past don't constitute teaching children to obey their authority.

The essential point to make here is that the average Democratic Party member is very likely not as intelligent as the average Republican, since the Democratic Party contains more minorities, who on average score lower on IQ tests than whites. But once you point out something like that, liberals go into IQ denial.

As the years go by, news of the world throwing billions at Africans with nothing to show for it no longer shocks me. (Plus ça change… In our the egalitarian age, who knows how many trillions have been wasted attempting to equalize the races?)

What I find, in a way, more disturbing is that ostensibly intelligent grown men will still sit around a table telling one another fairy tales about why, after all that money, Haiti still looks like...Haiti.

Can someone get these poor fools some Richard Lynn!

The publication earlier this year of Jared Taylor’s White Identity was quite a milestone. In essence, it was the sequel to his Paved With Good Intentions, which was, as National Review remarked upon its publication in 1992, “the most important book to be published on the subject [of race relations] in many years.”

White Identity has already been ably reviewed in AltRight by Derek Turner, and there is no need to rehash the book's arguments. What I will do instead is reflect on what has happened the to pro-White movement in the almost two decades that separate the publication of these works—and how this history portends for the growth of a White racial identity in the United States.

The main difference between Taylor's two books is that while Paved focused almost exclusively on Black-White relations, Identity has separate chapters for Hispanic and Asian racial consciousness, in addition to ones on Blacks and Whites. Multiracial America is here, and while Asians and Hispanics will not be forming a rainbow coalition with Blacks, they are also not going to integrate like the Italians, Irish,and Jews of last century either. Indeed, with the reality of affirmative action, changing demographics and the racial spoils system, it is of no benefit for non-Whites to integrate into the existing White society. (One important point in Identity is that Asians, once the “model minority,” are increasingly shunning assimilation for an identity of their own.)

Reading Identity, it is hard to avoid the feeling that things look bleak for White Americans. Taylor sums up the situation as follows:

The demographic forces we have set in motion have created conditions that are inherently unstable and potentially violent. All other groups are growing in number and have a vivid racial identity. Only whites have no racial identity, are constantly on the defensive, and constantly in retreat. They have a choice: regain a sense of identity and the resolve to maintain their numbers, their traditions and their way of life – or face oblivion.

The fate of the two books tells a negative tale of the last two decades. Paved was published by a respected, mainstream publisher (Carroll & Graf) and sold roughly 45,000 copies. It was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Washington Times and many other mainstream publications. White Identity was self published after getting numerous rejections from mainstream publishers. As Taylor notes, “this book is unfit for commercial publication in the United States.” It was reviewed in no mainstream publications.

This is an article of mine that was published in the Japanese English-speaking media back in 2005. In addition to evolutionary differences in DNA as a driver of HBD, it also posits faster biologial diversification through something called "neoteny."  Much of the political agenda of Liberal globalists and the Left is based on the view that we can't be all that different from each other having "branched out" from Africa a mere 60,000 years ago, giving us very little time to evolve significant racial differences. This theory of neoteny, which is still admittedly in its speculative stage, could represent a useful addition to the armoury of those who believe that differences between human groups are more substantial and should be recognized and respected in our social and political organization.

General Douglas MacArthur famously said that Japan was a nation of 12-year-olds. Well, he wasn't talking about fighting abilities, as the Japanese gave the Allies the fright of their lives in World War II. Nor could such a remark have applied to their level of intelligence, as Japanese consistently outscore Westerners by an average of 5 to 6 points in international IQ comparisons. Nor was it their business acumen, as, starting from the bombed out ruins of 1945, these "12-year-olds" built their economy into the second biggest in the world in a few decades. So, what the heck was MacArthur talking about? Whether he knew it or not, he was probably talking about neoteny.

Neoteny is a biological term that describes the retention of juvenile characteristics in adults, something that is widely recognized in the animal world. For example, we know that tadpoles mature into frogs, losing their juvenile aquatic character along the way. However, the axolotl species of salamander remains fully aquatic throughout its life, merely becoming a large version of a tadpole. A better known example of neoteny is the giant panda, which retains its baby-like cuteness into adulthood. Indeed, humans have juvenile characteristics relative to other primates. Our sparse body hair and enlarged heads are in fact reminiscent of baby primates.

The only consistent thing about liberalism is their inconsistency. It's hard work keeping together the various sorts of anti-reality notions that underlie modern liberalism. Of course, actually presenting a cohesive worldview is unnecessary when invective suffices in responding to challenges.

Diet is one of the more subtle pillars of leftism. As with all liberal beliefs, the low-fat diet is grounded in both academic spuriousness and social support amongst adherents. We expect defense of the low-fat paradigm to rest on shoddy evidence, as almost all anti-meat studies do not control for differences in general health conscientiousness between groups. But something interesting happens when the vegetarian mafia encounters evidence undermining their religion; they sometimes commit unbelievable errors relevant to their other beliefs.

Here's Amanda Marcotte admitting to the notion that racial groups differ, i.e. HBD (seriously):

This was heavily criticized, not just by vegans but by lactose intolerant people and equality-advocacy groups that pointed out, rightly, that the assumption of lactose tolerance is casually white dominated, since European-descended people tend to digest lactose on average better than everyone else.

In other words, "equality-advocacy groups" criticize the food pyramid's implied importance of dairy, arguing that this advice only applies to white people and thus illustrates yet another incidence of anti-minority bias. Of course, Ms. Marcotte (a vegan - shocking!) also thinks that believing in racial differences (which she admits to above) is the epitome of bigotry, so once again, it's a lose/lose in her mind.

In an article from Time magazine, the anti-paleo author makes the same exact case:

For one thing, there was no single Paleolithic "lifestyle." Survival in Ice Age Europe, for instance, was vastly different from life on the African savannah, requiring different diets, behaviors and genetic adaptations.

That's the most basic premise of HBD, yet I can't imagine Time racing to hire Steve Sailer any time soon. Unless Time has embraced bioconservatism, this naked appeal to racial differences contradicts the general leftism of their magazine. For example, here's a video celebrating the Harlem's Children Zone and its founder Geoffrey Canada, a video interview with Teach for America's founder, and an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates defending Henry Gates following his 2009 arrest. I can't imagine Time champions anything except liberal creationism, so the quoted statement surely contradicts one of their central premises. Fittingly, the article attempts to maintain the credibility of anti-male and anti-white diet and exercise, whereby foreign foods and testosterone-draining workouts find favor amongst the SWPL class. 

Curiously, liberals never really notice the apparent contradictions. Getting their ideas pushed matters far more than anything else.

 

Every couple of years or so, a “respectable,” Establishmentarian, Center-Left commentator will touch on the subject of racial differences in intelligence. William Saletan was the last. Andrew Sullivan is the latest. 

In the abstract, the fact that Beltway journalists would be interested in the subject of race and IQ should not at all be surprising. The evidence for racially defined and, more or less, intractable differences in General Intelligence (g) is mountainous. And race has tremendous predictive power when it comes to individuals and societies. (A report on an inexplicable achievement gap between Blacks and Asians might shock and dismay New York Times readers; among American Renaissance subscribers, it elicits a yawn.) The impact of racial differences in intelligence on international economies—and international investment—has yet to be fully explored.

Nevertheless, the reality of race undermines the civic religion of most Western societies—as well as almost every piece of socially uplifting legislation from the past 50 years—and thus has become the ultimate taboo.

And hesitant expeditions into the unspeakable by writers like Sullivan and Saletan usually evoke a quick, predictable response:

• The offender’s colleagues express outrage, and he is symbolically rapped across the wrist with a ruler;
• The offender’s critics eventually suggest ostracism as the only solution;
• The heretic relents, recants, and begs for forgiveness.

There’s no need for state intervention; journalists police themselves effectively.

But perhaps Sullivan will break the trend… In the mid-’90s, when Sullivan was Editor of The New Republic (and a neocon/neoliberal or sorts), he published an entire issue dedicated to sober commentary on Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Indeed, this issue—along with a non-hysterical review in the New York Times Book Review—marked the last moment in which racial differences in intelligence were discussed forthrightly in mainstream sources—before the door was slammed and bolted shut.

While little of what Sullivan writes will be surprising to readers in the AltRight sphere, he does make one important point that will touch fair-minded liberals: “The study of intelligence has been strangled by pc egalitarianism.” (Just ask Bruce Lahn, hardly a "White Nationalist" but simply a scholar searching for truth.)

Moreover, it came as no surprise to me that race realism is breaking out among liberals, who can no longer abide the cognitive dissonance between PC and their expressed support of the scientific method and empirical research—and not among conservatives and paleos. The “conservative movement” has fully embraced a kind of “Americanist Creationism,” in which everyone who believes in “equality” can be an American, and all earthly residents outside America's borders must be integrated into our One True Way. The paleos, it seems, have decided to take a pass on the central, most unavoidable geopolitical question of our time. This choice hasn’t granted them credibility...it's simply made them unthreatening. (Note that Charles Murray’s update on The Bell Curve, “The Inequality Taboo,” appeared in the neocon Commentary, not Chronicles.)

For years, Andrew Sullivan has been a reliable barometer of the social mood of America’s college-educated masses: that is to say, he’s flipped from being a neoliberal in the ‘90s...to a war-happy neocon after 9/11...to an anti-war “realist” around 2006...to an Obamaniac in 2008...etc. etc. etc.

Let’s hope that this time, he takes a principled stand.

Into the Cannibal’s Pot – Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa
Ilana Mercer, Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011, hb, 319pp

 

Ilana Mercer is a well-known controversialist on the American right, who writes a deservedly popular WorldNetDaily column and somehow finds time to maintain both a website and blog.

Her views are probably best described as paleo-libertarian. The book’s provocative title, which probably cost her potential readers, is borrowed from Ayn Rand, but the author tempers capitalist principles with respect for national identities and cultural traditions. Unusually amongst conservatives, she combines Israelophilia and dislike of Islam with trenchant opposition to American military adventurism. Unusually amongst libertarians, she is an outspoken critic of current US immigration policy as subversive of social order as well as fiscal responsibility. She has now turned her sights on her former homeland of South Africa – both for its own sake and because she feels its tenebrous present contains urgent indicators for America.

The author was born in South Africa, the daughter of a rabbi, but the family had to leave in the 1960s because of her father’s anti-apartheid outspokenness. They decamped to Israel, before the author moved back to South Africa in the 1980s to start a family. She was (and is) against apartheid; she recalls having tea with Desmond Tutu and being on the Grand Parade in Cape Town in 1990 to witness Mandela’s release. From there she went to Canada and eventually the United States.

Notwithstanding her anti-apartheid views, she feels duty-bound to show that the RSA reality was immeasurably more complex than the simplistic narrative which came to misinform the West’s policy towards its final African redoubt. In the old days, there were gross indignities and injustices, and yet in the African context the old SA compared favourably with its neighbours:

“When we departed, South Africa was still a country with a space program...gleaming skyscrapers, and department stores that rivaled Macy’s. The Central Business District in Johannesburg bustled. Crime was controlled, or at least confined. When mobs stoned cars en route to D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town…a tough and competent police sprang into action. An equally impressive Western system of Roman-Dutch law, and a relatively independent judiciary, dished out just desserts.” (1)

By contrast, the “Rainbow Nation” so revered by postmodern moralizers is largely dysfunctional and becoming more so, in accordance with what has become a sad post-colonial African tradition. The consequences for South Africans of all races range from the inconvenient to the lethal.

The country which carried on space programmes now suffers regular electricity shortages. Once-reliable government services have become a kind of lottery, with even the wealthiest suburbs experiencing interruptions in basic services like postal delivery, refuse collection and sanitation, while one third of budget-administering municipal councillors are functionally illiterate. There has been an explosion of AIDS, thanks to tribal prejudices against science—to the extent that an estimated 20% of adults have the virus. The overall unemployment rate rose from 19% in 1994, immediately before the end of apartheid and at the end of a long period of economic stagnation, to 31% in 2003. It has subsequently declined to 25%, but this is still very high for a country so well-endowed with natural resources, and with much lower levels of debt than many other countries. Black household income shrank by 19% between 1995 and 2000—although it had started to recover prior to the global financial crisis. This is despite – or because of—Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies which compel firms employing 50 or more staff to have a certain proportion of black employees and/or black investors. BEE has devastated whole industries, such as the mining sector (ironically, as Anglo-American was one of the chief instruments of ending apartheid) and have helped to force 10% of whites out of work and below the poverty line. Comparing past government performance with present, it seems as if the dearest wish of African National Congress MP Mario Rantho has already been realized:

“It is imperative to get rid of merit as the overriding principle in the appointment of public servants.”

There is less scope for wry humour when it comes to violent crime, although the author tries by entitling a section “Crime, The Beloved Country” in an allusion to Alan Paton’s classic anti-apartheid novel of 1948. Over 300,000 have been killed since the arrival of black majority rule as the erstwhile unjust but orderly regime became one which is theoretically just but with scarcely any order. Mercer cites BBC statistics from 2006 showing that on average, 65 people are murdered each day, 195 raped and 300 robbed with violence. Shockingly, she cites 2008 figures suggesting that more than 50,000 children under three years old are raped each year—10% of total rapes. By comparison:

“Few realize that during the decades of the apartheid regime a few hundred Africans in total perished as a direct and indirect consequence of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the death toll in ‘free’ South Africa where hundreds of Africans, white and black, die weekly” (author’s emphases)

So ungovernable are some places that private security firms have actually been hired by the police to protect…police stations. The South African Police Service’s acronym of SAPS seems highly appropriate. Even high-profile liberals, like writer Nadine Gordimer, historian David Rattray and former First Lady Marike de Klerk, are not immune from murderous assaults. Arguably more deserving of sympathy are poorer, apolitical Afrikaners, singled out for attack because some among them once oppressed and dispossessed blacks. Now all Afrikaners are being oppressed and dispossessed – except more rapidly and much more finally.

An economically and culturally significant subset, Afrikaner farmers (Boer of course means farmer), almost seems to be targeted for obliteration, with one tenth of them – over 3,000 – murdered since the end of apartheid, without anyone appearing to notice, let alone care. The author notes ruefully that “seals being clubbed to death on ice floes have garnered more attention” than what is widely accepted to be the actual genocide of these agriculturalists, often in circumstances of the most frightful cruelty. Statistically, farming in South Africa is more dangerous than mining. When Pretoria attorney Philip du Toit gallantly raised the unpleasant, unfashionable subject in his 2004 book The Great South African Land Scandal, he was brushed aside or condemned as the most verkrampte variety of bigot. The government, the semi-divine Mandela and the self-appointed “international community” all seem indifferent.

Many of the farmers who have survived thus far are quitting both the countryside and the country, defeated by physical assault, theft, sabotage and killing of livestock, incompetent police, corrupt officials and unjust land confiscations. By 2015, one third of farmers’ land will have been redistributed, and much of this acreage is already lying fallow or reverting to bush, because the new proprietors (often local tribal leaders or ANC party bosses) lack the interest or the skills to farm it. In 2009, South Africa became a net food importer for the first time. If or when famine strikes it will presumably be ascribed to the legacy of apartheid rather than the inadequacies of the nouvelle regime.

The white population decreased by 20% between 1995 and 2005, giving rise to the colloquialism of “packing for Perth” and causing even Mandela to snarl that they are “traitors”. Mandela’s Western worshippers may be surprised to learn that their demi-god would resort to such brusquerie, but after all he did lead the ANC’s terrorist wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) whose anthem contains the following un-neighbourly sentiment:

“We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them—kill the whites”

Even terrorists deserve a chance of redemption, but it is salutary to recall that Amnesty International—not generally considered a diehard conservative organisation—refused to recognize Mandela as a prisoner of conscience because of his continued commitment to violence, and that the country over which he hovers like some angelic presence early forged cordial links with the likes of Gaddafi, Castro and assorted Palestinian hardliners.

White flight has further skewed the imbalance between provider and provided for—today for every (disproportionately white) taxpayer there are no fewer than eleven (disproportionately black) voters. To add to this vast potential for class envy, many of these voters have been schooled to resent the whites on whom they depend. It is a volatile blend, fuelling radical redistribution policies and a sporadic ethnic intifada against whites—especially those who live on isolated farms far from police who might not come even if they knew what was happening, and would probably never catch the killers even if they did come.

I have used the word intifada because the Afrikaners always had an unusually intimate relationship with Israel. The author says of the Dutch Reformed Church to which most Afrikaners owe (or owed) allegiance—

“In their community they saw an extension of the covenant God formed with the Israelites.”

The material effects of this mysticism were decades of strategic co-operation between the two pariah-states, both hated for real or alleged racism, and both the objects of innumerable angry denunciations, UN resolutions and anguished editorials. Many in both condemned countries saw the situation as Mrs. Mercer describes it:

“It was SA and Israel against the world and against the forces of nihilistic liberalism intent on snuffing out civilized outposts at the tip of Africa and in the Middle East.”

Calvinist eschatological logic played a paradoxical part in South Africa’s trajectory—originally inspiring the Afrikaner expansion into the intoxicating-horrifying wilderness, then being used to justify and bolster apartheid before eventually turning in on itself, as the Afrikaners realized they

“…had become something they detested…the biblically blessed country became an Ishmael, an outcast.”

There was a consequent collapse of will in Afrikanerdom’s upper echelons. Big business always hated apartheid, there was little or no academic or artistic support, and when the church gave up in puzzled despair there was no more reason to resist—even though Afrikaners knew well that their quality of life would suffer. There is a revealing anecdote from the fraught final days of apartheid, when there were constant rumours of a military coup to forestall power-sharing. When General Constand Viljoen told General George Meiring that the army could take over the country in a single night, Meiring reportedly replied:

“Yes, that is so, but what do we do the morning after the coup?”

The author is particularly insightful on this subject, and en passant tells the little-known story of the slamse gevaar “(the Islamic threat”) in South Africa, as represented by the pro-Iranian revolution group known as People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, which almost unhindered carried out 80 bombings against civilians in 1999-2000 while the state security apparatus focused on a non-existent threat from white separatists.

The author’s father was against apartheid not out of Marxism or sentimentality but simply because he found the system to be inconsistent with the moral tenets he had imbibed from the Torah. Mrs. Mercer is at pains to explain his motivations, because it is her difficult duty to demonstrate that the country he and so many other well-meaning people helped create is in many ways inferior to the reviled Republic. Between the lines of the polemic there therefore crackles much unresolved tension, reflecting this balancing act between her loyalty to her father and her compulsion to attest to truths which will pain him. There is also a palpable sense of guilt—at fleeing from a once-beloved country, and leaving behind them fine people, black as well as white, who had not the Mercers’ good fortune of possessing a second passport and remittable funds.

“If only…” is her underlying refrain—if only the whites had insisted on minority safeguards—if only international opinion had supported the pro-Western Zulus rather than the pro-Third World “Xhosa Nostra”—if only the new reigning ideology had been capitalism rather than racial socialism—if only reform could have been achieved without this kind of miserable meltdown. She does not offer any SA solutions, although she quotes severally from the remarkable Afrikaner cultural activist Dan Roodt. She scarcely mentions contemporary Afrikaner parties like the Freedom Front Plus, or initiatives like the Afrikaner-only settlement of Orania in the Western Cape (which the new SA Constitution permits, and which Jacob Zuma visited last year).

Yet Cannibal is a klaxon of a kind—leaping frequently, if not always seamlessly, between the RSA and the USA. Mrs. Mercer seeks urgently to show how the perils of South Africa are being replicated in her new country of domicile. Both countries are roughly the same age, and both have frontier-taming, republican and Low Church traditions which are metastasizing into anxiety-utopian complexes. They also have large and mutually distrustful racial groups, a factor which militates against social cohesion and democracy because,

“A perquisite for a classical liberal democracy is that majority and minority status should be interchangeable and fluid.”

In America, as in South Africa, perplexed policymakers strive to address distrust through multiculturalism and affirmative action—perversely, because such policies all too evidently entrench rather than efface divisions. Both countries are wedded to what the author calls the “diversity doxology” and to globalisation; both are experiencing PC policy creep on social keystones like freedom of association (and dissociation), freedom of speech, strong families, self-reliance, fiscal rectitude, property rights and enforceable contracts. She feels that as some small recompense for America’s part in toppling the old balance of power, Washington should offer sanctuary to some of those whose livelihoods (and lives) they have ruined—one of her very few proposals, and one unlikely ever to make it into the US statute book.

The two countries’ situations are very different, and their destinies will therefore diverge—but there are strong similarities too, and she raises the powerful possibility what is happening now in South Africa is happening no less surely in her new beloved country.

 

NOTE

1. A rare and interesting cinematic idea of what the Cape Town of the 1960s looked and felt like may be found in the 1967 film The Cape Town Affair, starring Jacqueline Bisset and James Brolin

 

“Heartiste” (who’s still “Roissy” to me) demonstrates, through the ramblings of blogger Amanda Marcotte, that HBD and Feminism are implacable enemies.

Most everything he writes there is true...but the science of human nature demolishes more than just bitchy feminism.

In America, and much of the Western world, right-thinking people think about Evolution thusly: 

• If you’re liberal, then Darwin was absolutely correct. Only backward, religious people think otherwise. That said, around 60,000 years ago, Evolution pulled the emergency break: no significant human development has occurred since then; all apparent racial differences are either “skin deep” or social constructs. Only backward, racist, religious people think otherwise.

• If you’re a conservative, Darwin was dead wrong. To believe his Theory is to deny that there is a moral thrust to the universe—and thus to undermine the basis of Democracy, Equality, and Apple Pie. Plus, Darwin is racist.  

It’s difficult to judge which side is wronger in this dispute…

In the conservatives' defense, Darwin is “racist,” in the sense that the procedure of Evolution explains not only the differences between Africans and Europeans but those between Yorkshire Terriers and Pit Bulls.

What’s significant is that the positions of both the acceptable Left and Right are radically egalitarian, each in its own way.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that there’s no inherent reason why a sincere religious believer could not affirm that God (or the Gods) made the races distinct and separate—or that He (or They) delineated the fates of each individual. The godfather of scientific racism, Arthur de Gobineau, an ancien-regime Catholic, actually rejected Darwin, exclaiming, “We are not descended from the ape, but we are headed in that direction!”

Whatever the case, the American Creed, of both Left and Right,  is that You Can Be All That You Can Be, and anyone and everyone can be an American.  HBD is pure heresy.

I hesitate to write a preface to this article, as it stands on its own. It should also be clear that AltRight has no “party line” and, indeed, is at its best when it acts a forum for ideas to be tested. That said, I am not persuaded by Johnson Miller's conclusion that a scientific understanding of race should have no place—or, at most, a greatly reduced one—within traditionalist circles. I even quibble with a few of his factual assertions. That said, this piece makes an important point, and, furthermore, I recognize that there is a real divide within the non-aligned Right between “traditionalists” and “modernists.” “Archeo-Futurism,” a future-oriented movement within tradition, associated mostly with Guillaume Faye, is a project I support; however, I won't deny that there is a tension, and sometimes antagonism, between its two components. ~Richard Spencer

 

Human Biological Diversity (HBD), as a concept, is inimical to the radical traditionalism identified as the core orientation of Alternative Right. The use of HBD does stand as a challenge to the egalitarianism of Liberalism and, more generally, of modernity. However, the abstraction, materialism, and quantification upon which HBD is predicated are in fact more characteristic of Liberalism than of anything called traditionalism. We should not give ourselves over to the scientists’ materialist conceptions of man. We need, instead, an organic conception of man that recognizes the transcendent.

It was in the development of eugenics that we gained a clear crystallization of the “nature versus nurture” conflict, as well as the idea of races as statistical populations that is so important for HBD. And it was the Left that gave us eugenics. It was driven by a Progressive desire for an increasingly powerful state that could intervene to manage populations perceived as troublesome in order to promote the improvement of society. Eugenists believed in the perfectibility of man. But, instead of perfecting individuals through education and the creation of free societies, as was the desire of eighteenth-century proponents of the Enlightenment, eugenists sought to rationally manipulate the very materials of inheritance to produce long-term improvements in populations.

Granted, there were great variations in the methods and goals of eugenists, but, most relevant for HBD, was the development of statistical methods to map out human difference. But what concept of the nature of man is embedded in this? To them, man was fundamentally mechanical. He was defined by the material nature of his inheritance. Why did some people and not others commit crimes? Not because they were immoral, enmeshed in sin, or because of any other spiritual or moral quality. They committed crimes because of their biological inheritance. They couldn’t help it. This view of man absolves us of any responsibility, as well as of any free will or spiritual quality. It’s no wonder that eugenics came from the Left and not the Right.

Forty-one years ago, President Richard Nixon attended “The Game of the Century” between No.2 Texas and No.1 Arkansas. The Longhorns would win the game 15-14. From today's standpoint, the most noteworthy aspect of this titanic matchup is that both teams featured all-White teams.

Richard Nixon congratulates the Texas Longhorns, 1969 

Flash forward to this past weekend––No. 1 Louisiana State University and No.2 Alabama met in the latest version of “The Game of the Century” in Tuscaloosa. This time around, the POTUS was not in attendance, and the game itself proved to be a less-than-thrilling 9-6 virtual stalemate. But much like that game in 1969, the overwhelmingly majority of the some 90,000 in attendance at Bryant-Denny Stadium were White. But quite unlike Texas vs. Arkansas 41 years ago, which has been dubbed “Dixie’s Last Stand,” the vast majority of the players on the field were African-American. And most of Black players wearing the Crimson and White for 'Bama, and Gold and Purple for LSU, have absolutely no business attending an institution of higher learning. But this seem to be of little concern to the White alumni boosters of both schools. Indeed, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) has made a science out of lowering standards for Black athletes, with many schools relying on “special admission status” for athletes with poor ACT/SAT and grade point averages.

The SEC had some legendary programs in the Bad Old Days of White football, but it has flourished in the Integration era. In the past 20 years, just under 50 percent of the NCAA Division I National Champions have been SEC schools. More recently, Florida, LSU, Alabama, and Auburn have accounted for five of the past five BCS titles.

The South has some of the most segregated cities and counties in America, and yet, White alumni and fans of the 12 SEC schools are widely recognized as the most loyal, passionate, and intense followers of majority-Black college football. It is no exaggeration to say that these Southerns base their identity on their favorite team and what transpires on Saturdays in the fall. Living vicariously through the exploits of 18-to-22 year-old Blacks, whom they cautiously avoid in every other situation in their lives, these White superfans take offence at the mildest criticism of “their” team. Football is the Opiate of America (or at least the Opiate of this America).