In this episode of HBD, I discuss the controversy surrounding the Bronze Age Pervert tweet, and whether or not race realism is a viable political strategy in the 21st century. I also discuss why affirmative action is a bad idea and why race realism isn t.
00:00:46.480It's very depressing that he is associated with Nietzscheanism.
00:00:55.840He presents Nietzsche in a way that could only be described as teenage or juvenile.
00:01:06.160But the rest of his output seems to be filled with various bold assertions, bravery signaling his announcement that he is the biggest badass ever
00:01:23.460while he's actually kind of hiding away in Romania.
00:01:28.840And he kind of looks like a weirdo, to be honest.
00:01:33.080But I actually will wade into this because I find myself agreeing with him, at least on a superficial level, about the limitations of HBD.
00:01:47.880And here I'm speaking personally, not necessarily what his perspective is, but also some annoyance I have with some of these late coming adopters of HBD.
00:02:02.500I'm thinking here specifically of Aporia Magazine and Bo Weingart, but there are probably other examples.
00:02:09.340Anyway, let me read this one tweet because it will give me enough fodder to dilate on this matter.
00:02:17.380So this is Bronze Age Pervert, January 2nd, 2024.
00:02:23.360While for the sake of truth, I think facts about racial disparities should be discussed, it's not good at all politically.
00:02:39.120In 2024, going into any sort of political debate with a bunch of IQ charts or califers or anything resembling that would just be a total non-starter.
00:03:05.500I would ask whether posting homoerotic photos on Instagram, declaring yourself a barbarian Nietzschean, while ultimately being curiously Jewish, is a good path forward politically.
00:03:25.240I'm not sure race realism is worse than that one, but I guess we should just take him at his word that he knows better.
00:04:13.440You could have all the facts in the world enough to fill up many volumes by Richard Lynn, and that myth of race blindness, this idea that we can overcome the past, evolution, tribe, et cetera, is extremely powerful.
00:04:30.480The notion that every human person has the ability, whether it derives from his immortal soul or his mind in a kind of Hegelian way, that he can overcome all of this.
00:04:46.720He can overcome his tendency to side with his tribe.
00:04:51.840He can overcome his evolutionary past.
00:04:54.400He can overcome the history of colonialism or the oppression, the Holocaust, Jim Crow, et cetera, et cetera.
00:05:02.860There is a kind of mythical, idealistic impulse that derives the tenets of liberalism, and I totally agree with that.
00:05:14.240And I think in the face of something that powerful, race realism will ultimately fall flat.
00:05:20.400And I do think that that's its fatal flaw.
00:05:23.880I also agree that the truth is the truth.
00:05:28.000You should read the truth, you should read the data, use your logic and sometimes intuitive leaps, but you should just pursue the truth wherever it takes you.
00:05:41.300And even if it is politically unpalatable for most, that's okay.
00:05:49.560So I more or less agree with him here, even if he is acting in bad faith as usual.
00:05:56.000You won't convince some populations that they are inferior by birth and deserve their station in life.
00:06:01.540You won't even convince, quote, decent people, end quote, from high achieving populations of this.
00:06:07.880I don't know why he used a scare quote there, but I'll move on.
00:06:10.740On the other hand, discrimination to offset perceived past discrimination or natural inequalities is also felt to be wrong, although I think it would be relatively easy to convince modern populations to accept affirmative action to offset natural inequalities, which is another reason pushing this with a political intention is a big mistake.
00:06:31.260Okay, this isn't exactly clear, but I know what he's talking about.
00:06:37.420And he actually does clarify this in some other tweets.
00:06:41.960And I think this gets to an important aspect of why I also think race realism is rather unworkable and not really worth pursuing, certainly politically, but also intellectually.
00:07:01.260So there's a fact and value problem here.
00:07:06.460So there's the fact that Johnny can't read good, that Johnny has a low IQ, that Johnny got hit in the head by a mule when he was five, that Johnny's father was in and out of prison for his entire life, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:27.260There's also a value that we want Johnny's father, et cetera.
00:07:29.260There's also a value that we want Johnny to be good.
00:07:31.540We want Johnny to overcome those things.
00:07:37.800Those are just two very different things.
00:07:41.160Race realism is or has been very often associated with white nationalism.
00:07:50.640Much in the way, and pardon the controversial analogy I'm going to draw, much in the way that, say, Holocaust denial has been hand in glove with neo-Nazism or some sort of right-wing ideology.
00:08:09.680So I'll take the latter salacious example to prove the point, which is that theoretically you could, of course, find someone who examines the history books,
00:08:30.460examines the archives, delves into the Auschwitz camp, et cetera, and they are a liberal, they're a leftist, they're a communist, let's say, and they just determine that the Holocaust didn't happen.
00:08:44.800That is theoretically possible, of course, but it never really happens that way, does it?
00:08:51.380Most all Holocaust revisionists are right-wingers.
00:09:09.000They want to rescue the reputation of Hitler, et cetera.
00:09:13.680Now, that's a very strong example to prove a point, but you see where I'm going with race realism.
00:09:21.160Now, theoretically, you can go in with an open mind, just look at the facts, use evolutionary theory to reach race realism, and that doesn't have anything to do with what you feel or what your values might be.
00:09:47.840It might not be as strong as the Holocaust revision example that I mentioned, but most all race realists are, in effect, white nationalists.
00:09:58.280Now, you know, what is white nationalism?
00:10:02.620I think it probably could be defined as the idea that the American white population needs to be segregated from other races and needs a state of its own.
00:10:12.980Now, it can take a lot of other forms.
00:10:39.620So I'm thinking here something like American Renaissance, V-Dare, et cetera.
00:10:45.180They are, in effect, Republicans, but they're Republicans with a little bit extra.
00:10:53.020They are Republicans who bring their data tables to the party and don't just engage in dog whistling, let's say.
00:11:05.320So those people are naturally inclined to like HBD, and HBD reinforces many of their pre-existing presuppositions.
00:11:16.140So it says that white people are smarter than blacks, not quite as smart as Asians, at least on math, and not nearly as smart as Ashkenazi Jews.
00:11:35.160Now, this can take a number of different forms.
00:11:39.900I have definitely known some libertarians, some even anarchist types, who think that race realism is necessary precisely because there are going to be group inequalities in any free society.
00:11:55.580And if you find that a, say, law school class is predominantly white, Asian, and Ashkenazi Jewish, and blacks are well underrepresented, and Hispanics are fairly underrepresented.
00:12:18.040Then you could say, well, the admissions officers, they must be racist.
00:12:23.740There must be some systematic racism that's infected our entire society.
00:12:54.100So if your presupposition is that this should be a random distribution in this hypothetical law school class, then you're going to want to solve that problem.
00:13:02.860Well, another solution is that it's just about race realism.
00:13:09.860You know, Asians, high spatial mathematical IQ, lower on the verbal.
00:15:42.360Now, I don't think we should underestimate the power of white nationalism, even in the United States.
00:15:51.200So if you look at expressed preferences of the U.S. population, it is basically a kind of socially conservative, fiscally liberal grouping.
00:16:07.980I can remember growing up in the 90s and hearing a lot about this new type of person who was fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
00:16:19.460So what that means is he accepted gays, women in the workplace, just fine.
00:16:25.280But, you know, we can't tax too hard, and we've got to balance those budgets, etc.
00:18:02.680In addition to that, white nationalism has played a very important role in Republican politicking after realignment, which occurred, I guess, in the late 60s, was cemented by 1994 with the Republican Revolution, etc.
00:18:24.360And it's also known as the Southern strategy.
00:18:30.280We certainly saw it earlier with Goldwater, going hunting where the ducks are.
00:18:36.640That is, if you're a libertarian, pro-war candidate like Goldwater was, why try to convince people who don't want to hear that?
00:18:46.620Why not go to the South and win the Deep South on that message?
00:18:50.560I'm against the Civil Rights Act, period.
00:18:53.620And I'm also pro-flag, you know, yes ma'am, get some more apple pie up in this bitch.
00:19:01.160That is going to play really well in the South.
00:19:03.680That is the Southern strategy, effectively.
00:19:06.520All of these white Southern Democrats, across generations, moved off that party.
00:19:13.620And beginning with Goldwater, definitely with Nixon, there's some murkiness in there.
00:19:21.120You know, Jimmy Carter was the first evangelical Christian president, etc.
00:19:24.860But by the Reagan era and into the 90s, these white Southern conservatives moved off the Democratic Party and they became firm Republicans.
00:19:36.820And what's interesting is that from what I can tell, kind of looking back at my own career and looking at history, I think that race realism, that is, you know, people like Jared Taylor or Charles Murray.
00:19:58.060Although, you know, those are different types of people, but, you know, a lot of tons of similarities, that these types of people and the whole HBD motive was a kind of rationalization or explication of the Southern strategy, which probably was the most successful political strategy of my lifetime, maybe of the last 75 years.
00:20:26.860So what I mean by that is that, I mean, there's a famous line from Atwater where he said, you know, at one point you could go yell the N-word.
00:20:38.720He actually used the N-word when he said this.
00:20:40.940He's like, you could just yell N-word, N-word, N-word.
00:20:43.740Then you had to be a little more subtle about it.
00:20:45.760You had to say, well, we're against forced busing or too much integration, etc.
00:20:51.960And then you can't even talk about that.
00:20:53.940You've got to talk about, well, we're for Reaganomics and tax cuts and stuff like that.
00:21:03.400That is winning over whites to the Republican Party effectively on the basis of racism.
00:21:10.880And as I look back, you know, on my life, I see a lot of this white nationalism as being, in effect, a kind of like idea factory or intensification or, again, explication of what is a implicit political strategy.
00:21:33.720The Southern strategy, the most successful political strategy of the last 75 years, also the most subtle and the most implicit, tacit.
00:21:42.940It's what you don't say that gives it its pop.
00:21:46.460You don't just go out there and yell the N-word.
00:21:49.640You imply that the Republican Party is the home to whites.
00:21:54.100And you also imply that a certain kind of race blindness is, in effect, good for whites.
00:22:03.100And I think that might very well be true in many cases.
00:22:07.200You see this even today in a lot of the Ron DeSantis stuff or the critical race theory outrage.
00:25:58.620I haven't interacted with him in a while, but I used to interact with Bo Weingart quite a bit on Twitter.
00:26:05.100And it's, you know, he seems like a good guy.
00:26:09.620Okay, I have very little interest in this subject at this point in time because I feel like everything that could conceivably be said has been said.
00:26:27.140I mean, there's a famous story of someone who worked at the patent office in Washington, D.C.
00:26:34.840And he said, well, we might need to close this down because everything that could be invented already has been.
00:26:41.360And that, you know, that was in 1905 or something.
00:26:44.340I mean, it's probably apocryphal, but you kind of know the type of person who would say that.
00:28:30.160But it's presented as if, you know, I'm here telling you people what you finally need to recognize.
00:28:40.380And it's just this rehash of things that are rather tired at this point.
00:28:48.660I don't know what to say, but they're just reinventing all of these things that have been done before while conspicuously not giving people credit.
00:29:04.100I actually published a book, and I worked quite diligently on it.
00:29:47.760But it's really the same fundamental principles.
00:29:52.320And I don't know, maybe I'm just missing something, but I don't know where this goes from here.
00:30:02.400And I think it is rather odd, although maybe it's not really that odd, of conservatives now adopting it now that it's in itself fairly inconsequential.
00:30:13.060In the sense that conservatives are, you know, by their very nature, this backward-looking group of people.
00:30:21.280And I remember thinking this with the rise of Ann Coulter in the Trump movement.
00:30:30.740Now, she had had a career for 20 years, but she really became something with Trump.
00:30:37.380And she just sounded exactly like stuff that I'd read in V-Dare in circa 2003.
00:30:43.460You know, if we don't elect Trump, we don't stop immigration now, nothing matters, we won't have a country, or at least we won't recognize it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:32:08.560The moment something is irrelevant or backwards is the moment they start loving it because, due to their personalities, they're not on the vanguard of anything.
00:34:35.320You can't change them too much with education or society, etc.
00:34:41.660And come to conclusions that would infuriate every single race realist.
00:34:48.520For example, you could say that, yes, Hispanics have a lower IQ than whites on average.
00:34:55.680And thus, we need much more immigration, because we're moving to a service or retail-based society or economy, and we need those 90 IQ people to sell us the products or park our cars, etc.