Race in America and the Dork Right

Against an Authoritarianism of Clerks

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The right’s thinking about race in America is mostly as pathological and boring as the left’s. Much constipated effort is devoted to refutations of “arguments” of the “woke,” or tedious genealogies tracing their origins back to Locke, or nominalism, or Hegel, or something else that the would-be pundit can then wordchop. As there isn’t much to go on in the way of ideas among the left, this exercise ends up being tormenting and banal. At its most vivid the leftist posture is summarized in the images of the “invisible knapsack” of white privilege and “systemic racism,” which are invoked to explain the poverty and dysfunction of blacks as well as other peoples of color, including, one presumes, shades of beige. This is an absurd conspiracy theory on the level of Alex Jones hallucinations about transdimensional dwarven clockwork aliens, or demonic reptiloids thousands of years old masterminding world events. Everything from colonialism to lack of respect for nappy hair is invoked to explain colored folk’s trauma and inability to make it in modern technological civilization. I don’t know that non-imbecile leftists are convinced by any of this; mostly they are people who believe in equality, are offended by inequality of whatever origin, and believe that whites are the Original Oppressors and exploiters who must atone. People who want to believe this will find the arguments to fit these moral desires.

In some cases the response to leftist race hysteria and superstition can make things much worse. One now-prominent faction could be called the “IQ-right” or the “HBD right” (for “human biodiversity”). In its most extreme and revealing, though rare, form this amounts to a kind of “IQ nationalism” which posits or desires a political or social alliance or unity between different groups that are high IQ against especially the interests or claims of blacks, who as a group have lower average IQ. Newcomers on X or generally online to “dissident” ideas who are exposed to interesting statistics about race and IQ for the first time may not be aware that these are promoted for the most part not just by lovers of free speech or forbidden knowledge, but by a diffuse group with a more or less coherent view or program. They’ve long been active on the internet, since around the late 1990’s and are familiar to anyone who’s used online forums for a long time. They have their own moral and political positive aims, although these aims are now often unstated or forgotten.

These are secular rightists who believe in “good governance,” broadly defined negatively as freedom from the contemporary urban blights of high crime and high filth. A big part of the modern story of decay is the preferential treatment given to dumb and feral groups of people, which among other things encourages accumulation of filth and allows crime to spread. The left has no answer to this except more “programs” (funding, except to police) and more “education”; the IQ-right makes some good arguments about the delusional liberal expectations regarding education, with interesting facts drawn from various countries and their comparative spending per student, the results, differences in average national IQ, and so on. Many of the different claims and arguments this group makes about various things like this on education, or the uselessness of preferential hiring, or the injustices of DEI, are both true and useful. The problem is with their “other” views, their other motivations, and their desired type of society.

The writers of the IQ-right usually see Singapore or China as models of good governance in the modern world: most are Sinophiles. On immigration they are not as such restrictionists, but believe in IQ-selective immigration policies. Some believe immigration from high-IQ groups worldwide into the United States, Canada, Europe, maybe even Japan, should be increased. The more obnoxious among them make a show of “allying” with “leftist elites.” They also look down on “low IQ” or Walmart-type whites. In distinction to say, white nationalists, with whom they’re sometimes conflated by leftist press, this group is actually friendly to “model minorities,” and implicitly or explicitly sees them, especially East Asians, as potential allies against the black lobby or the cause for black racial reparations. This posited or desired alliance among “high IQ” professional elites, and especially with East Asian professionals against black lobbying and black interests or “dysfunction” is characteristic of the IQ-right.

Many from among the IQ-right also make the related argument that, since disparities in achievements or wealth between blacks and non-blacks are due to average group differences in IQ, and IQ is to a large extent heritable and innate, the leftist argument that disparities are caused by discrimination or exploitation are false. They blame traditional conservatives and centrist liberals for being unwilling to talk about innate or natural differences between racial groups and claim that if this was done, it would prove a powerful argument against wokeness.

Leaving aside the fact that wokeness doesn’t as such consist in only the claim for racial redistribution to blacks; and leaving aside also the willingness of liberals and leftists to invoke the necessity of state action to correct the injustice of nature, which they absolutely would do if forced to accept the reality of innate racial differences in ability (some already do this, and John Rawls the prophet of the center left bureaucracies did already long ago); one striking thing about this “anti-woke” argument from the IQ-right is the premise it accepts that redistribution of wealth is maybe justified if it can be proven that exploitation does or did take place. Although they don’t emphasize this aspect of their outlook, I think this assumption betrays actually another intention. The institution of the Senate exists in modern representative democracies, or is supposed to, in order to protect the unequal privileges of the rich and the nobles—Montesquieu is for example very explicit that the whole purpose of the Senate is that of course the nobles have a right to defend what they already have. These things have much changed since the 18th and 19th Centuries, and the full case for this very reasonable position wouldn’t be acceptable today, but the opposite, where every family with some inherited wealth is made to give an accounting for how this was acquired by their ancestors, is quite plainly totalitarian. It shouldn’t matter if wealth was gotten by contraband, by robbery from Guinea-Bissau, by luck in the lottery, through financial speculation, or by dutiful service in a “high IQ” professional position. Once this question is opened, there is no end to where it can go. You can claim that the door was already opened in modern America, whether in the 1930’s or certainly by the 1960’s; the fact that the American state has done this since the 1960’s and probably before is a betrayal of its free origins—forcibly removing the right of free association, for example. But if the case for free association and being secure in ownership of property is too controversial to make in our time, what constituency can you hope to get for the case that there is a natural biological hierarchy and that those who have not deserve it because they’re born to be eternally stupid into the generations? Anyway, once you introduce the question of “but do you have this property justly,” it’s absurd to think that the feeble “but we have it because we worked a professional job and had the required IQ to get it” is going to make any difference…

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This last conceit actually shows the origins of the HBD/IQ argument now trying to make itself public: new Asian and other “professional” minorities want to give themselves (and usually only themselves) exemption from redistribution to blacks, who they fear and loathe for all kinds of other reasons. This is a repetition of the arguments, or rather the pique, that liberal Jewish professionals have stereotypically carried in the past against the “WASP Brahmin elite.” It is part of the Ellis Island self-lionization to see the Anglo and the WASP as having gotten his social position and his family wealth by means of past evils. These are commonly recalled: slavery in the South, or among Yankees the trafficking of opium, other forms of contraband and piracy, exploitation and despoilation of the colonial world or the Filipines or China, of other races, etc. It is for example part of the mythology of some Jewish professional families to know details about the Roosevelts arriving in the New World with “merely the shirt on their backs and a suitcase of gold.” Mixed in with these fantasies and old wives’ tales about their social superiors’ ill-gotten wealth, who excluded them from clubs, Wall Street and legal firms and so on, is an opposite mythology about how hard work, law-abiding ethics, and native Jewish brains have allowed professionals like doctors, accountants, to gain a more moderate wealth more deservingly and also in accord with social justice. The same mythology is repeated by other Ellis Island immigrant groups against the WASP Brahmin.

I remember on more than one occasion as I was talking to conservative Jewish intellectuals about the end of the right to free association in America in the 1960’s, I was very piously informed that “we” had a real problem with racism at the time, however, and that government action needed to be taken. By another I was told that the University of Mississippi, which was a public university, excluded blacks unjustly. What struck me was the intense interest in these minute facts of supposed past injustice by the WASP, which had obviously been passed down in social circles or families as chattering accusation and invective against a hated superior social class. Of course these past immoral activities didn’t tarnish the ethnic group of my interlocutor who was remembering “our” sins—only those bad-blond-bully-others would have to pay!

I don’t mean to say that every HBD/IQ commentator who I’ve referred to is motivated by this, but many are. The general orientation of this sphere is ethnic or immigrant professional strivers, who imagine themselves as spokesmen for the “high IQ coalition” of recent arrivals, many from outside the European world. They wield test scores, degrees, and a moderately high income as their new arrival imprimatur of “social status,” which they seem to desire above all else. They seek an alliance with “high status” liberal polite whites and are trying to convert them to this view of IQ supremacy, or IQ-driven professional managerialism. In this they horribly misjudge leftist white “elites.” As quite a few of the prominent speakers for this view also support migration from supposedly “high IQ countries,” and also quite a few others are themselves self-identified proud members of “model minorities” or celebrators thereof I can’t help but suspect that the HBD/IQ-right argument serves less, as some white nationalists and leftists imagine, for a defense of European civilization or white majority rule in America, and more as a charter myth for a rising Chinese, Indian, and other similar professional class that deeply fears and loathes American blacks and also resents the cultural and social dominance of the majority of whites.

This group implicitly questions the legitimacy of white America’s inherited wealth and property. It veers between condescending toward “poor white trash,” courting “elite human capital” liberal white professionals and tech elites, and fearing and resenting both the demographic weight of a still-majority white America as well as the still lingering cultural-social dominance of elite and “WASP”-coded whites. The entire conceit of an “HBD-IQ” counter to “wokeness” is then in my view absurd because some of the most significant grievances against “white male patriarchy” come from high IQ immigrant groups. Actually many of the would-be pundits from the “IQ nationalism” faction appear to have implicit and explicit grievances against American whites.

This is by no means a new thing: reparations, DEI, the entire narrative based on white male patriarchal domination and exploitation of The Other was already in full force in the 1990’s, it was championed by “high IQ” model minorities, and its argument on behalf of poorer blacks or People of Color was only one important part of leftist claims. Here is an example…the Swiss National Bank responding in 1998 to an attempt to cancel the famous 19th Century historian Jacob Burckhardt, readily recognizable today as a woke cancelation campaign: Swiss National Bank on Burckhardt

This was not at all unique or rare even in the 1990’s, and it’s coming from a high-IQ group demanding reparations and respect, and having nothing to do with blacks or the things much of the IQ-right claims motivate wokeness. I’m not sure why this pique against The Man, or the perpetual huge costs imposed by DEI in the name of female privilege and lese-majeste, is not “woke” but only the grievances of low-IQ blacks are.

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The question of blacks in particular in the commentary of the HBD/IQ faction brings up a more amusing aspect of their fixations: a fear, resentment and admiration of the physical, athletic and sexual prowess of black and white men. The social dynamics here and how this fits also into the Asian immigrant experience to the United States could make for a long article or even a comedy novel all of its own, but this too is roughly a re-experience, or re-sentiment of the 20th Century Jewish professional’s and intellectual’s tensions and neuroses in American society. On one hand as within the professional and intellectual social class their competitors for mates would primarily be white men, who will generally outclass them physically and in terms of charisma, they are in many cases driven to greatly exaggerate the sexual and physical prowess of black men—who are often safely at a distance—as a kind of “gotcha” against white men…thus hapas, and Chinese and Indian men continue now on internet boards, along with transsexuals, the old Jewish lionization of black men as a cultural-sexual image against the resented white or more specifically WASP “lacrosse frat boy” who is the nerd’s actual or perceived competitor or bully. In the case of “professional” males from darker-skinned Asian and other races, there’s also sometimes an amusing attempt to extend the sociosexual allure that black males enjoy in current day American society to themselves as supposedly virile or attractive to women merely because of their skin tone (the opposite is usually the case though; an attractive Indian male would be well advised to self-present as Hispanic for example…his chances would improve).

But it’s not always possible or desirable to live far from blacks, especially if you want to live in New York or an urban environment in America. Then also very recently there was a frightening period of black agitation that members of this group, unacquainted with past American experience, think is unprecedented: in these cases fear of black men as such will override everything else. This was also true for the American Jewish professional who veered between lionization of blacks as a form of social and cultural combat with WASP’s and on the other hand primal fear and loathing as a result of the urban Jewish experience and helplessness to defend themselves in street confrontations. For a recent “professional” immigrant, especially one who grows up in a typical coddled “Tiger Mom” or similar environment as many “high IQ” immigrant groups tend to share, and who is unaware of and has no experience of America’s history of easily managing blacks or what is necessary for this, the fear of this group is primal and overriding. I can’t imagine the terror an Oriental professional feels living near Bedford-Stuyvesant other similar environment. (American Southern whites by contrast have a very different experience of blacks historically and although there are long-standing conflicts, they’re just not possessed by this same kind of primal fear, nor are immigrants who grew up in a harsher or freer street environment).

The “high IQ” immigrant pursuing “high status” nerdoid activities, eager to please parents, like the urban American 20th Century Jew before him, lives by contrast in utter fear of this group. This fear and maybe memories of occasional bad experiences on streets, school or more rarely in bars and other public places explains to a large extent the “political philosophy” and the preoccupations of the group I’m discussing in this article. In this they are also like a lot of the figures of the “Neoreaction” movement and other older commentators on human biodiversity who don’t share their immigrant, Jewish or Asian, etc., background but who are nevertheless driven by similar neuroses for somewhat different reasons. I don’t want to name many names here because I actually have respect for some as writers and journalists and consider myself friendly to them. I’ll mention one—Peter Frost, a commentator who seems to be entirely consumed by his fear, envy and fascination with black men, which appears in almost every aspect of his writing on “HBD.”

The political theory of “Neoreaction” is also motivated by this same general experience: it is a type of Hobbesian authoritarian liberalism, seeking to protect property and “civilization” specifically (it smells to me) from black barbarians against whom frail technology and finance nerds need apparently not only normal police protections but thousands of pages of theory, absolute monarchic control, and so on. A theoretical apparatus is then erected like a cannon at a mole-hill. In this endeavor, catastrophically in my opinion an “alliance” is also to be made with races and groups the white nerd sees as similar to himself, which include the “Tiger Mom”-reared careerist dork “high IQ” immigrants. I can’t emphasize this enough: the adulation that many Neoreactionary writers (along with the adjacent HBD/IQ sphere) feel for Chinese civilization is a type I’ve met in real life who sees the Chinese model specifically as an image or ideal to posit against their primal fear of black men. They know little about the actual China, same as the 18th Century Enlightenment philosophes who Tocqueville mocks for also just a lot of wishful thinking on the Chinese system. But they imagine it to be very congenial to their tastes and capacities: a place where high IQ and office-nerdoid qualities are prized, where they can live in physical safety from “bullies” and where women supposedly love and reward the intellectually and financially successful.

The ideal of this political orientation is Singapore. I have a lot of respect for Lee Kuan Yew and his achievement and what he could do with the situation and human material available to him, and I think his example will endure in history as a great one. I also think Singapore is impressive, and is to be praised when American and European cities are in a bad way…for what it is. It’s not that I disagree with the substantive claims these groups make about human biological differences or that I think the political aims, in this case Singapore as an example, are always bad or not respectable. I just think that the whole enterprise of marshaling pages and pages of theory to support a new-Hobbesian liberalism to protect white and Asian tech and professional workers against black barbarian violence because a black guy called you a pussy on the street once is overkill, possibly self-defeating, and in any case uninteresting.

(Singapore is also great for Southeast Asian standards and a good example that Chinese civilization doesn’t need to have filthy cities, but beyond that I got a very strong whiff there that this is the type of place Albert/LiuWei got such a shiny position as Assistant Vice President in charge of Logistics and Operations and his mother tells her friends what a good boy he is, and how well he has done, and look at the Instagram photos he just uploaded, the fine shirt he is wearing at this beautiful bar, and it’s a rooftop bar, can you see what a glorious view, and he is up for a promotion next week and possibly even a meeting or award with the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Interior…an important up and coming young man Albert/LiuWei is…and so on to perpetuity.)

The particular social, physical and character traits of such “professional” males and their theoretical defenders become the basis of a spiritual and intellectual bifurcation between the intellect and the body: a dystopian basis for a social order. It is based on a self-serving misunderstanding of civilization on the part of nerds which has long been the basis of the “HBD/IQ” orientation: that civilization is built by the dutiful, docile, orderly and shy clerk, tinkerer, “engineer,” and shopkeeper, in other words men like themselves, and that on the other side of these qualities you have all of those they have both deemed as foreign to themselves and occasionally fetishized, such as physical strength and ability, charisma, prowess in battle, violence, volatility in character, laziness when it comes to work, profligacy, attractiveness to women and sexual prowess, etc.. Not all HBD commentators foolishly attribute these hated and envied traits exclusively to blacks, but many seem to. Either way there is a false model assumed both regarding the origin and the preservation of civilizations worth having. What is assumed in a self-serving way here is the bourgeois, the Mandarin, the accountant or at best the craftsman and technologist as the founder or maintainer of civilization. It is a story as false and ultimately as emotional-moralistic as the Marxian delusion that the laborer is.

Hobbes was the prophet of the bourgeois man dominated by the fear of death. Hobbes’ two villains, the men who wouldn’t fit into this new order, were the religious fanatic driven by powerful beliefs that made the next world first in one’s mind and this life not valuable enough to fear losing, and on the other hand the noble and warrior driven by vainglory and combative spirits and not fearing death for that reason. The men who don’t fear death and who aren’t driven by what Nietzsche calls the English ideal of comfort are unpleasant reminders that not all human natures fit in this scheme, but will always form a powerful minority faction against it. In a displacement typical also of the midcentury Jewish professional, the qualities here hated in the (now-gone) vainglorious noble are transferred in the pettiest way to the feared black gangbanger. This equivalence or transference has no truth in it, because blacks as a population are fundamentally dependent on state benefits and police protection of themselves as a community—and historically become quite docile, not defiant, with a firm hand. But the more perceptive and cynical among the HBD/IQ crowd are I think making this bad argument knowingly and again using the example of black dysfunction or barbarism in fact as a proxy or wedge against personality types and attributes found in other whites who they resent or see themselves in competition with. Regardless of the psychological motivations and combat here in play, the end result of this fixation is to promote both domestically and abroad a kind of dystopian state. I think that Singapore is great for the overseas Chinese who were in a hard place, and I think it would be a terrible outcome for Europe and America especially if, unlike the overseas Chinese who still make up an absolute majority of the citizens of Singapore, white societies were to fall under the rule of a motley “high IQ” elite.

This mixed elite united only by “high IQ” and their professional positions would be armed with authoritarian powers to “keep down black dysfunction”—that plus a bloodless office flower language code of conduct would be the only thing uniting them. There are worse things than this, but not many. Anyone who’s worked in an Asian society for an Asian boss will have stories of pain and bleakness…in Japan, despite the fellow feeling assumed among Japanese by outsiders, having a Japanese boss is a very tough thing in life; it’s tough even for an expat in Japan who is respected as a European expert and somewhat exempt from Japan’s unusual codes of behavior. A famous tweet by legendary poaster Menaquinone4 captured this incipient dystopia: “zuckerberg’s vision: mulatto underclass clicking sponsored content all day; ruled over by autistic jew-asian elite. soylent only legal food”;

Zuckerberg seems—maybe—to have had a change of heart, but the HBD-IQ and Neoreaction/tech factions associated with these views I think have not…

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To seek an “alliance” with “high-IQ” status-striving Tiger Mom Asian groups in favor of an authoritarian “high-IQ” state is a dystopian overkill for the small and frankly apolitical problem of black dysfunction that a variety of states and societies have easily solved in different ways in the past. This “overkill” is what I think tips the hand of the HBD-IQ people, and that they intend to do away with much more than just “black dysfunction.” I think the society being proposed is an atrocity…the cruelty, the Oriental slave-driving, the bleak outcome that maybe many don’t see in “elite human capital” like Jack Ma, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Igbo accountants, a grim beigeiad of priest-clerks, and a variety of resentful constipated white nerdoids being given the helm of an authoritarian state to fight against “black savagery”—and not only that—all of this leads to an open debate of whether this or favela world would be worse. I’d agree Haiti would be worse, but if you consider the Dominican Republic or Brazil as possible outcomes, I think it’s at least an open debate. For the sake of human freedom in any case, I’d much rather choose the Dominican Republic to what is being proposed. To each their own I suppose: my purpose here isn’t to advocate for better or worse states, but to explain what makes this HBD-IQ faction, and certain aspects of the Neoreactionary philosophy to which it is adjacent, unpleasant and annoying. And to point out that it carries itself a positive moral and social vision, and isn’t just a criticism of wokeness, let alone just a list of “dissident” facts about human nature.

Many of the pundits of the IQ-right and other IQ fetishists are also incredibly annoying in their celebration of “liberal elite” nonentities like Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner as High Status “elite human capital.” The complete refutation of this stupid phrase and how immigrant strivers misunderstand the character and minds of “elite” liberals can be found in my friend Torbert Fahey’s article on the Doonesbury cartoon series:

Doonesbury and the Status Hallucination

According to the IQ-right and “Elite Human Capital” faction, Huma Abedin and Weiner are only bad because of their liberal mildness and perhaps their soft spot for the downtrodden blacks. They are believed by this group to be cynical Machiavellian-Nietzschean operators, or potentially so. This group, the HBD-IQ faction, seeks “an alliance” with such people over against not only blacks, but also dirty, Low Status boorish racist MAGA whites; it seeks to unite with leftist elites under a “nobility” of IQ and professional status. This pretense, and this shame over possibly being associated with “Low Status” flyover whites, is again typical of the immigrant parvenu and striver, as it was of the midcentury Jew unsure of his social position. This social posture again accounts for much that is annoying about this group, but beyond being annoying, what is being implicitly proposed, that the only reason Huma Abedin or Anthony Weiner or other such are bad is because they’re not assertive enough and not forceful enough, and that the only thing needed is to have such people ascend to their true status as a nobility…again I don’t know if it would be worse to have that ruling over you, or the murderous African chieftain sleeping all day with a dirty rag over his face from Gobineau’s description of life in Haiti.

There are freedoms involved in state incompetence and favela-world that wouldn’t be available in the bleak work camp imagined by the HBD crowd. But the relative merits of each isn’t what should be up for debate…the odd part is that this bifurcation is being conceived of in the first place. In reality there’s no bifurcation necessary between the attributes here assigned to blacks on one hand (wrongly) and on the other hand to “high IQ elites,” including especially “model minorities” and so on: this is a rhetorical construct for a forced choice, motivated by American race pathologies and the desire of a human type to stomp for itself. For these reasons the awkward apparatus of “race science” is invoked for example to justify or dispute titles to property, when all that would be necessary is an appeal to traditional American and widely accepted principles of freedom, of free association, living and letting be, and law and order. I say if a coalition is so powerless that it can’t win on attractive and mild and widely-accepted principles like these, still less can it win by invoking the fundamental inequality between man and man, and between racial groups. (That is a true doctrine, but a dark and widely hated one, especially by “liberal elites”—and if it was ever made into public principle of government, it would be a type of state very different than imagined by almost anyone today, including the IQ dorks…and for which no nation is yet ready.)

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The problem then is the vision such people have for the world as their implied solution to the political problem of “wokeness” and more generally the problem of race in America. The IQ-right solution consists of the same balance of cruelty and weakness that characterizes all past societies ruled by priests and clerks. I think the chances this group ever succeeds in putting America or Europe down this path are very small…but this is an annoying and obnoxious group and it’s possible they will from time to time influence this or that part of government. If domestically the arguments of the HBD faction lead to a dystopian mess of entitled, authoritarian and forceful Anthony Weiners and Huma Abedins running an open slave labor camp, I’m afraid that if ever applied to international affairs this doctrine can lead to other more gradual and insidious big mistakes that will slowly decay technological civilization over time. I think the possibility that such thinking can influence foreign affairs is even somewhat greater…it may in the mid-run affect where America puts its “weight” abroad for a few reasons. This thinking is I would guess semi-popular in certain corners of the tech world and will become more so. It can get a foothold then also in various parts of academia where more intelligent youth can become, covertly or not, interested in unusual or “dissident” ideas, now given some glamor or imprimatur by this or that HBD thinker having a column in the New York Times, or being known to be promoted by this or that tech billionaire. So even if it doesn’t get a serious foothold in domestic policy, it’s often the case that America’s foreign policy and State Department are separate from its domestic activity. Individuals in decision-making authority in the foreign policy apparatus can pursue interests abroad unrelated to events at home—a realm of relative freedom for some who can’t or aren’t allowed to put into action ideas at home but can try to reframe them for foreign policy. (For a long time in this way the CIA functioned as a vehicle for young intelligent and ambitious leftist American men who put the nation’s weight abroad behind the “non-communist left” that was often, unknown to their naive selves, the same as the communist left; Thomas Braden was such in the 1950’s, this policy being outsourced to him by his still more naive superiors. This has been very bad for the world and for the United States). Also, these ideas aren’t in certain circles as taboo as they would be in American society at large. For example, where a mass of lower class POC clamoring for respect and material handouts aren’t the main concern, the current IQ hierarchy places East Asians and Indians actually above white Europeans: proposals in that direction in a purely “expert” world wouldn’t be as taboo as in domestic affairs. East Asians and Indians and others would in any case, unlike white people, welcome to be considered such for all kinds of reasons.

At this moment American investment in Europe is far larger than in anywhere else, and the America-Europe relationship is the engine, for better or worse, of all world economic activity and higher technological and scientific innovation. This isn’t really known by a lot of people and it’s obscured greatly by the HBD crowd for predictable reasons (they think that if a 115 IQ Chinese or Korean immigrant in the United States has more moxy to get a degree and become an ophthalmologist than an equivalent-IQ descendant of Saxons, that this translates into East Asia becoming a technological and scientific innovation powerhouse at some point in the future, if only for more American investment and attention). But I remember William Odom saying in 2007 that American investment in tiny Belgium was five times what it was in India—and at the time a similar rhetoric about the inevitable end of Europe and rise of India and China was spreading in Intelligent Quarters. This figure has changed in the years since, but at present American investment in tiny Belgium is about the same as it is in India. When you consider other European countries, France, Germany, and especially Holland, England, etc., American investment in these far exceeds investment anywhere in the world, including in East Asia. It is often said that East Asia is currently the world’s factory, which is true, and I think America and Europe made mistakes in “industrial policy,” but what’s being produced in East Asia are toilets, washing machines, fridges, clothes, and mostly such things. At the higher level of technology even when it is manufactured there, East Asia doesn’t have the capacity to do more than copy American and European innovations and even now after decades of being exposed and trained in Western science, there’s basically no higher science that comes out of East Asia.

HBD people are fond of graphs that show the number of “citations” or “scientific articles produced,” which seems to place East Asia at a level about equal to Europe and the Anglosphere. They don’t tell you the vast majority of these articles, especially in Asia, have no content or scientific merit and no real-world significance in terms of technological innovation or maintenance. They are an emanation of academic children of Tiger Moms seeking to make their careers with irrelevant garbage output and cul-de-sac corollaries…for an example of the meaning of Chinese science even at its highest, I always like to remind people of the famous case of Gregory Perelman and the New Yorker article that dealt with the controversy surrounding that, centered on Chinese mathematicians’ eagerness to take credit for something they had no part in (…the article is revealing about the character of Chinese "science" down to the details). In higher mathematics there’s basically no output of worth outside of the United States, Russia, and France. Individuals from East Asian and Indian backgrounds can certainly be capable of work of genius—but almost always not in their own countries, and, I would claim, would not be so in a society that was not majority northwest European or Russian, and driven by northwest European or Russian cultural and spiritual norms that can only be sustained if the majority is actually northwest European or Russian. (The same is true for Jews historically: only those Jews living in European societies were able to achieve genius, and only when renouncing their insular culture and superstitions and assimilating to German, French, English etc., and a general European culture). Outside of a society that is both majority northwest European or Russian, and also driven by a culture that is dominant and confident in its northwest European or Russian character, modern technological civilization can’t continue indefinitely.

This conflicts with the story now told by the HBD faction, which believes the supposed four to five extra points in average IQ that can be attributed to most Northeast Asian populations must necessarily result in greater scientific and technological output than the greater European world. But this isn’t the case now, and this claim conflicts the experience of history, whether ancient or recent history, that I think is the greater authority as to the question of differences in ability between groups. If people in charge of foreign policy made decisions based on this false claim, the effects would be very bad: slowly America’s “weight” would shift from Europe to Asia. This would be fine if it were done with a sense of 19th Century manifest destiny that America was fated to rule the Pacific; but that attitude was founded on a very different understanding of the relationship between the European man and the Oriental. This change would be made instead with a sense that America’s politically reciprocal relationship to Europe, and its culturally and intellectually looking up to Europe, should be replaced with the analogue in Asia. Given also that many of those in charge of this policy would themselves be Asian, and that America doesn’t have the same experiences in Asia as it has in Europe (chiefly, rebuilding it and its liberal parties after World War 2, facing down communism together, etc.) the relationship would become far more “egalitarian” than the American-European one, with America maybe at times even taking second position. Regardless, as world “weight” shifts to East Asia, I think there would be a slow deterioration in scientific and technological innovation, with substance being replaced even more than it already is by empty careerism and “high status” striving, while everything slowly breaks down and decays.

If such insanity were carried out with, say, moving one’s weight to the Congo, the very bad effects and the mistake would be apparent very fast…but in the case of Asia, just as in the case of women, who can more readily mimic the outward forms of intelligence and professionalism, the decline would be slower, more insidious, harder to correct. No one can predict now what the things will look like decades away, and trends can change very fast, but I do think a world in which East Asia and India “led” economically, scientifically, intellectually, would come to resemble over time the same type of rickety, corrupt, cruel, suffocating work-camp society that’s been the norm in the Orient for at least two thousand years. If America does make such a mistake the only good side of it might be that it becomes distracted from policing Europe, which could then maybe save itself in time and thereby also the cause of freedom and excellence. But European man wherever he is should instead have the memory to remember Asian societies are dead societies and zombie cultures, and to have the confidence to continue the progress he has stood for since Greco-Roman antiquity—if the extra humanitarian reason is needed, he may also aim through this to rescue and be a home for the occasional geniuses who do come out of the Asian landmass, and who would otherwise be suffocated in their own cultures.

But these are dreams for far into the future and for people who claim to be able to solve political convulsions of our time. Meanwhile, I will be poolside in Jamaica…

PS:

On somewhat of a tangent: many of the pundits I referred to implicitly, some of who are better than others, made various personal mistakes in their career paths, but all made the crucial mistake of believing you can build a public career, complete with formal secure public positions and respect, as a commentator on racial differences. In the modern world, you can’t—not on this or any number of other matters. They are then in a difficult position. If they had wanted to remain in academia for example this question would have had to be approached without public attention and in any case much more tactfully. In the public and political sphere it couldn’t actually be brought up at all if you want to survive. If they want to comment on heretical matters they would have had or will have to accept the position of heretic: you can still survive as a heretic, but it’s hard, insecure, at times possibly dangerous, and your real name or position means nothing in that direction; so my claim that only frogs can approach these matters effectively.

The right in general has a problem: it forces its intelligent youth to choose between a life of telling the truth, which if you do it well can bring you fame and notoriety and the social adulation that is as addictive a good for a human, once he has it, as sexual or other satisfaction; and on the other hand a rather grim life of keeping silent but climbing a traditional career path in law, business, politics, academia, etc.; obviously any political faction needs both, and this is an unfair choice especially to put on young, energetic smart right wing or conservative people. One solution is for right wing billionaires to stop being so stingy if they want to win. Obviously some of these writers were treated unfairly by universities and shouldn’t be in a position where they have to make it on their own in alternative media. Still less so for many highly intelligent youth I know in law, business, and science who have to give up any public commentary or keep KGB-level opsec anonymity if they hope to do well in their fields—again, a very painful choice. The left takes its young who find themselves in this position, grooms them, and gives them much private adulation and support and a clear upward career path to make up for their not “sperging” out in public…or otherwise gives a path also to that public expression. The right cares nothing for its best young and tells them they’re on their own and that if their talents mean anything they will find success in “the market”…this is stupid.

To parry potential claims that this is self-interested: I have for now managed to secure for myself the means to say what I believe, enjoy myself doing it and not have to rely on anyone else, but it was a very difficult time in which I received zero support from anyone. I am not saying that to brag but because it’s unfortunate: I could have very much used it, and I would have probably done more. And there are many others like me but who are in positions where they feel they can’t afford the risk, or to go kamikaze as I have, and so probably many good books and especially collaborative enterprises like good movies etc., end up never being made. If the right doesn’t want to be a long-term perpetual loser in the realms of the intellect and culture it will have to solve this problem somehow.