By David Futrelle
Stephan Molyneux, the gabby YouTube “philosopher” whose racism is as overinflated as his ego, has been spouting nonsense about race and IQ for a long time. But over the last month or so he’s become so utterly obsessed with the subject he can barely go a day without posting some absurd new pronouncement on Twitter.
Molyneux is convinced that IQ differences between races are rooted in genetics and are more or less immutable. And that the refusal to acknowledge this truth — which is not in fact true, as I’ll get to in a minute — is causing incalculable damage to all of us, high IQ whities and low IQ non-whities alike, although Molyneux is most exercised about what he sees as the terrible bigotry faced by high IQ people (like, presumably, himself) for being the genetically superior people they can’t help but be.
Oh, and did I mention that he thinks “high IQ populations” — ie, white people in Western nations — are in danger of being swamped by brown and black dummies coming over the borders, or just staying home and causing troubles in their own low IQ countries? Because he thinks that, too.
But let’s start with his most basic assertion:
The latest studies show that IQ is about 80% genetic by our late teens, and racial differences in IQ have proven impossible to resolve through environmental changes.
Also different races actually have different brain sizes, which I assume is largely if not wholly genetic. https://t.co/v76B6pVaAF
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 7, 2018
Molyneux speaks with the confidence of a true expert, but he is not an expert on the subject, nor are his pronouncements true. Most of the actual scientists who study these issues think that views like the ones he holds are dangerous nonsense.
As noted by three psychologists who recently offered a detailed rebuttal to contemporary “scientific racism” in Vox,
the racial groups used in the US — white, black, Hispanic, Asian — are such a poor proxy for underlying genetic ancestry that no self-respecting statistical geneticist would undertake a study based only on self-identified racial category as a proxy for genetic ancestry measured from DNA. …
There is currently no reason at all to think that any significant portion of the IQ differences among socially defined racial groups is genetic in origin. …
Asserting that the relatively poorer intellectual performance of racial groups is based on their genes is mistaken theoretically and unfounded empirically; and given the consequences of promulgating the policies that follow from such assertions, it is egregiously wrong morally.
Moreover, the three scientists note, numerous studies have shown that IQ is not fixed. Overall intelligence in the United States, at least insofar as it can be measured on IQ tests, increased by 18 points from 1948-2002. (There is some concern that this increase, seen broadly around the world, may have begun to decline or reverse in recent years.) The gap between average white and black IQ in the US has narrowed dramatically. And programs like Head Start have helped to dramatically raise the reading levels and later educational success of poor children.
Molyneux handwaves away such objections. Like most modern “scientific racists” he’s not only convinced he’s not actually racist; he insists that he’s somehow fighting against racism. As he sees it, it’s those who don’t want to talk about race and IQ as if they’ve just walked out of a Klan meeting who are the real racists.
Denying racial IQ differences does NOT solve the problem of racism – it justifies and empowers racism.
Why? Because all disparities in racial outcomes end up being blamed on “white racism.”
Attacking all whites for biological realities beyond their control is horribly racist.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 12, 2018
If you avoid the realities of racial IQ differences, you end up either despising blacks for being “lazy,” or whites for being “privileged.”
Both are racist. Neither is true.
Embrace the truth.
End the hate.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) January 5, 2019
On more than one occasion, he’s self-righteously declared that he spreads what he sees as The Truth about race and IQ in order to … protect his daughter from accusations of racism?
Part of the reason I discuss race and IQ is I love my daughter, and I won’t let her be called a racist for biological facts that are beyond her control.
Sorry science-deniers, you’re up against a father’s devotion, one of the strongest forces in the universe. https://t.co/FZtVblrSYD
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 23, 2018
Piggybacking on the Trump administration’s demonization of Mexican and Muslim migrants, as well as on the alt-right’s racist hysteria about the alleged danger of “white genocide,” Molyneux claims that “high IQ” countries like the US and Canada and other mostly white countries in Europe are in danger of being overwhelmed by “low IQ” immigrants with darker skin.
“Modern Finnish research shows that countries with an IQ averaging less than 90 fail to create or maintain democracy,” writes Dr Helmuth Nyborg.
Statistically, migrants from low IQ regions will most likely destroy democracy.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 7, 2018
He also claims that the US is in danger of being undermined from within by our own brown-skinned “low IQ” citizens — some of whom even voted for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the last elections!
I was talking just today about low-IQ groups not being able to sustain a democracy.
Puerto-Rican Americans score in the mid-80s in IQ. That’s a lot of her voting base. https://t.co/E0d0LowHLh
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 7, 2018
Even letting in relatively high-IQ people from low-IQ countries can come back to bite countries like the US, in Molyneux’s view.
I’ve been warning for years:
Foreign aid swells the population of third word countries.
Mass immigration to the West strips the smartest people from those countries.
Those countries then fall apart.
Mass migration ensues.
Strip-mining foreign IQ has horrifying effects.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) October 26, 2018
Molyneux has managed to convince himself that this racist garbage isn’t actually racist; he’s just using REASON and LOGIC to defeat the COMMUNIST MENACE.
Racial IQ differences is the one topic that allows us to push back against Third World immigration without succumbing to racism.
Communists are determined to destroy the West through mass immigration.
That’s why we can’t talk about race and IQ.
Ultimate disarmament.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 31, 2018
Ironically, while Molyneux thinks it’s terrible for “low-IQ populations” to come to “high-IQ countries,” he also thinks it’s pretty bad for them to remain in their own, because, he contends,”low IQ populations” can’t sustain democracy.
The average IQ in Honduras is in the low 80s. Ignore that, and your fantasy wish list is worse than irrelevant. https://t.co/7i7YcGGhPK
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) October 19, 2018
Indeed, at one point he declared that hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved in Iraq if those in the US who got us into the Iraq war had been willing to recognize that Iraq was full of stupid people.
If we had been allowed to talk about race and IQ, the invasion of Iraq would never have occurred, because no one would have been under the illusion that a Jeffersonian Republic was going to emerge from a population with an IQ in the 80s.
Opposing science got >500k people killed.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) January 8, 2019
For what it’s worth, he also thinks that the housing crash was caused by a refusal to acknowledge that black and brown people are dumber than white people.
The housing crash resulted from refusing to talk about racial IQ differences.
Disparities in racial rates of home ownership were ascribed to racism, and banks were forced to make loans to unqualified minorities.
This destroyed the lives of millions of blacks/hisp.
We must talk
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 29, 2018
He’s also convinced, weirdly, that “fiat currency” is going to somehow make us dumber — never mind that IQ in the US is up considerably since Nixon’s decision to take us off the gold standard in 1971. You’ll have to ask him to explain this one.
The main problem with modern IQ is that fiat currency, debt and government money-printing all create the delusion of infinite resources.
IQ evolved to solve the problems of scarcity.
If govt shields us from scarcity, we tend to get dumber over time.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 21, 2018
Molyneux still claims, incredibly, that he’s not a white supremacist — noting that he acknowledges that the IQ scores of Jews and East Asians tend to be higher than (non-Jewish) white people. (Though the claims about Jewish IQ are now looking somewhat shaky.) But he certainly walks and quacks like a white supremacist.
Took my daughter to see my old graduate school desk in the University of Toronto Library, couldn’t help but notice the almost complete absence of white males in the entire building.
Next time we build a civilization, we should really aim to hang onto it.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) January 8, 2019
And he’s happy to repeat outrageously racist far-right conspiracy theories — like the idea that some nefarious group is pushing “propaganda” encouraging white women to hook up with black men.
It did strike me that this relentless propaganda for “white women with black men“ would serve to lower the average IQ of the offspring.
You don’t see nearly as much “white women with East Asian men,” whose offspring would tend to have higher IQs on average.
Hmmm…
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 24, 2018
He similarly regurgitates the neo-Nazi talking point that blacks in South Africa are committing “white genocide” against white farmers; indeed, he’s obsessed with this imaginary crisis.
No wonder Peter Gabriel and Bruce Springsteen suffer from depression – they spent the 80s selling out the whites in South Africa to the communists.
Where are their songs about the white farm murders?
They sold their souls for stadiums.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 29, 2018
When they are, South Africa commences. https://t.co/k6m3o1OFnL
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 26, 2018
While Molyneux thinks that acknowledging the very real violence that racism inflicts, both figuratively and literally, upon people of color is itself racist, and just serves to make people of color get mad about problems that are really the result (and not the cause) of their lower average IQ scores, Molyneux does agree that one form of prejudice is very real and very damaging.
And that is the terrible prejudice against smarties.
The largest unacknowledged bigotry in the world is the prejudice against and hatred towards high IQ people.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) January 7, 2019
How about we stop inciting hatred against higher IQ groups for stuff that isn’t their fault?
It’s like thinking tall people “stole” height of shorter people.
And let’s please stop calling lower IQ groups “lazy” and “entitled.”
Compassion for very human challenges is needed. https://t.co/zj3KL1h1aG
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 29, 2018
Let’s pour one out for our high-IQ homies!
For more on the issue of race and IQ — and more specific rebuttals of the claims made by Molyneux and other “scientific racists” — see the Vox article I quoted from above, as well as this piece in the Guardian, which puts the recent revival of “race science” in broader perspective (and also handily rebuts Molyneux assertions about Jewish IQ). For an even more detailed history, see this long piece in the International Socialist Review.
And if you’re interested in some of the issues with IQ tests themselves, the eccentric statistician and randomness guru Nassim Nicholas Taleb was annoyed enough by some of Molyneux’s recent tweets on the subject that he wrote up a brief polemic on the subject. Here’s a less-technical look at some recent research suggesting that IQ tests are “fundamentally flawed” as a measure of actual intelligence.
UPDATE: I made a few small changes and removed a few tweets that were largely redundant.
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The thing about “IQ” and the beliefs that surround it is that it’s not some quaint early 20th century belief like the theory that space was filled with a mysterious substance called “ether.” It’s a piece of arrant quackery that is widely believed and causes immeasurable harm by its effect on public policy, by supporting viciously false opinions of white supremacists like Molyneux and Charles Murray and millions of less articulate believers in antiscience*. It is not some merely ridiculous belief; it has huge destructive real world consequences. You see that clearly in the immigration debates in the US.
It also has a terrible effect on my sentence structure. Oh, well. I really hate seeing this totally antiscientific crap promoted as The Truth That Dares Not Speak Its Name (according to Sam Harris).
I think it is an obligation for people who do well on IQ tests — which I suspect includes almost everyone at WHTM, with the possible exception of someone who has severe test anxiety — to try to debunk the whole thing at every reasonable opportunity. People who don’t do well on those tests can always be accused of sour grapes. It’s the duty of those of us to do well on them to try to expose what a (ridiculously) rigged game it is.
*There’s a particularly fallacious belief — somewhat more prevalent in the social sciences — that if you can come up with a number for something, that that number must mean something important — even if you don’t really have any idea what you’re actually measuring. That’s what you have with IQ. You are measuring something, but damned if anyone can say what it is.
Oh, god, yes. Every parent/teacher conference, my mother was told that very thing. And that I just wasn’t applying myself. I ended up spending most of my time at home holed up in the attic reading The Lord Of The Rings over and over again.
Is it me or is the “we should stop blaming [poor minorities] for being lazy [because they’re stupid]” particularly obnoxious? Did he pat himself on the back after coming up with that one?
Legit smart person problems: not “living up to your potential,” feeling alienated, or never having learned how to deal with hard work because school was easy.
Not actual smart person problems: people not instantly treating you like a superior being.
Uh, yes there is consensus about racial IQ and genetics but most scientists are too scared to breach the subject because of obvious PC-backlash reasons. And those who do come out and work on it are just destroyed by the PC machine.
Ah, the old “everybody knows my position is correct, but nobody will actually say it because the mean old lefties – who have controlled everything throughout recorded history, obviously – will say mean things about them and destroy their careers” claim.
That’s some Grade-A scientific rigor you’ve got going there, Jase-man. Obviously, you’ve got the data and articles to back up your claims…oh, wait: the conspiracy has made sure no such data or articles exist.
How terribly convenient for you.
@ Jason D:
There is a scientific consensus that the earth is flat, as well… but everyone is just afraid to say it.
There is NO “scientific consensus” regarding what “intelligence” even IS, and there IS a broad consensus that IQ tests merely reflect cultural learning.
@ Jason
How can you know there is a consensus if, on your assertion, scientists are too scared to even speak about the subject?
The Jase-man knows, because he has rocked your Marxist little bubble with TROOFBOMS!
He’s got magic lobster powers, and you don’t, so how can you know there isn’t a consensus?
Huh?
HUH!!!?!???!???!???!???!
Even the unspoken assumption, that “group level IQ drives group level outcomes” is bullshit.
Where do we see this in action? Where is there a repeating pattern of higher IQ societies or nations having more success?
There isn’t one. At various times, the most successful nations have been in Egypt, China, India, Persia, Rome, and South America.
In other words, all the places which white supremacists consider inferior.
Until around the 16th century, Europe was what our president would call a “sh*thole country”.
This is why these guys always have to spout this Gish Gallop of sciency-sounding jargon and wave around links, because there isn’t any clear or obvious evidence of their thesis.
Aw, did Jason try to pipe up in here before he flounced? And I missed it? S’what I get for actually working I guess.
Lol
Yes, JD, there is a broad scientific consensus about genetics, race and IQ.
Unfortunately it isn’t what you would like it to be.
I’d cite sources, but we all know you aren’t gonna read those anyways.
Even if we were to take at face value that racial IQ is a thing, despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary, you really want us to believe Whites are superior?
Specifically the ethnicity that, despite having more access to knowledge, resources and technology, overwhelmingly and almost exclusively makes up the demographic that still believes:
– Climate Change is a hoax.
– The Earth is flat.
– Vaccines do not work.
– Trickle down/Supply Side economics works, despite 40+ years of evidence pointing to the contrary.
– Jews are pushing “multiculturalism” in an attempt to destroy Western culture.
Not by a longshot. If racial IQ were a thing, you’d be at the very bottom of the barrel.
@ Jason D
Care to give us a link or two to some scientific source? Because ”my white male opinion” isn’t a source.
This is like the “Get out Of Jail Free” card for the igno-right analysis….
@JasonD:
Why don’t you read something longer in form about why differences in mean IQ scores of racial groupings don’t necessarily indicate mean differences in the genetic contributions to IQ in those different groupings.
You could even start by reading me, over at my blog Pervert Justice, if you want something written by an actual WHTM commenter. I mention this because David has already provided numerous links above, yet you clearly haven’t absorbed any of that.
I’m not an expert like some of those authors cited at the end of the OP, but people tell me that the blog post I just linked as well as a couple of others were helpful in understanding why multiple confounds and their effect sizes lead to an inability to have any certainty about the contribution of genetics to the intergroup differences in mean racial IQ observed today.
But really, there was plenty enough information out there for you or even Steven Molyneux to reach to reach more accurate conclusions if only you had the wit to pay attention to the research.
I think the same basic scenario happened to me in university. I still don’t fully know what happened because I never got formally diagnosed with anything in adulthood, but I’m fairly certain that the “crash” was a primarily a symptom rather than a cause of some sort of mental health decline. I had mostly really good grades in my first year, but it felt to me like I had barely managed to keep it together. I think my family, especially my parents, thought of autism as some sort of RPG-like stat min-max and couldn’t conceive of me doing badly in academics unless I had become addicted to something like computers and games.
What gets me the most about this stuff about “innate intelligence” and “potential” is when I look at really accomplished and “intelligent” people who managed to nurture fascinating interests and it turns out that they had a lot of support from their family. My own family certainly tried to nurture a variety of skills in me, but they also put a lot of effort into trying to contain my behaviour and make me more “normal,” and they never really committed to encouraging any interest in particular. The closest they got was to buy me an expensive trumpet and private lessons, which I used in high school band. Then the lessons were stopped and I ended up focusing on science courses to prepare for university.
https://splinternews.com/the-long-history-of-law-enforcements-support-for-white-1830333632
I never did any IQ test and I don’t plan to either so I don’t know if I will do good or not. But I hate puzzles and bullshit like that so probably i won’t do very good.
At least you had the IQ part! We were so poor we couldn’t even afford the Q! All we had was I! And that was only after working 20 hours in the mines daily!
Stefan Food-Processor isn’t a high-IQ anything. He’s just an elaborately stupid person who thinks he’s the Great Gazoo.
I’ll take “Cool Story, Bro” for $1000, Alex.
Also, I’ll bet the poor little dear was bored stiff and rolling her eyes in disgust at her ranting jackass of a father, when she wasn’t trying desperately to pretend that she wasn’t actually with him.
Now, now, he is right about one thing. There is definitely bigotry against intelligence, just not the kind he imagines.
For example, an alarmingly significant percentage of the US population doesn’t “believe” in global warming (as if belief were actually necessary to acknowledge an extensively-documented fact) and exhibits extreme wariness and vociferous scorn towards any person suspected of “book lernin’.”
@Bina
I always feel so bad for these jackasses’ kids when they have them. Especially the daughters.
Re: Gifted and talented education
I was in gifted and talented ed as a sprog, and I have extremely mixed feelings about it as an adult. I am definitely aware these days that a lot of my “natural potential” was not so innate after all, but was a product of wealth and whiteness and secure housing and good nutrition and highly educated parents.
Edit: also I took an IQ test a couple of years ago (for frustrating funding related reasons) and I had gone down more than a standard deviation since junior highXD but yeah, IQ is a constant and predictive measure, sure okay.
@dashapants:
Now THERE is a truthbomb.
I’ll add that the adherents of Peterson, Molyneux, etc. are also bigoted against real intelligence, in that they refuse to read or consider anything which proves their theories and hypotheses to be not only outmoded, but LONG outmoded, and thus dead wrong. They seem to think that there’s some kind of grand cycle at work whereby the old and discredited will rise to the top of the heap again, and the increasing preponderance of evidence to the contrary just makes them bilious and pissy. No, fellas, phrenology ISN’T coming back. Now stop trying to make “fetch” happen.
Re: IQ testing and the like: I was always a smart little squirt — was reading before I was old enough to remember how I learned to. I can only remember back to age 4 or 5, so that probably means I was doing so, at least rudimentarily, by the time I was 3. Nobody remembers teaching me to do it, either — I seem to have just picked it up along the way, as I still tend to do today, by some kind of mental osmosis.
But since there were no gifted programs in the public schools I attended (thanks, rural and northern Ontario!), there was no place for my juvenile grey matter to go that wasn’t stultifying and boring. In fact, my kindergarten teacher initially thought I was the r-word because I wasn’t singing the ABC song with the rest of the class. The truth was, I’d heard it a bazillion times on Sesame Street, knew it off by heart, and wasn’t singing because I was bored of it! So my scared immigrant parents were called in and I nearly landed in Special Ed…until the poor teacher was informed that I already knew how to read and everything, and was just quiet by nature. So quiet, in fact, that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was reading in two languages already and didn’t need that babyish ABC song to tell me how.
Fast forward to me at 19, in my first year of university (and me the first person in my entire family to go, ever). I decided to try out for Mensa, and was accepted on the grounds that my SCAT-II score was 99th percentile. Attended a few meetings; wasn’t much impressed by the company, especially the leering dudes. Stayed a member for the sake of receiving the newsletter until sometime after graduation, when a sudden more-than-doubling of the dues convinced me that the smartest thing THIS now-former Mensan could do was just let my membership lapse and gain some real-world perspective. Which in my case meant understanding that being a good test-taker isn’t really a measure of anything, nor predictive of how one’s life is likely to go. There are bright people in all walks, as my definitely-not-stupid, but never-went-to-uni parents proved to me long ago.
And if anyone wants proof that intelligence and income aren’t necessarily in direct proportion either, just look at the current squatter in the White House. I’m not convinced that he’s even fully literate, and he’s what? Over 70? Dang, dude. Sure must be nice to be a racist millionaire slumlord’s brat.
I’m convinced that Trump is dyslexic. I’m a year younger, and I can’t recall hearing about dyslexia until I was grown up. If you couldn’t learn to read with everyone else, you were just stupid — there was no treatment for dyslexics except being placed in the “special class.” So Trump learned to fake it. There’s an episode of Quincy, the old TV show, about a man who starts a fire that burns down a factory and kills a co-worker because he can’t read the label on a container (someone put gasoline in a container that some cleaning liquid came in and put on a makeshift label, which the guy can’t read, so by habit he relies on the nature of the container).
The problem is, of course, if you can’t acquire information by the written word, you have to devise a lot of workarounds that don’t require you to admit that you can’t read. (Obviously he can read from a teleprompter, and he can probably read papers, it’s just that the effort of recognizing the words make it difficult for him to comprehend the ideas they are trying to convey.) That’s why he loves his word-salad rants rather than prepared speeches, loves very simple papers with visual aids, and depends on Fox to tell him what all those articles are saying. The telling thing was that he didn’t get what Mattis was saying about him in his resignation letter until Fox read it to him. ()I doubt that any of his minions would dare read it to him and explain what Mattis was saying.)
Trump is in a job where the ability to process vast amounts of information is critical, but his ability is very weak, and the workarounds he’s developed over a lifetime are simply too kludgy to work in his present job. I don’t think you can overestimate the influence dyslexia has had on his personality over the years.
Internet diagnosing dyslexia is om the same level as internet diagnosing mental illness. Don’t do that.