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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In my school most of my friends were intelligent and definaltey received benefits from this and each was in at least one gifted or talented program. because I was separated from them because of behavior issues in my languages class, I was not allowed to learn German, and I was in a special class with only 5 other people learning French, and it really sucked watching my friends go away with the fun class together and the fun teacher and knowing that they were allowed to learn 2 languages but because of one teacher descison i was denied this opportunity.
But my “gifted and talented” friends also had a lot of pressure on them, to perform well, and they were all very competitive and they liked to drag eachother down if one person didn’t perfom so good in a class. but I was not aware of this until after we left school and I was talking with my friend who told me how much this ruined school for him.
but because I was separated I never knew, and I guess they didn’t involve me in the competition because there was no competition from me. ?
When we were older and doing more advanced classes and I was in a literature class with my friends, one of them was so personally offended to discover I wasn’t as stupid as he thought! and really took insult when the teacher liked what I said, and my friend always checked my essay and homework to make sure he was still better than me on paper?
it’s totally madness to separate children like that and encourage them to compete and feel superior or inferior based on what a few teachers think. Especially because in my schools the benefits of the gifted programs clearly can help all students and should be accessible to all, at least for something like extra-curricular not something you only get access unless you are “chosen”.
Speaking as a member of a group (Jews) who were believed by the likes of this guy at the time my great-grandparents immigrated to be of extremely low intelligence–40% of us were determined to be ‘feebleminded’–and who are now believed by the likes of this guy to be of almost fiendish intelligence–I feel empowered to say ‘this is some racist bullshit’.
(I suspect that I am not notably smarter than my great-grandfather, who spoke four languages, survived the Russian Revolution and the First World War, and was a bissel Talmud scholar.)
@ Valentin
I’m sorry that you were made to feel like that.
And I mean, you read the (often very wordy) comments here and write thoughtful and engaging responses frequently, and this is all in a language that isn’t your native one. I’d say that’s some pretty damn impressive literate skills. Definitely miles better than anything I could do in a language that wasn’t English (my first language). Be proud of your accomplishments and your progress!
@Bina:
Food-Processor? I had been thinking Operating-System. You know, HP-UX, Linux, Molyneux. 🙂
@catlapa
thanks, I have a bit of a complex about it so my brain naturally looks for evidence to support my belief that I am stupid, even if there is no evidence there! So I am trying to learn a new habit of positivity and objectives. It was funny also because the friend who made me feel most slow, who read so fast, I met him again some years later and even though I didn’t read any of the books he read, at that time we were both reading the same book at the same time, so i guess I didn’t miss anything really ?
As a child, I consistently read books 2, 3 and even 4 grades above mine in elementary school. I was even placed in an advanced program once.
Once.
I was immediately removed and never got the chance again. The reason? I was viciously bullied non-stop for all 9 years of primary school and none of my classmates wanted to associate with me for fear of being targeted. It was of course spun as “doesn’t work well with others”.
I probably would’ve been one of those bored kids if I wasn’t terrified every day to the point of suicidal for nearly a decade. So while the idea is good in concept, privilege remains very much a factor.
@Katamount:
Except when it comes to crimes of violence. Y’know, a physical act that threatens the safety of society, and that threat level being dependent on a person’s physical capacity.
In THAT case, women and men magically transform into being exactly physically identical and should be punished equally!!
A little OT, but one of my personal favourite rightwingnut talking points is how many times studies have been published examining the differences between the sexes in sports and claim that hormones have ‘very little’ to do with it. Not even lying, one such study even claimed that body-fat and muscle mass had weak correlation, and concluded that the primary scientific reason for women being generally weaker was “woman-ness”.
But of course, the vagueness is the point. By fabricating an ethereal, unquantifiable essence it creates a sense of immutability, the unchangeable fact that men will always be superior, no matter what. In reality, a woman could theoretically just take a pill and be stronger than most all men, but that hurts the poor menz fweelings.
@Surplus to Requirements
Molyneux doesn’t even have a fraction of the amount of logical foundation to build an entire operating system. That requires multiple layers of complexity and a cohesive overarching vision with consistent communication.
Molyneux would be the brand name of one of those b&w lcd keychain neopets knockoffs from the 90s, an overglorified calculator.
@Jane Done:
Neither did HP-UX, but since when has that ever stopped anyone?
(snicker)
See also: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/HP-SUX.html
@Valentine
Don’t like seeing people I like hurting, so tell you something I don’t often tell. I was “taught” speed reading as a kid. There’s minimal pleasure in reading, ever since. Yes, I take in information fast. I don’t get to savor the language. To take time over a bit of prose and roll it around my tongue. Poetry – which I loved reading even as a youngish child – is just more words. Something designed for expression at about 70 words per minute loses all semblance of meaning at 300.
There’s no off switch.
You read slowly. Means you read carefully. And you get more pleasure and meaning from one good book than I would from a library. So it’s not all bad, OK?
I dunno, he does kind of recall the old Moulinex grater we had when I was a kid – looks comfortingly familiar (superficially plausible if you’re looking to hear confirmation of what you already believe), but is actually clumsy, inefficient and a bugger to clean after use. Though the old Moulinex is still considerably more useful and versatile than Molyneux, of course.
Also, rusty and tends to accumulate bits of mouldy cheese around the edges.
Um, that simile does leave rather a lot to be desired. Much like Molyneux, in fact. Sorry.
@shadowplay
one of my other friends learned speed reading, so he can read the Harry potter books the first from all of our friends. ? I always wondered how it works and my suspicious is what you said, that some of the data and information will get missed. I generally prefer poetry which is maybe because I read slowly and I enjoy the nature of the words(?) I don’t know. But I also like factual books about history and politics so maybe fiction books are not really my main interest. I still tried to read all of the popular and traditional books – I was trying now since I was 16 to finish Master and Margarita but I always reach half way and then I can’t continue. I don’t know why! Lots of my friends and family like that book and the adaptions, and I can see why, because the first half is fun and cool…but I will never know what happens at the end it seems. In fact, this happens to me with a lot of books, I read most of them or at least to half and then I just can’t continue…
I read Idiot by Dostoyevsky though, this was my greatest achievement because I was sick so I read it in one week because I had no other things to do, which I still don’t know how I achieved that! I tried to read it again recently and when I reached the first monologue I just thought “no one has time for this!” ?
@Jason D: Go home, Jason, you’re drunk.
@LindsayIrene: Holy mackerel…I’m amazed you survived your childhood. You deserve a medal for putting up with all that flak.
This may not be entirely on-topic (ironically enough), but I cannot stand Molyneux’s delivery. He says everything with this affected arrhythmic speech pattern that just grates. Is he attempting to sound posh?
Karalora,
I don’t know what you mean by sounding posh because I am not sure what that sounds like – but I also hate the way he speaks, it is very arrogant, like he thinks he knows everyhting and is better than the person or the thing that he is criticising. And it sounds like he expects always to be right and considers everything he says is a fact and that he is SO INTELLIGENT. There are not many people that make me too angry even to watch them, but Molyneux is such a massive arrogant butthole that I just can’t tolerate him. I want to say more but I don’t want to violate the comment policy. But fuck Stefan Molyneux.
Here I am being a jerk. Hello @Chip Daniels, are you new here? I don’t recognize you and I’d like to think I wouldn’t forget such sharp and snappy commentary! Welcome, pull up a chair (they’re all hard), light a candle (they’re all scented), and enjoy the scent of misandry.
And if you *aren’t* new, well, hello anyways!
@ Valentin:
I can certainly recommend giving it another go (especially since the title characters don’t even really show up until the midway point of the book).
This often happens to me – I think some authors just take a while to get the story started, and also sometimes I’m scared to start a new book in case I don’t enjoy it. Sometimes I can get around this by starting in the middle and just trying to figure out what’s going on.
(I did this accidentally with Watership Down as a kid – picked it up, mistaking it for another book I’d been reading. It was a few sentences before I noticed the characters were all different, and another page or so before I figured out they were rabbits.)
@mooncustafer
I think I reached the part where Margarita is flying naked on the broomstick. Then I don’t know, I just stopped reading it! I actually finished one book last year, I, Claudius which I enjoyed more than I expected because I always think the Romans are really boring. But it is written quite simply and it’s quite short and the plot movies fast. But then I started to read a *very big* book about the Romanov dynasty which was a gift from my mum…and oh my god I will never finish that!
I think I will try this. People always seem to give me books for gifts and I feel guilty that I never read them, so maybe this technique will give me a chance to at least get something.
This is my same fear too, because reading slowly means that starting a book needs a lot of time and I want to make sure I am giving my time for something I will enjoy and which will be a benefit for me. I have two books with me right now to read: a book about Ukranian history “Gates of Europe” by Serhii Plokhy and Claudius the God, which is the sequel to I, Claudius. I was in board now for more than 5 weeks and I didn’t read a single word of them ? Well that is not 100% true, I started to read Gates of Europe in October 2017 and then…guess what?…I stopped half way!
@Valentin
That’s pretty much what posh means, usually with the added implication of being rich, or pretending to be rich.
Posh isn’t just rich, it’s old money rich. And it often comes with particular affectations of speech, and that’s what Molyneux’s weird habit of beginning a sentence with about fifteen syllables crammed into the space of a couple seconds, and then sort of coasting the rest of the sentence, reminds me of.
Exactly. And this is precisely why our very own home-grown piece-of-utter-shit hedge-fund-manipulating all-exploitation-all-the-time anti-women’s-rights spit-on-the-disadvantaged ultra-right-wing tory politician Jacob Rees-Mogg (who is not in fact from “old money”) gets such mileage out of his affected speech patterns. He dresses, acts and above all speaks like a mild-mannered toff, and a remarkable proportion of press and people love it so much they don’t care what he actually stands for (his own enrichment, and nothing else. And fuck [over] everybody who is not J R-M, especially the poor).
@Valentin,
Would you be interested in something like books on tape for your reading pleasures? Basically they’re books read by someone – sometimes the author, sometimes an actor – and you can listen to them in pretty much the same ways you can listen to a podcast. Perhaps that might be a solution for you?
Or would watching a good dramatization help with getting you past the halfway hump? If someone in your circles know of a good adaptation of a written work you’re struggling with, that can be a way to get the gist of the book’s story.
And speaking of adaptations, the US TV show Masterpiece Theatre had a terrific adaptation of I, Claudius a few decades back. I don’t know if it’s been made available anywhere, but if you can track down a copy, it would be worth it, I think.
I was supposed to be a gifted child and was ranked in the top 1 percentile as a kid, whatever that means. Getting branded as ‘gifted’ stirred up a lot of resentment from both kids and teachers, and I think a lot of it was gendered, unfortunately. I liked to believe we lived in a progressive society and it would be no hindrance to me, but in fact the schools saw no point putting me on gifted children’s programs which were for nearly all male students. My parents were religious fundies and only expected me to marry and have kids anyway. I did not know that I was trans then, of course, but I did feel something was wrong. Mum always made the argument that I should because I ‘could pass my brains’ on to my son. I’m sure it doesn’t work like that, and anyway, you can’t live vicariously through your kids 🙁
@Redsilkphoenix: Jetpack Vixen, Intergalactic Meanie
I don’t really like audio books or books on a tape. I listened to them when I was a child but I don’t really like to listen to them now. My gf likes them and she listens when she is working or making house chores, but I prefer music if I will listen to anything. Also, even though I struggle to read quickly and complete books I enjoy reading, quietly and seeing the words on the page and it also means I can take the time that I want.
I like adaption but I prefer to watch them only after I read the book, and even if they are good they never seem to be as good as the book. For example, after I read Idiot I watched the Russian adaption, it is very good and very accurate, compared to other adaption but I still think the book is better. And for the books that I didn’t finish but want to finish I don’t want to ruin my imagine of the characters by the interpretation of someone else.
But I am excited to find an adaption of I, Claudius. I know there is a British one made for television with episodes but I forgot to try and find it when I was home. But maybe it will be good if I try to read Claudius the God first anyway.
GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina said
Motivated reasoning? I had a lot of it until I discovered the internets. I had my first IQ test at the age of 5, just before I started kindergarten, second test in third grade, third in tenth grade. All telling my parents (and me) that I was smarter than the average kid. Got me into the gifted program in elementary school. There was no program in high school, but the test proctor admitted that the school got more funding per capita for gifted students. Umm, glad I could help?
Only at the end of page one and I’ve deleted a bunch of quotes and replies, so I’ll just move on to the tl;dr:
1. I’ve always been good at taking tests.
2. I’ve learned from the internets that I’m not *nearly* as smart as I’ve been told I am all my life.
3. I’m not sad about this because there are loads of really amazing people on the internet (and meatspace) to learn things from. This is one of my favorite learning spaces!
On to page two (after I feed the kitty boys)