Is Race Realism Dangerous?

Yes.

Sebjenseb argues that the popularization of race realism would not lead to genocide:

“Given that racialism has been historically common, and that this has not lead to an unusually large amount of genocides against low status racial groups, I must assume that it this will not be the case for the hereditarian brand of racialism as well.”¹

Anatoly Karlin agrees, citing the fact that many genocides throughout history have been of high IQ groups by low IQ groups.

Cremiuex on Twitter cites a study showing that exposure to race realism does not make people into genocidal maniacs. In fact, it seems to make people more sympathetic to uplifting and supporting black people.

Compare this to funding for the disabled. Everyone knows that people with Down’s Syndrome have low IQ; everyone knows that people in wheelchairs can’t walk up stairs. Acknowledging the fact that people have real genetic disabilities does not reduce sympathy for the disabled. “They can’t help it, they were born that way.”

The problem with race realism is not that it threatens to induce genocide. Afterall, most Americans from 1650 to 1950 held the belief that black people were hereditarily inferior to whites, but there was no widespread movement to decrease the population of black people. The KKK wanted them segregated and oppressed, but had no plan for extermination. At most, Lincoln supported a proposition to ship blacks to Liberia, but the intention was to grant blacks their own country, their own land, an ethno-state, and political liberty. If anything, the Liberia Project was paternalized Black Nationalism, not a form of genocide.

Ironically, the most “genocidal” policy against black Americas has been abortion, which has been supported and upheld by liberals, not “race realists.” Furthermore, it is possible that welfare could decrease fertility, although the effect depends somewhat on the race of the woman. At the very least, welfare increases fatherlessness, which has an impact on fertility. Married women have a higher pregnancy rate than unmarried women, and unmarried women have abortions at 4x the rate of married women (although as the institution of marriage degrades these gaps may narrow over time).

So, if Democrats are the real racists, maybe teaching people about race realism will actually decrease racism, and make society more stable!

There is an argument to be made that black people would benefit from a hypothetical race realist government. Maybe such a government would be more effective at tackling crime and poverty. The problem with this whole line of thought is that the danger of race realism is not in its potential harm to blacks, but in social destabilization between whites.

Why did they pass Civil Rights?

How black was the Supreme Court in 1954, when it decided to desegregate the schools? How black was congress and the senate during the passage of the Civil Rights Act? Even today, congress is only 11% black. It’s not as if blacks controlled the military, congress, senate, supreme court, or had significant power over America’s leading newspapers, or controlled the banks…

One way to retroactively justify Civil Rights is to say that black people were threatening to riot in the streets, and if Civil Rights wasn’t passed, then the entire country would erupt into “race war.” This is a bit like saying that Israel will have to open its borders to all Palestinians, otherwise, Hamas will do another October 7th.

This argument is made all the more comical by the fact that America’s worst race riots have occurred after the passage of the Civil Rights Act:

1. In 2009, in Oakland, California, rioters burned cars, including a cop car, and smashed the windshields of many others. Dozens of dumpsters were set on fire. Historical sites, like the Fox Theater, were vandalized. As the rioters broke into storefronts in early January, they found Christmas trees available to light on fire.

2. During the 2015 Baltimore protests, 113 cops were injured, and 350 businesses were looted or lit on fire, along with 150 cars.

3. During the 2016 riots in Charlotte, North Carolina, rocks were thrown at police, and the interstate was blocked off by burning semi-trucks. Gunfire filled the night as stores were looted. The NASCAR Hall of Fame, Charlotte Convention Center, Hilton, Hyatt, and Hampton Inn were all attacked, with their windows smashed.

   1. United States Army veteran David Palmer was attacked by 10 of the rioters. "He has a fractured eye socket and multiple broken bones in his face. [.. He] is going to have a metal plate on the left side of his face and will need reconstructive surgery."

   2. A video of the attack was posted to Youtube, where the rioters shouted, “You’re in the danger zone now, white boy!” The video was censored and deleted.

4. On the first day of the 2016 Milwaukee Riots, at least four buildings were looted and set on fire. Rioters fired guns at police, threw bricks, and assaulted journalists covering the event. On the second day, cop cars were smashed by rocks, and someone was shot in the neck. On the third day, there were 30 separate instances of gunfire recorded.

Most of these riots are not remembered, because they were overshadowed by the 2014 Ferguson Riots, and now the 2020 BLM Riots. But it is hard to argue that “because whites were afraid of black violence, they instituted Civil Rights.” If that were the case, it would have been repealed after the race riots began.

Maybe Civil Rights hasn’t fixed racial violence in the long term, but did it at least have a short term effect? No. Immediately after its passage, in 1968, the King Assassination Riots took place, resulting in 43 deaths and 3,000 injuries. In Cincinnati alone, 70 fires and $3 million dollars of property damage was recorded. One recently married white college student, Noel Wright, was dragged by 8 black rioters out of his car with his newly wedded wife. He was stabbed to death, and his wife was assaulted. Trenton, New Jersey, was even worse, with $7 million dollars of damage done. Over 100 cities were besieged.

If Civil Rights wasn’t passed to suppress violence, what was it for?

The nine supreme court justices that voted — unanimously — against segregation.

Who were the justices?

It is possible that elites are dumb. When I ask rightists why white elites would vote for Civil Rights, I usually get some response that boils down to, “they were dumb and didn’t understand the consequences,” or “the Jews did it.”

Admittedly, Felix Frankfurter was a Jewish supreme court justice. Maybe he tricked the other eight justices to vote “against their interests.” I find that unlikely.

1. Sherman Minton

Justice Sherman Minton was an FDR crony who supported, explicitly and without reserve, suspending the constitution to give FDR unlimited powers during the Great Depression. He popularized this message in a speech entitled, "You Cannot Eat the Constitution,” and his campaign slogan was “You can't offer a hungry man the Constitution.”

His argument was that economic depression led to starvation, and therefore, the president could suspend all laws until the economy was fixed. Prior to the outbreak of WWII, his opinion was that America should delay entry into the war as long as possible to wear down all European powers (Britain, Germany, Russia), so that American intervention would have the best chance at crushing the rest of the world and establishing American hegemony. This strategy proved to be successful.

Before Brown vs. Board was decided, Minton had already signaled his general opposition to racial discrimination in the Barrows v. Jackson decision of 1953. Minton wrote the majority opinion, stating that whites did not have the right to freedom of association with respect to real estate.

Minton was not a communist, however. In Dennis v. United States (1951), he upheld the government's right to persecute any group which advocated for overthrowing the government, including communists. Minton’s views could be described as a form of Liberal Imperialism. He was supportive of big government, foreign interventionism, and racial equality, but also anti-communist.

2. Tom Clark

Like Minton, Clark grew up poor, and was a Democrat. In 1941, he became the Civilian Coordinator of the Alien Enemy Control Program. This was a program to prepare the way for the eventual internment of the Japanese population. He later apologized for his involvement.

During the Truman administration, he crafted Executive Order 9835. This ostensibly was an order to extensively vet all 4.5 million government employees, and fire those with communist sympathies. Only 378 people were ever fired under the order’s mandate. The order, while sold to the public as an “anti-communist test” to deflect criticism that the government was soft on communism, it actually targeted more far-right than far-left groups, including the KKK and variants of the Nazi Party.

When Clark was appointed to the Supreme Court, he was criticized for having little-to-no judicial experience, and being a close friend of Harry Truman. Prior to the 1954 ruling, Clark demonstrated his commitment to racial equality in 1950 with Sweatt v. Painter, which established the precedent that "separate but equal" was not a valid justification for racial segregation. That decision was delivered on the same day as McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), which declared that it was illegal to segregate by race in public education at the graduate (Master’s Degree) or professional level (PhD).

3. Harold Burton

In 1946, the Supreme court ruled 7-1 in Morgan v. Virginia that Virginia could not enforce segregation on interstate buses. It could still enforce segregation on buses that remained within the state, but not on buses which engaged in interstate commerce, which was governed by the federal government. Burton, at that time, was the lone dissenting voice, pointing out that this was a violation of the state’s right to regulate its own commerce.

The case was brought to the court by Irene Morgan, who refused to move to the back of the bus. This “Rosa Parks” strategy for challenging segregation occurred already in 1944, during WWII, 11 years before it would be copied with increased effect.

Irene Morgan

After refusing to move, Morgan was presented with an arrest warrant by the sheriff. She tore it up dramatically. Another sheriff tried to move her, and she kicked him in the groin. Then another sheriff was sent, and she ripped his shirt. The Supreme Court heard her case, and gave her the victory. Quite an award for thrashing the police.

Burton was the lone dissenting voice, but it was not out of racism. He had been a member of the NAACP since 1941.

4. Robert Jackson

Jackson was raised on a farm, and was chairman of "Democratic Lawyers for Roosevelt." He helped draft the text of the Lend-Lease agreement prior to Pearl Harbor, in order to help the Bolsheviks defeat Germany. He also supported removing the American right to privacy, by allowing the FBI to wiretap anyone they found to be suspicious.

At the end of the Second World War, Jackson served as the U.S. Chief of Counsel in the Nuremberg Trials. During cross examination, Hermann Goering would often tease Jackson, causing him to fly into a tirade against Nazis on several occasions. This was seen as an embarrassing outburst by other prosecutors, because it undermined the claim that Nuremberg was a neutral body, rather than an ideological one with a predetermined conclusion.²

There is evidence that Jackson originally intended to dissent against Brown v. Board, because he believed the decision to be legally untenable. In a secret draft revealed by William Rehnquist, he wrote that he was "predisposed to the conclusion that segregation elsewhere has outlived whatever justification it may have had." At the same time, he was concerned that "legislating from the bench" would cause an extreme reaction in the South.

As Jackson debated the issue with Justice Frankfurter, he came to believe that "our representative system has failed" — meaning that democracy failed to achieve a moral system, and a non-democratic solution was required.

Furthermore, he denied the idea that "there were differences between the Negro and the white races, viewed as a whole." He believed that blacks could "outgrow the system [of segregation] and to overcome the presumptions on which it was based."

It is clear throughout the draft that Jackson believed the ruling in Brown was illegal, unconstitutional, unlawful, and undemocratic. Yet he made the ruling out of a strong moral and social conviction that it was the right thing to do. Jackson asked Chief Justice Warren to add the following sentence to the final opinion: “Negroes have achieved outstanding success in the arts and sciences, as well as in the business and professional world.” He died five months later, at the age of 62.

5. William Douglas

Douglas married his first wife in 1923, and divorced her in 1953. His relationship with his children evaporated to the point that he was unaware when his first wife died, because his children refused to speak with him. In 1951 he began an affair, and married his mistress in 1954. In 1961, he began a second affair, and divorced his second wife in 1963. At the age of 64, he married his 23 year old mistress, and then divorced in 1966. In the same year he married a 22 year old student. These divorces caused him to become extremely indebted.

He was a strong Democrat, saying "I won't resign while there's a breath in my body —until we get a Democratic President."

He was the son of a priest, and his mother would tell him from a young age that he would become president someday. The death of his father caused him to grow up in poverty. His experiences working with Mexicans and socialists led him to identify with their cause.

Douglas attempted to prevent the execution of Jewish communists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; be believed the environment had legal personhood (like corporations do today); he opposed the Vietnam War; he supported gay rights; and he supported the legalization of pornography. Keep in mind that he was appointed in 1939 by FDR. The “woke left” is not new at an elite level, only at the level of mass adoption.

6. Felix Frankfurter

Felix Frankfurter was not a natural born American, having been born into a Jewish family in Austria in 1882. At age 12, his family migrated to New York City, where he was exposed to political lectures on socialism and communism. In 1919, he married the daughter of a Christian minister, which upset his Jewish mother. They had no children.

Teddy Roosevelt commented that Frankfurter was nearly a communist, to the point of “excusing men precisely like the Bolsheviki in Russia.”³ Frankfurter helped found the ACLU in order to defend communists from persecution by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, was a strong opponent of Frankfurter, calling him "the most dangerous man in the United States."

Frankfurter became FDR's right hand man in 1933, and was appointed to the supreme court in 1939. There is a legend that when Chief Justice Fred Vinson died, removing opposition to the Brown v. Board decision, Frankfurter claimed this inspired him to believe in God for the first time. The implication is that Frankfurter believed God was killing moderates in order to usher in a new American order.

Despite the fact that Frankfurter had little ideological disagreements with communists, he was afraid that if the Supreme Court angered the American public, it could lead to a violent backlash or fascist revolution. Therefore, he believed the court should moderate its own views and practice a slow form of incrementalism, to always move the country in a certain direction, “boiling the frog” rather than lighting it on fire.

7. Stanley Forman Reed

Stanley Reed was one of the first justices in this list who was rich; he was the son of a physician, and traced his ancestry to the pilgrims. He and his wife were very active in the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, organizations which were originally meant to celebrate Anglo-Saxon heritage. He also enjoyed cattle breeding as a hobby.

Reed was a Democrat, but served first under Herbert Hoover in agriculture. He later was recognized as being talented by FDR and recruited to build the Commodity Credit Corporation to fix agricultural prices. He also worked with FDR to take America off the gold standard in March, 1933.

He was nominated to the supreme court in 1938 after being mentored by Frankfurter, and then became a mentor to justice Jackson. On the subject of desegregation, Reed was part of the all-white Burning Tree golf club, and had to recuse himself from cases regarding all-white restrictive covenants, since he was part of one.

By today’s standards, Reed sounds like a racist, but he saw no contradiction (or was able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance) in between being part of all-white neighborhoods and all-white clubs and at the same time supporting communists, like Alger Hiss. After all, FDR was also a part of the same Burning Tree club. Perhaps it was a bit like Bohemian Grove, as described by Richard Nixon.

8. Hugo Black

Hugo Black is the most conservative justice examined so far, at least in his early political career. Despite having provided legal counsel for a black victim of "convict leasing" between 1907 and 1911, he later joined the KKK prior to 1925. In 1925, the KKK was embroiled in a rape-and-murder scandal, which was the reason for his resignation.

Why did Black join the KKK? Was he convinced by its ideas, and then had an ideological revelation after 1925? Black is quoted as having said “I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes.”⁴

Black did genuinely hate the Catholic church; not from a conservative perspective, but from a liberal one. He agreed broadly with the writings of Paul Blanshard, who attacked Catholicism as reactionary, and endorsed socialism and humanism instead.

It seems that Black’s involvement in the Klan was partially motivated by his anti-Catholicism, which he maintained throughout his life, and also his political opportunism. Once the Klan began to sour in public opinion in 1925, he dropped it and was happy to vote for desegregation as early as 1948 with Shelley v. Kraemer.

9. Earl Warren

Finally, the chief justice, Earl Warren. Warren was the son of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, both born in Scandinavia. Like most other of the justices, he was born into poverty.

In 1919, Warren joined a number of fraternal societies, such as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Moose, and the American Legion. By 1938, Warren was so popular in California that he simultaneously won the Republican primary, Progressive Party primary, and the Democratic Party primary for attorney general. He advertised himself as "non-partisan" and pledged to support FDR in 1942.

In 1927, Warren ruled that attending a communist meeting was a "clear and present danger" to society, and could be prosecuted as seditious. In 1936, he prosecuted Earl King, Ernest Ramsay, and Frank Conner for the murder of George Alberts, which he believed was a communist conspiracy. However, in 1953, Warren granted Ramsay a pardon, indicating that he repudiated his former anti-communist views. By 1956, he was criticized by Joseph McCarthy for being too lenient against communists.

In Mendez v. Westminster (1947), Mexicans, who were legally considered to be white, sued the government for trying to segregate them into different schools. In response, as Governor of California, Warren signed the Anderson Bill in 1947 to end segregation against native Americans and Asians.

Unlike all of the other justices on this list, who were appointed by FDR or Truman, he was appointed by Eisenhower. Although Warren had expressed anti-Asian sentiment throughout his political career, by 1944, he expressed regret for supporting Japanese internment. By the time of his appointment, he was a committed desegregationist. Warren pressured Reed, who was considering dissenting, to force a unanimous decision. Warren believed that any dissent would only encourage massive resistance from the south. He later privately supported JFK for president.

Why the wait?

Every justice surveyed so far was against segregation already by 1944. So why did it take the court 10 years to defy democracy and states’ rights and deliver its verdict?

For example, in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), it sounds odd today that the supreme court would declare it illegal to segregate Master’s or PhD programs in 1950, but wait four years to declare it illegal for K-12. The delay was not an ideological one.

Did the justices on the court have a change of heart between 1950 and 1954, where previously, they thought “only really smart people can handle desegregation, whereas the general masses cannot”? Or was the delay in rulings not due to an internal ideological shift, but external factors: the slowness of the legal bureaucracy which brought cases before the court, or a form of “testing the waters”?

Testing the waters.

Most justices wanted desegregation in 1950, like many white American elites. However, there was a recognition, especially from Frankfurter, that desegregation at gunpoint would have an extremely powerful blowback from the American white majority. Just six years prior to the Brown ruling, Strom Thurmond won four states running third party. Democrats were able to avoid a third party revolt in 1952 by nominating John Sparkman, a segregationist, as Vice President.

After the Brown ruling, the reaction intensified. Frankfurter’s prediction turned out to be correct: the decision provoked “massive resistance.” What if the Supreme Court ruled in 1934, instead of 1954? Would Americans actually have revolted against the government? Or refused to fight an overseas war against Germany? It is impossible to know. All we can do is examine the “massive resistance” as it was, and imagine how it might have been even greater.

Massive resistance.

In 1960, despite the fact that Harry Byrd was not even running for president, he won two states: Alabama and Mississippi. Byrd never sought the nomination; never campaigned; never declared his intention to run for president. But he was one of the most popular segregationists in the country, so people voted for him nonetheless.

This wild result was due to the fact that, at this time in these two states, voters voted for electors individually instead of as a slate. So, for example, 324,050 voters in Alabama voted for Frank Dixon, who went on to vote for Harry Byrd in the electoral college.

Barry Goldwater capitalized on this "southern revolt" in 1964, switching the south immediately from Democrat to Republican. White voters in the south had one issue, and one issue alone: segregation. In 1968, George Wallace won a stunning 13.5% of the vote as a third party candidate. His performance in the electoral college as a third party candidate has never been matched to this day.

The Wallace Threat

Wallace was essentially a protest candidate. There was no way he could win. However, what he could do is force congress to select the president, as is the law when no candidate wins 50% of the electoral college. This would throw the American political order into chaos, and set the groundwork for a follow up campaign in 1972, which he intended to win. In order to do this, he would have to drive Nixon’s electoral vote share under 269.

There are two ways Wallace could do this: winning states outright, as he did in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, or by taking enough votes away from Nixon that Humphrey would win more states. Both of these would lower Nixon’s electoral vote share.

The easiest state to steal from Nixon was Missouri. Humphrey was only behind by 1.13% of the vote. If Wallace increased his effectiveness by 9.92%, increasing his vote share from 11.39% to 12.52%, he could have stolen enough votes from Nixon to push Humphrey over the edge.

The next two easiest states would have been Tennessee and South Carolina. Wallace trailed Nixon in these two states by 3-6%. If he increased his effectiveness by 11-18%, going from 34% of the vote to 38% in Tennessee, and from 32% to 38% in South Carolina, he could have won those states.

Finally, the fourth and biggest state (and the most important to deny Nixon an outright victory) was Ohio. Ohio would either require that Humphrey increase his effectiveness by 5.31%, or that Wallace increase his effectiveness by 19.31%.⁵

How could Wallace have increased his effectiveness? First of all, his running mate, General Curtis LeMay, made a constant series of unforced gaffes around nuclear weapons. He seemed to have a fetish for the idea of starting a nuclear war. Americans, even racist ones, had no tolerance for this. Racist Americans, like most Americans throughout history, have an isolationist streak, and the prospect of nuclear war scared them, because of the threat of retaliation.

Vietnam didn’t have nuclear weapons, and maybe the Soviet Union wouldn’t retaliate, but it still seemed like “bad karma.” What goes around, comes around. Americans were in favor of keeping a defensive arsenal, but didn’t want to see more mushroom clouds. There was also the fear of a nuclear winter, no matter who bombed who, that would engulf the whole world. Whether or not these arguments were rational, they appealed to isolationists.

Wallace was smarter than LeMay, and promised to get out of Vietnam within 90 days of taking office. He appealed to popular isolationist instincts. But LeMay’s contradiction of this sentiment hurt Wallace.

Before LeMay’s comments, Wallace was polling as high as 21%. In the actual election, he dropped down to 13.5%. So while Wallace never had a chance to win, had it not been for LeMay, he probably could have forced congress to vote for the president directly. This would have been a big middle finger to the establishment, forcing them to acknowledge the power of the racist vote, and set the stage for a third party victory in 1972.

Unfortunately, Wallace didn’t have a large pool of elite segregationists to pick from outside of the south. LeMay was from Ohio, which was crucial to Wallace’s electoral strategy.

After Wallace.

In the 1972 Democratic primary, Humphrey won a majority of the votes, but lost to McGovern by the weight of the "electoral votes" in each state. Both men won approximately 25% of the popular vote. Wallace was not far behind in third place, at 23%. Again, in 1972, George Wallace was a force to be reckoned with. He won the primaries in Michigan, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama.

Besides Wallace, Wilbur Mills also ran in the 1972 primary, and he won the state of Arkansas. He was more ambiguous on segregation than Wallace, but had signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto to resist the federal government against the order of Brown v. Board.

In 1976, Wallace won 12.82% in the Democratic primary, and the states of Mississippi and Alabama, about half of what he got in 1972. Jimmy Carter won the primary, partially because of his southern evangelical appeal. This was the high point of the “moral majority” in America, the fruit of Billy Graham’s “Campus Crusaders.” The Evangelical movement was promoted and funded as an anti-racist alternative to traditional southern Christianity.

One of the last segregationists to announce his intention to contest the Democratic primary was Claude R. Kirk Jr. in 1984, but he withdrew before the primaries began, and he was a former Republican. By 1988, the racist vote was reduced to representation by David Duke, who won less than 1% of the vote. Finally, after decades of struggle, racism no longer had a place in the Democratic Party.

30 year lag, or 100 year lag?

Supreme Court decisions made in 1954 (or even 1946) had a nearly 30 year lag, when compared to the 12% of Democrats who supported segregation in 1976. In the case of at least half the justices surveyed, a strong case could be made that they held some form of communist, socialist, or humanist prejudice against segregation as early as 1934. Some were even political radicals going back to 1919.

It is difficult to poll the private opinions of American elites in 1919, but given the evidence presented here, it would be safe to say that at least 10% of American elites were against segregation as early as 1919. That is not to say that they did not join all-white clubs or believe in “segregation for me, but not for thee.” This is still the case today: liberal white elites often practice forms of segregation, but believe that when it is practiced among lower or middle class whites, it is repugnant.

One way to view this hypocrisy or “dual morality” is that white elites see themselves as superior to both whites and blacks. From the perspective of IQ, this is essentially true. White elites have a minimal IQ of 125, and an average IQ of 135. Claims by the right that elites are stupid are wishful thinking. By comparison, the black-white IQ gap of 15 points, from 85 to 100, seems less relevant. When you’re at the top of a skyscraper, everyone down below looks like little ants, and you don’t notice which ones are “tall” and which ones are “short.”

A large proportion of white elites believed in at least one of these causes viewed today as proto-liberal or progressive: abortion, pornography, big government, foreign intervention, modern monetary theory, anti-religious sentiment, atheism. This isn’t to say that they believed in all of those things simultaneously, and that they didn’t also believe in things like sexism, age gap relationships, or eugenics. But it is to say that for many white elites, they may have felt that there was a correlation between the nativism of the KKK and opposition to progressive liberal policies. By lumping in reactionary sentiments and racism together, they came to oppose racism as part of the “reactionary package,” rather than carefully pulling the two apart and examining each issue on its own merits.

Do white elites regret desegregation? No. They live in safe neighborhoods, and send their children to good schools. GDP is up. The stock market is up. Desegregation has not presented any kind of threat to white elites. In fact, the net effect of desegregation has been to decrease the percentage of average black ancestry in the country. Whereas in 1900, black Americans were mostly monoracial, today, at least 20% of self-identified “black” Americans are actually biracial, like Obama and Kamala Harris. With the decline in fertility and rise of abortion, the population of monoracial blacks has decreased as a percentage of the population. Rather than causing white genocide, desegregation is more likely to cause black genocide.

Some of the arguments which white elites used to defeat segregation may have been overly optimistic or fantastical. This would be an example of motivated reasoning, where intelligent people tell themselves lies to morally justify acting on behalf of their own selfish interests.

What would happen, though?

What would happen if race realism, HBD, hereditarianism, or IQ charts were made popular? When Cremieux measures the effect, and finds small “or even positive” results, he is missing the point. The problem with racial science is not that it hurts blacks: this is merely the excuse that elites use to suppress it. They make an appeal to empathy, saying that racism hurts black people, when this is not necessarily the case (racism could lead to increased paternalism, for example).

The greatest victim of race realism is not blacks, but white elites.

To understand this, differentiate between “average response” and “marginal response.” Cremieux measures the average response, and finds that the average person doesn’t have a very passionate or intellectual response to race realism. They persist in their moral programming to support minorities no matter what.

But if race realism became popular, it would also be permissible, and no longer taboo. The “marginal” effects of this would be enormous. For comparison:

Say you took a poll in the year 1900 of some Christians. You informed them that God isn’t real. You polled them on the following questions: 1. Would you stop being monogamous? 2. Would you have gay sex? 3. Would you legalize abortion? etc.

Most of the Christians, even when convinced that God wasn’t real, would persist in their moral programming. Mediocre minds, when presented with new information, still persist in their old moral programming. This is because most people do not ever attempt to rationalize or justify their morality. They are not capable of this form of moral agency.

However, a marginal group of people do have agency. It is precisely these people, the ones with agency, who have a disproportionate ability to effect change in the world. These are the French revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis: small, cult-like groups which take ideas to their logical conclusion. Jordan Peterson warned you about these people. Chaos!

Chaos is the greatest sin against the present day elite. Perhaps 70 years ago they were more dynamic, more progressive, more open to change. Now that things have settled into place, their biggest challenge is managing an increasingly paranoid, dissatisfied, disaffected, disenchanted, and disturbed population.

In 1932, the Bonus Army marched on Washington, DC, asking for higher pay. There are some similarities to that and January 6th, but there are also some key distinctions:

1. The Bonus Army just wanted to get paid. To make them go away, the government could either impose a higher cost than the pay they’re requesting (threat of violence or imprisonment), or pay them off with money.

2. January 6th rioters believe that the government is controlled by child-raping adrenochrome-drinking Epstein-loving Satanists.

The problem with the second case is that these are fanatics who cannot be paid off and violence only inflates their martyr complex. This is the kind of intractable problem the elite is trying to manage, and they don’t need something like race realism coming along to add further chaos to the civic religion.

The vast majority of people would not be affected by race realism by directly analyzing that information and attempting to incorporate it into their worldview or reconcile it with their existing beliefs. But indirectly, they would be affected by a small, marginal “counter-elite” who would attempt to forge and incorporate a new, responsive, holistic worldview.

This isn’t a new phenomenon: when Darwinism and Nietzscheanism was introduced to the world, 99.9% of people ignored it. A small group latched onto it and created Naziism, which nearly conquered Europe. Ideas don’t need to affect large groups of people to matter, at least not at first. They only need to have a marginal effect on a small group, which then takes power and changes society. That’s how communists and liberals changed society: they believed in an unpopular idea (desegregation), took power, and forced it through.

You could argue that this is already happening with groups like the alt-right or dissident right: they have grabbed hold of “taboo” ideas, and now they are forming a “counter-elite.” But when compared with historical counter-elites, like the French Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, and Nazis, this is definitively not true. It may have been more possible in 2014, but with the rise of Trump, the alt-right has redirected all of its energies into “populism,” rather than an revolutionary, intellectual vanguard.

Popularity vs. vanguards.

A superficial analysis of history, as is common among the right, will claim that the Nazis and Bolsheviks were populists. This is a “tip of the iceberg” mistake, where a political movement is only recognized and analyzed after it becomes powerful enough to begin winning elections or seizing power. All of the previous, subtle, esoteric work is ignored and discounted. However, without that work, you might as well cast your vote for Vermin Supreme.

I’m not here to interrupt rightists from their 70 year long cargo cult of dressing up in uniforms, marching in the streets, holding rallies, forming and disbanding fake political parties, and cheering on ephemeral soccer hooligan violence. You do you. There seems to be a seven year life cycle where these things get popular (“this has never been tried! We’re the first ones!”), then they utterly fail and the constituency becomes demoralized at all the time they’ve wasted in vain sacrifice (“blackpilled again!”), then some younger generation with a shorter attention span forgets the failures of the previous seven years and starts the whole process all over again. This can’t be helped. People are stupid. Lord knows there are still anarchists in Portland holding Trotskyite councils for sex workers, etc, etc. There are dumb people on both sides.

The point here is that polling a majority of people and finding that their reaction to new information is to simply continue along whatever moral inertia they were programmed with is an over quantification of a qualitative problem. But Cremieux’s data is still valuable, because it demonstrates how little moral agency the average person has. It just doesn’t tell us anything about how society would ultimately change if HBD became popular, because the political effects would come from marginal counter-elites, not from the opinions of the democratic mass man.

1. Will Belief in Race Science Lead to Genocide?

2. Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial. (1983), pp 269–293.

3. Murphy, Bruce Allen; Owens, Arthur (2003), Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965), p. 265

4. Ball, Howard. Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior. 1996. (page 16, 50).

5. To be clear, “effectiveness” just means dividing the “needed margin” by the “actual votes.” So if the margin of victory was 2%, and the actual vote was 20%, then the candidate needed to increase their “effectiveness” by at least 10% in order to win.