11/27/2022
Above, independent scholars Emil Kirkegaard and Noah Carl
It’s not often that one reads an article that one disagrees with so strongly that one has to do the modern equivalent of writing a letter of protest to the local newspaper. However, this recently happened to me with regard to The Jews Are Ye’s Misfortune, [by David Cole, Taki’s Mag, October 25, 2022], which asserted that there are no younger people writing about race realism — the vital issue of racial differences and their consequences and the heritability and impact of intelligence. There most certainly are, though they are not necessarily in the traditional places, such as universities.
Cole’s complex piece, which characteristically bashed a remarkable number of targets, concluded equally characteristically that Ye (né Kanye West) was right in highlighting that “Jewish overrepresentation in business, finance, entertainment, and medicine is a real thing, one that the ADL would always prefer not to discuss.”
My particular objection among Cole’s bashing:
This is something nobody on the far right likes to talk about, but the fact is, the thought leaders who can rationally and persuasively write about issues of race (not just Jewish stuff but matters involving IQ heritability and race and crime) are aging out, and no one’s replacing them. Where’s the new generation of Taylors and Brimelows? My [Takimag] colleague Steve Sailer isn’t old by normal standards, but it says a lot about a movement when the 64-year-old guy is “the kid.”
I protest! It simply cannot stand that the “older generation” of Human Biodiversity researchers are “aging out and no one’s replacing them.”
As far as journalism goes, as American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor commented in an email to VDARE.com:
I think Cole is brilliant to the point of near genius, but he’s wrong on this. There are some very smart young guys: Pedro Gonzalez, Ron Unz, Ed Dutton, Emil Kirkegaard, James Kirkpatrick. You could even include some of the offbeat characters Unz publishes.
But of course these are all non-MSM figures. Significantly, Charles (The Bell Curve) Murray’s recent book Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race refuting the Black Lives Matter Blood Libel was completely shut out of MSM debate.
Jared Taylor continued:
Where the old guard is dying off and not being replaced is in Universities. Jensen, Rushton, Harpending, and Eysenck are dead. Lynn, Gottfredson, and Nyborg are retired. No one is bringing along graduate students.
I have to admit that Taylor is on to something here.
However, while I don’t mean to toot my own horn — well, okay, I do, I’ve got books to promote — but I’m only 42 (middle-aged, but certainly not old in the general scheme of things) and I’ve written numerous academic papers and many books on precisely these kinds of issues, most recently my book The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution. This explores the heritability of intelligence, moral character and religiosity, as well as the impact of multiracial societies on evolution. My whiz kid coauthor on that book, J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, is as it happens 15 years my junior, but more of that later. This book was the sequel to At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future. I wrote this with Michael Woodley of Menie, who is a mere four years my junior.
In fact, at the most recent London Conference on Intelligence — the annual meeting of academics interested in such forbidden areas — I was amazed by how many people in their early twenties I found. Some of these chaps had operated clandestine HBD societies when they were undergraduates, to avoid being “cancelled” and barred from university property by the Woke student union. I was recently asked to speak before precisely such an innocuously named university group.
This, indeed, is consistent with the evidence outlined in The Past is a Future Country. We showed there that, although educated young people are becoming ever more Woke, they are also ever more polarized, because among more intelligent people the big predictor of fertility is traditional religiousness and conservatism (both highly heritable); while liberalism is the great sterilizer among the more intelligent.
As we noted:
Since the 1960s, the West has moved ever-Leftwards. “Equality” and “feelings” are central to the New Religion that rejects all traditional values. Yet beneath the institutionally-dominant “Left” stews a growing and restless “Right.”
But enough about me, and about those with whom I have authored books! Other examples:
But the key difference in this “New Generation”: many of them are not working at universities — because their research is too anti-Woke, and they are too contrarian with regard to the New Religion, for that to be possible.
Like me, although I’m affiliated to an Eastern European university, they are independent scholars who rely on patrons and donors.
A few generations ago, this was not the case. The ideology of Wokeness had not yet taken over universities, truth was more firmly prized, and there were fewer women running universities, so they were less like nursery schools: more concerned about systematizing, less concerned about “feelings.”
Professor Richard Lynn (b. 1930), towards the end of his working life provoked protests, but he could still work at the University of Ulster. His Emeritus Professorship only withdrawn, in the face of Woke hysteria, when he was 89 years old.
As J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles and I argued in The Past is a Future Country, universities go through a “Priestly Cycle.” They are established by geniuses who are autistically focused on the truth and thus make important breakthroughs. This gives universities prestige, so they attracted normal-range intelligent people, who tend to be focused on social status and fitting in. These people gradually take over the university and change its culture from being about the pursuit of truth to being about promoting society’s religion. The genius types are driven out of the university, which ceases to conduct genuinely original research. Universities lose prestige, as does the religion. Eventually, in order to survive, the universities reform.
In the meantime, genuinely interesting research happens among independent scholars.
This is the situation in which the “New Generation” of HBD researchers increasingly finds itself in the Winter of the University Cycle: meaning that guerrilla tactics, such as alternative and social media, are needed in order to convey their results — especially, in my observation, in the Anglosphere.
It should be emphasized, however, that there are some young HBD researchers within Western universities. They manage to be extremely careful in how they go about and how they convey their research. I’m obviously not going to name any of them — even though their research speaks for itself — as to do so would be akin to putting a target on their head that said “Cancel Me” in bright red ink. Such research, though increasingly relegated to obscure journals, does still occasionally appear in significant ones, as Pesta’s case testifies.
And, again, I do have to admit there’s a new looming problem: totalitarian gatekeepers preventing maverick researchers accessing public data.
We are unquestionably entering a new anti-scientific Dark Age. But, like Galileo, HBD researchers are still working away.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.