05/19/2023
Earlier: Partying Prime Minister Sanna Marin A Product Of Finland’s Brittle Conformism (And Her Own Neuroses)
In the The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, a book I wrote with J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, we analyzed U.S. General Social Survey Data and predicted that leftist women politicians would become increasingly stupid. Well, that’s happening. Two examples: Finland’s former prime minister, Sanna Marin, and Angela Rayner [Tweet her], deputy leader of Britain’s Labour Party.
Marin hit the international headlines recently with the announcement, which shocked nobody in Finland, that she and her husband were divorcing after only a few years of marriage [Finland’s party-loving PM Sanna Marin, 37, announces she is divorcing her husband after 19 years together, by Rachel Bunyan, Mail Online, May 10, 2023]. She hit the headlines before that with the new HBO fly-on-the-wall documentary, First Five, which follows the five women party leaders who ran Finland’s outgoing left-wing coalition [HBO Max Follows Finland’s Historic Female Cabinet for Documentary Series ‘First Five’ (EXCLUSIVE), by Manori Ravindren, Variety, April 20, 2023].
The notorious party-loving young PM, who became head of Finland’s Millennial women-led coalition government in 2019, had been with Markus Raikkonen since she was 18. They have a 6-year-old daughter. But last August 6, as I reported at the time, she did something incredibly stupid. She allowed herself to be video-recorded while she appeared to be drunk, and was dancing in a sexually provocative manner, including on her knees with her legs spread apart and her arms behind her head. Of course, the video landed on TikTok.
More stupidly, Marin’s friends swear and refer to themselves as the “jauhojengi,” or flour gang. “Flour” is a Finnish euphemism for cocaine. Importantly, Marin was not on vacation and so was, in effect, on duty [STT: Sanna Marin not on holiday when party video was filmed, YLE.fi, August 19. 2022]. At the time, Finland was in a state of “heightened military alertness” because of the Russia-Ukraine war [Marincanceled her vacation herself and went to party — Finland at the same time on heightened military alertness, by Juha Ristamäki, et al., Iltalehti, August 19, 2022].
Then other videos emerged from the same evening. At a nightclub in Helsinki, Marin danced intimately with 39-year-old Olavi Uusivirta, a Finnish pop-star who appeared to be kissing her neck.
The Daily Mail:
In August last year, the party-loving prime minister was secretly filmed dancing intimately with Finnish singer Olavi Uusivirta, 39, leading to him issuing a denial that they were having an affair. There is no suggestion Uusivirta is to blame for the couple’s split.
Uusivirta claimed that he and Marin were simply ’friends’ and ’nothing inappropriate’ had happened between them at the Helsinki nightclub.
Grainy video footage showed Marin draping her arms around the singer. Uusivirta was seen pressing his face against her neck at one point in a gesture that some in the Finnish media have claimed was a kiss.
Witnesses told Finnish media at the time that Marin had danced with another two men in similar fashion and sat on the laps of another two during the high-spirited night out.
But Finnish singer-songwriter Uusivirta who got divorced from his wife in 2021, dismissed any suggestion that he was in a relationship with his country’s leader.
One suspects that her husband sportingly delayed the divorce until she got through Finland’s recent parliamentary election.
Sanna does not seem to be very bright. Her high-school grades prove the point.
The “Lukio” (academic high school) results of Finnish politicians are publicly available. In rough translation, the marks are
Sanna was Very Good in Finnish, Passable in Swedish, Good in English, Excellent in “social studies” and Satisfactory in Mathematics. She studied “communications,” a light-weight degree, at Tampere University, one of Finland’s less prestigious universities. So she’s not academically inclined, or, again, all that smart. By contrast, Finnish government minister Thomas Blomqvist, right, scored “Excellent” in every subject [These are the high school diplomas of the ministers — the fresh minister of culture has top papers, by Petri Turunen, Ilta-Sanomat, June 2, 2021].
And, of course, foolish, impulsive behavior — such as promiscuity and having an illegitimate child and drug use — is associated with low IQ. So is low socioeconomic status in childhood. Sanna was partly raised in a children’s home due to parental poverty and dysfunction. In the HBO documentary, Sanna insists that she’s innocent of any wrongdoing and she’s just being accused and complained about for nothing. She claims she’s never done anything wrong. The trouble she faces is the fault of others, and she’s just a “human” who needs to be allowed to “live” [Sanna Marin’’s measure came full circle — a fierce reckoning in the new documentary, by Salli Syrjänen, Ilta-Sanomat, May 15, 2023].
Poor moral reasoning and selfishness are also markers of low IQ [At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future, by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie, 2018].
Unsurprisingly, the partying PM was forced to resign when her party lost in the general election last month.
But she isn’t alone in the not-so-very-bright department. Britain suffers with Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labour Party, which looks set to return to power after the next General Election.
Raised by an illiterate single mother, she recalled being accidentally given dog food as a child because her mother couldn’t read the label on the can. At 10 years old, she became her bipolar mother’s caretaker, then gave birth to her own illegitimate child at 16. Born in 1980, she was already a grandmother at the age of 37.
Ms Rayner said in “modern days” she and her siblings would “definitely” have been taken into social services. Her mother, Lynn Bowen, suffered from mental health issues.
Asked if she was ever in danger of being taken away by social services, Ms Rayner said: “I think, you know what, in modern days, definitely we would have gone. …
“My mum couldn’t cook. I mean everything went in a frying pan. It was chips and chips, chips and sausage, literally everything went in the frying pan.
“My mum used to give us jelly and shaving foam because she used to look on the pictures. She didn’t know what the food was in it.
“You know, we had dog meat once because she thought it was stewing steak because she couldn’t read it.
“We used to laugh about it and joke about it but in modern times we probably would have ended up in the system but because of my nana took a very keen interest … and she was there.’
Ms Rayner recounted how she and her siblings would go to her grandmother’s house for a bath because hot water was “too expensive.”
[Angela Rayner, 41, claims her mother fed her dog food and shaving foam because she could not read labels and in ‘modern times’ she ‘definitely’ would have been taken away by social services as she opens up about growing up in poverty, by Jack Maidment, Mail Online, September 24, 2021]
That background didn’t bode well for smarts or a bright future, although Rayner, to her credit, has made something of herself.
Then again, unsurprisingly, she has been reprimanded many times for her impulsivity. In the House of Commons, she labeled a Conservative MP with whom she disagreed as “scum” [Angela Rayner apologises for calling Tory MP ‘scum’ in Commons, by Simon Murphy, October 21, 2020].
Indeed, the flame-haired Labour MP from Stockport is such an obvious example of our hypothesis that we christened our finding “The Rayner Effect.”
Intelligence is roughly 80 percent genetic, while whether one is conservative or leftist is between 40 percent and 60 percent genetic, depending on how you measure. As reported in The Past is a Future Country, people are becoming less intelligent for genetic reasons. Low IQ people have more children and more generations due to their impulsivity, inefficient contraception use, and dropping out of school earlier.
However, when you control for intelligence — or, rather, when you look just at the top quartile of IQ — leftism is a big sterilizer. Conservatism is less of a sterilizer, and religious conservatism seems to be a fertilizer. Conservatives have more children, which might not only affect who dominates the elite’s political caste but also determine elections:
It is one of the more unusual battle lines in the culture wars.
Liberals, it is said, have a baby problem. They don’t have enough of them, compared to conservatives. And this failure to replenish their ranks is a reason why they lose elections. Call it a fertility gap.
“The political right is having a lot more kids than the political left,” Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks says. “The gap is actually 41 percent.”
Studying numbers from the General Social Survey — a government survey of social trends — Brooks found that 100 unrelated liberal adults have 147 children, while 100 unrelated conservatives have 208 kids.
That makes a difference, Brooks says, because “80 percent of people that express a political party preference are voting like their folks.”
Hence, more Republicans.
[The Political Fertility Gap, by Jake Tapper and Sheila Evans, ABC News /GMA, August 23, 2006]
The elites, unsurprisingly, are changing in another way. Leftists are getting more stupid far more quickly than conservatives, and some kinds of conservative elites are getting smarter.
Eventually, the dominant elite of the future will be filled with conservatives, who will occupy positions vacated by retiring high IQ leftists who are not replacing themselves. We expect white leftist elites — non-white leftists are often “conservative” when it comes to their own genetic interests — to be increasingly less intelligent than white conservative elites. That might explain why the 2020 Democratic primary was a fight between two geriatric white men.
This problem of a less-intelligent leftist elite will be even more pronounced because the left over-promotes women for ideological reasons. Surely, Marin and Rayner were elected deputy leaders of their leftist parties because they are younger women. Rayner was selected as a Labour candidate for her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne from an “all-women shortlist.” A possibly more intelligent man simply wasn’t allowed to apply [Exclusive: Labour Drops All-Women Shortlists For Next General Election, by Alexandra Rogers, HuffPost, March 7, 2022].
Thus, the leftist political elite will be increasingly dominated by intellectually mediocre whites and ethnocentric minorities who agitate for their own racial interests, along with women who are over-promoted because of their sex, but whose leftism, as VDARE’s Lance Welton has reported, strongly coincides with mental illness.
Our prediction: The left can forget about electing its own Margaret Thatcher.
Edward Dutton (email him | Tweet him) is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, Łódź, Poland. You can see him on his Jolly Heretic video channels on YouTube and Bitchute. His books are available on his home page here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.