The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

IQ Voodoo and Other Errors

Posted on | August 6, 2026 | No Comments

One of the problems with American politics is how the two-party system tends to foster a Manichean duality on every issue. The Democrat “borg” (which includes media and academia) pushes whatever its policy agenda may be at any moment, and demonizes anyone who dissents. Meanwhile, those of us in the conservative opposition (Republicans, by default) are compelled to naysay whatever Democrats are advocating. Over the course of decades, one may see the two coalitions change — constituent groups changing loyalties — but this process is usually so gradual that it is not recognized at the time such shifts are happening.

One of the sudden shifts came in 1994, when the Republican Party’s “Contract With America” helped produce one of the most consequential midterm elections in American history. For the first time in 40 years, the GOP captured control of both Houses of Congress. Among other things, 1994 marked the beginning of the end of moderate or conservative Democrats being able to win elections in the South. This was ironic, in that Bill Clinton had been elected as an alleged moderate, but during his first two years as president, enacted an agenda so left-wing that it completely alienated many of his erstwhile supporters — including me.

You don’t get to backstab me twice.

When I explain why I quit the Democratic Party, that’s what it really comes down to. Loyalty matters. Honor matters. Bill Clinton proved himself to be disloyal and dishonorable, and we are all today living with the consequences of his betrayal, for which he cannot be forgiven, because he has never really admitted what he did wrong. People like that don’t deserve an explanation; just walk away, and resolve yourself to get even, however long it may take to obtain your revenge.

Something else monumental happened in 1994 — the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. As I’ve said before, when the book first came out, I read the reviews and editorial comments about the book and actually believed the “crypto-Nazi race science” smears. And then, in an online argument (dial-up modems and Usenet), I shared that opinion and got called out: “Have you actually read the book?” Oops.

Once I read The Bell Curve, it was a revelation. Arguably the most important part of the book is Part I (“The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite,” pp. 1-125), which explains how the widespread use of standardized testing after World War II had created a gigantic sorting machinery, organized for the purpose of identifying the smartest children and directing them toward elite higher education. The elite schools (highly selective in their admissions processes, accepting only a fraction of those who apply) could pick and choose from a nationwide pool of students because the SAT produced a single uniform metric of academic potential. SAT scores were correlated to IQ, and you could see (as illustrated by a chart on p. 40 of the book) how the sorting of students worked to send the very brightest to the most prestigious schools.

This sorting mechanism was never perfect, however. There are smart kids who, for whatever reason, don’t get on the competitive treadmill of earnest strivers whose entire adolescence is organized around getting accepted by an Ivy League school (the protagonist of Risky Business simply MUST get into Princeton). Yet, as The Bell Curve makes clear, statistical averages matter, a lot. So if you decide to party your way through high school, as some of us did, you will later face an uphill battle to get ahead, while those Ivy League kids will spend the rest of their lives thinking they’re smarter than you. “Steeper Ladders, Narrower Gates” is the title of the chapter in which Herrnstein and Murray explain how the process of “cognitive partitioning” had become increasingly stringent.

None of that has anything to do with race, which doesn’t make its appearance as an analytical factor until page 269 of The Bell Curve, and what Herrnstein and Murray were trying to do, in that regard, was to explain why three decades of welfare spending and civil-rights activism had done so little to eradicate the disparities of income (and other socioeconomic metrics) between races. The Left claims such disparities are evidence of racism (“RAAAAACISM!”) and, on that matter, the message of The Bell Curve is simply, “No.” Herrnstein and Murray then discuss the possible consequences of their analysis in terms of public policy, but the real takeaway from the book is that we have to abandon the “blank slate” thinking and radical-egalitarian fanaticism that led to the dead-end failures of the “Great Society” agenda.

The smear against The Bell Curve as “racist,” however, is not the only dangerous misunderstanding. There is also the danger of what I think of as “IQ voodoo,” the belief that intelligence is synonymous with moral virtue, the only metric of human value. It is certainly true, as shown in Part II of The Bell Curve (“Cognitive Classes and Social Behavior”) that higher IQ is correlated with many positive behavioral outcomes, and vice-versa. However, this doesn’t mean that having the kind of SAT score that gets you into MIT or Stanford is a secular equivalent of sainthood — a member of “the elect,” as our Puritan forefathers might have said.

Believing that they are better than everybody else — not merely smarter, but also more “compassionate,” etc. — is what makes our elite so insufferably obnoxious, especially to those of us who tested pretty doggone good ourselves, even if we didn’t go to Harvard.

A problem closely related to “IQ voodoo” is our natural tendency to accept persuasiveness as a substitute for correctness. It is not merely possible, but entirely common, for people who are very good at articulating arguments to use that persuasive power to promote ideas that are disastrously wrong. The reason socialism is enjoying a vogue among young people nowadays is not because the economy is particularly bad, but rather that those under 40 don’t have the memories that us older folks have. We know damned well that socialism doesn’t work, and has never worked anywhere, whereas naïve youth don’t have that knowledge. And there are very clever people (especially including podcasters) who are good at making arguments for socialism that seem persuasive to those who don’t have the kind of knowledge we have.

The same is true, by the way, for anti-Semitism. It’s probably not a coincidence that both socialism and anti-Semitism are what all “the cool kids” are into nowadays. The rise of podcasting as a medium, and the way online algorithms feed into siloing and confirmation bias, are a perfect storm for the gestation of mind viruses. I mention this because so-called “popular historian” Darryl Cooper did another interview with Tucker Carlson and it was like the Wuhan lab of mind viruses.

Someone more patient than me should go through videos of Darryl Cooper and do a critical analysis of his rhetorical method. I can’t stand to listen to the guy, but it’s obvious that he employs tactics of sophistry to “sell” his toxic belief system to those not inoculated against it. One such tactic is to suggest that those who believe “conventional wisdom” on any topic have been duped by propaganda. For example, the purveyor of JFK assassination theories will mock you for thinking that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible, citing as disproof the seemingly impossible trajectory of the so-called “single bullet” which, according to the Warren Commission, hit John Connally before ricocheting to hit Kennedy. What the conspiracy theorist is trying to do is to distract you from the lack of evidence for any plausible alternative to Oswald as the assassin. Whatever problems of ballistic detail may be involved in Oswald’s marksmanship, it is a violation of Occam’s Razor to go chasing around in search of far-fetched alternatives, when you have the Marine-trained gunman, equipped with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, in a sniper position with a perfect view of the presidential motorcade. Case Closed, as Gerald Posner said.

Same thing with Darryl Cooper’s “just asking questions” method of promoting antisemitic beliefs. He is not merely criticizing Israeli policy, or U.S. foreign policy, but is trying to distract from — to downplay or dismiss — the reality of murderous Islamic terrorism as a factor in the Middle East. And in doing so, he breathes new life into anti-Jewish slanders that were widespread long before Hitler came to power.

The fact that Cooper is both intelligent and persuasive does not change the fact that he is wrong and deceptive. Jesus warned his disciples to be “wise as serpents.” We ought to pay heed to that warning.



 

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Intellectuals

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