Race & IQ Differences:
An Interview with Arthur Jensen, Part 4

5,778 / 43:14

Part 4 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here, Part 5 here)

Transcript by Hyacinth Bouquet. The following is a transcript of the fourth part of Marian Van Court and Arthur Jensen’s conversation, which can be heard here, or using the player below.

There are a few places where the recording is inaudible, and have been marked as such. If you can figure out what is being said, or if you have other corrections, please offer them in the comments below.

Topics include:

The negative consequences of barring intelligence tests to determine ability to benefit from various forms of education and vocational training

The difference between vocational and academic educational tracks

Why black racial pride leads them to choose academic instead of vocational courses, whereas less intelligent whites have less trouble gravitating toward vocational education

One-quarter of blacks have IQs of 75 or under, which is categorized as mentally retarded in the state of California

Mentally retarded people cannot attain more than a sixth-grade education, which means that grades 7-12 are entirely wasted on them

Why mental retardation is not just “slowness,” because there are certain things those who suffer from it cannot understand, no matter how long they work at it

The catastrophic consequences of a critical mass of low-IQ people without adult supervision

The secret agenda of school integration: to dilute low-IQ students below the critical mass that paralyzes the ability of a school to function

Organized opposition to intelligence testing

Organized proponents of intelligence testing

The mentality of born dissidents

The Jewish question

Jewish opponents of intelligence testing

Jewish proponents of intelligence testing

Arthur Jensen: Okay, now on number ten, I’ll just read the last sentence of this long question: “How exactly does eliminating tests of mental ability damage education and the economy?”

One can learn something about this from the armed forces. What they have found would apply in large, major private industries. That is, when people have to be trained for the job that they do — and this is very often the case, because the schools haven’t trained people for the specifics of any given particular kind of job, so you have to put people through some kind of training program if the job involves any complexity of skills at all — a certain percentage of people selected at random will not pass the training course. Or, they will take much longer. They’ll have to go through the course at a much slower rate, or have to repeat it in order to come up to a satisfactory level of performance.

If you pick job applicants at random for any kind of training program that prepares them for doing the specific job that the employer wants done, the people will differ quite markedly in the success with which they get through such a program. Some won’t get through at all; some will take anywhere from slightly longer to get through to as much as ten times longer to get through. Some will only get through if they repeat the training program one or two times.

If one wants to have any kind of efficiency, one would want to select for persons who are most likely to succeed in a training program, of some reasonable length, to accommodate the number of employees that you want to put through this program. It’s simply a matter of efficiency. No football coach would select players at random, because the average would be lower of what he got after training, and from what he would get if he very carefully selected the players before he began their training. The ease of training, and efficiency of training, would differ markedly from a randomly-selected sample than from a group that was selected for athletic talent. Any high school coach knows this. The armed forces know it, and employers know it. It’s been found that the best and most objective means of selecting people for this purpose is by means of tests. Interviews are notoriously poor for this purpose. Past work records and work histories are quite good, but often you are employing people who have to be trained for a specific job where there’s no job that was like it before. You can’t hire someone to do a job who’s already experienced in it. You have to put them through a training program.

This is the case in many of the things that have to be done in the armed forces. For example, they have all of these Navy training schools. These training schools differ in the cognitive demands that they make for a particular kind of training. Being trained as an electronics technician makes much greater cognitive demands than being trained as a cook, for example.

Marian Van Court: So before people use IQ tests at all, they would have to use these other criteria which you say are like an inventory . . .

AJ: Also, in an earlier time, many people learned things through an apprenticeship relationship with someone who did it, in the days before mass hiring in large factories and so forth. A kid who wants to learn to be a blacksmith goes and works with a blacksmith as an apprentice, and if he shows no talent for it, the blacksmith would get rid of him and get another kid who showed some aptitude for learning smithing. There would be quite an apprenticeship period, and children were often apprentices to their parents in a given occupation. Efficiency and so forth weren’t the order of the day. You didn’t have 200 applicants for ten jobs, so there was no need for selection. That’s still the case in certain occupations, in certain parts of the world today; but in places where specific training is particularly required for jobs, then selection tests are a very economical way of running your program.

The least efficient way is to select people at random by lottery. We know that aptitudes for learning a particular kind of thing differ enormously in populations.

MVC: I think you said earlier in this interview, on Wednesday, that the correlation between IQ and education is becoming lower now. Did you say that?

AJ: Yes, somewhat, because of the fact that by education I mean the number of years spent in school, and that’s because the school system has worked very hard to prevent dropout. The aim is to keep as many kids in school as possible until they’re 18 years of age.

MVC: I was thinking that since education is often used as one criterion for selection for jobs — maybe they would use tests, too, but they often use education, either in combination with a test or even entirely as the criterion — wouldn’t the lessening of the correlation between IQ and education mean that society is not discriminating as well in selection of people, so this would result in a lot more hiring mistakes and would be worse for the economy?

AJ: That’s true. There’s still a high enough correlation that if one can’t use tests, the next best thing to use is the amount of education a person has had. The Navy people tell me that the difference between an eleventh-grade dropout and a twelfth-grade graduate is a much bigger gap than you would think with just one more year of education. It’s the fact of finishing that apparently adds some greater increment of favorable prediction for that person than would be expected from just one more year spent in school. The fact that the person stays in school until he’s reached some formal finishing point apparently carries quite a lot of weight.

Among all high school graduates, there is still going to be a tremendous range of ability, and you still want to select within that group. If you couldn’t do that, then one would want to select in terms of how many years of schooling the person has had.

MVC: Do you think we would be better off if we had a system similar to what they have in Europe, I think, where they send more people to vocational school? I mean, do you think that would be better?

AJ: Decidedly, because I think that there’s a very substantial segment of the population, perhaps as many as 30% of the total population, who have very little aptitude and virtually no interest in an academic education at the high school level. Beyond about age 12, about where the eighth grade would finish, there is really nothing much left in a regular academic school for these people, and they’d be much better off in some kind of vocational school learning more specialized, employable skills.

MVC: Why aren’t we doing this? Is it because they’re worried that the racial differences would be too great?

AJ: I think that the racial thing has a lot to do with it, and also the idea that everyone should have an equal opportunity to be President of Harvard, or of the United States, or win a Nobel Prize, and that you’re depriving people of that if you get them on a track, as early as age 12 or so, that doesn’t lead to a PhD in nuclear physics.

MVC: Yes, it’s like the denial of the existence of significant individual differences, as well as the group difference thing.

AJ: That’s right, yes. It’s as if everyone who is given a full opportunity, who really wanted to, should be able to do any of those things. They can be Beethoven, or Einstein, or whatever, if they really want to, and so you shouldn’t really deprive anyone of the kind of education that it would take to reach that level. It’s a silly notion, of course, but I think this is what is behind this kind of thinking, in large part.

What one does have to do, and what they’ve discovered in England, of course, is that there does have to be a provision for late bloomers, because there are such children as late bloomers who don’t show much academic promise early in life. Stephen Hawking, this brilliant theoretical physicist from Cambridge University who’s got a bestseller book out now on the history of time . . .

MVC: Does he have some kind of thing like cerebral palsy?

AJ: No, he has Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He’s totally paralyzed, but many consider him the greatest mind in physics since Einstein. He claims that he didn’t seem to be much good at anything as a kid. It took a while for him to discover his talent. If he’d gotten shunted off into a vocational school, he may never have become a Professor of Physics at Cambridge. He now holds Newton’s Chair, the same Chair that Newton had, the Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. [inaudible]

One has to have some provision for persons to be re-examined, periodically, and to change tracks, if their abilities seem to warrant it; but to try to shove all kids through this kind of an academic program I think is just ridiculous. Kids who can’t do fractions, they try to put into advanced math courses to ensure that they have equal representation of different racial groups in some of these courses.

MVC: It’s extremely unkind, when you think about it, because they’re bound to be unhappy and upset and feel terrible about it.

AJ: Right. I think that this is the root of a great deal of the violence and vandalism that one sees in schools today. The school program is so frustrating, and there’s a well-known principle, you might say, in psychology that frustration leads to aggression: the frustration-aggression hypothesis. I think that one is seeing a great deal of that in the schools today. Kids being retained in schools that have programs that are totally irrelevant to those children, and they’re simply frustrated and hostile. They take it out on the teachers and on other students.

MVC: Yes, I know a number of people who’ve been teachers who have had to choose a different occupation, because there was so much violence and they were constantly afraid.

AJ: Yes, we know that just in recent weeks there have been news items in the paper about teachers being beaten up and hospitalized, and even murdered by pupils. This occurs in these schools, almost exclusively in these schools, where the children are extremely frustrated by the school program, because they’re just not accomplishing anything that is of any tangible value to them. They’re not able to do the level of work that the school is demanding. They spend years trying to master rather elementary things. They could be spending that same amount of time learning skills that would be more useful to them once they’re out of their years of school.

MVC: Even if people had the opportunity to go into vocational schools, even if they didn’t say, “Okay, if you don’t pass the test, you go to this school; if you do, you go to this other school” — if you just gave people more of the opportunity, I think it would probably be the ones who are smarter who would gravitate towards the more academic things. Then the ones who weren’t so smart would naturally want to do something practical.

AJ: Well, that doesn’t actually hold. It’s not a linear relationship there, and it’s confounded with racial pride. A Berkeley professor, for example, actually did a study on this some years ago, in a predominantly lower socioeconomic school district here in the Bay Area. He found that relatively low-IQ white kids would opt for the vocational courses, but black kids with the same level of IQ would not, and often resisted going into them. They wanted to be on the academic track, even though they were flunking in those tracks, because there was something that they regarded as demeaning to go into a vocational track.

That idea has been put into them, I think, largely by our society and the media, and it’s a shame, really. [Inaudible] values and attitudes are changed, I think we’ll still have this problem of children preferring to flunk algebra rather than get a good grade in auto shop, or something.

Then there’s another problem that’s never mentioned with regard to this racial difference, and that is that one-fourth of blacks actually score below about an IQ of 75, which is rather universally regarded as a cutoff for mental retardation. Some people put it at 70; some at 80. In the California schools, an IQ of 75 is the cutoff for mental retardation. Persons below 75 are deemed to be retarded by almost any standard, except by the standard of the people who are themselves in that category. About 25% — that’s one in four blacks — in the United States would fall into that category. That’s a fairly large segment of the population. Anything resembling academics beyond a sixth-grade level is just out of reach by such people. No one has discovered any means by which you can really get more than a sixth-grade education in such people.

MVC: Are there classes for mentally retarded people? I know there used to be.

AJ: Oh, there still are, of course, yes, and many of these children are in such classes. But what I’m saying is that when these children leave school, they are rarely above a sixth-grade level in any of the kinds of skills that we associate with formal schooling. They’re not even very good at acquiring the skills that are required in the trades. It takes an average level of intelligence just to be a reasonably good carpenter, or even a carpenter’s helper. You’ve got to be able to measure things; you’ve got to be able to reason out problems that occur in the construction of something, and so on. We know that persons below about IQ 75 appear very handicapped when given any kind of a task that isn’t extremely simple and routine, such as coring apples, or being in a cannery, or working a letter-opening machine, or something like that. It’s extremely simple and routine.

MVC: It’s interesting how, on all of these issues, the public is so completely misled. I remember seeing things on TV where they talk about the mentally handicapped, and then they say, “They’re just slower than other people at catching on.” And the word “retarded” itself — it’s kind of misleading.

AJ: It is really quite misleading, yes. They’re slower in developing during the course of childhood, and they are slower at whatever they learn, but there is much more to it than just slowness. I mean, these people would not learn algebra if they had ten years in which to do it, whereas the average schoolkid can get through the first year’s course in algebra in one year. A person with an IQ of 75 would never come up to the level of the average kid who’s taken a course in eighth-grade algebra, no matter how long he spent at it.

It is misleading to say they’re simply slower. They are that; but they also have a low ceiling of what they are able to accomplish in terms of cognitive complexity. It may not have been a problem, and may still not be a problem, in certain agrarian cultures where the work remains extremely simple, consisting of pushing a plow around and picking what grows and things like that. Even in those cases, in any given primitive village there would be brighter people who would make the important judgements as to when to plant, and this, that, and the other thing.

Another thing that isn’t realized is that what we are seeing the results of now in some big cities is what I would call a critical mass of persons who are in this very low IQ category — where all of the people in the neighborhood are, let’s say, below 85 or 90, and the average may be somewhere around 75. You then get a kind of a critical mass, so that these rather intellectually deficient persons are not buffered by more responsible, thinking people.

The mentally retarded, in a society where the average level of ability is fairly high, are not conspicuous and are not so much at risk to themselves, or to the society, because they’re so well buffered by others who can look after them and supervise their activities. But when you get a critical mass of those people, without any buffering elements in the community, then you have a situation which amounts to a kind of social pathology. I’ve talked to social work people in New York, for example, about the kind of social work services that are necessary in some whole neighborhoods of New York. It’s really quite incredible to see that other people have to go in there to see that these people survive, in a sense: that the children eat on a regular basis, and that sick children are taken care of, because the parents don’t do any of this. It isn’t wanton negligence on their part, it’s an incapacity to see the problem.

MVC: Yes, it’s interesting, the idea of the critical mass, and the lack of smarter people to buffer the bad decisions and the poor judgment.

AJ: I was at a meeting of school people once; this was where I got this idea. I was at this school meeting, and one of the things that came up in the discussion — it was a meeting years ago, when they were talking about integrating Berkeley schools — and one of the strongest arguments for integrating the schools, but one which has never gotten out to the public, is that it helps to break up the critical mass and distribute it around to a lot of schools so that it’s buffered enough that the teachers can cope with the situation, and a school can still seem like a school. If you get too much of this low ability in one school, then the school ceases to resemble a school in any recognizable sense. You get this critical mass and all kinds of problems appear in that particular school. By spreading this problem around to a lot of schools, it in a sense disappears. The critical mass that creates the terrific social pathology is broken up, and it doesn’t occur to nearly the same degree.

That’s the kind of thinking that you’ll hear in talk among school people, but wewill never see in the press, or in any formal writing in this area.

Well, I’ll let you go on. Do you want to go on to the next item?

MVC: Okay.

AJ: Well, let’s see, this involves the Hunter-Schmidt estimate of how much is actually saved by hiring on the basis of a selection test by the government.

I’m simply not able to comment on that. I’m aware of their work. I have heard that some economists have criticized the specific evidence. There is no question that there is some great savings to employers, and to the government, in hiring people who are selected by means of tests. What this amount is can only be estimated, of course, because you don’t know what it would have cost if they hadn’t used the test; if they just hired at random, or had some other, less efficient method of selection.

There is a lot of debate as to just how to go about estimating what the cost is. Some people disagree with Hunter and Schmidt’s exact estimate, but no one disagrees that it is some very considerable amount. It’s not a trivial amount that can be ignored.

So, that’s all I can say about that. I haven’t looked into the technicalities of the argument, as to what the objections to Hunter and Schmidt’s particular method is. One of the critics on this, I think, is a fellow named Levin, or Levine, at Stanford University. He’s an economist there, and he’s in education and economics. I’ve heard that he is one of the more vociferous critics of Hunter and Schmidt on this. I forgot his first name, in fact. It’s not Michael. There’s another Michael Levin, New York University, and it’s not that Levin. I’d have to look up the fellow’s name. I’ve got it someplace here, but I don’t know him personally. I’ve heard that he is one of their critics. It’s not important that he be mentioned, but I’ll simply mention the fact that their figures can’t just be taken at face value without acknowledging that there is some question about them in the eyes of other experts.

Now, question number 12: “Is opposition to the use of mental tests in any way organized?”

It certainly is. There are certain organizations, very powerful organizations, which are opposed to the use of these tests, or at least of certain tests. Of course, the American Association of Black Psychologists has been very much opposed to the use of tests in school; and, of course, they were the ones who instigated the Larry P. case, which resulted in the banning of tests for use with Hispanic and black children. I think maybe it’s only black children now who cannot be tested for any kind of placement decision, placement in special classes of any kind.

MVC: Is this in California?

AJ: In California, yes. This is the famous Larry P. decision, and the group that was behind that was the Association of Black Psychologists. One of the leaders in that group is a man named Harold Dent, a black clinical psychologist. Asa Hilliard was another one, a Professor at the University of Georgia. That’s one group.

The largest and most powerful group is probably the National Education Association, which I think is one of the first, or second, largest lobbies in Washington. Of course, they are strongly opposed to the use of teacher selection tests, teacher competency tests, and so on.

Some unions are probably opposed to the use of tests, but I can’t name any specific unions. The National Teachers Association acts like a union in this respect, and tries to protect the interests of its membership by doing things that they try to put down to the use of tests. They publish books attacking tests, and they’ve held large meetings and conferences attacking tests, and this is part of their official policy.

Now there’s a new group called Fair Test. They put out a newsletter called The Fair Test Examiner, and they put out many publications. They recently had a conference, I believe, in Washington, DC that was attended by, maybe, something between 100 and 200 people. Harold Dent, whom I mentioned earlier, the black clinical psychologist, is one of the leaders in this group. The group is made up largely of activists, Left-wing types, and a lot of lawyers. There are very few, if any, psychometricians or professional persons in this group who are experts in the test field.

Their newsletter consists of constantly mentioning various group differences, like black-white differences, and black-and-white-Hispanic differences, and sex differences, and so on. It’s largely propaganda against these tests. Their criticisms of tests are really simply ad hoc criticisms at the item level. They hold up specific test items for ridicule and don’t seem to be cognizant of any of the actual literature about test bias, but they have been successful in influencing politicians. They have blocked the teacher qualification test in Alabama. They have blocked the use of IQ tests and standardized achievement tests, I believe, in the elementary schools of North Carolina. They’re very active in New York state. They seem to be a growing and increasingly strong group, and certainly have influence on politicians and the like.

MVC: Are they affiliated in any way with Stand for the People [cannot verify group name]

AJ: Not to my knowledge. There may be overlap in the membership, and it’s interesting that both of those groups have their headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both originated there, apparently.

MVC: I just happened to run into a thing in the paper about Fair Test, and I noticed that they were in Cambridge, so I thought, hmm. I wrote to them, but I haven’t gotten anything yet.

AJ: They may send you a list of their publications, and so forth. It might be worth your while to buy a few, although they’re rather exorbitantly expensive.

MVC: I hate to contribute anything — even a penny — to their cause, but I think it might be worthwhile to spy on them a little bit.

AJ: Absolutely, sure! I know someone who did that by going to their recent conference. He’s not a member; in fact, he’s quite opposed to them, but he just attended the conference as if he were a member, just to see what was going on.

MVC: Even in the Eugenics Special Interest Group, which is a tiny, tiny organization, I know that there are people who are completely hostile to our point of view, but they just want to keep an eye on us, you know.

AJ: You’re always going to have that. I have people who take my classes on that basis. I’ve had students from the SBF [?] who have actually enrolled in my classes so that I couldn’t put them out on the ground that they were just auditors, or something. You simply deal with these people. It seems all right to me; it’s a legitimate thing for people to inform themselves of what others are doing.

MVC: Sure.

AJ: Okay, now: “What about supporters of mental tests? Is there even a loose-knit organization of them?”

There are organizations, but they’re not organizations whose aim is to support mental tests, particularly. They’re very different kinds of organizations. They’re not propaganda organizations, in any sense. They’re not organizations that are out to criticize the groups that are attacking tests. There are organizations, such as the Psychometric Society, which is the most ivory-tower group of people anyone would ever want to find. I mean, they deal largely in psychometric esoterica. Pretty much the same could be said for the Division 5 of the American Psychological Association, the Division of Measurement and Psychometrics: test and measurement, of educational psychological measurement, and so on.

Those divisions don’t seem to take much of a stand against their critics, and they themselves have a lot of internal dissension about technical matters, so that a critic can go into those organizations and say, “Look, the experts can’t even agree.” But what they’re disagreeing about is not the things that the critics are holding up to the public; they are disagreeing about technical, esoteric points. I’ve even heard some of the people in those groups described as having the foxes guarding the henhouse. I mean, they’re people who, themselves, are willing accomplices to the propagandistic critics of tests.

MVC: I can’t understand that. What’s the matter with these people?

AJ: I think that gets into speculation. I don’t know what’s the matter with them, but I do know there are people who seem to dislike their own chosen field, in a sense, and try to tear it down. They make their own reputation as critics within their own field, and they never suggest anything constructive to improve the situations that they’re criticizing. There are persons, for example, who are quite noted measurement specialists, psychometricians, who have no use for any kinds of mental tests. I don’t know what they’re doing in the field. They do nothing to contribute to improving mental tests, but their whole careers are dedicated to tearing them down, and tearing down any methodology that’s suggested for improving the situation.

MVC: Maybe it’s just some kind of unfortunate personality trait of destructiveness, or a sort of nihilism.

AJ: I think so. I’ve heard it suggested that these are people who’ve had trouble with their fathers, and they see the authority figures in their field, or the field itself, as sort of the establishment, or as the fathers that they’re constantly fighting against.

MVC: Yes, but an awful lot of people have had trouble with their fathers, and I have known people who are just critical of every single thing, and they’re very . . .

AJ: There seem to be some sort of, you might almost say, born dissidents.

MVC: Yes, exactly.

AJ: There are dissidents here who may sympathize with the Soviet Union, Soviet policies on everything; but if they were there, they would be dissidents there.

MVC: Right.

AJ: They’re just born dissidents. There are people like that. I think it’s a personality trait, and you’ll probably find some of these people in every field, and you simply have to put up with them. It’s surprising how little they are criticized by their colleagues, by other people, in the organizations to which these people belong.

MVC: Well, I’ll just pass this along without any comment, but I think it was Roger Pearson who said to Nathaniel Wall that he thought that in the academic world, Jews as a whole were disruptive. I just thought it was an interesting word: disruptive. Some of my best friends are Jews, and I’m not anti-Semitic or anything like that, but I am always looking out for things, so that I can understand better what is characteristic of Jews, and what is not.

Actually, this is getting a little far afield here, but Nathaniel and Sylvia, his wife and I, have discussed the basis of anti-Semitism at great length and have come up with what I thought were rather interesting, and possibly original, ideas. It goes beyond the idea that people are envious because they’re rich. That’s certainly part of it, I think, but I don’t think that’s all of it.

AJ: Not only rich, but successful. Some who aren’t rich are extremely successful; that is, they are Nobel prizewinners, or this, that, or the other thing.

This is fairly true of other groups. For example, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, where they’re a minority in certain countries, such as Malaysia, there’s a lot of prejudice against them because they’re the successful minority. There’s a lot of prejudice against Indians, that is East Indians, in Africa because they’re a successful minority. There is, even in England, a prejudice against East Indians, mainly because of their success as a minority there. They hold more high-level jobs than their proportion in the population would predict, and many Britishers resent this.

So I think that maybe any group that becomes rather conspicuously successful compared with the majority that was there before these people came on the scene may be resented. I figure that may be a large part of it with Jews.

Now, when I think of some of the dissident types in my own field, there do seem to be quite a number of Jews that come to mind. But then, there are quite a number of Jews in the field itself. It would take some actual research to determine whether that proportion of dissident types is any greater than the proportion of Jews in the field itself. See what I mean?

MVC: Yes. If I had to guess, I would guess that there would be a difference, just from my own personal experience.

AJ: Let’s look at who some of the big dissidents are with respect to the study of individual differences, genetic differences, and so forth. There’s Stephen Jay Gould. There is Richard Lewontin. There’s Leon Kamin. There’s Jerry Hirsch. There’s Peter Schönemann. Those are just the first few who came to mind.

MVC: Okay, you could easily look at the question of your critics versus your supporters, and Jews versus non-Jews, and it just struck me, from way back, that there’s a very clear preponderance of Jews who are attacking you. And the only one I know who supports you is Nathaniel Wowl [?? – cannot verify]. Wasn’t there somebody like Kagan, or something like that, who used to be against you, and then he changed his mind?

AJ: Right, Jerome Kagan. There’s Richard Herrnstein. There’s Bernard Rimland. There’s a lot. I’m not sure about H. J. Eisman [??]. I know his wife is Jewish, because she’s the daughter of a very famous Jewish concert violinist, so I know she is. I’m not sure about him.

MVC: Didn’t he escape from Nazi Germany?

AJ: Right. He did. So, you could name a good number of Jews in this category, too. There’s Bernard Davis, the Harvard Professor at Harvard Medical School, who’s one of my strongest supporters. There’s Robert Gordon.

MVC: Is Gordon a Jewish name?

AJ: I don’t know whether it’s a Jewish name, but he is Jewish. There’s his wife, Linda Gottfredson, who is Jewish. I could make a longer list of Jewish supporters than I could of opponents, actually. It may just be because there are so many Jews in the field.

MVC: I realize that it’s very easy to be mistaken in terms of your casual observation, and I think you quoted Galton [??] somewhere . . .

* * *

Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of readers like you. Help us compete with the censors of the Left and the violent accelerationists of the Right with a donation today. (The easiest way to help is with an e-check donation. All you need is your checkbook.)

For other ways to donate, click here.