The Brigitte Nielsen-Thomas Sowell Fallacy
Examining NAXALT & how Exceptions do not Disprove the Rule

2,931 words

Brigitte Nielsen photographed with Nancy and Ronald Reagan and Sylvester Stallone. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Europe and the West have been crippled by an intellectual and ideological paralysis, whereby any call to action or indeed any empirical observation of repeatable, observable trends are met with unending obfuscation. Such obfuscation takes many forms, but one particular tactic is to counter any observable trend or pattern, or any call to action or resolution stemming from these conclusions, with an exceptional outlier or anomaly that seemingly refutes the observed pattern or trend. This form of intellectual paralysis takes a particularly acute form in regards to observations regarding differences between the races. When someone makes a generally true statement generalizing the collective of a racial group, e.g. blacks committing wildly disproportionate numbers of violent crime, this sort of objection will ask “what about those who do not conform to the trend?” This objection is also raised to counter observations concerning general but pervasive differences in I.Q. between the races among other pressing matters. While such objections should not be taken seriously by anyone, these tactics have unfortunately proven to be far more effective than they deserve.

One way to conceptualize the nature of this fallacy is to consider what this author calls the Brigitte Nielsen fallacy, an exercise that should be particularly helpful for those of a more mainstream persuasion, For those unaware, Brigitte Nielsen, born in 1963, was a model who then became an actress, enjoying some prominence in the mid to late 80s. She starred in, among other things, Rocky IV, as the wife of the Russian boxer Ivan Drago played by Dolph Lundgren. She was also in Beverly Hills Cop II. The only thing I remember from seeing that sequel comedy during my childhood was a line by Eddie Murphy, which I remember as, “That’s one tall bitch,” but, open inquiry, the line was confirmed to actually be “that’s one big bitch.” That line is in response to the fact that Brigitte Nielsen is 6’1.

And that is the crux of the Brigitte Nielsen fallacy. Just because Brigitte Nielsen is unusually tall in no way discredits or impugnes basic principles of sexual dimorphism, as those principles define the human species. As a general rule of thumb, with very limited exceptions, men are taller, larger, and stronger than women. This is self-evident to any observant person with an I.Q. above room temperature. While Brigitte Nielsen is 6’1, very few if anybody would ever offer her, or the rare Amazonian women like her, as proof that the rule of sexual dimorphism, as it relates to height, strength, bone density and myriad other differences between the sexes, is somehow invalid. Indeed, while Nielsen is taller than the average white man and even taller than the average Danish man, her body otherwise conforms to all other principles of sexual dimorphism, including wider hips, narrower shoulders in relation to her particular body, and so on. The same sort of specious reasoning would allow someone to conclude that, because Uncle Arthur lived to be 93 years old despite smoking two packs of cigarettes a day his entire adult life and adolescence, his example somehow invalidates the incontrovertible fact that cigarettes and other tobacco products kill people by inducing lung cancer and a number of other terminal ailments.

Although this fallacy is oft employed in a variety of different contexts, readers are unlikely to find the “Brigitte Nielsen fallacy” in any Rationalwiki article or anything of the like. Sometimes referred to as “the exception that proves the rule,” it is not listed in any collection of logical fallacies that I perused in writing this essay. That stated, it is imperative to examine the purpose of this rhetorical device and the ways in which it induces illogical thinking and poor reasoning. It is very often if not always used to throw someone off track, to deflect from the arguments asserted. Interactions with transgender “people,” to the extent one can call them people at all, and their gender radical allies almost invariably invoke this specious tactic, particularly in response to the argument that few transgender “people” “pass” as the sex they attempt to emulate or mimic. In many instances they will cite truly extraordinary exceptions that defy the rule to some limited extent, such as Buck Angel or Emma Ellingsen. Of course, even these extraordinary outliers probably do not pass in person, and even if they did, they would fail that ultimate test, either in terms of being in a state of undress in a locker room setting or God forbid someone should entertain sexual relations with such a creature in order to be seen as tolerant and “virtuous” under the perverse, sordid moral system of the radical left.

This sort of specious reasoning is used with greater efficacy in regards to racial matters, and has been for over sixty years. Whenever someone cites hard truths about racial disparity in violent crime or the indelible I.Q. gap ranging between one and two standard deviations, a motley assortment ranging from bleeding hearts to racial nihilists will always trot out the extraordinary exception that seemingly contradicts persistent observations and trends about race. Two popular examples among mainstream conservatives are Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas. While Thomas’s marriage to a white woman is to be condemned, he seems like a very decent man and a fine legal mind. Sowell similarly, by all indications, seems like a very decent man with a fine mind, although much of his prose seems captive to a desperate need to refute the hereditarian explanation of why whites and blacks are so different collectively. As fine as these and other persons are, they change nothing about the average, the collective. Despite being exceptions to the rule, they do not disprove the rule: the hard truths about blacks collectively. Such figures are exceptions in the very same way that a 6’1 Danish woman is an exception to the rule of sexual dimorphism in humans dictating that, with very few exceptions, men are stronger and taller than women.

Responding to the Brigitte Nielsen fallacy in any way other than curt rejection and dismissal makes it impossible for both the individual or society to make sense of the world around us, to observe patterns and rules and implement any course of action around these rules. Suppose for example if the Brigitte Nielsen fallacy were invoked in regard to what age society allows people to drive, namely 16. To be sure, there are likely some 13-14 year-olds who are mature enough to handle driving privileges, and have grown to a sufficient extent that they are able operate a vehicle safely and efficiently, with their legs long enough to reach the gas and brake pedals, and tall enough to observe traffic through the windshield. But society does not entertain such abject lunacy because it would be unworkable to sift through countless drivers’ license applications from 13-14 year-olds with only a fraction actually being able to demonstrate that they are qualified and able to drive safely. In regards to the racial problems plaguing the United States particularly, a more apt analogy might be not only making 13-14 year-olds eligible to drive, but lowering standards or applying double standards to increase the number of 13-14 year-olds who can pass a driver’s test.[1]

The absurdity of the Brigitte Nielsen fallacy perhaps comes into sharpest relief in relation to combat in the “island hopping” campaigns in the Pacific theatre during World War II. American soldiers found out very quickly they were fighting an enemy utterly alien and foreign to their own culture and civilization, particularly in way of the banzai attacks that in many ways defined the Japanese soldier. Those attacks stemmed from an ethos or concept called gyokusai, meaning “to die gallantly as a jewel shatters.” That ethos, combined with other Japanese norms and mores, dictated that surrender, or actually the dishonor associated with surrender, was a far worse outcome than death. As a result, American soldiers found a staggering 97 percent of Japanese soldiers fought to the death, even when fighting was utterly futile. Among other phenomena observed in this theatre, this resulted in seemingly senseless, but ferocious and unnerving banzai attacks by the Japanese. Wounded Japanese would often “play dead” and then ambush unsuspecting American soldiers, lunging towards unsuspecting GIs after pulling a grenade to commit suicide but also “take a few” in the process. As a result, American soldiers did not accept surrender the same way they did on the European continent, and would often shoot at what they thought were dead bodies or dying Japanese in the aftermath of a battle or fire fight. Of course, there were exceptions to this ethos that defined the Japanese soldier, but the Americans did not tailor their modus operandi—that is, the way they interfaced with Japanese as a rule—on the basis of these exceptions. To have entertained the Brigitte Nielsen fallacy and tailor procedures on the battlefield around these exceptions rather than the rule would have been quite literally suicidal.

Society has unfortunately heeded to the “Brigitte Nielsen Fallacy” in relation to any number of contexts, including not just race but gender roles as well.[2] This is evinced most particularly in relation to allowing women in combat roles in the armed forces and “on-the-beat’ roles in law enforcement, the notion being that because some women—exceptionally few, actually—can meet the onerous physical requirements of combat or “on the beat” law enforcement, it is wrong to preclude women categorically. In these and other instances, it has been an unmitigated disaster, and rather than strictly applying the same standards to women that apply to men, standards have been lowered for women to allow for these extraordinary “exceptions.” In the particular context of women in “one the beat” law enforcement roles, the internet is rife with an inexhaustible number of videos showing female police officers attempting to apprehend a male suspect with utter ineptitude, with results ranging from the comic to the tragic.

To consider exceptions to the rule about black criminality, black deviations in IQ, and many other grievances is no different than acting like women are just as tall as men because Brigitte Nielsen and a few Amazonian women are known to exist. These are the exceptions—not the rule. Concentrating on these exceptions induces a sort of intellectual “false start,” focusing on these outliers rather than the larger picture at hand when one simply observes the collective. This coupled with other outright lies and delusions, such as that race is merely a social construct or just skin deep, have wrought terrible havoc on society. These lies and delusions have come at a terrible price, as they have created an existential threat to Western civilization. By insisting on these lies and delusions, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, society has devolved into a low-trust dystopia, as Robert Putnam’s research predicts, a more universal problem plaguing to multiculti delirium, as it transcends the many problems peculiar to the “black problem.” In relation to the problem with blacks collectively in the United States, and surely wherever else they are found in sufficient numbers around the globe, the cost is monetary as well, as depicted in this disturbing infographic.

When contemplating the cost of interacting with blacks as American society in particular has done for 80 years, consider the cost entailed insofar as making allowances for exceptional outliers necessarily requires including the black collective as a whole in the bargain. Catastrophic race riots every decade or so, each one progressively worse, culminating in the Saint George riots of 2020, with destroyed property valued in excess of one billion dollars. Between 20–25 people were killed, a drop in the bucket in ocean of lost lives sacrificed at the hands at this absurd experiment. Conventional wisdom insists this is the reckoning for what many regard as America’s and now all of Western Civilization’s “original sin”: racism, slavery, so and so forth. Eighty years of social experiments, costing trillions of dollars, have proven that racial differences, both genetic and, for lack of a better word, cultural are utterly incorrigible. Even more damning, this propensity to frame policy and society in regards to racial issues with a focus on the exceptional outlier, rather than collective, aggregate whole serves to retain a racial ethnic minority that, in the most charitable light, harbors strong resentments against the white majority for perceived wrong-doings. The animus blacks collectively hold for whites might be better described as something that is becoming a centuries-long, ancient hatred. This animus of course makes no acknowledgement of the hundreds of thousands of white men who died (or suffering gruesome injuries and disfigurements) in the Civil War, or the staggering national debt that Great Britain went into in order to abolish slavery. Nor does it acknowledge the trillions in wasted expenditures in Great Society, affirmative action, and other government policies that have been implemented for their general welfare. Whatever the case, deliberately and obstinately retaining a disparate racial or ethnic group that harbors such resentment or even hatred to another group will invariably destroy any such society so misguided and foolish to entertain such madness.

Focusing on the exceptional outlier while forsaking the collective whole has led to other absurdities, as well, including the pathetic pandering the GOP has undergone in a forlorn effort to woo black voters as well as convince its political opposition that Republicans are “not racist.” Blacks vote overwhelmingly democrat, and the misguided efforts by the Trump campaign have barely moved the needle, all while ignoring the base vote of white “working class” people in those swing states on which winning and losing the election will actually be determined. This error compounds other catastrophic errors, including the advancement of disastrous political candidates like Herschel Walker and, most recently, North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson who is embroiled in a series of scandals.

There are of course other considerations that implore a race realist perspective, including how race is an indelible part of culture and any collective polity or social contract that allows a group of people to coalesce and bond around their shared race, blood, history, and language. These considerations inform why the race, blood, and soil are the first principles of any enlightened understanding of civilization.

Nor is it the case that society, what is properly regarded as European society and civilization, can cherry-pick or exempt extraordinary individuals like Sowell or Thomas from the black collective. One problem with this is these persons do not exist in isolation, they have extended family, and doubtlessly much of that family are not exceptions to the rule. Beyond that, to the extent that peoples coalesce around race, blood, and soil, such a fruitless endeavor does not solve other problems, including how diversity and multiracial societies lead to balkanized, low trust societies. To the extent that black people must find a way to exist in their own civilization, such as it is, excluding those few blacks who defy the general principle seems harmful and counterproductive to blacks as well. The needs of our own people and civilization of course take precedence.

Contrary to much of what conventional wisdom in more mainstream cultural outlets would suggest, nothing stated in this essay would cause those who understand how examples like Sowell or Thomas are outliers to treat such individuals with anything other than decency and respect. Of course, the notion that anyone who understands hard realities about race is necessarily crude, sadistic, or evil is a lie propagated by Hollywood and other peculiar and pernicious centers of culture in the American Empire. Movies like Mississippi Burning have programed the masses to regard anyone who does not pander to black victimization ideology or utters what they regard as racial heresy as evil and immoral, and many of them are conditioned to do so with a Pavlovian response. This is buttressed by spectacles hand-picked by sensationalist day time television, from Donahue to Jerry Springer decades ago. This demonization by media and other cultural centers of power is readily invalidates by men like Jared Taylor or Countercurrents own Greg Johnson, as it is with most if not all readers of this essay. Nor should it cause anyone to fail to recognize that these men are exceptions to the rule, just as one can still abide by laws of sexual dimorphism (which includes returning to traditional gender roles and stop engaging in such madness as putting women in combat roles or “on the beat” duty in law enforcement) while still observing and recognizing that Brigitte Nielsen is 6’1. She is indeed 6’1, but that does not mean society should tailor women’s roles and function in society on the basis of such an aberration. And so it must be in regards to matters of race. For that reason, this essay advocates for propagation and greater understanding of what shall hereinafter be referred to as the “The Brigitte Nielsen-Thomas Sowell Fallacy.” Exceptions and outliers do not disprove the rule, and this applies above all to matters of race.

Notes

[1] Few analogies bear close scrutiny, and this one is no different. A key difference here is that while 13-14 year-olds eventually become old enough to obtain a learner’s permit and eventually drive, no such progression exists in relates to blacks in particular.

[2] Descriptivist vandals are even using it to invoke linguistic and literary chaos, for example cherry-picking the limited number great authors used they in a singular form to advance such a farce, without ever of course submitting the percentage in which such usage is found in the belles-lettres. See “Descriptivism Defied: A Defense of Prescriptivism in the Language Wars.”

Please see Richard Parker’s new Substack page, The Raven’s Call, featuring essays and other writings with a unique, hard-right perspective.