Eugenics is back on the menu, boys

Affluent White men are really annoyed about steps towards giving other groups a fair go. Really bloody annoyed. To the point that a coalition of them is prepared to resuscitate old ideas about genetic determinism to prove that “science” says that they are the only ones fit to lead. And they won’t be told their “science” is bunk. No way, no how. They are establishing a global alliance of Free Speech Unions to put us in our place. 

And if we’re not willing to accept that it’s Science, they have a backup plan: God. 

It was bad enough that a Black man was elected president of the US. They didn’t even need the Black Lives Matter protests (or MeToo movement’s overdue accountability for treating women as toys) to fire them into action. Those eruptions merely supercharged the process that had been long in the making.

In the 1980s, neoliberal thinktanks in the US took a minor academic and invested in his career. Charles Murray was their man. Taking “research” mostly from the Nazi-linked Pioneer Fund, Murray argued that the poor and the non-White were genetically inferior, trapped as life’s losers. Welfare would only encourage them to breed; instead, the gene pool should be elevated by letting them die off. The Civil Rights movement was communism.

Rupert Murdoch was then, and has remained, a keen booster of Murray’s work.

Post 1989, the White men who had fought the Cold War looked around at the Free World they had given their pens to defend. They didn’t like what they saw. Life was messy, multi-hued, boundaries blurred. All those were unsavoury identities. The identity of the conservative White man was the only identity that wasn’t one. His identity was the “normal” around which all the rest must exist in quiet obeisance.

The body understood as the architect of neoliberalism, the Mont Pelerin Society, debated through the 1990s: was it White genetics or the glory that was Western Civilisation that made the West uniquely and inspiringly “fit” for capitalism?

The scientific basis for “race” has been debunked. The nineteenth century idea that “races” were ranked by quality on an evolutionary ladder, with White men at the top and the First Peoples of Australia on the bottom, we imagined buried amongst the toxic curios that marked our history.

Those ideas, dead in the mainstream, were being fostered behind the scenes, and with mountains of money to drive them into our civic discourse.

That grotesque Pioneer Fund has been made over. Hope Not Hate UK found in undercover operations that it was effectively relaunched as the Human Diversity Foundation in 2022. HDF “appropriated” Pioneer’s residual funds.

Meanwhile key foundations in the dark money networks described by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer have split their donations between neoliberal projects fighting tax and regulation and white supremacist projects.

The new name for the ideology, human biodiversity (HBD), is handy: it’s not just race science that this marketing of biological determinism promotes. It allows for the idea that class, like Murray argued, is also genetically fixed. No remediation (or Heaven forfend, changes in society) can improve what genes mandate. Similarly, sex is determined as two complementary entities, with nature dictating their roles in society. Intelligence, ability, fitness for the civic space is biologically determined. DEI becomes a wasteful fight against adamantine nature.

As a side note, education for the masses should, therefore, never be more than the bare minimum. It is a waste to educate the terminally hopeless, and the odd outlier might pick up inconvenient critical thinking. Private school education must fit the sons of the White elites for their roles as the innovators and leaders as nature decrees.

Some women and non-White people find themselves roles laundering this absurd ideology. One of the HBD movement’s outlets is the Australian Quillette. 

Most of the drivers are, however and obviously, affluent White men. Some of them are stratospherically rich. The tech oligarchy is entrenched. 

Peter Thiel appears to have been one of the more strategic. His career began in a neoliberal thinktank where one of those dark money donors fostered his ability to market a 1999 culture war book against multiculturalism and diversity.

The faux-intellectual end of this movement to return our nations to being in the thrall of the “conservative” White man is national conservatism. The “national” in that label is about ethnostates but inserts a faith as the desired national identity, a placeholder for “race”. For the US, that in-group is “Christian”. In this ideology, racial essentialism is inherent, and God has blessed their goal to make their perverse reading of his commandments the inviolable law of the nation. For the Israeli Jewish nationalists who are pivotal in this promotion of Christian Nationalism, it’s nifty teamwork. Shared demonisation of Muslims reinforces the unstable alliance.

The transatlantic body the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF) that turned national conservatism into a conference movement, NatCon, was driven in part by Israeli Jewish Nationalist intellectuals, in part by reactionary Christians, in part by people affiliated with neoliberal thinktanks. Peter Thiel gave the keynote at the first conference in 2019.

Research published by the UK’s Byline Times has found that simultaneously with the forging of NatCon, Peter Thiel’s people were networking at Cambridge University, particularly around the Faculty of Divinity. Associate Professor James Orr hosted Charles Murray at Cambridge in 2021. From 2019, this network had also been trying to overcome resistance to installing race-science by promoting influencer Jordan Peterson in a visiting fellowship. In 2021, his Cambridge fellowship was allowed.

Nafeez Ahmed at Byline has investigated the network of biological determinists integrated into this sphere of activity. He has also linked the Free Speech Union movement, working primarily to protect the actors’ rights to assert any bigotry as “scientific.” There is a Free Speech Union organisation in both Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa.

In 2023, that Cambridge activity formed into the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). James Orr is on the Advisory Board. He is also the UK chairman of the EBF (which Zionist-run body created NatCon), a NatCon Statement signatory, a co- founder of the Free Speech Union, Chairs the MAGA-UK thinktank the Centre for a Better Britain which advised Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. He has just been appointed as Farage’s official Reform adviser. He is anti-abortion and calls migrants “invaders.”

On the ARC board with Orr are current Australian politicians Andrew Hastie, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Amanda Stoker. Emeritus YouTube influencer and former Deputy PM John Anderson is reputed to be a co-founder of ARC in Australian media coverage. Tony Abbott and John Howard are on the board, too.

The Australians on the board, and those others appearing at the UK conferences, are troublingly close to past and possible future leadership. ARC is also valued in News Corp operations with The Australian’s editor an excited participant in last February’s ARC festivities. He appears to have made his broadsheet into an unofficial partner of the organisation; it is certain that national conservative ideology fills its opinion pages.

Adherents to the movement may not admit that HBD underpins their beliefs and policy recommendations, but the racial ranking and biological essentialism permeates their commands for the nation. Palestinian lives are portrayed as utterly worthless. First Peoples are enjoined to dissolve into European Australia. Families are promoted at women’s expense.

The promise of automation and AI to replace the messy masses with dark factories, or offices, means even fewer of the supposedly genetically inferior are needed. The strategists’ reactions to Covid and to the climate catastrophe show how little they care about the survival of millions of people.

Human biodiversity is handy. It allows these figures to claim that they’re not racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted. They declare science’s revelations about nature make their pronouncements, however awkward, inevitable. Adding the absolute requirement that God dominates the nation’s shape makes their bigotry unfalsifiable, mounded onto this claim of scientific weight.

Australians cannot afford to ignore the company our leaders keep. ARC’s goal is to tell a “better story” of a mythical orderly past to be recreated. The pun in the name suggests that it aims to be the ark that saves (White) people from the flood of colourful modernity. Audience members at the first ARC conference in 2023 were heard to mourn that (white supremacist) Hungary might have to be the “Israel” for Christians fleeing a pluralistic West. Israel itself is showing us how bloody this national (re)formation can be.