YouTube Sends Another AmRen Video to the Back of the Bus

We all know that major internet companies are in on a campaign to stop “hate.” That means disabling Facebook accounts, banning Twitter users, censoring YouTube, and even deactivating URLs.

YouTube has just quarantined another video on the American Renaissance channel. On October 17th, we put up a video about eugenics called “Let’s Break a Taboo, Part II.” YouTube just informed us that it will never recommend the video, has disabled comments, and now makes you click through a warning screen telling you some people think it’s “offensive.”

At least YouTube did not ban it completely. It does that if it thinks a video’s primary purpose is to incite violence or hatred. YouTube seems to think we are inciting hatred or violence only as a secondary purpose.

You can still watch the video, but only because this is a direct link. A Google or YouTube search will never find it. You might watch it and try to figure out what were the specific words or phrases YouTube thinks are so offensive.

Because, you see, YouTube never tells us. It just sends us a note saying, “Upon review, we have placed restrictions on how the video will be shown.” YouTube generously lets us “appeal” a quarantine — but gives us only about 40 words to do it. It then writes back to say, “After re-reviewing your video we’ve decided to leave the restrictions in place.” In other words, YouTube won’t — or more probably can’t — explain what it didn’t like.

Several weeks ago, YouTube sent “How to Achieve Racial Separation” to the back of the bus. Take a look at it here. We’d like to know what is offensive about a plan to eliminate racial friction.

As for “Let’s Break a Taboo, Part II,” you can read the entire script below. Let us know which are the passages you think triggered the censors.

Let’s Break a Taboo, Part II

My last video was called “You Already Believe in Eugenics.” In it I explained that eugenics simply means encouraging human genetic combinations that avoid bad traits and promote good traits.

The word was coined by the great British scientist, Francis Galton, and eugenics was at its height during the first half of the 20th century. Some famous supporters were Winston Churchill, Linus Pauling, John Maynard Keynes, Teddy Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Arthur Balfour, Luther Burbank, Alexander Graham Bell, and Woodrow Wilson.

By 1925, over a hundred colleges offered courses in eugenics, and most Ivy League schools provided massive funding for eugenic studies. High school text books said eugenics was necessary to protect American society.

Socialists and women promoted eugenics because they thought improving the nation’s population would help the poor and reduce inequality. H.G. Wells supported eugenics for that reason, and so did Bertrand Russel and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The Webbs founded Fabian socialism. Harold Laski, who later headed the British Labor Party was also a strong supporter.

Opposition to eugenics came from Catholics and from conservatives who thought decisions about mating should be left entirely up to individuals.

In the United States it was common to give free lectures on eugenics, and eugenics societies held fitter families contests, in which families were judged by experts on their desirable qualities. Here is a family of three generations of winners, with their trophies.

Encouraging people with good qualities to have children was not so controversial; sterilization to prevent reproduction was. In 1907, Indiana was the first state to pass such a law, which was intended “to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.”

By 1931, 30 states had eugenic sterilization laws.

Most people now associate eugenics with Nazis and the Holocaust, but Germany passed its own sterilization law relatively late, in 1933, after many other European countries. As a percentage of the population, the Swedes sterilized twice as many people as the Germans did.

The policy against Jews was not a eugenics policy. Nazis considered Jews an enemy people, not genetically inferior. The Nazis also had a notorious euthanasia program, under which 80,000 severely retarded and incurably insane people were killed to free up hospital beds, but that wasn’t part of the eugenics program either.

After the war, eugenics became so associated with Nazism that it drove people to take crazy positions. Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky of Columbia said that there is no such thing as a bad gene. J.D. Smith of the University of South Carolina wrote that we need to protect the genes for mental retardation because it “is a human condition worthy of being valued.”

Fortunately, few people are that nutty anymore, but Americans are still very skittish about applying genetic principles to people.

Asians are much more realistic. Japan didn’t repeal its sterilization law until 1996. The Chinese will not let you marry if you have any of a whole list of conditions. In Singapore, the government gave tax incentives to better-educated women to have more children. The idea was that smart women marry smart men, and they have smart children. The percentage of Singapore births that were to college-educated women rose from 37 to 48 percent.

Meanwhile, in the United Sates, trends are in the opposite direction. Lower IQ people are having more children than higher-IQ people. If you test American children for IQ and then find out how many brothers and sisters they have you get a clear correlation: The higher the IQ, the fewer the siblings. There is a negative correlation of .18 between child IQ and family size.

The British scholar Richard Lynn, who has probably studied the question more thoroughly than anyone else alive, concludes that this means the genetic basis for intelligence for white Americans is dropping at a rate of about one IQ point per generation.

For blacks, it’s worse. Black women are about twice as likely as black men to get a bachelors degree, and even more likely to get a masters degree. Many educated black women never end up marrying, while blacks on welfare have many children. Prof. Lynn estimates that the genetic basis for intelligence for blacks is declining by about two IQ points per generation.

Prof. Lynn also notes that more than half of the single women on welfare in the United States are in the bottom 20 percent of the IQ range. They are likely to be passing on other undesirable traits, along with low intelligence.

What can be done about this? First, many people think that any woman on welfare should not bring more children into the world for the rest of us to feed, house, clothe, and try to educate. Would it be wrong to require that woman have implantable contraceptives so long as they are on welfare?

Nobel-Prize winner William Shockley had a different idea: Offer people $1,000 for every IQ point below the average of 100, in exchange for voluntary sterilization. A person with an IQ of 90 — ten points below the average — would get $10,000. Some people would object that low-IQ people aren’t competent to make decisions like that, but I don’t hear them saying low-IQ people aren’t competent enough to vote. And if they can’t make decisions, should they have children?

What about promoting desirable traits?

Psychologist Raymond Cattell suggested that the government should seek out the most intelligent children in the country and pay their parents to have more. David Lykken of the University of Minnesota suggests that only people who are screened and licensed should have children. Sociologist Hugh LaFollette points out that couples have to meet strict standards to adopt a child. Why should it be any different for making a child?

In a healthy society, it would be possible to promote the idea that smart, capable people should have many children, and others should have fewer.

But, as usual, in practical terms, Asians are way ahead of us.

The Beijing Genomics Institute is the largest genetic research facility in the China, probably in the world. BGI is hunting very hard for the genes that influence intelligence and other traits. And when they find them, they will do what’s called embryo screening.

This is how it works: You take, say, 100 eggs from a woman and fertilize them in vitro with sperm from her husband. You screen the embryos and implant the one that is most promising. In intelligence alone, you would have a 30-point variation above and below the average child that couple would have had, so you could choose an embryo that was 15 points higher in IQ. You would have a similar range of other traits. It’s only a matter of time before the technology is perfected.

In the West, squeamish governments will certainly ban embryo screening, but facilities for it will pop up on the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas. Rich people will go for designer babies; poor people won’t have the choice.

What may turn out to be a simpler procedure is CRISPR gene editing. This involves making direct changes to the genome by removing undesirable genes and adding better ones. In the West, scientists want to ban this technique for humans. Not the Chinese.

They have a plan: First, eliminate mental retardation, mental illness, and all genetic diseases. Second, promote intelligence, diligence, and other favorable traits.

Any country that uses modern techniques on a large scale — and China is determined to be the first — will shoot to the top in every field.

Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics,” saw this coming 100 years ago. “The nation which first subjects itself to rational eugenical disciplines,” he said “is bound to inherit the earth.”

One reason we refuse to take genetics seriously is that it would mean we could no longer pretend that all groups are equal, that blacks are genetically no different from whites and Asians. Our refusal to accept genetic differences between races makes it hard to understand population genetics at all. Asians don’t have that problem, so they can think clearly about the long-term genetic future of their people.

We have a choice: Are we going to take modern science seriously? Or are we going to keep pretending that preschool programs can turn every ghetto child into a nuclear physicist? Do you or don’t you care if our population continues to decline while other countries take a different course?

If you don’t care, I have some advice: Make sure your grandchildren learn Chinese.