Bronze Age Pervert recently published an essay, "Race in America and the Dork Right: Against an Authoritarianism of Clerks." He didn't mention any of us by name, but in a deleted tweet he said he had in mind Razib Khan, Richard Hanania, and "to a lesser extent" Nathan Cofnas.

BAP doesn't engage with any of our arguments. His essay consists mainly of bombastic assertions not based on evidence. (Apparently some people think this style sounds very intelligent and profound. More on that in a moment.) I've documented the history of belief in group equality, traced the causal path from the equality thesis to wokism, and explained how a hereditarian revolution is feasible and desirable. BAP ignores all of that, and goes on about how the "dorks" are really motivated by their fear of the "physical, athletic and sexual prowess of black and [gentile] white men."

An interesting passage:

"It is based on a self-serving misunderstanding of civilization on the part of nerds which has long been the basis of the 'HBD/IQ' orientation: that civilization is built by the dutiful, docile, orderly and shy clerk, tinkerer, 'engineer', and shopkeeper, in other words men like themselves, and that on the other side of these qualities you have all of those they have both deemed as foreign to themselves and occasionally fetishized, such as physical strength and ability, charisma, prowess in battle, violence, volatility in character, laziness when it comes to work, profligacy, attractiveness to women and sexual prowess, etc."

It is unclear on what basis BAP apparently identifies with qualities like "prowess in battle, violence," etc. Unless I'm missing something, he was never in the military, but spent his youth in school getting a PhD. He even hid behind a pseudonym for years until he was doxed (or, if he allowed himself to be doxed, until he was safe from cancellation). This posturing as a violent warrior seems to me like LARPing.

More important, the HBD "nerds" are entirely correct about what traits are necessary for civilization, chief among them being general intelligence. Civilization moves forward because of people with IQs above 120. All things being equal, the higher the average IQ of the population, the more civilization you get. IQ is also associated with valor. It's estimated that WWI and II cost Europe 3 IQ points, since intelligent people were more likely to charge into enemy fire.

Physical strength can be meritorious to a certain degree when combined with other virtues. But who is more admirable: the Hanshkenazi "nerd" who builds a rocket to go to outer space, or the nude bodybuilder who looks at himself in the mirror? There's no objectively correct answer to that question. But I'll put my cards on the table and say that, in my view, the former has achieved a higher level of greatness than the latter.

Curiously, BAP's only specific example of a great individual is Grigori Perelman—the mathematician who proved the Poincaré conjecture and turned down the Fields Medal and the Millennium Prize. But Perelman is not a nude body builder. He is a skinny Jew with an extremely high IQ and a monomaniacal focus on his work.

BAP asserts that a society organized around the principles of HBD would be a dystopian "authoritarianism of clerks," and, in any case, he says that HBD is very unlikely to be widely accepted. There isn't much of an argument for this. In reality, dissidents have one and only one effective weapon against the reigning ideology, which is the truth of hereditarianism. There is highly suggestive evidence that a hereditarian revolution may already be underway. Virtually all young intellectuals on the right are aware of the facts about race. The world's richest man and the incoming Vice President of America both probably know the truth. A single tweet by Musk could open the floodgates.

BAP says that HBD acceptance wouldn't defeat wokism, since liberals would pursue race communism on the basis that we are obligated to correct for the unfairness of nature itself. If he is right, why is there not a single clear example of a liberal who takes such a position? Kathryn Paige Harden isn't an example, since she denies that there's any evidence for race differences. Liberals wouldn't perceive HBD as such a threat if it could be reconciled with their ideology. Hundreds of thousands of data points show that hereditarianism cures wokism. The fact that we can imagine some hypothetical HBD-based incarnation of wokism doesn't mean that anyone is going to take such a view seriously. The empirical evidence shows that virtually no one in real life is an HBD race communist.

The bar for being considered a great intellectual in the online right is very low. Many people will be easily impressed by pompous references to Nietzsche and "antiquity," or howlers such as "in higher mathematics there's basically no output of worth outside of the United States, Russia, and France." If you find BAP entertaining, I don't want to take that away from you. But it would be a mistake to look to him for guidance on political theory or strategy.