I just happened to read this opinion by Quinn Slobodian in The Guardian: “MAGA’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future.” Yes, it does. Of course it does! But this guy completely misses the point.

I didn’t have the time to skim through his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, but I will. But this quick opinion article disappointed me. The only unquestionable statement is the following one:

One thing that Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley partners share is an obsession with IQ. Being a “low-IQ individual” is a standard insult in the president’s repertoire, and being “high-IQ” is an equally standard form of praise for those on the tech right.

But then, things get messier. Curtis Yarvin’s “IQ fetishism” has nothing to do with MAGA and Trump. I first mentioned Curtis Yarvin, Marc Andreessen, and Nick Land, and the “PayPal Mafia” that includes Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and many others in this post. (About Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan, you should also read the English-language quotations from an otherwise Romanian post here.) Something I really didn’t know was this tidbit of info:

IQ fetishism had a history in the valley; one of the pioneers of the need to take eugenic measures to increase IQ was William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor (the building block of computer chips), who proposed that people with an IQ below the average of 100 should be given $1,000 per IQ point to sterilise themselves.

And indeed, William Shockley nurtured ideas you’ll find somewhat familiar:

Although he had no degree in genetics, he devoted the last two decades of his life to advancing his philosophy that intelligence is genetic, that blacks are genetically inferior and as a group could not be as bright as whites.

He called his philosophy “retrogressive evolution,” suggesting that blacks, whom he deemed intellectually inferior, were reproducing faster than what he considered intellectually superior whites.

…

Shockley regarded his work on genetics as more important than his work on the transistor …

In a 1980 interview, he told Playboy magazine that the “major cause for American Negroes’ intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by improvements in environment.”

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He also said that “the evidence is unmistakable that there is a basic, across-the-board genetic disadvantage in terms of capacity to develop intelligence and build societies on the part of the Negro races throughout the world.”

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Under Shockley’s proposal, non-taxpayers with an IQ below 100 would have been paid $1,000 for each of their IQ points under 100 if they agreed to be sterilized. Such an intervention in the gene pool was necessary, he argued, to curb what he called “dysgenics,” overbreeding among the “genetically disadvantaged.”

In 1980, Shockley became the first Nobel laureate to publicly state that he had contributed to an Escondido sperm bank set up to pass along the genes of so-called “geniuses.”

Also:

Shockley also may have played an unintentional, walk-on role in Harry Truman’s fateful decision to drop an American atomic bomb on Japan. In July 1945, Shockley was recruited by the War Department to write a report predicting the number of casualties in the event of an American invasion of the Japanese mainland. ‘We shall have to kill at least five to ten million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and a million casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 killed,’ Shockley concluded. Less than a month later, on August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, instantly killing more than 100,000 Japanese civilians.

Now, this opinion piece in The Guardian focuses on

the ideology that links the west coast of tech entrepreneurs and founders to the north-east and midwest of tycoons and conservatives around the Maga coalition.

…

That same coalition has bet the future of the US economy on breakthrough developments in artificial intelligence.

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If their predictions are true, it will eat the right’s precious IQ too.

The problem is, you cannot put in the same basket MAGA and the Musk, Yarvis, Andreessen, Thiel gang. The reason should be obvious: MAGA is merely a mass of morons used by this “Techno-Dark-Mafia” to come to power.

Here’s a depiction of reality:

I have to insist that Elon Musk is by no means a genius. He is literally an idiot. The rest of the gang do have above-average IQs, but not him.

Then, Donald Trump has severe cognitive impairment issues. He was never the smartest tool in the shed, and he’s uncultured as hell, but the only thing he has in common with Elon Musk and Thiel & Co. is the lack of empathy. Elon Musk: “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on … The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. There it’s [where] they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Otherwise, the traditional Republicans, including mentally retarded individuals such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, RFK Jr., Ben Carson, Mike Johnson, are also less intelligent than the average MAGA voter.

So here’s the irony: all those MAGA voters and Trump are much less intelligent than the techno-mafiosi who really have some IQ to care about!

Basically, we’re talking about retards voting to put their lives under the control of some maleficent yet intelligent people who use Trump as a smokescreen to lure the idiots!

The fact that Trump, being more retarded than a frog crushed by a truck, has disconcerted even his billionaire supporters, causing them losses, is something they’ll have to deal with.

To put it even more straightforward: there’s no such thing as “the right’s precious IQ”! MAGA’s voters and politicians are low-IQ individuals. The high IQ of the Techno-Dark-Mafia is a completely different matter.

So, dear Quinn Slobodian, it’s not “MAGA” who will lead us towards an inhuman future. It’s a tiny technological elite. MAGA itself will indeed be a victim of this future, but not this tiny elite.