Are Curtis Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, and myself "neo-pagans?"

"World" magazine tries to figure out what we have in common.

From World magazine (“Sound journalism, grounded in facts and Biblical truth”):

Moral minority

Christians are losing their grip on the GOP as neo-pagan ideas gain influence

by Emma Freire

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a political philosophy called “fusionism” dominated the Republican Party. In broad strokes, fusionism consisted of an interventionist foreign policy, free market economics, and Christian social morality—with an emphasis on being pro-life and opposed to gay marriage. President Donald Trump killed fusionism when he adopted a noninterventionist foreign policy and imposed tariffs on the entire world. But what of the Republican Party’s morality?

Many of Trump’s votes in 2024 came from a group sometimes called “Barstool conservatives,” basically nonchurchgoers without much of a political creed beyond their hatred of wokeness. But non-Christian thinkers are also reaching the party’s more high-brow audience.

“They provide an alternative intellectual, moral superstructure for the right,” said Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Reformer. “It’s a rival set of ideas that are non-Christian. These groups, although they’re small, provide an alternative ideology that people can very easily understand and adopt.”

The extent of this influence can be hard to discern. Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) calls secular and neo-pagan influences indirect, seen mostly through MAGA influencers on social media. “The problem is that many conservative Christians, who see ‘the left’ as the only threat to Christianity, open themselves to malevolent influences on the right,” Tooley says. “They falsely assume that any force on the right must be a friend to Christianity. They also forget that sin is universal and not confined to the political left.”

… Here are four of the non-Christian philosophies creating ripples in conservative circles.

… Barstool Conservatives

… Curtis Yarvin

… Bronze Age Pervert

An extremely flattering illustration

… Steve Sailer

Tucker Carlson is no stranger to controversial interviews. But in June 2024, he invited a guest on his show that even he acknowledged came with baggage: Steve Sailer.

“So I gotta say, it’s a little weird to be sitting across from you in my barn,” Carlson says. The room doesn’t match most people’s idea of a barn. The two men sit underneath a chandelier made of antlers, surrounded by dark-wood bookcases, a grandfather clock, and an American flag. The occasion for the interview is Sailer’s new anthology, Noticing. But it is so much more.

The “weird” element Carlson refers to is not his barn but the fact that Sailer, who writes for far-right websites and has an eponymous Substack, has appeared in public. In an email, Sailer tells me he used to be seen as “this Lord Voldemort of the intellectual world, frequently referenced but never named.”

“I went over 10 years without being allowed to give a talk in public,” he says. “I’d get signed up to give a presentation in a hotel meeting room, but then the Southern Poverty Law Center or some other hammer of Cancel Culture would intimidate the hotel into cancelling the contract.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has called him a “proponent of scientific racism” and a “white supremacist.”

Sailer popularized the term “human biodiversity,” the idea that the human race is best understood through the lens of evolution. He claims he’s basically a sports fan, noting that some races tend to do better in certain sports and playing positions. “I just employ the kind of thinking that’s not terribly controversial in the sports world to more politicized questions about society, such as education or crime.” He has written about racial differences and test scores. He’s also reported that FBI data shows that 60% of known homicide offenders are African ­American.

Renn explains, “The animating feature of human biodiversity is: evolution works on humans, and therefore human groups, essentially races, genetically vary and all of these differences of outcomes in our world are as a result of genetic variations between groups.”

Despite its connection to evolution, Sailer says he doesn’t see human biodiversity as incompatible with religious faith. “You can also discuss the microevolution of biodiversity among humans intelligently without believing that our species came about solely through macroevolution without any guidance by a higher power.”

Matthew Walther disagrees. “The idea that a human being made lovingly in God’s own image, endowed with a rational soul, can be reduced to or can be considered synonymous with one measure of his or her intellectual capacity, is so profoundly and obviously anti-Christian.”

While Yarvin, BAP, and Sailer emphasize different things, Walther thinks they are closely intertwined. “You could say that the human biodiversity thing is the hardware, and the BAP thing and the Yarvin thing are the software.” Walther believes the notion that some races are more intelligent or more capable is implicit in Yarvin and BAP’s work. Human biodiversity states this notion explicitly, albeit in a style that purports to be neutral and scientific.

BAP denies being influenced by the modern group of writers who use the label human biodiversity. “My own views on the importance of nature and biology in human social and political life are influenced by Plato and Aristotle.”

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Sailer got 4.3 million views on X. But beyond metrics like these, it’s difficult—if not impossible—to measure how many people these non-Christian philosophies reach, much less how many people believe them. Still, the ideas filter into the public consciousness through podcasts, memes, X posts, and Substacks—and often they’re only referenced in indirect ways.

Below the paywall is the full email interview with Ms. Freire’s questions in italics and my answers in regular type:

Paywall here.

Thanks! Please find my questions below.

Many of our readers (who are mostly southern Baptist or Presbyterian) have probably never heard the term human biodiversity. Could you please briefly explain what it is?

Basically, I'm a sports fan. I just employ the kind of thinking that's not terribly controversial in the sports world to more politicized questions about society, such as education or crime.

For example, it's no longer in doubt that adult men tend to be better at most sports on average than adult women, with the possible exception of some artistic sports like figure skating and water ballet, largely for physical reasons. Thus, for example, when an also-ran male collegiate swimmer, Will Thomas, declared himself to be Lia Thomas, he instantly became an NCAA champion.

Today, everybody except the most fanatical ideologues of transgenderism recognizes that what Thomas did is not fair. 21st Century Americans mostly like women's sports, and we recognize that due to patterns of human biodiversity, it's not fair to real women to let ex-men like Thomas take home the glittering prizes.

Racial diversity in sports performance tends to be less strong than sex diversity, but there are still striking patterns. For example, from 2004 through 2023, 20 years, no non-black cornerbacks started the season as a starting cornerback in the NFL: that's 1280 out of 1280!

Why was this? Most football fans would agree that African Americans tend to have biological advantages at one-on-one pass coverage.

But, perhaps, racial stereotypes contributed to the percentage being 100% instead of, say, 95%? Back in the days of mainframe computers, corporate executives used to say, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," the most trusted brand of the time. Similarly, perhaps NFL coaches tended to assume that "Nobody ever got fired for starting two black cornerbacks," but that if they took a chance on a white or Samoan starter and he got burned for the game-losing touchdown, they might get fired on Monday.

Finally, the University of Iowa built a reputation as a football program that gives white cornerbacks a chance, and in 2024, two white CBs from Iowa finished the season starting for their NFL teams. One of them, Cooper DeJean, intercepted a pass in the Super Bowl and ran it back for a touchdown.

So, maybe there has been a little discrimination against white cornerbacks. It's a possibility. Maybe, maybe not.

But note that the Cornerback gap is the type of subject that we can, hopefully, hold a civil discussion over without too many extremists objecting to the notion that blacks might have biological as well as cultural reasons for tending to be better at cornerback than whites is a demand for genocide of the white race.

Unfortunately, our intellectual discourse about non-sports patterns of racial differences tends to be less mature.

What role does evolution play in HBD?

In the 1860s, Charles Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton noticed the phrase "nature and nurture" in Shakespeare's The Tempest and realized it provided a handy framework for thinking about a wide variety of subjects.

For example, in the NFL, whites dominate the positions of placekicker and punter. Is this because whites are born with stronger legs? Maybe, but it doesn't seem too plausible to me that whites have a large natural advantage in lower body strength. What seems more likely is that white parents invest more in nurturing their sons to kick and punt well at expensive training camps for punters, place-kickers, and long-snappers.

But other statistical differences we see in the world around us are likely to have something to do with genetic inheritance, which is presumably influenced by evolution.

But, please keep in mind, that when talking about "human biodiversity," we are talking about "microevolution" within the human species. (Assuming that we define a "species" as a population that can mate with each other and produce fertile off-spring, humans are clearly just a single species.) The existence of the microevolution that creates racial differences in humans, like the existence of the microevolution that has given us such a diversity of dog breeds, likely makes more plausible that primates underwent macroevolution into humans in the distant past. But you can also discuss the microevolution of biodiversity among humans intelligently without believing that our species came about solely through macroevolution without any guidance by a higher power.

Over the past year, I’ve noticed a lot more discussion about DNA and IQ in my X feed. For example, in the recent dustup over Ashley St. Clair’s announcing she’s given birth to Elon Musk’s child, I read X posts suggesting that the baby will be fine without a lot of paternal involvement because our genes are deterministic for our life outcome. Here's some examples. Do you think posts like that are influenced by HBD? ( I understand that may be hard to answer. My story explores the idea that people today are often influenced by podcasts/memes, etc. in ways that are hard to pin down.)

Parents today tend to invest more time and money in the nurturing of each child than when I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, nobody paid to send their kids to punting camp until about the 1990s. Similarly, parents tend to talk more to their children today in the hope of increasing their vocabularies and SAT Verbal scores to get them into fancier colleges.

The downside of this trend, which is in many ways admirable, is that people compensate by having fewer children. Around the world, the number of children born per woman has been dropping rapidly, and will likely drop below the replacement rate. We really don't want the human race to die out eventually because parents can afford to only have one child due to the high cost of long-snapper camp and the like.

A 1998 book by Judith Rich Harris called The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, which was a popular topic when I started the Human Biodiversity email group for scientists and public intellectuals in 1999, made the then-novel argument the parents shouldn't worry so much about how good a job they are doing raising their children because behavioral genetics has been showing that nature plays a huge role in how they turn out.

There is a lot of wisdom in her view. On the other hand, as I pointed out at the time in a book review in National Review, parents do have a lot of influence over their children in many areas less often studied by behavioral geneticists, such as which religion they grow up with. You can read my 1998 review of her book at my Substack, SteveSailer.Net:

My story will also discuss Curtis Yarvin and BAP. A political commentator who I interviewed said, “You could say that the HBD thing is the hardware, and those [Yarvin or vitalism] the software. They have a lot of the same priors about race but they're taking it in various other directions.” Do you have any reaction to his statement? Is that true?

Curtis (who used to be known by the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug) is a great guy and I like him a lot. Like Bronze Age Pervert, he's an extremely articulate spokesman for his own views, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

You have been persona non grata in some circles for years. But you have recently become more welcome. Do you have a personal theory as to why that is the case? Do you think it might be the backlash against the great awokening?

I started writing in the 1990s. I've always been a lighter-weight, more journalistic version of the outstanding social scientists James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray. Back then, when I thought about the future, I hoped that when I get good at this second career of mine, I might wind up with, say, a column on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. For a combination of reasons of nature and nurture, I'm conservative, but I'm also open-minded toward other people's arguments and public-spirited.

Instead, due to the madness of the times, I came to be seen as this Lord Voldemort of the intellectual world, frequently referenced but never named. During the Great Awakening of 2013 - 2022, I went over ten years without being allowed to give a talk in public. I'd get signed up to give a presentation in a hotel meeting room, but then the Southern Poverty Law Center or some other hammer of Cancel Culture would intimidate the hotel into cancelling the contract.

Over the last couple of years, however, as the Great Awakening peters out, I've been allowed out in public. I want to thank the publishers of my anthology Noticing at Passage Press.