Like clockwork, whenever someone disagrees with me these days, they pull out this screenshot:
Originally directed at Alan Levinovitz (a liberal scholar at James Madison University with whom I previously have had many good discussions), this tweet is being misrepresented to indicate that I am a Nazi, a fascist, eugenicist, etc. No other evidence is produced to support this view (there isn’t any), and many people, all too eager to dismiss positions that call into question their own, take it as if the case were therefore closed.
Before I refute this, I do want to point out that what upsets me here is not the way that I am viewed. It’s that I put a lot of work and thought into my positions, and it is disappointing to me that people are so reluctant to think critically about their own that they take a single, ambiguous tweet to justify their closed-mindedness. I really believe that what I have to offer position-wise could be very valuable to other people, and I think it’s a great loss that people take this kind of mental shortcut to lose out on that value.
With that said, I wrote the following thread that I’m adapting to this post, to address the people who seem so damned motivated to dismiss what I say. It should be thought-provoking on its own, but it should lay to rest concerns among people who are open-minded enough to take the time to read this. For the rest, they’re on their own. God bless.
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Some facts: Many of the leading eugenicists in the 1910s Germany were liberal Jews. Genetic testing of embryos and fetuses is eugenics, currently an evolving part of medicine. Genetic manipulation of human embryos is also eugenics, which we will debate in the coming years.
At one point I had grave concerns about the information economy's impact on unskilled labor and the need for higher cognitive ability to keep up.
Being unemployed is a devastating and soul-crushing experience, something that I know from personal experience during one of the worst periods of my life, and I don't wish this experience on anyone. If we could prevent that for vulnerable people, that would be great.
Now, I had the above concern about the information economy based on some things I read in 2018, that I now think were overblown.
Nonetheless I think the prospect of cognitively enhancing our children through genetic manipulation is a fascinating one, and an issue that we as a society will to grapple with in the coming decade or two. This is an inevitable discussion that we will have.
As it stands, I would want my own children to have that advantage if it existed. Other people may have different opinions. To some extent, some services are already making something like this a reality. This is eugenics. This is just the reality of modern technology.
People can try to cancel me over talking about this, because they cannot actually address the arguments in my article. My article has had several million people read it, including professionals at medical and public health institutions all over the world.
It's hot, and my detractors are desperate.
And the best that these people (including professors who should actually have arguments but don't) can do is dig up old tweets and call me a Nazi or white supremacist or fascist. It's sad, but that's classic Twitter.
Most of my friends are Jews or Asian by the way, and I voted straight-ticket Democrat in 2020 and have half-Asian children. But yeah OK I am a white supremacist.
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That’s the post. To this, I would add a few things.
First, here is a picture of my children that I took today when we visited the science museum. They are mixed race:
And although I am not a eugenicist, I am very confident that they are better looking and just generally more pleasant and better in most ways than the children of the people who are criticizing me. Despite that, they are certainly the product of miscegenation and certainly not members of any Master Race. (I mean this last sentence tongue-in-cheek: to say it in plain terms, my children are half Asian and would be rejected and sent to the concentration camps by most people who would consider themselves Nazis and fascists. That is the plain truth.)
Second, here are a few tweets from 2020. For a Nazi, fascist, etc. they are quite suspect:
To be clear, I really am a centrist. I have economically left-leaning views, socially right-leaning views, and a deep and abiding belief in liberalism, secularism, and free speech. And I am an atheist with profound respect for religious belief.
I supported Fauci and the election of Joe Biden but, when the threat of Trump was gone, had a reversal in my belief when I realized in 2022 how authoritarian and pseudoscientific the so-called online evidence-based community, and eventually, the established authorities themselves were being about COVID.
Over the past half-year, I have undergone a big shift in my beliefs where I am even more relativistic, liberal, humanistic, and tolerant and open to other beliefs than I was before.
And I greatly despair of the dogmatism, zealotry, and pseudoscience that has been pushed by everyone on the topic of COVID—but especially by the authorities.
I genuinely am hoping for my independence and the critical bent of my mind to be useful for the ongoing discussion, and I believe it will be.
And I will not and cannot be bullied. Not in the long term.
People are free however to try! However, I encourage them to be open—more for them than for me. Because if I am right, and I am, then what I have on offer can only improve the lives of people who currently disagree with me.
-Kevin
Puke worthy
Hi Kevin,
There is a most interesting moral, philosophical, psychological essay by "rogue anthropologist" Haley Kynefin, "A Unifying Theory of Evil": https://brownstone.org/articles/a-unifying-theory-of-evil/ .
I added a link to this in a footnote to my article on the crimes against humanity which constitute much of the COVID-19 pandemic response, with so many doctors and members of other professions playing an active role in this, despite having the best of intentions. The article is: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/the-covid-19-pandemic-response-killed .
In the footnote https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/i/103188262/footnote I suggested that Haley Kynefin, you (having a degree in medical anthropology, and others could have a long and lively discussion about how it is that so many doctors were so mistaken in their beliefs and actions.