A commenter on one of Steve Sailer’s blogs (can’t remember who) once had an insightful observation about liberalism. It’s largely motivated by narcissism. I think an example of this might be liberals enjoy being evolutionists because it makes them feel intellectually superior to all those Republican creationists and they enjoy being politically correct because it makes them feel morally superior to all those Republican “racists”.

But what happens when liberals find out that being an evolutionist makes you what liberals would consider a “racist”? A fascinating example of cognitive dissonance.

For decades creationists have been arguing that Darwin was a racist and that evolutionary theory is inherently racist. In some ways this argument is completely unfair. Darwin was actually extremely progressive for his era in the sense that he opposed slavery and had great compassion for black people. But on the other hand, in my opinion, it’s totally obvious that Darwin had views that modern liberals would consider racist. In my opinion, Darwin believed in HBD, and quite radical HBD at that.

For starters, Darwin was one of the first to infer that humans evolved from monkeys in Africa. This was long before we had much proof to that effect, so why would Darwin even think such a thing? He obviously thought that the monkeys in Africa (i.e. chimpanzees, gorillas) were especially human-like, or that the humans in Africa were especially monkey-like, or both.

Even more disturbing, was this quote from Darwin:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Now liberals will have use believe that despite Darwin being caught red-handed with his pants down comparing certain races to apes, he did not really believe in HBD: “You see, what he really meant was….” It reminds me of when a man gets caught by his wife having sex with his secretary, his only rebuttal is “baby, it’s not what it looks like.” What it looks like is Darwin describing an evolutionary hierarchy: Caucasian > negro/Australoid > gorilla > baboon.

In a desperate attempt at revisionist history, liberals have swarmed to wikipedia, the media, academia, and other liberal-friendly platforms to argue that Darwin’s HBD extremism is actually HBD denial, once we understand the context. According to liberals, Darwin only meant that Caucasians would replace savage races because of their cultural superiority; biological superiority had nothing to do with it. And are we also supposed to believe that Darwin’s predicted demise of gorillas was also for cultural, not biological reasons?

Never mind that Darwin’s theory of natural selection was actually based on biology, not culture. Never mind that Darwin’s own cousin (Francis Galton) was the father of HBD. Never mind that Darwin’s own book on natural selection was subtitled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Never mind that one of Darwin’s closest friends and disciples Thomas Huxley was a hardcore HBDer. Why let facts get in the way of a convenient rationalization.

According to racismreview.com:

…Darwin applied his evolutionary idea of natural selection not only to animal development but also to the development of human “races.” He saw natural selection at work in the killing of indigenous peoples of Australia by the British, wrote here of blacks (some of the “savage races”) being a category close to gorillas, and spoke against social programs for the poor and “weak” because such programs permitted the least desirable people to survive.

But many liberals can not accept Darwins’s HBDism because it would mean that either the creationists were right to condemn Darwin or that liberals were wrong to condemn HBD. In a choice between surrendering their intellectual or moral authority, liberals choose denial. For liberalism is like a religion, and Darwin was the prophet. Like all religions or cults, when the truth is exposed, people don’t stop believing. Just the opposite: They just come up with increasingly creative rationalizations to deny the truth, and the effort this takes makes them more and more psychologically invested in denying inconvenient realities.