TL;DR LAC is wrong about Jewish IQ being 100, all evidence indicates it is 107-112. Aside from misreading existing literature and engaging in selective critiques, LAC completely omits recent genetic data on Ashkenazi IQ. This is unacceptable. His video is also full of conjecture and half-baked presuppositions about IQ, genetics, group differences and related studies. Intellectually honest people will stop promoting this video, and particularly LAC’s thesis on AJ IQ, if they don’t want themselves and the Dissident Right to look like a bunch of idiots. Still, LAC does put forward some valid points on Jewish overrepresentation and institutional power that others have already made in the past

Intro

This is the video in question that LAC produced, which was also posted to this sub awhile ago. In a prior video, LAC had pointed out in that Jewish overrepresentation on shows like Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman was in great excess. This Jewish IQ video he made was partly in response to comments made on the Joe Rogan video citing ‘high Jewish IQ’ as an explanation, as it relates to Jewish overrepresentation. In this response vid, LAC makes the claim that Jews actually have an average IQ of only 100 - and that all the evidence to the contrary is either bad, biased, or outright fabricated, even stating that high-Jewish IQ is an “absurd, pseudo-scientific fantasy notion”. Therefore, IQ cannot explain Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power or influence.

I agree with the latter - IQ cannot explain Jewish overrepresention (as I myself and others have argued before) – however, the idea that Ashkenazim don’t have an average IQ above 100 is wildly outside the consensus of people who have actually studied this topic, and is a demonstrably not true.

As I re-watch this video (I think in-full for the first time) there are a lot of erroneous claims, and faulty, half-baked logical exercises that are either totally speculative or outright contradictory given what we know about IQ, genetics, and group differences. Instead of writing a novel about all of these things, I am only going to point out that LAC is wrong about AJ IQ, which is 107-112 and not 100.

Having to write a response to a video like this is frustrating because LAC makes some good points about Jewish power and influence - but these are entirely undermined by the main thesis of the video being wrong. And now we have a bunch of people running around saying ”high Jewish IQ is deboonked!! when it is not.

The main mistakes LAC makes are these:

1. He misreads Richard Lynn (2004), and omits other US studies from his analysis/critique
2. He omits non-US and non-Israeli studies on AJ
3. His use of Israeli IQ data is poorly informed or dishonest
4. He omits recent genetic studies (which is inexcusable to the point of blatant dishonesty)

Anyone could be forgiven for making a video about this topic and not seeing prior studies/posts on this because the information is censored, suppressed by google, or ignored by the MSM, and thus difficult to find. Under normal circumstances, someone like myself would just let this video stand with the expectation that some viewers would criticize LAC's shortcomings, LAC would eventually realize that he was wrong, and he would just post some kind of retraction or amendment video. However, several rebuttals have been posted (including ones by Bronksi which I have watched and one by Ubersoy I have not watched), and LAC has not responded to these at all, and the video continues to gain views (**nearly at 150k* as of this writing)

While we can agree that exposing the “normie” to the overrepresentation is good, and LAC makes some good tangential points, LAC is wrong about Jewish IQ, and this video cannot stand without contradiction – firstly because it is incorrect, second because it makes us look bad. It is practically slanderous to the many people that have actually done research on this topic.

1 Selective critique of US studies and misreading of Lynn (2004) LAC makes several claims about IQ tests on Jews that are uncontested. The first is that there are very few “good” studies on Jewish IQ - a lot of them are old, on children, are unrepresentative, or have other problems. This is basically acknowledged by everyone since the mid-2000s. This is partly why a range for average IQ is usually given (e.g. 107-112). However, what evidence we have, irrespective of quality, consistently suggests Jews have slightly to moderately higher IQs than gentiles.

Another one of the arguments LAC repeatedly makes is that for some of the mid-20th century US studies it is unclear whether or not Hispanics have been counted as “white”. While this argument is highly speculative, and it may be true for some mid-20th century studies like Backman (1972) (I don’t know) it is not true for Lynn’s 2004 study of data from The American National Opinion Research Center (NORC) with years spanning 1992-1996 (Ash mean IQ = 107.5). At around 7:40 LAC says:

“Note again that non-Jewish Whites are grouped together, which means it is unclear, again, if this group includes people with Hispanic admixture”

This is incorrect – Lynn explicitly states on page 4 of that study:

Fifth, the small difference of 1.4 IQ points between the non-Jewish whites and the ‘‘other’’ category is not statistically significant or very informative. The category is largely made up of Hispanics and Asians, who are themselves a heterogeneous category

[Emphasis mine] So now we are left with a recent study on adults (age 18) that doesn’t have this Hispanic problem and also indicates AJ IQ is >107. Richard Lynn and Kanazawa published another follow-up study in 2008 that concluded AJ vocabulary IQ to be 109.

LAC critiques several other sources (presumably given by commenters on his vid) for high AJ IQ. Two of these are The Bell Curve, and KMac’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone (first of three in the CoC series). LAC points out the references these authors use in text are Levinson’s studies from the early 20th century, and that these studies are suspect. That is fair, I don’t think many interested people take these studies very seriously. The lack of interest on the validity of the numbers produced by Levinson in these books can probably be explained by 1. The fact high AJIQ was more or less already accepted when they were written (basically pre-internet, 1990s) and 2. the fact the authors of these works were not particularly interested in exactly what the average IQ of AJs was - since this fact was only tangential to the main point of explaining their objective SES success (TBC) and/or political influence (CoC). In either case LAC is within rights to say that these can be dismissed as evidence because neither of these are actually IQ studies on Jews, even if they are often used a reference by casual posters online.

However, this leaves us with only two true ”studies” that LAC can actually contest in the video without errors (that are known to me) - Backman (1972), and Storfer (1990). For the sake of argument, lets give LAC maximum credibility and just agree that these studies are wrong or not representative, without any investigation or reservation. Still, he still has his work cut out for him. In Richard Lynn’s 2011 book The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish intelligence and Achievement, he compiles studies on Jewish Intelligence across a variety of regions.

For the United States, Lynns lists 32 IQ studies on pages 275-276, Table 19.2. I am not going to bother to calculate the average of these studies (after excluding Levinson’s studies, which include some adjustments), but the average is definitely >107, probably ~ 110.

2 Exclusion of non-US studies

LAC makes no mention of IQ studies outside of the US or Israel. Again from Lynn’s book on page 76, we can see 7 studies done in Britain and Ireland that the average Jewish IQ is 110.8, including one of Richard Lynn’s own studies of 7-16 yo’s which puts IQ at 108.2. TBF, most of these studies are older and on children, but nonetheless corroborate the idea that Jews have IQs above 100, and about 107-112. There may be other studies in other countries I don’t know of, but Lynn’s research is exhaustive and .PDF I have access to doesn’t facilitate a text search feature so I’m stopping here.

3 Israel

At ~28:00 LAC smugly dismisses any explanation of the 103 average IQ for Ashkenazis living in Israel when he says "Some of you might want to point out these are “Israeli” Ashkenazis rather than the “”American”” Ashkenazis this video is ostensibly about, and I assume that’s a fine point to make.. as long as you’re willing to accept that moving to Israel somehow drops your IQ by a standard deviation” This statement is unintentionally ironic. The most accepted explanation for the discrepancy between Ash Israeli IQ and international AJIQ again comes from Lynn in Race Differences in Intelligence (2004):

Most of the Ashkenazim Jews in the United States and Britain fled persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1914 and in Germany between 1933 and 1939. It seems likely that these would have been the more intelligent who foresaw the dangers of staying and were able to organize emigration. Those who remained in Russia and Eastern Europe would likely have been a little less intelligent. These are the ones who emigrated to Israel after World War II to escape persecution and poverty and whose IQs are a little lower than those of Ashkenazim Jews in the United States and Britain. A further factor is that many of these supposedly European Jews are not Jews at all but pretended to be Jews in order to get permission to leave the Soviet Union (Abbink, 2002).

So yes, lower-IQ jews and Jewish-pretending Slavs “moving to Israel” from 1945-1990 would, in fact, lower the average IQ of so-called “”Ashkenazis”” in Israel (or so this explanation goes). LAC should have at least looked into actual explanations already proposed for this instead of making up his own strawmen to respond to. He continues:

“So, in regards to the argument “Ashkenazis possess a genetic advantage in Intelligence”, the numbers for Ashkenazi Jews blatantly disprove the possibility”

No – and the fact that LAC implicitly accepts an IQ of 103 for ‘’Ashkenazi’’ Jews in Israel is evidence against his own thesis. This appeal to the impossibility of genetic explanations is also also ironic - because he completely omits relevant recent data on this subject.

4. Complete Omission of Genetic Evidence

By far the most egregious omission in LAC’s video is the lack of any mention of the more recent genetic studies that support the range of 107-112. These studies are the “nail in the coffin” on this topic because they decisively nail-down the elusive age-old question of “what is the Jewish IQ??” Instead of confronting or even mentioning these studies directly, LAC just makes a bunch of bad, half-baked rationales as to why genetic explanations are supposed to be implausible. Most of these critiques are problematic for a lot of reasons that I won’t get into, instead let’s just look at the data on this topic.

There are two main studies in this realm (that I know of) to speak to – the first is by Dunkel, Woodley, Pallesen, and Kirkegaard in 2019

I am not going to bother explaining how the nuances of how GWAS studies work, since Bronksi has already explained that here (also, Bronksi – if ever you blatantly plagiarize my shitposts again without attribution I will send my personal KKK/SS/RW death squads to lynch you). In short, essentially what is done for these studies is:

1. Acquire a genotype for a large population (in this case, Christian whites and Jews in Wisconsin)

2. Acquire IQ scores (or proxy for IQ scores, like educational attainment) for individuals in the same population

3. Do statistical analysis on gene variants in this population to isolate which genes are associated with high IQ

4. Look at the frequency/distribution of these IQ-related genes between the subpopulations (Jews and Christians), and create a “polygenic score” (a multi-gene-based IQ score”) for those subpopulations

Dunkel et al did exactly this - and lo-and-behold the Ashkenazi polygenic IQ score comes in around 110. At the time I wrote my old post, there was also an ongoing study that replicated these findings in the UK, but that link is not good and I don’t what happened to it.

The science in this area is moving extremely rapidly. Davide Piffer published a replication of this in 2019 using the same method and it perfectly predicts IQ by ethnic group, including Whites, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, and Jews. There are definitely more studies like this since then, I am not taking time to find them right now.

So, to deny the validity of these studies would mean to deny all direct genetic evidence for all racial IQ gaps. Since race-realists (or just “realists”) must hold that IQ is ~80% heritable, a denialist position is completely untenable, and so one must accept that fact that AJ IQ is about 110, as has been indicated by prior studies, case closed. Given how rapidly this field is advancing, further genetic studies will only strengthen the conclusions of the heritability of IQ, race and IQ differences, and more precisely determine what the mean Ashkenazi IQ is, which is certainly going to be between 107-112, probably 110.

Summary

LAC made the erroneous claim that AJIQ is 100 based on speculative conjecture, selective critiques, and misreadings of existing studies. A more thorough review of the literature and recent genetic data (that LAC inexplicably omitted) clearly puts the Ashkenazi IQ at ~110-111, well within the range of most trusted experts that usually say AJIQ is ~107-112. LAC ignores critiques of his videos, which is dishonest and irresponsible. However, LAC otherwise makes some good points about Jewish power in his video (that were also already made by many others). The fact that Ashkenazi IQ is about 110 means it cannot explain their overrepresentation, so these conclusions are the same.

Post-Critique Notes

Taking a step away and considering this video and its impact to the WN/DR movement as whole, one has to ask themselves

“What is the value of a video like this?”

I really don’t know. I think the most obvious thing that comes to mind is that ”it is probably better that the masses know about Jewish overrepresentation than it is they have a correct understanding of IQ, or what the average IQ of Ashkenazis actually is.” and by extension “If a video redpills a bunch of people on Jewish influence, even if it is wrong about AJ IQ, so what?”

I can’t really disagree with such a sentiment. Considering the current sociopolitical climate, and our position, it is a fact that our opponents are in complete control and use propaganda shamelessly without any regard for the truth at all. Most people live their lives with all kinds of contradictions and false presuppositions, regardless of political persuasion. So, I think the exposure alone is a net-positive for the movement as a whole. Still, I think there needs to be an intellectual vanguard in the WN movement that is consistent and doesn’t make these kinds of mistakes. So, at least for this subset of people who want to be empirically rigorous and intellectually honest, this video has to be rejected. Consider the many things people like Sean Last or Faulk have produced that should have had many, many more views than this video. If only quality of research was the metric that won views.

Failures of Common Sense

The popularity of this video in general is disappointing. It was even posted to the sub, and it got 12 upvotes (which is a lot here). The top comment is an anecdote in support of the video’s conclusions, but even my own comment was not overly dismissive, just skeptical. Let us take a moment to consider who LAC is contradicting with his claim “AJ IQ is 100” :

• Richard Lynn (several studies cited by LAC, some misread, (personal opinion of AJIQ = 110) not presented/ignored)

• Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray (Bell Curve authors)

• Gregory Cochran (personal opinion: 112) and Henry Harpending (evolutionary psychologists / race-realists, authors of A Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence and The 10,000 Year Explosion)

• Any signatory of the 1994 Mainstream Statement – Including Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, Rushton, Linda Gottfredson, and Thomas Bouchard

• Up-and-coming HBD researchers like Kirkegaard, Dunkel, Michael Woodley O.M, Piffer, and Pallesen

• Trusted autodidacts such as Sean Last, Ryan Faulk and Cremieux

Just to name a few. So, why do we expect this random YouTuber, in a response video, to sufficiently contradict the conclusions of so many trusted experts and in the face of so much evidence?

High Jewish IQ Causes Butthurt for Mystifying Reasons

Some people in the community do not accept high Jewish IQ for some reason, and the subject inspires fervent denial. I do not know why this is the case. East Asians have average IQs of ~102-105, this fact doesn’t arouse nearly the amount of controversy as the AJ IQ does. Jews also suffer from a wide variety of diseases, including Tay-Sachs, Gaucher disease, Bloom syndrome, and a variety of other diseases. Do this inspire jealousy or something?

Accepting High Jewish IQ is Easier Than Denial

In the long run, it is easier to accept an AJ IQ of 110 than it is to deny it. There is an abundance of other corroborating evidence of high Jewish intellect beyond just IQ tests, including earnings and educational attainment, which are basically impossible to explain solely through nepotism (and Lynn 2011 lists a lot of these across many countries over time). If you’re a race-realist, denying this and other evidence that Ashkenazim have a higher IQ basically puts you in a more difficult position, because now you need to argue that these things that indicate higher intelligence are true among whites and other groups, but not for Jews specifically. Not only does this mean that any critique you have of this evidence will necessarily weaken the position for high heritability of IQ between other races, it also means you have to do more work. It also gives the impression you are not objective and have self-serving bias, which undermines your credibility for other claims (like race and crime, or HBD generally) while simultaneously playing into the “White Supremacist” trope (which is easily dodged by accepting high East-Asian and AJ IQ). Gentile geniuses outnumber Jews at least 4:1, we have the raw intellectual advantage. The reason for Jewish dominance of Western institutions is nepotisim, organization, and racial consciousness – and the lack of these things among whites is why are losing. That should be the ultimate point of the whole exercise