Martin Willett's Eugenics Madness

Being a videographer grappling with philosophy is no mean feat. It can be relatively painless if you are speaking in a vacuum, but despite what some might say I certainly do not. I have spent my entire life honing my ability to separate reason from dogma, and today I am no different, albeit my values have evolved over time, as they should for anyone who is open to question. As such I’m someone that’s grown to abhor the groupthink of identity politics.

Taking this stance has put me in the firing line from many directions. Why? Because identity politics incites the most primitive urges in humanity in times of moral crisis, and attracts a great deal of damaged individuals desperate to belong, or dominate others. But it’s not just the usual suspects who take issue with my opposition to identity politics; feminists and MGTOW, or cultural Marxists of one stripe or other. It seems that over time I’ve attracted the viewership and subscriptions of fascists, and by fascist I mean consequentialists who believe that race is the basis for enacting identity politics through state coercion. I’ve never expressed any values that would align with such beliefs, but what I have done is criticise cultural Marxism rather a lot, and fascists hate cultural Marxists for diluting race and nationalism. Obviously this has led to a lot of assumptions about my reasons for disliking cultural Marxism, which have nothing to do with the elevation of racial identity politics.

When I recently made a video describing how libertarianism is a philosophy based on negative liberty, and thus is totally incompatible with any form of positive liberty, whether it’s race based or some form of totalitarian model of state control over natural rights, this led to uproar from fascists who originally attracted to my channel for my criticism of cultural Marxism. Fascists, like cultural Marxists, spend a lot of time revising terminology and definitions so that they can then present themselves as arbiters of freedom. Both fascists and cultural Marxists try to co-opt the libertarian label in equal measure, and even as far back as World War Two Friedrich Hayek covered this in the Road to Serfdom, addressing how this was a common tactic even then. So this is nothing new; if a label has positive ramifications in the mind of the public, totalitarians will try to co-opt that label for their own nefarious purposes, whatever ideological brand they might be.

One example of someone hiding behind such euphemisms and doublespeak is Martin Willett. I was once a subscriber to his channel, and carefully listened to his ideas on eugenics with an open mind. But I have concluded that he is a pseudo-intellectual of the worst kind, and has nothing to offer but the same old tired arguments that fascists used to justify scientific racism in the past. It’s worth noting that, just like other leftists (and fascists are leftists) they detest any distinctions that can be used to tie them down. Thus associating someone like Martin with fascism will always be met with similar deflections that Marxists use – conspiracy theory ad hominems or the dismissal of the very validity of the word Marxist, fascist, or communist, for example.

Willett takes old fascist ideas and tries to present them as new, which is sometimes called neo-fascism. Sometimes there is a new spin, but none-the-less these ideas are thematically the same at their core. It’s the same sort of strategy as cultural Marxists, who are in fact neo-Marxists – who present old Marxist ideas with a new twist.

My disagreement with Willett came about when he became outraged by my video “Libertarianism & Immigration”. To summarise, this video explains that while there is nothing wrong with race based freedom of association on private property it is illegitimate to use the power of the state to subvert other people’s property for any reason, let alone race. Only individuals can decide what to do with their property. It is only when the individual is harming others that rights can be bypassed, and it is certainly not grounds to do so if people of different races are freely associating with one another.

You will notice that this video has a lot of down votes compared to others. As well as enduring a video response from Martin Willett to incite his own followers to attack the video in question, I also had to deal with sock accounts (people using several accounts to vote and comment multiple times). Martin Willett initially suggested that I was being presumptive to suggest these were in use, though each time he was blocked he came back onto my channel with a new account, and this occurred several times. This is reflective of the disingenuous nature of Willett throughout our interaction during this exchange.

Martin’s main issue with the video he took such offence with was the idea that haemophilia is sometimes linked to small reproductive circles, otherwise known as inbreeding. What this resulted in, after he finally realised that he was not going to be able to troll my channel with reams of eugenics propaganda and misrepresentations of my arguments, was a video in which he repeated the same old denial that his fragile ego cannot accept; that haemophilia is exacerbated by inbreeding, but is not created purely by inbreeding itself. While certain strains of haemophilia are less likely to occur under the conditions of inbreeding, male carriers of certain rare strains of the disease can have it pass onto female children when haemophiliac men marry their cousins.

Whatever the case, Martin’s entire premise is a red herring given that his predominant argument denies that there are any significant genetic disorders linked with inbreeding. This is categorically false. Small genetic circles most certainly do aggravate genetic disorders, increasing the odds of them being active in offspring. Denying this is the mark of someone totally disconnected from scientific reality, or at the very least completely invested in ideological cognitive dissonance.

Martin’s views become all the more bizarre when he ranting about pedigree dog breeding, using this to indirectly defend, of all things, human inbreeding. Whatever ones ethical perspective regarding the ethics of  pedigree dog breeding it can lead to a great deal of health issues for the dogs born of this process, such as King Charles Spaniels suffering from syringomyelia, or boxer breeds with with high rates of heart disease and cancer. The 2008 BBC programme “Pedigree Dogs Exposed” not only highlighted the great many dangers surrounding pedigree dog breeding, but also the link to the eugenics movement of the 20^th century. Like this movement, pedigree dog breeding is a high risk reproductive strategy with cruel ramifications, and to translate dog breeding to human breeding at any level is abhorrent, not to mention very troubling given that this is such a dehumanising juxtaposition.

The real bee in the bonnet of eugenicists like Willett is the fact that genetic diversity is the key to a healthy process of reproduction, and there is little to be gained from obsessing over minor racial features to the detriment of a wider genetic gene pool, while there is a lot at risk if this is disregarded. The advantages of genetic diversity are set out in the theory of heterosis, also known as hybrid vigour - naturally this theory is despised by racial purists. Though great care must be made to remain within the parameters of the gene pool of a particular species, as opposed to cross species interbreeding, this does not mean that restricting reproductive interaction to a subspecies, to small populations, or worse - relatives, just to realise a certain eugenics vision or bloodline, is a wise reproductive strategy. Conversely cross species interbreeding comes with its own risks, such as the pairing of a horse and donkey producing a mule that, while being hardy animals, cannot reproduce.

Rather than human beings playing god, far better to allow evolution to deal with the probability of positive mutation, than the flawed hand of man taking charge, having shown time and again that this much power is far too much for any human to handle.

Nature is its own free market - let it do its work.