Darwinian Racism with PHD Richard Weikart

Throughout All Ages Ministry and Creation Fellowship Introduction

Okay, Diane, why don't you start us off with information on Throughout All Ages Ministry?

Okay, Throughout All Ages Ministry, 1530 Apologetics. It goes into the public high schools to build up the student's character and to intellectually think about their worldview and to weigh it with truth.

For more information on the ministry, you can go to throughoutallages .com. You can also follow Stacey Gaona on Facebook. It's S-T-A-C-E-Y-G-A-O-N-A. And you can go to YouTube and subscribe to Christ Girl to follow her story.

Great, thank you. This year, Creation Fellowship is partnering with Throughout All Ages Ministry. Good evening and thank you for joining us. Creation Fellowship in Santee has been meeting for 10 years, eight years in person and presently online for two years.

We're a group of people who come together to learn more about the six-day creation account that happened some 6 ,000 years ago. You can find Creation Fellowship Santee as a public page and a private group on Facebook and you can watch past presentations on our video platforms at YouTube, Boo, Rumble and BitChute by searching Creation Fellowship Santee or just CFS 2020.

We often call ourselves CFS. BitChute is the believer's best video platform. We encourage using BitChute, that is B-I-T-C-H-U-T-E. When you do find us, please subscribe and like our videos. If you have questions or would like to get on our emailing list, send us an email at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com.

I do not spam and I only send out one email a week. This week, brought to us by Throughout All Ages Ministry, we have professor of history at California State University, Richard Weikert. I understand he is emeritus, which means that he holds this title even though he may no longer be the professor there.

He is the author of From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler's Ethic, The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Hitler's Religion, The Twisted Ideas That Drove the Third Reich, and The Death of Humanity and the Case for Life.

His most recent book is Darwinian Racism, which is our topic tonight, How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. He completed his PhD in modern European history at the University of Iowa, receiving a biennial prize of the Forum of History of Human Sciences for the best dissertation in that field.

Apparently, these words are too big for me, Richard, so I'm going.

To turn it over to you. Okay, thanks. Yeah, tonight I'm going to be talking about my book, Darwinian Racism, right here. That's my, yeah, that's backwards. That's a problem with computer video, it does everything backwards.

Darwinism, Evolutionary Ethics, and the Road to Racism

Anyway, so I got into this topic in a rather interesting way, and so I'm going to sort of go back just a little bit. When I was doing my dissertation at the University of Iowa, I was looking at the way that Darwinism was being interpreted by German socialists like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and other prominent socialists.

And while I was doing that, I got interested in the way that some Darwinian thinkers at that time, including biologists, but also some social thinkers, were trying to replace Judeo-Christian ethics and other ethical systems with evolutionary ethics.

They're trying to formulate this kind of evolutionary ethics, and that is what got me interested in my next research project, which was about evolutionary ethics. But as I got along and was researching about evolutionary ethics, this is like in the late 1990s when I was doing this, I discovered that a lot of the people who were promoting evolutionary ethics, especially by the 1890s and early 1900s, were also promoting eugenics, which was the idea of trying to breed better humans by doing things like compulsory sterilization, controlling reproduction of other kinds of things like that.

And they were also promoting, some of them, the more radical fringe of them were promoting euthanasia. There was also close ties to scientific racism among a lot of these thinkers. And so I got interested in looking at how evolutionary ethics was being more broadly applied.

And I started noticing that a lot of these thinkers did sound a lot like Hitler and the Nazis and their ideology. And so I decided to explore that. And that's where my book, From Darwin to Hitler, came from in 2004.

I wasn't originally thinking of Hitler at all. I wasn't trying to look at the way Darwinism was impacting Nazism. I was looking at the way that Darwinism was impacting ethics. And so as I went along, that of course brought me into some controversies with people who thought it was sacrilege to write a book that was connecting Darwin to Hitler.

And so then I had to sort of defend my position along the way several times. And this book that I put out earlier this year called Darwinian Racism is basically a sequel to From Darwin to Hitler. The book From Darwin to Hitler actually looked primarily at the pre -1914 period.

It looked at how German thinkers before World War I were interpreting Darwinism and trying to formulate evolutionary ethics and eugenics and racism on the German scene. And then only the last chapter actually talked about Hitler.

And then in 2009, I published a sequel called Hitler's Ethic that looked at Hitler's ideology and focused primarily on Hitler himself. And so this new book sort of broadens that out and looks at the way that Darwinism was being used by the Nazis to justify and buttress their ideology in the 1930s and early 1940s.

It does look at Hitler, but then it also looks at the Nazi biology curriculum and other kinds of things too that I'll get into a little bit as we move into the material here in just a little bit. Now I should say too that this is a very timely topic because my last chapter on white nationalism, we just saw a shoot up in Buffalo this past weekend.

And in fact, I just wrote an op-ed article that just came out today on townhall .com as well as some other websites about that Buffalo shooting because the manifesto that that white nationalist put forward justifying his shooting of predominantly black shoppers in a supermarket was based upon Darwinian thinking.

It was based upon Darwinian ideology. And my last chapter of Darwinian racism looks at that more extensively. And in fact, this manifesto of this Buffalo shooter actually confirms a lot of the points that I made in that last chapter about the tight connections between Darwinian thinking and current white nationalism.

Now you won't get this in the mainstream media. You won't get this in NPR or places like that because they're focused on blaming white nationalism on religion, especially evangelical Christianity. In fact, this past year, there were three books published by university presses, all of which basically tried to make the connection between evangelical Christianity and white nationalism, evangelical Christianity as being sort of the cause of white nationalism.

But the truth is that Darwinism plays a very key role in today's white nationalism. Now there were in the past, especially if you go back into the 19th and early 20th century, there were groups like the Ku Klux Klan that did try, unfortunately, to connect their brand of Christianity with racism.

But in the mid 20th century, there was a key shift there. And most of the white nationalists today are embracing it on the basis of scientific racism, not on the basis of any kind of religious kind of ideals.

Darwin, the Struggle for Existence, and Racial Inequality

Now, one of the first things I do in my book, Darwinian racism, is I look at Darwin himself. Because the question gets posed a lot of times, was Darwin a racist and why? And there's some people, some people say, well, yeah, of course, he was a racist because everyone was a racist back then.

But by the way, not everyone was a racist back then. David Livingston, the famous explorer and missionary to Africa, was not a racist. And he was loved by the black Africans that he helped and tried to elevate in the time that he was ministering in Africa.

But to be sure, most people were racist in Darwin's time. But what's interesting about Darwin and racism, it wasn't just a side thing to his theory. Darwin's views about evolution were tied very closely to racism.

In fact, Darwin thought that racism was a evidence for his theory. Now, why was that? Well, Darwin in the Origin of Species, where he, by the way, doesn't talk much about humans, he just in the last couple pages mentions humans really briefly.

In the Origin of Species, the first two chapters of Darwin's book are on variation. The first chapter is on variation under domestication. The second chapter is on variation in nature. So for Darwin's theory to get off the ground, he had to show that there's lots of variation within species.

And so when he turned his attention to the human species, as he did in his book The Descent of Man, which was published 12 years after the Origin of Species in 1871, he talks quite extensively about different human races being widely different.

Darwin thought they were different not just physically, but he thought they were different intellectually. He thought they were even different morally. He thought they had different moral traits biologically ingrained in them.

And so Darwin thought that racism was evidence for his theory. Interestingly, after Darwin's time, Darwinists were going to sort switch things around. Once Darwinism became the established theory, Darwinists were in fact going to say the opposite.

They were going to say that Darwinism was proof of racism, because Darwinism had to have variation, so races must be widely divergent. But there's also another thing about Darwinian theory that was important in relation to races.

And that is that Darwin believed that the races were caught in a struggle for existence, which was a essentially competition to the death. And Darwin does talk about racial extinction, and he talks about races exterminating and replacing other, or other races.

Here, I actually read you the quote here from The Descent of Man. Darwin stated, at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.

So by the way, when people talk about replacement theory, Darwin believed in replacement theory. Now he believed it in the opposite way. He thought the Europeans were replacing the indigenous peoples.

And he saw this happening, by the way, in his own day. He saw British imperialism going out, and he saw the native populations of the Americas, of Australia, New Zealand, and other places being replaced by the Europeans, and the Europeans exterminating these other peoples.

Darwin thought that was a good thing, because he thought it would bring about biological progress. And so this is a way that Darwin's racism becomes even more problematic, because not only does he think that races are unequal, based on his view of biology, but he also thinks that these races are in competition, and that some are going to end up exterminating others, and that this will bring about a biological progress.

So racial extermination, he thinks, just a natural process that goes on all the time in other species, and goes on then in the human species as well. Now after Darwin's time, many Darwinists continue to argue that Darwinism provided support for racial inequality.

They claimed, like Darwin himself, that not only were these physical characteristics, but also mental and moral characteristics. One of the most prominent German Darwinists, Ernst Haeckel, was going to claim that there were 10 different human species.

Now unlike Darwin, Darwin himself said they're all part of one species, all races are part of one species. But Darwin said they're just subspecies, races are like subspecies. Haeckel thought they were even more divergent, and he claimed there actually were 10 different human species.

And he claimed also that the, what he called the lowest human races, were closer to the highest apes, than the lowest human races were to the highest humans. So this is pretty, so Haeckel is claiming that the distance between the highest humans and lowest humans is greater than the distance between the highest humans and the lowest apes.

So that, by the way, was designed to try to convince people of human evolution by showing that there's huge divergent within the species, only a little bit of divergence between different species, which is what Darwinism has had to try to approve all along.

So Haeckel was going to be one focusing on these huge inequalities that he saw, that he claimed were part of the human species. There were many others who similarly did this. There was a German historian, cultural historian named Friedrich Helwalt, who laid stress on racial struggle.

He claimed that when the Spanish conquistadors came over to the Americas, that they're killing off of Indians, American Indians was simply part of the struggle for existence. And Helwalt said, you know, it's just a natural thing, you know, don't moralize about it.

There's, you know, it's just a natural process. And he thought it would lead to the elevation of the human species. They're also, so you have this notion of racial inequality. Then secondly, you have this notion of a racial struggle, struggle for existence.

And then thirdly, Friedrich Ratzel, a German biologist who became a geographer, he actually wrote a book about Darwinian biology in his early days of his career when he was a biologist, but then he switched careers to a geographer.

He developed the idea that became known as living space. And this was based upon his idea that the Darwinian struggle for existence is a struggle over space. It's a struggle over gaining space in which you can then live off of, gain, you know, gain your food supply and such.

And so Friedrich Ratzel developed this idea then of living space was gonna become very prominent among a lot of Darwinian thinkers in the early part of the 20th century. And then a fourth key idea that was going to emerge in the late 19th and early 20th century on the basis of Darwinian ideology was the idea of eugenics, which I'd already mentioned earlier, which was the idea of trying to breed better humans.

Some Germans even were proposing killing people with disabilities. Ernst Haeckel in particular in 1870 already proposed killing babies with disabilities as a way to try to improve the human species and get rid of those that he considered unfit.

And so the euthanasia movement was going to grow out of that. Now these four key ideas, racial inequality, racial struggle, living space, the struggle for living space, and then eugenics were all going to be adopted by Hitler in his worldview.

They aren't even prepared by others. Hitler was not innovative in his worldview. Hitler was drawing upon ideas that were already there and had already been developed by scientists, in fact, not just by crank or, you know, fringe publicists or something.

Many of these ideas were considered by many scientists to be sort of settled science of the time. And Hitler was going to embrace these ideas and make them central to his ideology. It's not just that Hitler had these ideas that they were just floating around there.

It's that these were actually central ideas to Hitler's ideology. Hitler once said that, just to give an example of this, Hitler once said that the difference between Marxism and his own National Socialism or Nazism was that the Marxist believed in class struggle and he believed in racial struggle.

So there's that racial struggle notion. The idea of living space, this is why Hitler launched his aggressive wars, is because he wanted to gain living space. He even used that term in German Lebensraum, that he was trying to gain Lebensraum or living space for the German people by going out and conquering the Slavic territories to his east.

And then eugenics was also a very prominent part of Nazi ideology. They passed compulsory sterilization laws the first year they were in power. They ultimately set up a euthanasia program where they killed people with disabilities beginning in 1939 to 1940.

And Hitler was going to express this belief in biological evolution many times during his career in all sorts of ways. In his book Mein Kampf, which many of you are probably familiar with, have heard of anyway.

In Mein Kampf, he talks about the process of biological evolution. In his second book, which is just called the second book because it was never published and never had a title, so it's today just known as Hitler's second book.

In his second book, the very first chapter is entitled War and Peace in the Struggle for Life. And that term struggle for life, by the way, is a term that Darwin himself used. Darwin called it sometimes a struggle for existence, sometimes he called it the struggle for life.

And then if you look at how Hitler actually explains what the struggle for life is all about, he talks about populations increasing faster than their food supply. That's exactly what Darwin had based his theory on on Malthus's population principle.

And that they're locked in this struggle for existence. So Hitler very clearly bought into this racial struggle idea and based it upon Darwinian ideology. Then Hitler also in his speeches, as well as in his monologues.

He gave a lot of monologues during the war in his headquarters and these were transcribed. And we now have transcribed copies of what Hitler said and he talks pretty extensively there about his belief in evolution and Darwinism and such.

So there's lots of evidence and again in my book I spell this out obviously in greater detail. I have an entire chapter on Hitler, in fact. But then aside from just Hitler himself, the Nazi regime promoted evolutionary theory in quite a number of ways.

And one of the interesting ways to look at this is to look at the official biology curriculum of the Nazi regime. You know, you'd think that if you want to know what the Nazis believed about evolution, look at what they taught in their schools.

And indeed this is exactly the case. If you look at the official biology curriculum, it contains strong doses of Darwinian evolution, not just in relation to non-human organisms, but also in relation to humans and the development of races.

So the evolution of races. So the Nazi regime is promoting these ideas in the biology curriculum in a very strong way. And by the way, this is one of the most solid proofs against those few. There are a few people who've, you know, tried to refute my position.

One of them is Bob Richards at the University of Chicago, who published a book called Was Hitler a Darwinian? And my book that I just published, Darwinian Racism, blows his ideas out of the water. Because I not only show that Hitler himself did believe in Darwinism very clearly and give plenty of evidence for that, but the official Nazi biology curriculum promotes biological evolution, including the evolution of humans and including the evolution of races.

And not only in the biology, this official curriculum, but if you look at the biology textbooks during the Nazi period, which I've done, I've looked at the biology and I didn't look at just the ones, you know, published in 1933 or 34 when the Nazis were first coming to power, because they could have still been influenced by pre-Nazi editions and such.

But I looked at the textbooks that were published in the late 1930s and in the 1940s, by which time the Nazis would have had plenty of opportunity to revise and correct things that they disagreed with.

And what we find is that they universally teach biological evolution, Darwinian evolution. And these were approved by the Ministry of Education, the Nazi Ministry of Education. So it's pretty clear that the Nazi Ministry of Education was promoting Darwinian evolution in a very big way.

Not only that, but the Nazi regime was also elevating professors into positions in the biology professorships in the German universities who believed in evolution. In fact, there were some figures who were specialists in human evolution who were given university positions.

One example of this is a man whom you've never heard of, but his name is Hans Weinert. And Hans Weinert was appointed as professor of anthropology at the University of Kiel in northern Germany. And Weinert was an evolutionary anthropologist.

That was his specialization, was studying the evolution of humans. And that's not the only example. The Nazis also promoted other evolutionary anthropologists to positions within the German universities.

Quite a number of these evolutionary anthropologists, by the way, again, these are people are studying human evolution, were also SS officers. So there again explodes the idea that the Nazis were against the notions about human evolution.

They put people studying human evolution into positions as SS officers, and they often put them in charge of training, worldview training sessions for medical personnel, for scientists, for Nazi organizations.

And so evolution played a very prominent role in Nazi ideology and was certainly being promoted in a very big way during the Nazi period. We can also see this if we look at Nazi newspapers and periodicals.

Because in Nazi propaganda, the Nazis were also promoting Darwinism. And there's not a shred of evidence that they opposed Darwinism, which is what Bob Richards has claimed. Just as one example among many, and I give more examples in my book, the Völkischer Beobachter, which was the official Nazi newspaper, in 1932, so this is the year before the Nazis came to power, published an article that was simply called Darwin.

And by the way, the Völkischer Beobachter did not publish a lot of pro-evolutionary propaganda. The reason for that is it was a newspaper that was covering current events, mostly. So most of it's covering political events and such.

But they did publish this article in 1932, simply entitled Darwin. And the article honored Darwin and made clear that they were promoting evolutionary biology during this time. If you look at Nazi periodicals, Alfred Rosenberg was one of the key leaders of the Nazi worldview.

He was considered one of the leading Nazi ideologists, ideologues, during the time of the Third Reich. Rosenberg, in the periodical that he edited, published quite a number of articles relating to biological evolution and human evolution, making very clear that he was positioned in the Darwinian camp as well.

Not only that, but the Nazis, especially late in the Nazi period, especially as they were fighting their war with the Soviet Union, published in the early 1940s some manuals that were designed to train SS policemen, as well as their army troops, in the Nazi worldview.

And so you have these worldview manuals, essentially. And they're actually the classroom manuals. They actually are divided up into classes. And so, you know, it'll say class one, class two, class three, class four, etc.

And these worldview training manuals do contain heavy doses of Darwinian biology. Just to give one example of these, there was an SS manual called Rassenpolitik, which is translated as racial policy. And in that book, it argues that races arose through evolution by natural selection, and also claimed that further progress in evolution is our purpose in life.

That our purpose in life is to, you know, bring biological progress about. So we have these Nazi world, and there was other Nazi worldview manuals too, similarly, that were designed to train soldiers and train SS police and such in the Nazi worldview.

And all of them contain a very heavy dose of evolutionary biology. So, these Nazi ideas, if you will, were very prominent. They were front and center. There was no secret about them. These were not, you know, something that they were just peddling behind the scenes or anything like that.

Mainstream Scientists, Nazi Policy, and Scientific Racism

Now, one of the things that some people have argued in relation to some of these ideas and the Nazis is they said, well, this is pseudoscience. That's a term that gets bandied about a lot. This is just pseudoscience.

It's not really science. Or they'll say, this was just the view of some fringe publicists, some, you know, anti-Semitic cranks, you know, in the early 20th century that Hitler took off on. And so, one of the things that I do in my book, Darwinian Racism, is I lay to rest that caricature of Nazi ideology by showing that these ideas were actually fairly mainstream among serious scientists.

Some of the leading scientists, in fact, during the Nazi period. And we're not talking just here about scientists that the Nazis themselves had put into positions of authority. But these are people who were recognized in the scientific community before the Nazis came to power.

For example, the leading anthropologist in Germany was Eugen Fischer. And when I say leading anthropologist, he was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity, which was one of the most prestigious positions in the German academic world.

I mean, it'd be like holding a Harvard or Yale professorship or something like that. In fact, it was even better than a Harvard or Yale professorship in some ways, because they were not even required to teach.

That was just a research position, but extremely prestigious. So, Eugen Fischer received this position in 1927, which was six years before the Nazis came to power. So, it's not like the Nazis, you know, catapulted him into this position.

In fact, it's, if you look at how things actually work themselves out, Fischer had more influence on Hitler and Nazi ideology than vice versa, the reality is. Fischer was a staunch racist who believed that races were unequal.

He believed that they were, he believed in the Darwinian struggle for existence between races. And he was even going to serve on committees, once the Nazis did come to power, Fischer was going to serve on committees, drawing up racial policies for the Nazis, and drawing up eugenics policies for the Nazis.

So, he was going to be a contributing to the Nazi worldview on the one hand, before the Nazis came to power, but then he also was going to be promoting Nazi policies based on this worldview, once the Nazis did come to power.

He was also a participant in a program to sterilize those German children who were half black, who had been born from the African, the French African troops after World War I. There was several hundred half black, half German babies that had been born in the period right after World War I, and Fischer was very strongly involved in the program that the Nazis ran, which was, by the way, completely illegal.

The Nazis never passed a law to legis, to legalize this, they just did it behind the scenes, but he helped to verify, to sort of identify who were these people, and he served in a committee to try to draw up the ways to do it.

So, he was fully on board with this Nazi program of sterilizing these people who were half black. So, this was not just being done by, you know, cranks on, you know, who were, you know, on the margins of society.

These were serious scientists who were following his policies, and Fischer is just one example among many at the time as well. And again, there's, again, I refer you to my book if you want to look at more examples of that.

Just one more example, though, that I think is kind of interesting is Conrad Lorenz. Conrad Lorenz was a, is a Nobel Prize winning biologist who won his Nobel Prize after the Nazi period. He was a young scientist during the time of the Nazi period.

He's from Austria, and he won his Nobel Prize for his study of animal behavior. But during the Nazi period, Lorenz, in 1940, wrote an article in which he argued that Darwinian evolution was the best support for the Nazi view of race and racism.

And he even said that, in fact, his article was bashing creationists, who he thought were completely misguided. And so he's upholding Darwinian evolution and saying that Darwinian evolution is the best way to support racism during this time.

And so, Lorenz, as well as many other scientists at the time, were claiming Darwinian sanction for their policies, such as sterilization, once the euthanasia program came on board, and for their racial policies as well.

American Eugenics, Immigration Restriction, and Margaret Sanger

Now, one mistake that some people make, too, is that they think, well, that's just the Germans. And that's who I've talked about primarily up to this point. My, most of my research has been done on the Germans.

I've been looking at the the Nazis and the German scientists and such. But there also were Americans and British men and women who embraced similar kinds of ideas, too. So let me just give you a couple of examples here of early 20th century American scientists who embraced ideas that are fairly similar to Eugen Fischer and some of the other German scientists.

Henry Fairfield Osborne was a very prominent scientist. He was a professor at Columbia University in New York City beginning in 1891. He was a paleontologist. He was thoroughly committed to Darwinian ideology.

He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History. But he argued that Darwinian evolution had produced the racial inequalities that he thought were around within the human species. And he even wrote the preface to the book by a white supremacist named Madison Grant.

Madison Grant wrote a book in the early 20th century called The Passing of the Great Race. And Madison, this was one of the most influential books promoting Nordic racism or the idea really of white supremacy in this period right at the beginning of the 20th century.

And Osborne was fully on board with those ideas, so much so that he wrote the foreword to, or preface rather, to that book. Osborne was also the co-founder of the American Eugenics Society. So he was completely on board with the eugenics program as well.

Another key figure in the early American eugenics movement, really the leading figure with really within the German, excuse me, the American eugenics movement was Charles Davenport. Charles Davenport was a professor of biology for a while at Harvard and for a while at the University of Chicago in the 1890s and early 1900s.

He was an avid Darwinist and he believed that eugenics was based upon Darwinism. In 1904 Davenport became the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which was a key center for eugenics in the United States.

In fact, it was really the center for eugenics research and publications in the early part of the 20th century. In 1929 Davenport, just to show his racist bent, published a book called Race Crossing in Jamaica.

And in that book he argued that racial mixing leads to biological degeneration, which by the way was a similar idea that the Nazis were peddling during the 1930s as well. So Davenport believed many of these ideas too.

Also Davenport, together with some of his close colleagues at Cold Springs Harbor, pushed very hard to get restrictive immigration legislation in the United States based on their views of scientific racism.

The idea was that they thought that Eastern and Southern Europeans were inferior to Northern Europeans. They thought that East Asians, Chinese, and such were inferior biologically to Northern Europeans.

And so they called on Congress to put immigration restrictions on, and this passed Congress, largely based upon scientific racism of Davenport and others. Again, this is being pushed by scientists. This is not just, you know, something being pushed by some cranks.

And again, these are American scientists too. This is not just going on in Nazi Germany. Now of course the Nazis were the most fanatical ones about promoting some of these ideas of eugenics and scientific racism, but they were ideas that were percolating through the ideology of Americans as well.

Another key figure, and many of you may be more familiar with this one, is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. She was also intensely racist and believed that birth control would help to reduce the Black population.

And so she was using her birth control as a way of eugenics, but it was also a race-based view of eugenics as well. So in any case, the scientific racism was fairly prominent in the early part of the 20th century.

Again, in the United States as well as in Nazi Germany. It was going to persist in Germany longer than in the United States because in the United States in the 1920s and 30s, anthropology, especially under the influence of Franz Boas at Columbia University, who was one of the most prominent anthropologists of the early 20th century in the U .S., began emphasizing cultural determinism rather than biological determinism.

And so he began turning away from race as an explanation for human behavior and such. And so anthropology and sociology and such by the 1930s and 40s in the United States was moving away from scientific racism.

In Germany, of course, in the 1930s and early 40s, the Nazis were in power, and so they were still promoting scientific racism, which was going to diminish after World War II in Germany once the Nazis were defeated.

White Nationalism, Neo-Nazism, and Darwinian Biology Today

Now, we might think then, okay, well, the Nazis were defeated, scientific racism waned in the mid to late 20th century. So why do we need to worry about any of this today? Well, interestingly, as I suggested toward the top of my talk when I was talking about the Buffalo shooting that just took place this past weekend, there are quite a number of white nationalists today who are spreading very similar ideas, and that's why sometimes they're called neo-Nazis.

Sometimes they refer to themselves as alt-right. Sometimes refer to themselves as white nationalists, white supremacists. You'll see all those terms used about them, but they are also promoting their racism on the basis of Darwinian biology.

So Richard Spencer, who was one of the key leaders of the alt-right, he got a lot more attention right around 2016 -2017 than he has in the last few years. But Spencer, who was one of these flamboyant leaders of the alt-right, said group differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection.

When he's talking about group differences, he's talking about racial differences. And then he also said racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution. He also said, quote, the preference for one's own race is a product of our evolutionary history.

So he not only thought that races were unequal because of evolutionary history, he also thought that our evolutionary history made us prefer our own race to other races there and built that into our psyches somehow.

So Spencer certainly sees his white nationalism being built upon Darwinian foundations. Likewise, there was a professor at California State University, Long Beach, a psychology professor who embraced evolutionary psychology.

His name is Kevin McDonald. He tried to explain anti-Semitism as a product of evolution, actually on both sides of it. He tried to explain that the Jews banding together and promoting their own welfare and essentially conspiring, in his view, conspiring against the other non-Jews was part of their built into them by their evolutionary competition in the past.

But he also thought that anti-Semitism was a reaction against the Jews based on evolutionary considerations. So he thought that there was this racial struggle for existence going on. And he promoted this in a number of books that are very widely read by white nationalists and promoted on a lot of white nationalist websites today.

Another book that's promoted on a lot of white nationalist websites today, and sometimes actually you get the PDF version of this on some white nationalist websites, is a book by Ragnar Redbeard. And this is a pseudonym.

We don't know who exactly wrote it. There's some guesses as to who wrote it. But Ragnar Redbeard wrote a book called Might is Right. And the subtitle of the book is Survival of the Fittest. And Redbeard's book was written back in the 1890s, but it didn't become very prominent until the 1960s when the leader of the satanic church, Anton LaVey, began promoting this book Might is Right.

Might is Right is one of the most vitriolic, incendiary pieces of social Darwinist literature I have ever read. And I'm an expert on social Darwinism, so I've read a lot of it. This is really one of the worst pieces.

It's very Nietzschean. It's very social Darwinist, very anti-Christian in its orientation. And this book is being promoted on a lot of white nationalist websites. In fact, in 2019, there was a young man who shot up the Gilroy Garlic Festival.

Maybe some of you remember this just three years ago, little less than three years ago, who shot up the Gilroy Garlic Festival. And just before he did that mass shooting, he posted to his social media that everyone should read this book Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.