Convenient Delusion: Money = Intelligence
How “scientific racism” has become the justification for a Palantir Reich.
I have been writing about the racist, genocidal ideology behind much of the billionaire class for several years. But until recently, they have generally used rhetorical fig leaves to create room for deniability.
Apparently, no more.
The richest man in the world publicly agrees that money and intelligence are essentially the same: Elon Musk thinks being poor means you have “low intelligence and low self control.” The implied corollary, of course, is that people with money, like him, are automatically smarter—and commit less crime.
This is the underlying delusion driving the broligarchy, the PayPal Mafia, or whatever label you choose for the Silicon Valley fascists that helped give us Donald Trump: Musk, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, David Sacks, Curtis Yarvin, and their collaborators.
It’s not just white supremacy they’re promoting. It’s capital supremacy: money equals intelligence. It is often the delusion of the powerful to make themselves believe that they were just born better.
To evaluate this claim, here is a compilation of clips from Musk, Thiel, Yarvin, and the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp. These are not particularly smart men; they are just high-functioning psychopaths willing to be the most amoral operators.
Psychopath is not meant as a pejorative label here; I mean it in clinical terms. These men all exhibit low affective empathy—they don’t feel for other people. Generally, psychopathy and affective empathy are highly inversely correlated, while cognitive empathy—the ability to think through what someone else might be feeling—is somewhat less inversely correlated.
This means most psychopaths can pretend to have empathy when it’s convenient—but don’t experience the same emotional consequences.
Scientific racism, eugenics, and social Darwinism are all related, discredited concepts which seek out a rationale for a stratified society based on intrinsic characteristics. These ideas became popular in the late 19th century, and were later promoted by five presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Donald Trump.
This just-released ad for Jasmine Crockett’s Senate bid illustrates this attitude—consisting solely of a compilation of Trump calling her “low IQ”—an epithet he pathologically applies only to Black people.
Trump‘s recent comments about Somalians being “garbage” because their country is fraught with poverty and violence is another example. This was followed up by Stephen Miller who said openly that Democrats have a plan for the “Somalification of America.”
“In other words, when you see the state of Somalia, that’s what they want for America, the end of the day, because it’s easier to rule over an empire of ashes than it is for the Democratic Party to rule over a functioning western high-trust society with a strong middle class.”
Importantly, as of several months ago, Stephen Miller’s wife Katie works for Elon Musk as his assistant—although now she splits time doing a podcast—featuring guests like Elon Musk. She is a direct node between two people who believe they are superior to everyone else—and think they have the power to make their racist vision happen.
At the same time, the theocratic Supreme Court just decided to take a case on birthright citizenship—which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment. If they decide to somehow weaken or overturn it, tens of millions more citizens would be at risk—mostly brown and Black people.
Pete Hegseth’s serial murder of Venezuelans on boats in the Caribbean is another deliberate signal of the regime’s attitude towards lives it feels are inferior.
All of it is part of a concerted effort to force a massive ethnographic shift on America. The rapid buildup and deployment of violent paramilitary ICE, CBP, and HSI agents to hunt and kidnap brown people is just the prelude to a darker and more comprehensive vision: deliberately enforcing a racial monoculture.
These 19th century ideas persist because they fill a psychological and rhetorical need:
People who do immoral things need a story to tell themselves and to others.
The story here goes that a special group of people has been elevated to power and granted obscene wealth strictly due to their incredible intelligence alone. The reason they control trillions of dollars is not their willingness to lie, defraud, and steal their way into power; it is their intrinsic genius.
For example, after the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, gave a bizarre interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that many thought was a sign of drug abuse, the company put out a statement from him blaming his behavior on being “neurally divergent.”
But he didn’t stop there. The statement also claims his neural divergence is a “rare ability” that lets him “see past performative ideologies” and perceive things others can’t. This means, according to Alex Karp, that AI technology “is biased in our favor” and people like him will help solve “the West’s most urgent problems.”
This is just short of claiming he’s in the X-Men. It’s reverse-ableist propaganda conferring special status to himself as a member of some kind of evolutionary leap in humanity who will save “the West.” As a white, male, neurodivergent person like Alex Karp, I find it extremely insulting.
The truth is that Karp’s company is absurdly overvalued, a cult stock, and after he struggled to formulate a rationale for it on stage, his excuse was essentially: “You can trust me. I’m much smarter than you are.”
In 2011, the man who gave Karp his job, Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir and co-founder of the PayPal Mafia, argued on the same side as professional scientific racist Charles Murray—who wrote the infamous book The Bell Curve—that some people just aren’t smart enough to go to college.
This is how the PayPal-antir elite see themselves—as the very top of a pyramid of humanity with Somalis on the bottom as “garbage,” Black people as “low IQ,” and brown people as worthy of being forcibly deported by the tens of millions.
I would argue that they are on top of a different pyramid—a pyramid of personality disorders with malignant Dark Tetrad types like Thiel, Musk, Miller, and Trump at the apex. It is not intelligence that correlates with money; it is the willingness to be more immoral and anti-human in how you weaponize it.
As I wrote in 2022, the Big Problem is that we sort all the psychopaths to the top:
Under-regulated capitalism has allowed a strain of raging psychopathy to take control of key sectors of our way of life, including business and politics.
At the root of this dynamic is the fact that our system rewards people who don’t care about others because they have an array of options that people with empathy don’t have. It’s hard to be competitive when your competition is willing to do shit you would never be willing to do. So the people who are willing usually win.
You can’t defeat this defect in the system through moral argument, or politics—you can only defeat it by changing the system itself.
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We're living in an Upside Down world ⁉️ Excellent article and will reStack ASAP 🙏
Brilliant analysis Jim. Appreciate you!