Luke Ford

According to Wikipedia:

In 2015, Young wrote an article for the Australian magazine Quadrant entitled “The fall of meritocracy”. In it he advocated what he termed “progressive eugenics”. Young proposed that when the technology for genetically engineered intelligence is practical it should be allowable for a decision to be made by poor parents with low IQs over which embryos should be allowed to develop using intelligence as a marker. “It could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility”, he wrote.

Young attended a conference in May 2016 on Eugenics which was secretly convened at University College London in preparation for another landestine conference in Toronto later in 2016 at which he gave a speech.

I hadn’t planned to comment on any of the lies and smears, but some stuff is so grotesquely slanderous you cannot let it go unchallenged https://t.co/qgg24bS6oX

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) January 11, 2018

Wow, that's what I call an honourable defence – insightful, frank and nail on head by Toby Young's editor @FraserNelson – @toadmeister shown in much more rounded light than recent hyperbole has allowed: https://t.co/ds0sRhUa9k

— Claire Fox (@Fox_Claire) January 7, 2018

'We should forgive Toby Young his smutty tweets, no matter how awful they are'.

Academic Phillip Blond tells @juliaHB1 that @toadmeister will fight the 'East German-style totalitarian culture' seen at many universities and we should give him a chancehttps://t.co/L8jPq9WrK1 pic.twitter.com/FtHusVf0na

— talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) January 4, 2018

This is a thread about the controversy surrounding my appointment to the Office for Students. I've also posted a version of it on @facebook https://t.co/zKJsohDMga 1/

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) January 3, 2018

When I took Toby Young for lunch on June 16, 2003, he wasn’t eager to talk about race, IQ and the Bell Curve. He thought I was weirdly obsessed with the topic and wondered why I kept bringing it up when it made him so uncomfortable.

Luke: “Did you read The Bell Curve?”

Toby: “No. I read a long essay about it in The New Republic, but I’m not a big believer in genetic determinism. Both my father and my maternal grandfather died with all their hair whereas I’m almost completely bald.”

Luke: “Do you think the average level of intelligence is the same between the races?”

Toby: “The Bell Curve made a big impression on you, huh? In New York, my experience was that the smartest and funniest people I met tended to be gay Jewish men. So whatever genetic advantages they enjoy, they’re not about to pass them on.”

Luke: “Do you think the average black person is as smart as the average white person?”

Toby: “Yes. I don’t think there’s any scientific basis for thinking there’s any difference. You can’t disregard social factors when it comes to a person’s IQ. To say it’s determined by race is simply untrue. I’ve got a low IQ, so naturally, I completely disregard it as a measure of intelligence. The few black people I met in New York tended to be very nice and sympathethic.”

Luke: “How do you feel about the number of Jamaicans in Britain?”

Toby: “I like the fact that contemporary Britain is a very multicultural society. The area I live in in London, Shepherds Bush, is a real multicultural area, much more so than any area I lived in in New York. There’s something nice about people from completely different worlds going about their business together. It gives the neighborhood a vibrant texture. There’s something very unpleasant about more racially segregated neighborhoods. Why would anyone want to live in them?”

Luke: “Low crime rates?”

Toby: “The crime rate in Shepherds Bush is fairly high but not as high as less multicultural areas. People who commit street crimes will go to slightly wealthier areas to commit those crimes. I’ve never been mugged. My house has never been burgled. My house has never been broken into. They say a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. If I’m ever the victim of a street crime, maybe I will change my mind.”

Next Time Plead Ignorance, Toby

Colbycosh.com writes: I don’t
imagine anyone exactly likes being hit with questions about their views
on race by Luke Ford, the muckraking porn journalist turned conflicted
Orthodox Jewish convert. But most of them probably handle it less catastrophically
than the ordinarily quite clever British gadfly/author Toby Young:

Luke: “Did you read The Bell Curve?”

Toby: “No. I read a long essay about it in the New Republic, but I’m
not a big believer in genetic determinism. Both my father and my maternal
grandfather died with all their hair whereas I’m almost completely bald.”

I’m sure I have readers who are almost as ignorant of genetics as I am,
yet recognize–having been through, say, the tenth grade–how absurd it
is to imagine that a trait appearing only in males must be passed on only
through males. Not only that, but he imagines “genetic determinism” to
mean that one is always and in every respect exactly like one’s parent–and,
moreover, hasn’t heard that male pattern baldness is known, with a fantastically
high degree of confidence, to be, er, genetically determined. (OMIM
has a brief history of the relevant research.) Of all the potential
reasons to “not be a big believer” in genetic determinism, Toby picked
one of the very lousiest.

Toby Young’s Party

I arrive at 6:55 PM, 6/16/03, at 150 South Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The screening room is next door to the William Morris Agency, where I was fired (from my position as a temporary assistant) in July of 1997 for giving my book to an agent’s assistant who requested it. The guy responsible for firing me, Ben Silverman, went on to package such hit TV shows as Who Wants to be a Millionaire? He’s now an independent producer.

In the lobby, I meet Richard Rushfield, an unassuming-looking writer from Vanity Fair (where he worked with Toby). We walk together to the screening room.

I see Cathy Seipp and her 14-year old daughter “Cecile.” I relax. I know there’s an adult around, a lifeguard on duty.

Toby holds court with several admiring young women.

Cathy re-introduces me to the luminous Jenny Isaacson and her husband Barry, an independent movie producer.

I regale them with tales of my lunch with Toby and how PC and carefully spoken he was. Toby pitches in with renditions of my particularly incendiary questions.

Cathy says I need to cut out my racial questions.

Cathy, Barry, Toby, and David Poland tell me that crime is not significantly about race and give me myriad examples.

Cathy says Chinatown has the least crime of any area in LA. I say it’s because Chinatown is homogenous. Cathy says East LA is homogenous.

Others pile on that Santa Monica is homogenous yet has a high rate of crime.

David suggests crime has greatly to do with poverty. I say there are poor Orthodox Jews yet they don’t commit violent crimes. David says that’s because Orthodox Jews have evolved support systems. I reply – what does that say about Orthodox Jews? What does it say about groups that don’t evolve such?

My heart is warmed that these good secular people have resisted the siren call of race. Good for them for clinging to the one true faith of many good-hearted American secularists – race does not matter. I congratulate their ability to have faith against all evidence, to believe because it is absurd. They make a Christian blush with their unswerving piety.

Everybody in this room of non-racists is white. Why not use a fine service like rentanegro.com to remedy such an evil?

Chaim Amalek writes: “I propose a new line of inquiry, and perhaps a new sort of business for Luke. Ask elite people (producers, bloggers, etc.) how many close friends they have. Then ask them to give the names of those of their close friends who also are black or Mexican. Contact them to confirm said friendship and ethnicity, then turn that into a book: “Some of My Best Friends . . . White Elites Who Befriend Negroes and Mexicans.””

David “Hot Button” Poland writes Luke: “Good for you for clinging to the one true faith of most American racists – race is the controlling factor. I congratulate your ability to have hate blindly against all evidence, to believe because it is absurd.

“Only someone who has never really suffered the sting of bias could wish such a simple-minded standard on others… or someone who is intentionally self-delusional. It gives false comfort to believe crime or greed or power can be understood by attaching the attributes to races, creeds or colors. But that is the most dangerous illusion of all. Which is not to say that there are not money-grubbing Jews, criminal Blacks, horny Hispanics, etc, etc, etc. But a Jew would tell you that the success of their culture is based on a prioritization of education, a strong community and the sense of being hated across the globe… and all the millions of variations within those ideas. Hatred begins with simplification.”

I talk to Rob Long for 15-minutes. I begin with the Writers Guild debate between Robert Scheer and David Horowitz. Long was invited to participate on the panel but he was out of the country. Long wondered why Scheer and Horowitz, professional debaters, were invited on the panel, when they weren’t in the industry and the panel was supposedly about blacklisting and censorship in the industry.

Long says there was no point to the panel. There is no blacklisting and censorship in the industry. People don’t lose their jobs for their political views.

I asked if there any working writers with whacky repellant extremist views. He said no because those type of people don’t tend to be in touch with reality enough to do good work.

I wonder why religion plays such a minor role in Hollywood entertainment. My producer friend says it is the Jews. Most of the Jews in Hollywood are secular and they fear a pogrom is on the way when people start taking religion seriously. When this producer walked into a meeting after Al Gore selected Orthodox Jew Joe Lieberman as his running mate, two secular Jews told that this would sink Gore’s chances because so much of America hates Jews.