Fred Reed‘s columns are often good fun to read, as he has a rather acerbic and highly entertaining style. For those who don’t know anything about him, he is quite a prolific writer. He is a US Marine and Vietnam veteran, who was severely wounded in the jungles of Southeast Asia – so badly, in fact, that he had glass shards buried deep within his eyeballs which had to be surgically extracted. (As surgeries go, from what little I understand of such things, this is among the most painful and horrible procedures out of the lot – which is saying something, given how awful surgery in general is.) He has written quite a few books, and you can find a full detailed autobiography on his Amazon author’s page.

Put simply, Mr. Reed is a brave, tough, capable man who has an opinion and is not afraid to defend it. Good for him. I admire that. But there have definitely been times when his rather acerbic commentary has veered right off the path from truth and straight into nonsense. His takedown of the Pentagon reformers, for example, was a particularly stupid and egregious attempt to smear those within the US military, such as Col. James Burton and Col. John Boyd, who tried to push the top brass in the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel to adopt weapons and technologies that actually freakin’ WORKED within a reasonable budget and schedule.

If Mr. Reed had been right and the Pentagon reformers wrong, the American military today would not be an $800 billion paper tiger thoroughly soaked in sulphuric acid. The F-35 Turducken Plane would be a highly reliable, completely stable, runaway success. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle would not have had such a troubled production history. The F-15, F-16, and A-10 would all have been disastrous ventures, and the USAF would have abandoned the idea of creating fit-for-purpose aircraft that perform very specific functions very, very well. (Oh, wait, they did do that – which is why we have the F-35 Joint Strike Flying Piano.) And the US military might actually stand a chance at winning wars, instead of getting ground down to bloody pulp in stalemates around the world.

Mr. Reed isn’t afraid of controversy, but he isn’t always right. His latest venture into controversial topics concerns his views about Jewish intelligence and the puzzle of relative Jewish outperformance in various fields.

The Jewish Question

The first article that Fred Reed published on the subject of Jewish outperformance referenced the notion that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of approximately 115:

Among IQists, it is doctrine that blacks have a mean IQ of 85, fifteen points below the Hagvaca average of 100, and this is held to account for the lack of success of blacks. Searching the literature reveals authorities asserting that Ashkenazi Jews have a mean IQ of 115, as far above ordinary or Hagvaca whites as whites are above blacks. Eureka, and all. Equal differences of input produce equal differences of outcome. N’est-ce pas?.

Hagvacas don’t want, and Jews know better than, to emphasize this. Yet there it is.

One finds such as this, “Ashkenazi Jews, who make up 80 percent of the Jews in the world today, have, on average, the highest IQs of any ethnic group in the world. While Asians are often touted as the smartest people in the world, Ashkenazi Jews as a group average 115 on an IQ test—eight points higher than Asians and dramatically higher than the world average of 79.1. Ashkenazim skills in verbal reasoning, comprehension, working memory, and mathematics are simply astounding—the group averages 125 on an IQ test of verbal reasoning. Since 1950, 29 percent of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who represent a mere 0.25 percent of the global population.”

He got quite a bit of flak for this, and rightly so, because as others (including myself) have pointed out before, the notion that Ashkenazi Jews have such a high average IQ is not supported by actual data or evidence. Our Beloved and Dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Vox Day the Most Malevolent and Terrible absolutely shredded the Crazy Christ, Jordan B. Peterson, for using the exact same silly argument. And all that OBADSDL(PUBH) did was use some numbers to prove a basic point.

Unfortunately, Mr. Reed did not back down on his views even when supplied with hard evidence that very clearly contradicted his arguments:

What explains the seething resentment, other than a sense of inferiority? There is a close affinity between Jew worriers and anti-vaccers, and with conspiracy theorists in general. I have not actually heard anyone saying that Jews contain microchips or nanoparticles to alter our DNA, but I expect this any day now. There is the same sense of some unseen evil, a foul miasma, like swamp gas, palpable, almost visible but just out of the range of vision. behind everything. The (Jews, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the Davos crowd, the UN, World Government, the Democrats).

For example, CTs believe not only in black helicopters, FEMA camps into which conservatives will be stuffed come the Reset, and a half-dozen (at least) conspiracies involving the virus, but also that Jews destroyed the Twin towers and killed JFK. I sleep with a loaded pistol.

The conspiracy game would fascinate psychiatrists if they weren’t already crazier than their patients. On the same page of the Vacca whacsites you can find articles arguing on powerful authority that the virus doesn’t exist, and that it is a conspiracy to depopulate the earth, that the needles contain microchips to track us and nanoparticles to reprogram our DNA for some reason probably not desirable. This is not parody. I know people who believe all of these things. But wouldn’t the nanoparticles jam up the needles? And if the earth were depopulated, who would the microchips track? These are deep waters.

Then, always, there is white Christian civilization, which Jews are said to be destroying. If so, they are not very good at it, since the said civilization has proved the most successful to date, but we will not worry about this. Does not one have in logic if any to believe either A, that Jesus is the Son of God and Jews His chosen people, in which case one might expect them to have a leg up in life, or B, that Christianity is a fraud, arguably perpetrated by Jews, and that the faith has no more truth in it than an elaborated Cargo Cult? And if Jews are good enough for God, shouldn’t they be good enough for us’

As arguments go, this is not merely bad, it is juvenile in the extreme.

An Innumerate and Illiterate Argument

Let us go over the actual hard data concerning IQ. Here are some basic facts, and I will do my level best to substantiate the data wherever possible. If The Male Brain or any of my other Jewish readers has better data, please share it with me so that I can update this information – I don’t read or understand Hebrew, so I’m working with one hand tied behind my back here:

• The total population of Israel is approximately 9 million people as of 2019, according to the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics – though, if you visit the CBS page itself and try to look at their monthly bulletins, that goes all kinds of screwy in English and I have no idea why;
• Of that 9 million, 74.24% are Jews of different backgrounds, and 20.95% are Arabs;
• Data on the proportion of Israeli Jews who are Ashkenazim are remarkably difficult to find in English – the most recent data that I could find date back to 2013, wherein apparently 2.8 million Ashkenazi Jews lived in Israel at that time;
• Given the population growth rates and immigration rates of the Jewish return, it is safe to assume that this number is substantially higher today, given that the population of Israel was about 8.134M in that year;
• Therefore, given that the Ashkenazi proportion of the population of Israel in 2013 was about 34.4% ( = 2.8 / 8.1345), and given immigration rates and birth rates, let us ASSUME that about 40% of Israeli Jews are Ashenazi by origin;
• That gives us about 3.61M ( = 9.021M * 40%) Ashkenazi Jews in Israel, in total;
• The average IQ of Israel, as measured across multiple tests and databases, is about 95;
• The average IQ of Arabs is estimated at 84, as of 2010 – compare this with an average Muslim country IQ of 81, just for shits and giggles;

OK, we have some basic facts and numbers. Let’s put them together.

If Israel’s population is 74.24% Jewish – of which about 40% are Ashkenazi – then the percentages look like this:

• 29.70% of all Israelis ( = 74.24% * 40%) are Ashkenazim;
• 44.54% of all Israelis (= 74.24% * 60%) are non-Ashkenazim;
• 20.95% of all Israelis are Arabs;
• We can account for 95.19% of all of Israel’s IQ based on the total population proportions, which leaves 4.81% unaccounted for;
• Since I have no hard data on the IQ statistics of that percentage of the population, I will ASSUME, for simplicity’s sake, that this segment has an average IQ equal to the average IQ of the entire country of Israel, i.e. 95;

Based on this information, the one thing that we do not know is, what is the average IQ of non-Ashkenazi Jews within Israel? We can solve for this easily using some basic mathematics.

Therefore, if we assume that Ashkenazim have an average IQ of 115 – and we’re just taking Fred Reed at his word here – then a weighted average calculation tells us that:

29.70% * 115 + 44.54% * X + 20.95% * 84 + 4.81% * 95 = 95

This is a very, very simple equation with one variable to solve for. We are solving specifically for the IQ of the non-Ashkenazi Jewish population. A little elementary MAFF will tell us that this number comes to:

87

So essentially, in order to believe this idea that the Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 115, you have to believe that non-Ashkenazi Israeli Jews have an average IQ barely higher than that of the Arabs with whom they share the neighbourhood.

Does that sound even remotely plausible to you? To me, it sounds idiotic – not least because I have actually been to Arab countries (Egypt, the UAE, and Oman), as well as to Israel. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise that Israel is significantly more advanced than you would imagine a country with a majority of people with an average IQ of 87.

Based on actual hard data from other countries – what there is of such, at any rate – that claim is balderdash.

The average IQ from a sample of 136 adult Jews in Serbia is 103.5 – impressive, but SURE AS SHIT not 115, and assuredly not 87 either. This is in line with what OBADSDL(PBUH) Vox Day predicted 2.5 years ago when this silly topic first came up.

Racism Not Required

The reality is that this notion of highly superior Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is a complete fiction based on biased, cherry-picked, and poorly conducted studies. Even Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, two scholars whose work is otherwise superb and has held up repeatedly against every attack, published this particularly arrant form of nonsense in The Bell Curve, and have never retracted it, to my knowledge.

The deeper you look, the worse and more absurd the story gets. Those results from Serbia that I reference above can be downloaded and read for free. The paper in question lists the IQs of Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Mizrachim, and Ethiopian Jews, and then does an actual assessment using actual human beings – instead of theoretical constructs and “peer-reviewed” papers – to do some real research.

The reality is that Ashkenazim have an average IQ of about 104. That’s pretty damned good, no doubt. And the sample size from the Serbian study referenced above is statistically valid using a t-test – 22 Ashkenazi participants is not large enough to conform to a Gaussian distribution, but a t-distribution with 22 degrees of freedom works fine. And even if you take the US IQ scores and not the British ones, the average Ashkenazi IQ is only about 106 – again, NOT 115.

In other words, you don’t have to be a foaming-at-the-mouth racist to realise that the numbers just don’t make sense. There is nothing mathematically valid about the argument at all.

Other Explanations for Jewish Outperformance

Given that the numbers don’t add up, what, then, explains relative Jewish outperformance in numerous fields, including academia, business (especially finance), politics, and other areas?

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise the reality that Jews outside of Israel tend to stick to their own. You simply have to keep your eyes open to observe it.

When I lived in the USA, I could see for myself that Jews clustered very clearly in specific areas. If you drive up to Englewood, NJ, for instance, you’ll quickly realise that the entire place is basically a Jewish suburb – and, not at all coincidentally, it is a very wealthy one.

Furthermore, when you spend time in the fields where Jews congregate, you will quickly find that they hire their own and promote their own. I saw this personally, repeatedly, when I worked in banking and finance. A disproportionate number of people in the field were Jews. They strongly preferred to hire Jews, and they strongly preferred to work with Jews.

There is nothing particularly new or surprising about this. We all do it. Most other races are far more brazen about doing it than Jews are – Indians use a particularly nasty form of “kiss-up-kick-down” management and are notorious for implementing rigid caste hierarchies in Western workplaces, and Chinese managers simply will not hire Whites (or Indians, for that matter) into their teams if a Chinese person is available for the same purpose.

No Correlation Between Jewish Expulsion and National Performance

Furthermore, if Jews are such great outperformers, and indeed so critical to society, why is it that, when they were expelled from England in 1290, France in 1306, and Spain in 1492, each of these nations went on to considerable achievements of national and imperial greatness within a century of that time?

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League and other organisations would have you believe that the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, in particular, was catastrophic to the economic and cultural development of that country. That is a flat-out lie. Spain went on to become the dominant power in all of Europe in the 16th Century, and was responsible for some of the most prolific military, scientific, and intellectual output of that period – after the Jews left.

As far as I can tell, there is no particularly strong correlation between expelling Jews from a land, and the subsequent cultural, aesthetic, economic, and philosophical achievements of that land. The USA is about the only example that I can think of where the presence of Jews has contributed considerably to the economic and political development (in good AND bad ways) of the host country.

None of this should be seen in any way as advocacy for the expulsion of Jews. Nor should it be seen as an attempt to persuade people to accept more Jews than the native population is willing to bear. All that I am trying to point out here is that the presence or absence of Jews in a country appears to be, at best, irrelevant to that country’s actual outcomes – and may be deleterious to it, though I draw no conclusions at all on this subject.

Concluding Remarks

Returning to what Fred Reed wrote, and continues to write, about Jews and those who criticise them, you don’t need to be a racist, a conspiracy theorist, or an outright idiot to see that what he has to say is not supported by the evidence. Jews do exhibit somewhat higher than average intelligence. But their intelligence levels are not so much higher as to justify claims of a 115 average Ashkenazi IQ.

Nor is it in the realm of wingnuttery to claim that Jews band together and look after their own. They plainly do. All you have to do to verify this is to examine the evidence on the ground with your own two eyes. If you spend any time whatsoever in New York’s Diamond District, you will note very clearly that Jews self-select for their own kind when hiring and doing business there. That is the simple truth, and there is nothing wrong about it – every race and every tribe, with the rather conspicuous exception of Whites, does this.

Deriding and demeaning those who point out these basic things as racists is not an argument. I have lived among and around Jews for years and have visited the state of Israel. I like Jews, personally, and wish them well. That does not mean, however, that I am going to let them get away with defaming and demeaning those who criticise them when their attempts at controlling large sections of the culture, financial interests, and ruling class of a country go very badly wrong.

The fact that much of the neoclown coterie that got the Western world into so much trouble was, and remains, Jewish, is but one data point that stands against them. Jews are not the world’s wisest or smartest people – indeed, God selected them to carry His word to the entire world precisely BECAUSE they were the lowest of all peoples at the time.

It is well past time that we dropped this pretence of extreme Jewish intelligence as an explanation for their relative outperformance, and looked to other, more sensible, more factual explanations instead.