The hashtag #roman empire has reportedly been viewed over a billion times on TikTok, with most videos women asking men the question: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? The surprising answer: a lot. Feminist historian Mary Beard, of course, says it’s because of male chauvinism [How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Expert has thoughts on the new TikTok trend, SkyNews, September 27, 2023]. Well, here’s one reason to think about it: I believe the rise and fall of Rome coincided with the rise and fall of Roman intelligence. Rome fell because its people were becoming less intelligent. And the same thing is happening today.

Indeed it is! My new paper proving that dysgenic breeding and immigration caused the fall of Rome is causing all the right mutants to froth at the mouth with cognitive dissonance. https://t.co/5m8eN5Wipx https://t.co/patkSs61td

— Edward Dutton (@jollyheretic) July 26, 2023

Many theories attempt to explain the Roman Empire’s collapse. It was overstretched, meaning it could no longer efficiently transport the necessary raw materials. Or it came up against problems that its elite could not solve, leading to the populace losing faith in these elites. The problem with these explanations is that they invite obvious questions. Why did Rome gradually become less efficient? Why were its elites decreasingly able to solve the problems of running a large empire?

The essence of intelligence is “solving problems.” Group-level intelligence is associated with all of the markers of civilization: wealth, numeracy, education, democracy, social trust, obedience to the law and just authority, and, importantly good health and public hygiene achieved with plumbing and sanitation. (This is explored in the book Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, by the late Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.)

We would then expect civilization to weaken selection for intelligence because it reduces environmental harshness and leads to improved living conditions: again,

See also: VDARE Video Supercut: Everything That Was Said About Immigration In The GOP Debate

In the interest of saving everyone’s time, we provide a supercut and transcript of what was said about immigration in the second GOP candidates debate, held in California’s Reagan Library on Wednesday night, September 27. It’s only 15 minutes of the one and three-quarter-hour debate.

Perhaps significant of the new globalist Fox News, two of the three moderators were immigrants: Stuart Varney from England (I knew him slightly when we were both financial journalists in lower Manhattan in the early 1980s), and Univision’s heavily accented Ilia Calderon, described as an “Afro-Latina,” from Colombia.

My take after arguably sparking America’s second Thirty Years’s War For Immigration Reform in 1992 (yes, we’re a bit late):

• We have to admit the GOP has come a long way on immigration.

As late as 2016, ¡Jeb! was still calling illegal immigration “an act of love” and clearly planning a massive Amnesty. Now all GOP hopefuls say they favor border control. They’re probably lying, of course, but it’s undeniably different from 2004, when Dubya, having proposed a super-massive Amnesty/ Immigration Surge, was able to pretend to attack John Kerry from the right because no one grasped what he had done, as Steve Sailer documented in this hilarious column.

• But no mention of reducing LEGAL immigration.

Much less an immigration moratorium. This is somewhat disappointing because Ron DeSantis has in the past implied skepticism about legal immigration. But, again, he failed to use the issue to outflank the field, and Trump.

• In fact, Chris Christie lets the mask slip and tells legal immigrants “we want you here in this country.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial Page–type mindless immigration enthusiasm is not dead, it’s  just hiding.

• And Mike Pence conspicuously evaded saying he’d deport DREAMers.

Pence betrayed Tom Tancredo during the Bush Amnesty Wars, and he too has obviously just been hiding during the Trump years (although he has learned to talk a good line on the Border).

• However, an emerging consensus on ending Birthright Citizenship.

The enterprising if slippery Vivek Ramaswamy

Subscribe to Ann Coulter’s Substack UNSAFE.

Earlier: Nikki Haley—GOP Consultants’ Great (Indian) Hope Against Trumpism

You’d think the one thing Republicans would have learned from the 2016 Trump campaign is that voters wanted something completely different from what the GOP had been offering.

For decades, Republicans had run on tax cuts, more military spending to fund the Forever Wars, and diversity-lite. But Trump proved that what voters wanted was a wall, mass deportations, and a white guy who wasn’t embarrassed about being white. The GOP was like a man who keeps giving his wife Super Bowl tickets for her birthday, when what she wants is a fur coat.

Unfortunately, Trump himself didn’t learn anything from the 2016 campaign, either. Once he got into office, he gave us Super Bowl tickets: tax cuts, more military spending to fund the Forever Wars, and diversity-lite.

Back when he was talking about Mexican rapists, anchor babies, Kate Steinle, sanctuary cities and a Muslim ban, Trump was a runaway hit with voters! Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Jeb! were left lying by the side of the road, mumbling about their immigrant relatives.

After six months of impotent rage as they watched Trump’s poll numbers rise, the Republican Establishment finally took its revenge the night of President Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address.

The instrument of their revenge was Nikki Haley. Appealing to Republicans’ diversity-lite side, Nikki is fairly bristling with implausible stories of racist America treating her and her family racistly in the 1970s (the darkest days of the Jim Crow South!). But the epilogue is that we have ”come a long way.” I, for one, am totally relieved that we have finally redeemed ourselves in Haley’s eyes.

Now, she’s running for president, as the perfect establishment candidate, designed to repel voters from coast to coast. Having Haley in the White House would be like having to watch ”Roots” every night. (Note to candidates: ”Being in the White House” includes being in the vice president’s office.)

At the 2016 State of the Union, President Obama

We reported extensively on the German home-schooling Romeike family (above) in 2013, when the Obama Administration weirdly resisted their asylum request:

• Obama Frees Foreign Criminals but Seeks to Deport German Homeschoolers, by Brenda Walker, March 19, 2013
• Memo From Middle America | Eric Holder’s DOJ Finds Some Foreigners It Wants To Deport—White Evangelical German Homeschoolers, by Allan Wall, March 21, 2013
• These GENUINE Asylees Merit Our Support: Sign The White House Petition!, by Paul Nachman, April 9, 2013
• Defining America Down—Jose Antonio Vargas (Yech!) And What’s At Stake In The Latest Amnesty/ Immigration Surge War, by James Kirkpatrick, April 16, 2013
• German Homeschoolers Lose Asylum Case in Court, by Brenda Walker, May 15, 2013
• Memo From Middle America | More On The Romeike Case—What’s Wrong With Wanting White Immigrants?, by Allan Wall, May 28, 2013
• Memo From Middle America | New Evidence Of What Romeike Homeschoolers Face In Germany—But Obama Still Prefers Fraudulent Mexican Asylees, by Allan Wall, October 6, 2013
• DHS Saves German Homeschool Family from Deportation, by Brenda Walker, March 5, 2014

Although the Obama Administration prevailed in court, it for some reason did not in the end  deport the Romeikes—see Memo From Middle America | The Homeschooling Romeikes Allowed To Stay—To Bolster Administrative Amnesty, by Allan Wall, April 8, 2014. But now the Biden Administration is trying to do it again: Evangelical Christian family begs Biden administration to stop their deportation back to Germany where it’s illegal to homeschool their kids—while MILLIONS pour across open US border, by Emma James, Daily Mail, September 25, 2023.

Background: 20th century Germany, having gone through the First and Second World Wars and been ruled by the Nazis, reacted by passing laws against various kinds of Wrongthinking, and by increasing German Federal control of education.

One of the ways the German government controls Wrongthinking: banning homeschooling.

Wikipedia says

Homeschooling is—between Schulpflicht (compulsory schooling) beginning with elementary school to 18 years—illegal in Germany. The illegality has to do with the prioritization of children’s rights over the rights of parents: children have the right to the company of other children and adults who are not their parents. For similar reasons, parents cannot opt their children out of sexual education classes because the state considers a child’s right to information to be more important than a parent’s desire to withhold it.^[21]

I have no idea what constitutes sex education in modern day Germany, and I’m not sure I want to, but I’m not reassured by stories like this: It’s not all anal sex’: the German schools exploring love, equality and LGBT issues, by Abby Young-Powell, Guardian, November 23, 2016.

Germany started modern sex education in 1969,

Earlier by Edward Dutton: “Brave And Kind”—Remembering Richard Lynn

Finally ending the Orwellian situation where Wikipedia couldn’t acknowledge evolutionary psychologist Richard Lynn’s passing because it won’t link to Politically Incorrect sources like VDARE.com or American Renaissance, a Main Stream Media outlet has published an obituary, more than a month after he died [Richard Lynn, evolutionary psychologist who declared his belief in the benefits of eugenics—obituary, The Telegraph, August 31, 2023]. But as Danish independent researcher Emil Kirkegaard, who worked with Lynn, has pointed out, the British newspaper’s send-off was quite an astonishing piece.

It's almost Straussian. "Look here's this guy, Richard, he's dead. His research was bad bad bad according to the people who gave us the replication crisis. Also here's literally 4 of his book covers, for work you shouldn't be reading. ;)"

— Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) September 5, 2023

It’s as if the anonymous writer wants the readers to realize that Lynn was logically correct, and wants them to read his research themselves. However, he also understands that he must disguise this desire as a Politically Acceptable condemnation of Lynn, though it is a condemnation that the intelligent reader—or the reader “in the know”—will be able to “see through.”

Kirkegaard’s term “Straussian” refers to German political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago. Strauss argued that great thinkers are socially and politically pressured not to openly express radical and original ideas. Accordingly, as one commentator puts it, “what they really think is true is found between the lines and often contradicts what they seem to say in the actual lines” [What is Straussianism (According to Strauss)?, by Peter Augustine Lawler, Society, 2011].

Thus, The Telegraph’s obituary begins with Lynn’s own words:

“Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent,” he said. “To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”

For all but the most emotional Leftist, the controversial nature of such a view, and that a senior academic held it, is spine-tingling clickbait.

The first paragraph went on to emphasize just what a notorious scientist Lynn was:

[H]is belief in the value of genetic selection to improve the quality of the human population, led to his being described as “one of the most unapologetic and raw ‘scientific’ racists operating today” and as an “unapologetic eugenicist.” [Both descriptions courtesy of the SPLC]

Although “scientific racism”