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Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.
The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.
While the tone of your post is a bit aggressive, I do strongly agree with this line of reasoning. I've always been skeptical of hard HBD because I grew up in a rural white town, where there was so much despair and economic struggling.
In my opinion culture is OBVIOUSLY the bigger factor than genes or IQ. And the rise and current downfall of most whites is actually the perfect example. White people used to rule the world with an iron fist, we roamed the seas and dominated everything we saw. Then our culture changed over time, and despite our very similar genetics to our ancestors of a few hundred years ago, we have... the problems we have now.
Some white people roamed the seas and conquered, but most stayed home. Part of culture/context/circumstance isn't how talent is developed, it's also what talents are brought to the surface and become visible.
Consider a toy example: Puerto Rican baseball players
Until 1989, Puerto Rico was treated as a Latin American nation by Major League Baseball, teams signed players at 16 for cash (and typically they had under the table agreements with trainers before the players came of age). Young prospects in Latin American countries can start earning money at a young age, often getting support from trainers before turning 16 if they showed promise. This has lead to Caribbean countries producing disproportionate talent relative to their population, because kids are incentivized to focus on baseball from a young age.
By contrast, in the United States, players can't be signed for cash, they can only be drafted after graduating high school (or attending college) at 18. Players in the draft (historically) got less money than international players, and they got it at a later age.
After the change, Puerto Rico produced fewer MLB players, and according to some reports a lot of athletic poor kids switched to soccer, where they could be signed at a younger age.
Let's take this as a toy model. Assume that 100%, or near enough, kids will pursue the dominant sport. Soccer and Baseball are different enough that there's probably almost no crossover between athletes who could do either at a professional level, genetically they're going to be two distinct groups. Assume for our toy model that 2% of Puerto Rican kids have the freakish foot-dexterity and cardio to play Soccer professionally; and a separate 5% of Puerto Rican kids have the tremendous eyesight and hand-eye coordination to play Major League Baseball.
Under one MLB regime, Puerto Rico will produce MLB stars. Under a different regime, it will produce soccer stars. The 2% that are genetically built for soccer will be merely good athletes if they pursue baseball, and the 5% that are genetically suited for baseball will be merely good athletes if they pursue soccer. Puerto Rico's overall athleticism hasn't changed, the genetics haven't changed, but what aspects are highlighted have changed.
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