Godwin's Law has Been Demonstrated Yet Again

Godwin's Law has been demonstrated in a new post by David Klinghoffer, of BeliefNet, who is also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. The post concerns the tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. by James von Brunn, a clearly unhinged extremist who killed a security guard. Klinghoffer wastes no time in describing von Brunn in black and white terms: "James von Brunn, Evolutionist." He quotes a section of von Brunn's writings/ramblings:

As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically and behaviorally deprived mongrels.

Klinghoffer then writes:

This wacko [I love the compassionate term] despises Christianity, too, though not quite as much as he does Judaism. Like Hitler in Mein Kampf, he draws lessons from his interpretation of Darwinism. He's very big on dangers to the Aryan "gene pool." The subtitle of his book promies: "A New Hard-Hitting Exposé Of The JEW CONSPIRACY To Destroy The White Gene-Pool."

There are so many things wrong with this post, I am not sure where to start. For one thing,the whole "no Darwin, no Hitler" meme has been debunked so many times that the people that write about this subject who perpetuate it are either culpably ignorant or intentionally lying. Given the Discovery Institute's record, I am not sure which this is.

The second thing that is funny about this post is that von Brunn clearly had a very screwed up idea of what evolution is and Klinghoffer, because of his complete lack of understanding of evolutionary theory, missed it completely. If you selectively breed a population by using only a subset of that population, traits that would normally be masked in a large gene pool, get expressed. Very often these are bad traits that are lethal. Genetic history is replete with examples of societies that isolated themselves from other groups only to have very strange, not so good traits express themselves and then fix themselves in the population. The other thing that happens when you have a subset of a population isolate themselves, they become evolutionarily less viable because they cannot adapt as well to changing conditions.

James von Brunn wasn't an evolutionist. He was a white supremacist and a xenophobe. David Klinghoffer should have been smart enough to figure out the difference. Once again, crack research from the Discovery Institute!