Shortly after the brutal murder of Renee Good at the hands of federal ICE agents, self-described “theocratic fascist” and conservative personality Matt Walsh took to X not just to defend the murder but to mock the murdered.
Calling Good a “lesbian agitator,” he wrote that she “gave her life to protect 68 IQ Somali scammers.”
Now there’s a lot to unpack in that statement. For example, notice how Walsh frames Good as a lesbian, referencing her queerness as a way to “other” Good, distance his anti-queer audience from her humanity as “not one of us,” and justify her murder.
But also look at how he also denigrates the humanity of Somali immigrants by referencing their allegedly low IQ — also a common rhetorical theme of Donald Trump’s insults.
IQ (intelligence quotient) is a standardized score intended to summarize a person’s performance on cognitive ability tests — especially abilities like reasoning, pattern recognition, working memory and problem-solving — relative to other people of the same age. In most widely used IQ test systems, scores are set to follow a roughly normal (bell-curve) distribution with an average (mean) of 100. Scores above 100 indicate above-average performance relative to peers and scores below 100 indicate below-average performance.
“The claim that Somalis have an IQ of 68 is low enough to feel absurd.”
Thus, the claim that Somalis have an IQ of 68 is low enough to feel absurd. (And please note how he both claims that Somalis have IQs indicating intellectual disability yet are able to competently scam the state government.) Is Walsh simply fabricating a number with the general implication that “Somalis are dumb?” Why be so specific?
Well, Walsh actually believes the average IQ of a Somali person is 68.
In February 2025, speaking about Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Somali, Walsh said: “You know what the average IQ in Somalia is? It’s — take a guess. It’s 68. … You know, if I — if you didn’t know anything about Somalia, you never heard of it before, but I just told you that, oh, there’s this country called Somalia and the average IQ is 68, you would make a lot of assumptions about what the country must be like. And in Somalia’s case, all of those assumptions would turn out to be true.”
Walsh paints Somalia as a violent, dangerous, failed state with a low GDP. And it’s true that Somalia’s volatility is precisely why there are so many Somali refugees living in Minnesota, but Walsh frames this as “Somalians are too stupid to have a country” rather than the truth, which is that Somalia was weakened by European colonialism before its collapse and hindered by ineffective and harmful international interventionism in the decades following, leading to its victimization by terrorist groups.
If the average IQ of a Somalian is 68, that is an effect, not a cause of their nation’s instability.
But where does Walsh get his numbers? In the clip mentioned above, he says “that estimate comes from a study that was done in the early 2000s, I think.” Whether he’s ignorant of the exact study or actively obfuscating the source isn’t clear, but what he’s referencing is a book called The Intelligence of Nations by Richard Lynn and David Becker. Lynn and Becker’s original work came out in 2002, with the latest edition published in 2019.
“Whether he’s ignorant of the exact study or actively obfuscating the source isn’t clear.”
Richard Lynn, who headlined the book, was a self-avowed “scientific racist” with a well-documented history of racist and anti-immigrant statements, including advocating for the “phasing out” of “incompetent societies.” In the book, Lynn and Becker conclude that Somalia’s national IQ is 68, based on one 2017 study published by the white supremacist magazine Mankind Quarterly.
That study, “A Study of Sex Differences in Intelligence of Somali Refugees in Kenya” — of which Lynn was part — reports cognitive test results for Somali refugee schoolchildren living in the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya. The researchers tested 2,440 students ages 8\ to 18 (1,443 boys and 997 girls with an average age of 13) in 2015 using Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Plus (SPM+).
These 2,440 refugee children then had their raw test scores converted to a “British-scaled IQ,” meaning their raw scores were compared to the British population average of 100. Thus, when these Somali refugee children scored a 68, that in no way means “Somalis have an IQ of 68.” It means this group of refugee-camp schoolchildren scored in a way that mapped to 68 when normed against British children.
Their score of 68, then, is only meaningful insofar as it is a measurement of how this group compares to the overall British population. It should be no surprise that refugee children dealing with the trauma of war and who have had limited or no formal schooling would perform poorly on a British standardized test when compared to the average British person.
Further, this study never was intended to be an indicator of the average intelligence of Somali adults. It is specifically about male-female discrepancies within the Dadaab refugee camp. The authors even state: “We also have to wonder whether the results obtained with these Somali refugees in Kenya permit any meaningful extrapolation to conditions in Somalia.”
So, to conclude, when Matt Walsh claims Somalis have a 68 IQ, he is relying on:
- A single study done in 2017, published by a white supremacist journal, that used child refugees as their test subjects, and whose authors explicitly questioned if their results could be extrapolated to the nation.
- A book written in 2019, published by a white supremacist and self-proclaimed racist, that utilized that study’s limited results and recommended accepting this result “with reservation.”
Walsh goes on to claim about this statistic that “there have been a lot of attempts to debunk this, none of them successfully.”
Well then, consider this the first.
Renee Good was killed because she cared enough about her neighbors to show up — because she refused to let fear be the final word in a city being terrorized by ICE raids. Matt Walsh’s tweet tries to turn that death into a punchline: a “lesbian agitator” who “gave her life” for people he calls “68 IQ Somali scammers.”
But that phrase is not analysis — it’s fascist and racist propaganda. It’s a rhetorical shortcut designed to strip both Good and Somali immigrants of their dignity in a single breath: to make both Good and the people she stood up for something less than human.
Josh Olds
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the forthcoming small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.