Fitness influencer Dr. Mike Israetel has become embroiled in controversy after allegedly promoting eugenics and race realism in a now-deleted video from his secondary YouTube channel. The accusations emerged amid ongoing scrutiny of his academic credentials and professional conduct.
The controversy intensified when content creator Anabolic Stick drew attention in his recent YouTube video to Mike’s two-year-old video titled “Is intelligence really different among the races?” which Israetel quietly removed following criticism of his doctoral dissertation.
In the footage, Israetel reportedly stated: “I 100% acknowledge because I’m literate that race is truly a biological construct. It is deep. It pervades almost everything and and it has realworld differences in ability that are complicated.”
Israetel continued in the deleted video: “Yes, race is real. Yes, race differences exist. Yes, even in every single quality that you think is too politically incorrect to talk about.” He explicitly avoided elaborating further, citing fear of cancellation, stating: “If I fill in the blanks of what I mean, your boy’s out.”
Additional recordings from a podcast appearance reveal Israetel making claims about ethnic hierarchies, suggesting certain groups possess superior intelligence and organizational abilities. These statements have been characterized by critics as textbook examples of scientific racism—pseudoscientific theories that attempt to justify racial hierarchies through misapplied biological concepts.
Critics point out that modern scientific consensus firmly rejects the notion of race as a biological construct. Research, including Lewontin’s landmark study, demonstrates that 85% of genetic variation exists within populations rather than between them. Environmental factors such as nutrition, education, and socioeconomic conditions have been shown to significantly influence IQ scores, as evidenced by the Flynn Effect and post-reunification studies of East and West Germany.
This controversy follows law student Solomon Nelson’s viral video examining Israetel’s doctoral dissertation, which identified numerous statistical impossibilities, data inconsistencies, and fundamental errors. Nelson concluded that the thesis “fails to meet the basic standards of doctoral scholarship.”
Critics argue that someone with a PhD in exercise science should not invoke academic authority to promote discredited racial theories, particularly when such claims contradict established scientific consensus across genetics, anthropology, and psychology.
Israetel has not publicly addressed the specific content of the deleted video or clarified his position on race and intelligence.