Emil Kirkegaard's Race Pseudoscience and Nazi Network

The Guardian ran an article recently about people and organizations Pinkerite has blogged about. Thanks to Oliver for the heads-up. The article is Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss.

The tech boss is a guy I'd heard of but forgotten, Andrew Conru:

HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.

I mentioned Conru over a year ago because he is also a donor of Richard Hanania.

The HDF is the Human Diversity Foundation  apparently now partially funded on the remains of the infamous Pioneer Fund. The name recalls Steve Sailer's old Human Biodiversity Institute.

HDF is owned by that international man of douchebaggery, Emil Kirkegaard.

HDF’s owner, Emil Kirkegaard, has made similar comments about “remigration”, saying of families settled for two or three generations: “I generally support policies that pay them to leave.”

Kirkegaard, who also appears to use the name William Engman, is an author of more than 40 papers published by Mankind Quarterly, a British race science journal established in the 1960s.

Emil Kirkegaard says HDF ‘is not involved in politics’. 

Originally from Denmark and now living in Germany, he heads what Frost described as an “underground research wing” for HDF consisting of about 10 hobby researchers and academics.

Ongoing HDF projects, discussed in a video call between the group last year that was led by Kirkegaard, included studies into “international dysgenics”, whether dating apps alter human breeding, whether people with progressive opinions are mentally ill or whether Wikipedia editors are too leftwing.

The Guardian article is based on an article by Hope Not Hate, Race Science Inc. published a few days ago. 

And it is a hum-dinger.

And the article starts with the Scandza Foundation which I was talking about last month. 

The article:

The Scandza Forum is one of the most important events in the far-right calendar. Hosted by Fróði Midjord, a Scandinavian neo-Nazi, it is a conference of extremist intellectuals who gather for lectures on white nationalism, race science, and World War II revisionism. In May 2023, the Scandza Forum was held for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic at the Von Stackelberg Hotel in Tallinn, Estonia, attracting more than 100 far-right activists from across the western world.

Among the guests was an undercover reporter for HOPE not hate.

At the conference, our infiltrator met a man who introduced himself as Matthew Archer, although we now know his real name is Matthew Frost.

Frost said he was the founder of Aporia, a website running stories on “HBD”, or human biodiversity. This is the belief that there are meaningful and measurable differences between different “races”, especially in terms of intelligence. It is, in essence, the misuse of science to promote racist ideology.

According to the article, Aporia is part of the HDF’s organisation, as is a scientific racism research team. 

Aporia is the racist Substack account. I'm waiting on Jonathan Katz to talk about Aporia one of these days since he wrote about other Nazis happily making bank at the racism-friendly Substack.

Aporia has a direct connection to German Nazis:

The third senior figure of HDF is Erik Ahrens, a social media advisor in Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party. He is an advocate of white nationalism, and appeared at the AfD’s Potsdam conference in November 2023, at which party leaders discussed deporting German citizens of foreign descent.

The Hope article includes images from the slide presentation given for the HDF's ghouls. You can see the org chart here. That's Kirkegaard in the bottom square to the right of the org chart.

Just to give the HDF some historical context, I created my own org chart, based on info from the Hope Not Hate article and elsewhere.

You can see the PDF version here.

It's funny, in the article Kirkegaard is shown as being so happy about meeting Peter Thiel. Kirkegaard is on the record as saying that homosexuality is a mental illness. He surely must know that Peter Thiel is proud to be gay.

I guess money changes everything.

Back in May we saw that Kirkegaard had Mankind Publishing House LLC registered in Wyoming and now it seems he has the Human Diversity Foundation LLC registered in Wyoming too.

And as usual it comes back to the Nazi Bar known as the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). Many of those connected to Aporia are associated with or attended meetings of ISIR including Kirkegaard, Charles Murray, Helmut Nyborg, Jonathan Anomaly, Curtis Dunkel, David Piffer, Bryan Pesta, James Thompson, Russell T. Warne, Razib Khan, Gregory Clark, Garette Jones, Jonatan Pallesen, Toby Young and of course ISIR bigwig Richard Haier.

It now makes perfect sense that so many right-wing organizations and race pseudoscience ghouls like Steven Pinker all chipped in to defame the guy that Emil Kirkegaard owes money to last year. Aporia attacked Rational Wiki for the same reason more recently. 

Kirkegaard is an essential player in the right-wing billionaire-funded racist/neo-Nazi/fascist network.

Jerry Seinfeld changes his mind

 So a few months ago I wrote about Seinfeld hanging out with right-wing creep Bari Weiss, whining about the Left ruining comedy. 

Apparently Seinfeld has done a 180 on the issue. Which is a good thing - but like the hosts of The Majority Report I can't guess what happened. Maybe he finally realized what creeps Bari Weiss and her crew are?

Good piece on the racism of traffic stops

A link in case you get that stupid "Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot" message. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ygQ2wEwJw

The Trump campaign fully embraces race pseudoscience

Per the Washington Post:

In an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, Trump’s suggestion that non-White immigrants are genetically inferior was made explicit.

The comment came as Trump was disparaging his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“How about allowing people to come through an open border,” he said, “13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person and they’re now happily living in the United States?”

This is a false claim — “outrageously false,” in the wording of The Washington Post Fact Checker — based on a misrepresentation of numbers released by the government. That data indicated that there were about 13,000 immigrants who had committed murder but were not in custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many, though, are in custody elsewhere, including at the state level. Nor were they all immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration; many were here under Trump, too.

Unchallenged by Hewitt, Trump continued on the subject.

“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” he said. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Reinforcing that he was talking about the “bad genes” of immigrants, Trump offered up more false claims based on the ICE data.

Hewitt, rather than contesting Trump’s genetic argument, shifted the conversation with no apparent irony to the federal criminal charges Trump himself faces. These, of course, are not a function of criminal genes, in Trump’s estimation, but instead of the political whims of Biden. (In reality, they are a function of Trump’s actions.)

"Criminal genes" is a core belief of Biosocial Criminology, a loose collection of racist, hereditarian beliefs that relies heavily on the racist garbage of Jean-Phillipe Rushton. How did I miss this article in Undark on the subject of Biosocial Criminology?

Later that year, the lead author of the paper, Brian Boutwell, took to the right-wing magazine Quillette to complain that biosocial criminologists were being shunned by their colleagues. Around that time, Boutwell and one of his co-authors on the paper, Florida State University criminologist Kevin Beaver, appeared separately on the show of alt-right podcaster Stefan Molyneux to talk about the links between crime, biology, and race. (Wright, one of the Cincinnati professors, appeared on the show too.)

Shunned or not, the authors of the paper maintained active careers. Boutwell is now an associate professor at the University of Mississippi. One of his co-authors, J.C. Barnes, was until recently the chair of the Biopsychosocial Criminology division of the American Society of Criminology. Another co-author, Beaver, now directs the Biosocial Criminology Research & Policy Institute at Florida State University, and he maintains an affiliation with King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. (Beaver did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Steven Pinker is a booster of biosocial criminology, which the Undark article does not mention, but which I've been tracking.

It should come as no surprise that Trump embraces race pseudoscience, considering he is funded by racists like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen. 

In a surprise twist, Andreessen's partner Horowitz has switched to supporting Harris.

But any reporter doing the least amount of research on Thiel would understand exactly how racist he has always been. This is from "Contrarian" the book about Thiel by Max Chafkin:

Clarium employees read, played chess, and debated (sample topic: If you were going to design a country from scratch, what would it look like?) Everyone spent a lot of time talking politics, though out was important that those politics always be of the right-wing variety. An employee told me that it was common to hear talk about climate change denial and to see web browsers open to VDARE, the far-right website with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. There were liberals at Clarium, but they understood that it was best to keep those views quiet. 

How ironic that Steven Pinker (born in Canada), who apparently despises Trump (see him doing his awkward dance when Trump lost in 2020) has contributed to Trump's dangerous racist beliefs, by promoting racists and race pseudoscience (albeit usually stealthily) for the past couple of decades.

Intellectual Dark Web 101: Bret and Eric Weinstein

 

Meanwhile, The Majority Report reports on Eric, solo.

Schadenfreudefest with Some More News

Do not have any foods or liquids in your mouth when you watch this. I am still cleaning the coffee off my computer screen from sudden uncontrollable explosive laughter.

Individuals engaged in intellectual dark webbery, grifting and stochastic terrorism that are mentioned in this episode of Some More News, Some Grifters Who Finally Faced Consequences, include:

• George Santos
• Tim Poole
• Dave Rubin (named member of the IDW!)
• Benny Johnson 
• Alex Jones
• James O'Keefe 
• J. K. Rowling
• Elon Musk
• Jacob Wohl
• Jack Burkman
• Milo Yiannopolous
• Shaun King
• Andy Ngo
• Ali Alexander
• Sydney Powell
• Rudy Guiliani
• Trump

Dave Rubin from the glory days of the Intellectual Dark Web, from Bari Weiss' infamous article. Has it already been six and a half years?

70-year-old reactionary has thoughts about the kids these days

I find it funny that the same media outlet, The Good Men Project, that promoted the career of Robin DiAngelo nine years ago is now promoting the career of Steven Pinker. 

Although Pinker and DiAngelo do have one thing in common - both believe in ethnic essentialism. 

But while Pinker aligns with the race pseudoscience organization International Society for Intelligence Research, DiAngelo is the freelance purveyor of the belief that "white" people (however DiAngelo defines white, she's never been clear about that) are all born to be hopeless racists. Unless they spend thousands to take DiAngelo's seminars where they may be absolved of their original sin.

Pinker likes to spend his time with racist grifter Michael Shermer who, unlike Pinker, is a blatant admirer of the racist charlatan J. Phillip Rushton. Pinker is too much of a weasel to admit his real beliefs, although the fact that he spends so much of his time hobnobbing with racists is a give-away.

Pinker is still a subscriber on Twitter/X to professional racist Richard Hanania. The image above was captured today.

So Pinker, who recently turned 70 (I wonder if he considers himself old now, instead of middle-aged as he did a year ago), shares his diagnosis for what is wrong with the kids these days. Surprise surprise, it is what every right-wing reactionary grifting ghoul has been saying for at least five years: wokeness.

Robert Conquest, the historian, is sometimes credited with a law that states that any institution that is not constitutionally right-wing becomes left-wing. You can see the drift that has happened to many institutions recently. They have not become left-wing in the economic quasi-Marxist sense but “woke” in the sense of identitarian politics, seeing culture and history as a zero-sum struggle among racial and sexual groups. A kind of intolerant identitarian politics has captured several societies with well-defined intellectual goals. It has happened to the ACLU, the American Humanist Association, and Planned Parenthood.

On top of being entirely predictable and annoying Pinker is such a hypocrite. Pinker supports people like Michael Shermer, Richard Hanania and Linda Gottfredson, who indisputably believe that culture and history is a zero-sum struggle among racial and sexual groups. They believe human society is a genetically-determined hierarchy of intelligence with white men at the top. Although to be fair, sometimes race pseudoscience mongers claim East Asians are on top, depending on which pseudoscience monger you're talking to.  Although even if they believe that East Asians are the most intelligent, you can still find them barking about the superiority of Western Civilization™. 

And then sometimes they declare Jews to be separate from whites while claiming Jews are on top (per the never-tested, far-fetched Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.) 

This is not hyperbole - Gottfredson can be heard literally ranking races by intelligence with Stefan Molyneux in 2016. If Pinker has ever spoken out against Gottfredson, I've never found any evidence of it. There's far more evidence of Pinker defending Gottfredson, as he did in 2018.

You can be sure that Pinker's interviewer, Scott Douglas Jacobsen, does not ask Pinker about his support for Hanania or Steve Sailer or other racists, since Jacobsen can be found in 2022 promoting right-wing racist hereditarian trash rags Areo and Quillette as "freedom of speech" publications. 

Just the kind of lazy quasi-journalist who serves Pinker's interests the best.

International Society for Intelligence Research is a Nazi bar

Helmut Nyborg and Emil Kirkegaard, and their
tacky fashion-sense, standing in what I assume is
Nyborg's home, thanks to the sports poster
in the background

Although the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) likes to imagine it appears respectable, by inviting some real science researchers to its conferences and publishing some real science in its journal "Intelligence," the organization displays its Nazi and segregationist/anti-Black heritage by continuing to platform hardcore, racist extremists.

Allowing Emil Kirkegaard to participate in its 2024 conference, after briefly exiling him for two years, is a dead give-away.

Kirkegaard is also part of the right-wing extremist neo-Nazi Scandza Forum gang. 

The organization has apparently been renamed "Guide to Kulcher." According to its website,  that name "...is from a book by American author Ezra Pound." 

Pound, although known as a poet, was a Nazi collaborator and traitor to the United States of America. He avoided the firing squad he so richly deserved thanks to his influential friends.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights says:

The Scandza Forum was modeled on the London Forum, described by Greg Johnson as “the most important Rightist metapolitical organization in the UK and the model for the New York Forum, the Northwest Forum, the Scandza Forum, and similar events all over the white world.” [xi] 

London Forum founder Jeremy “Jez” Bedford-Turner was found guilty of inciting racial hatred in May 2018 after having called for his “soldiers” to liberate England from “Jewish control” in 2015. Under cross examination Bedford-Turner admitted that he wanted all Jews to exit the UK.[xii] Attendees at a 2017 London Forum included Holocaust denier David Irving, assorted anti-Semites, and an individual that declared the 2016 murder of British MP Jo Cox by “Britain First” advocate Tommy Mair to be “cheery news.” Also present was Ian Millard, an attorney banned from the bar in November 2014 after tweeting, among other things, “National Socialist Germany 1933-1945. Its flaws were few, its achievements many. Don’t believe Jewish-Zionist lies.”[xiii] 

In keeping with such origins, and Greg Johnson’s views on Hitler, it is unsurprising that the Scandza Forum appears to have a swastika embedded in its logo.

With some 50 to 150 attendees reported at permutations of the Scandza Forum, the event brings together racists from across Europe and the U.S., offers up live music and undertakes strenuous efforts to screen attendees. To date forums have been held in Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm, Sweden. Greg Johnson describes that, “The primary importance of events like the Scandza Forum is to encourage face-to-face community and networking…The real gain is meeting old friends and making new ones for socializing, brainstorming, and launching new initiatives.”[xiv]

Being anti-Black is built into ISIR's ethos, in spite of its very occasional Black participants, thanks to its association with people like Linda Gottfredson and, before they died, Arthur Jensen and J. P. Rushton. But it wasn't notably big on anti-Semitism. I assume that's because, in part, some influential promoters of race pseudoscience like "celebrity intellectual" Steven Pinker are Jewish. 

But now ISIR has harkened back to its Pioneer Fund/Wycliff Draper legacy thanks to some ISIR conference participants' alliance with Scandza Forum/Guide to Kulchur.

Emil Kirkegaard hasn't given presentations at Scandza/GTK conferences as far as I have found, but he's certainly attended them, as shown in the photo from the 2023 conference below. With him are Helmut Nyborg and Edward Dutton, who did speak at the conference. 

Nyborg has by my count participated in 13 out of 23 ISIR conferences, the most recent in 2022. He's a big fan of ISIR's ur-racists Rushton and Jensen. He's published in ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly. He's appeared at an American Renaissance conference. 

Dutton has not participated in ISIR conferences although he has attended at least once, last year - proudly announced by the far-right racist Aporia Magazine ghouls. More importantly, Dutton has been published in "Intelligence" the journal of the ISIR, many times.

Infamous anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald, who participated in at least three ISIR conferences, has also participated in at least one Scandza/GTK conference. 

So - is it really so bad that the ISIR allows neo-Nazis to participate in its conferences? 

Yes. Here is Michael B. Tager's Nazi bar story, which was originally shared in a series of tweets:

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."

And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."

And i was like, oh ok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people." And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.

The ISIR doesn't appear to have any intentions to shut its own Nazi infestation down - in fact they seem to be encouraging it.

The Far Right & the International Society for Intelligence Research

The Atlantic published an article by Ali Breland yesterday, The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. Thanks to Maxine Margolis for the heads-up!

I have an issue with the title though. The far right has long been obsessed with Race and IQ. The important issue, which is what the article is really about, is that the Republican Party is being infected by race pseudoscience: 

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

And it's been going on since at least Bari Weiss's infamous glorification of several hardcore race pseudoscience promoters among the "renegades" of the Intellectual Dark Web including Michael Shermer, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, Sam Harris and of course Steven Pinker.

I don't think the article really has a good handle on Steve Sailer's career though, whatever Sailer may claim:

In June, (Sailer) also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. 

I have long noted on this blog that 2012 was the last time Steven Pinker mentioned Sailer in public after a previous decade of promoting his career, so I assume that's why Sailer picked 2013 as the year he was allegedly pushed out of the spotlight. And 2023 was when stochastic terrorist Elon Musk took over Twitter and invited all the racist ghouls back on. 

But New York Magazine had an article all about Sailer in 2017, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right. So Sailer was hardly in hiding. 

The article does not mention the International Society for Intelligence Research, of course, but it does mention Stefan Molyneux, who had Linda Gottfredson, one of the most prominent members of ISIR on his show and together they ranked races with Black people on the bottom. 

The ISIR chugs along, year after year, almost completely unnoticed by the mainstream media, platforming many many proponents of race pseudoscience at its conferences. In 2023 it featured Michael Woodley of Menie, Gregory Clark, Rosalind Arden, Richard Haier, Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker. 

This year they allowed one of the most extreme racists back in to make a presentation - Emil Kirkegaard.

There's a reference to "Bronze Age Pervert" in the Atlantic article and as outrageous as he is, his message per Breland is a perfect encapsulation of the ISIR ethos from Arthur Jensen to Linda Gottfredson to Richard Haier:

Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. 

I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of the participants of the annual Racist Rodeo - AKA the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

You can see the spreadsheet here.

Below are the top ten most frequent participants in the annual conferences since the first one in 2000. 

Note that participation is determined by mention in the annual conference program either for the inclusion of their work, or as an organizer or advisor or various administrative functions like interviewing the participants. But identification as a participant doesn't necessarily mean the individual was at the conference in person.

I haven't completed the 2024 conference since they haven't released the program yet, so these numbers are based on a timespan from 2000 to 2023. There was no conference in 2020. The right column is the number of times each has participated.

Lubinski, David	20
Bates, Timothy C.	18
Benbow, Camilla P.	18
Plomin, Robert	18
Deary, Ian J.	17
Haier, Richard	17
Johnson, Wendy	17
Detterman, Douglas K	16
Gottfredson, Linda	16
Colom, Roberto	14

So let's meet these most enthusiastic ISIR racist rodeo participants.

• David Lubinski is married to Camilla Benbow, and is currently at Vanderbilt University. In addition to being the most frequent ISIR conference participant, he received a "Lifetime Achievement" award from ISIR along with Benbow in 2019. Lubinski was one of the signatories of the Linda Gottfredson paper defending the race pseudoscience view in The Bell Curve, and as of 2022 was the director of the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which accepted money from the Pioneer Fund under the name Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. In 2023 the Institute of Mental Chronometry gave a grant of half a million dollars to two ISIR associates, Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee. 

Lubinski has not published anything directly about race, that I was able to discover so far, but his dedication to the cause of race pseudoscience seems certain via his various Jensenite associations and his apparently warm relationship with people like Linda Gottfredson and Steven Pinker. When Pinker was at the 2017 conference, Lubinski interviewed him and asked him, in effect, what made him come over to his side, the race pseudoscience side:

How did someone with your background, someone who at one point in his career and I'm not putting him on the spot because Steven said this publicly, said early on, he found individual differences "uninteresting" how did someone at that stage of development become so interested in human psychological diversity that you developed expertise in individual differences and wrote a book like "Blank Slate."

"Human psychological diversity" is a term indistinguishable from Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." And clearly Lubinski is using the term "individual differences" as a synonym for "human psychological diversity." 

Lubinski published an obituary for Jensen in American Psychologist that paints Jensen as compassionate towards Black people while failing to mention Jensen's alliances with hard-core racists like American Renaissance; that he was supported by the Pioneer Fund; and that he was on the board of the neo-Nazi publication Neue Anthropologie.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.  

• Timothy C.  Bates is a member of the editorial board of Intelligence, the publication associated with the ISIR. Bates' far-right, racist political views are apparent on his X/Twitter feed, where he retweets the likes of techno-fascist Trump-funder Elon Musk, Steven Pinker, and Razib Khan. He was the president of ISIR in 2017 and 2018.

On the Facebook page for the ISIR, Bates posts a reminder of how much the ISIR gang loves the incredibly racist Charles Murray. 

 

• Camilla P. Benbow, like her husband David Lubinski, underplays her race pseudoscience beliefs, but is clearly an enthusiastic participant in the ISIR race pseudoscience project. She is also at Vanderbilt. She's coauthored with extreme Jensenite Richard Haier and with extremist David C. Geary who has published in racist Aporia and racist "hereditarian" Quillette. I think that like Pinker, Lubinski and Benbow are too careful to make blatant racist statements, but they are clearly allies with those who do. They let those allies take the heat, while they continue to benefit from the financial legacy of the Pioneer Fund and who knows how many racist plutocrat donors.

• Robert Plomin - David Gilborn explored the perniciousness of Plomin:

‘… the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table, despite all the progress blacks have made in this society … the last great battle over racism will not be fought over access to a lunch counter, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, under a microscope, on the battleground of our DNA.’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. (2008) 

Why write a paper about racism and genetics in the second decade of the Twenty-First century? Surely arguments about race, intelligence and genetics are dead and buried? A Black man has been President and, in both the US and UK, bold assertions about racial minorities’ supposed intellectual inferiority have led to public condemnation for the speaker. Part of my answer lies in the main title of the paper, which quotes Professor Robert Plomin, one of the principal figures in contemporary writing about genetics and education. 

As I explain (below), Plomin has become something of a celebrity-academic in the UK; his claims make headline news, his views are sought by policy-makers, and he features in pop-science radio shows. In one such show, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili (Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, UK) he was challenged on the topic of race. Plomin described his approach as follows:  

‘In general I’ve felt softly softly is a better way to go…’ (BBC Radio 4, 2015).[1]  

Until recently many in the field of behavioural genetics have been far less reticent about airing their views. The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is the most famous, but by no means the only, example of such work (see Eysenck, 1971; Gottfredson, 1986; Jensen, 1969; Lynn, 1991 & 2001; Rushton, 1997). This paper shows how, in recent years, a softly softly approach (that avoids explicit reference to race) has become more common. I argue that this inexplicitness should not be mistaken for an absence of racialized thinking and does not signal that the current work is free from possible racist consequences. Indeed, if anything, the new softly softly version of hereditarianism may be even more dangerous than the outspoken version of earlier periods. 

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

😱 Plomin published an article with Deary that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer. 

• Ian J. Deary - curiously, Deary is quoted for the anti-hereditarian side in the Guardian: 

No one has successfully isolated any genes “for” intelligence at all, and claims in this direction have turned to dust when subjected to peer review. As the Edinburgh University cognitive ageing specialist Prof Ian Deary put it, “It is difficult to name even one gene that is reliably associated with normal intelligence in young, healthy adults.” Intelligence doesn’t come neatly packaged and labelled on any single strand of DNA. 

So it's strange that he spends so much time with people convinced of the hereditarian hypothesis, and, let's be real, hard-core racists and neo-Nazis who show up at ISIR conferences. 

 

😱 Deary published an article with Plomin that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer.   

 

• Richard Haier - I wrote the first iteration of the new version of the Rational Wiki article (NOT the one discussed here) exploring the extreme Jensen-infused racism of Richard Haier, the most devoted member of the Jensen race cult.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

• Wendy Johnson - appears to be a Jensenite, but did not make a good case for racism when she appeared in an online interview. However, she has published with blatant racist Jan te Nijenhuis. And of course has no problem hobnobbing with all the racist extremists who show up at ISIR conferences.

• Douglas K. Detterman - according to his Wikipedia entry: "Among his achievements, Detterman founded the scientific journal Intelligence in 1977, and was editor in chief from 1977 to 2016 where it was taken over by Richard Haier. He also founded the International Society for Intelligence Research and was its president until 2011." 

The entry doesn't mention that Detterman is also vice president/director of the Jensenite, Pioneer Fund grantee organization the Institute of Mental Chronometry. It is likely that Detterman is just as racist as Gottfredson is and Jensen was, but is more careful to downplay the racism at the heart of his belief-system. 

 

👉Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.    

 

• Linda Gottfredson is hideously racist, shamelessly so - possibly the equal of Jensen and J. P. Rushton. She can be heard ranking "races" with perfect confidence on white nationalist Stefan Molyneux's program. Her career is propped up by her lack of shame and the Nazi money of the Pioneer Fund. Gottfredson introduced Charles Murray to race pseudoscience. Of course this horrific racist ghoul is a long-time and highly admired member of the ISIR klan. They gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. 

👉Author of the defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence. 

• Roberto Colom is a huge fan and defender of the race pseudoscience of political operative and life-long recipient of wingnut welfare Charles Murray. He's also chummy with Murray on Twitter/X. Likes to cite all the biggest race pseudoscience ghouls in his work. Published in ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Five of the top 10 ISIR conference participants signed Gottfredson's "Mainstream Science" claim. 

Another signer was R. Travis Osborne - pro-segregationist, director of the Pioneer Fund. His article "Racial Differences in Mental Growth and School Achievement" was included in a collection of race pseudoscience essays edited by Robert Kuttner, another segregationist. That collection was a big influence on Arthur Jensen.

The race pseudoscience obsession with school achievement has continued from the days of segregationists like Osborne through the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which was originally called "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences" through to Kathryn Paige Harden and "behavioral genetics" arguing that educational attainment is the result of genes, to Richard Haier arguing for manipulating genes to raise IQ.

Jonathan Katz on J. D. Vance and the Weinstein brothers

Jonathan Katz took a deep dive into the infamous Eric Weinstein-hosted interview of J. D. Vance and came up with some good, if predictably nauseating stuff.

He refers to Bret Weinstein as "disgraced evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein." I certainly have long thought Bret was a disgrace, since the Evergreen incident, which I am convinced was at the very least partly a deliberate scam on the part of Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. My opinion was then bolstered by Bret and Heather shilling ivermectin as a treatment for Covid. 

And then there's that obsession with Game Theory.

But I didn't know about this latest Bret Weinstein disgrace:

Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biology professor turned podcaster and ivermectin guy, repeated a series of discredited pseudo-theories about AIDS in a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Weinstein, a frequent guest, told Rogan that he found the theory that party drugs like poppers cause AIDS to be “surprisingly compelling.” (It is not.) Weinstein also told Rogan he came to these ideas by reading a recent book by anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, creating a sort of unholy turducken of misinformation passed onto an audience of millions. 

Wow, what a garbage person.

Katz goes on to give a full accounting of the Intellectual Dark Web's racist, misogynist pseudoscience context that inform's Eric Weinstein's views, and demonstrates how much Vance agrees with them.

The problem is that race-baiting, misogyny, and a general obsession with supposedly in-born hierarchies aren’t distractions from the Trump team’s message. They are the campaign’s message. Even when confronted with an issue that genuinely concerns the electorate — such as the still-high cost of living, especially for those of us raising children — they can’t resist offering rhetoric and solutions that sound like they come from the minutes of a 1920s meeting of the American Eugenics Society, if not the pronatalist movement in Fascist Italy itself. The reason is simple: They really believe this stuff.

***

The vice-presidential candidate concludes:

VANCE: Just to sort of bring this full circle to where we started, is that the economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately gonna unwind and collapse upon itself. It has to. I think it's, yeah — it’s the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market.

Yes, Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and great influencer of medieval Christian doctrine, who taught, among other things that: “the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying”; and “for the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority,” and who summarized “the female is a misbegotten male.” Those virtue politics.

In spite of Steven Pinker's public distaste for Trump, the Republican ticket is the Intellectual Dark Web ticket, holding the same pseudoscience beliefs that Pinker has been promoting via evolutionary psychology first, then by a cleaned-up version of Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." Or as David Lubinski, bigwig at the International Society for Intelligence Research calls it "human psychological diversity."

Which is why the Republican ticket, funded by anti-democracy Peter Thiel and lead by a pussy-grabbing rapist and a misogynist creep, is the most evil in American history. 

And Pinker likes to attack Trump but he has no qualms about allying himself with Republican operative Bari Weiss and her garbage rag. But that's who Pinker is, a complete and utter weasel.

Where Arthur Jensen got his "science" from - Robert E. Kuttner and his race extremist gang

From the ISIR 2012
conference program

Arthur Jensen is the guiding light along with J. Phillip Rushton of the International Society for Intelligence Research. The ISIR was very sad when they both died in 2012.

Jensen is even more important to the ISIR than Rushton, since the ISIR has been led by one of the most devoted of Jensen's disciples, Richard Haier and a closely allied organization, the Institute of Mental Chronometry was founded by Jensen.

John Jackson has an excellent study of Jensen's "science" at his blog. 

He points out that in Jensen's most famous race pseudoscience paper, How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Jensen wrote:

This is practically axiomatic, according to the geneticists with whom I have spoken…. Races are more technically viewed by geneticists as populations having different distributions of gene frequencies. These genetic differences are manifested in virtually every anatomical, physiological, and biochemical comparison one can make between representative samples of identifiable racial groups (Kuttner, 1967). (p. 80)

Jensen simply moves from a socially defined “race” like “black” to the claim that they are the same as a genetic population. He knows this because of “geneticists with whom I have spoken.” Which geneticists? He provides us with a citation with to (Kuttner, 1967). 

The citation is from an article, "Biochemical Anthropology" written by Kuttner, which was included in a book, Race and modern science. A collection of essays by biologists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists which was edited by Kuttner.

In the article Kuttner appears to think that measuring bodily fluids in a variety of groups will somehow provide a racial taxonomy:

"Race taxonomies in the past depended almost exclusively on the descriptive anatomy of skin and bone... The body contains many thousands of substances, some of which most certainly vary in quantity or type with ethnic identity. In this light it is regrettable to note how rarely until recent years tissue or blood studies were employed in anthropological research. (pages 197-198)

But Kuttner doesn't need thousands of substances because he has already determined racial classification in advance: on page 207 he refers to "three major races" identified as Caucasian, Negro and Asiatic Mongol. 

But throughout the article he makes observations of seemingly randomly-selected populations of uncertain identity and widely-diverging scope, much as with the work of Daniel G. Freedman. 

(E. O. Wilson cited Freedman's work in "On Human Nature," the book that followed "Sociobiology" and was written to defend Wilson's race pseudoscience claims.)

For example on page 211 Kuttner writes:

Further investigation revealed that American Indians of Sioux linguistic stock had elevated pepsinogen with an average of 30 percent greater than Caucasians...

So one group is "American Indians" who speak Sioux. He compares this tiny population to "Caucasians," one of the "three major races." 

He doesn't define who exactly counts as Caucasian and he sometimes uses the term "white" as a synonym. He identifies two sub-groups of Caucasians, "Europeans" and "White Americans" but there's no reason given for why he makes the distinction:

Plasma cholesterol values for Europeans and White Americans may range from 50 to 100 percent higher than for non-Caucasians inhabiting backward areas. (page 202)

So not only different "races" but "inhabiting backward areas" versus, presumably Caucasians inhabiting non-backward areas.

Kuttner does not seem to understand the concept of "controls." 

By the end of the article, he all but admits that he has proven nothing, but he's hopeful for the future:

It has not been the intention of this review to do more than sketch in the horizon. The task of introducing a dynamic new science is not difficult but to summarize it defeats the best efforts of any reviewer. It may be sufficient to say that in terms of new discoveries to come, biochemical anthropology promises to be an extremely stimulating contributor to our knowledge of human biology.

And this is the basis of Arthur Jensen's claim for "gene frequencies."

The collection of essays, "Race and modern science. A collection of essays by biologists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists", which appears to be the foundation of Jensen's racialist views, is written by racists, fascists and Nazis:

• Bertil Lundman served on the executive committee of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, an organisation that promoted eugenics and segregation, and the first publisher of Mankind Quarterly.

• Jan Czekanowski - "In the context of the racial theories of his time which have since been disproved by modern genetics,[2] Czekanowski classified Europeans into four pure races. The four pure races were the Nordic, Mediterranean (Ibero-Insular), Lapponoid and Armenoid."

• J. D. J. Hofmeyr - "Soon after its launch in 1960, Hofmeyr joined the international advisory board of the Mankind Quarterly, a pugnacious journal conceived by right­wing intellectuals as a reaction against the liberal anti­racism of postwar anthropology in the United States and Britain. Through the networks of The Mankind Quarterly, and with the support of Pretoria University, Hofmeyr became closely involved in promoting a profoundly racialised view of human genetics geared to the defence of high apartheid."

• Ilse Schwidetzky, worked with Nazis, published Racial Psychology in Mankind Quarterly.

• Luigi Gedda, far-right Italian politician and eugenicist, one of the founders of Mankind Quarterly.

• David C. Rife wrote in Mankind Quarterly in his review of Carlton Coon's The Origin of Races that the book was "a new milestone in our knowledge of the evolution of men. It should be on n the book shelves of all scientists, as well as of others who are interested in the history of mankind. It is undoubtedly being viewed with serious concern by the advocates ages of egalitarian nonsense."

• C. D. Darlington - "Asked by a reporter for The Sunday Times whether or not he was a racist for this connection to John Baker, who believed that no civilizations had ever arisen in Africa, all "negrids" had a "fetid smell" and were "less evolved,"[11] Darlington replied: "Well, I'm regarded as one by everyone except the Jews, who are racist, and who utterly agree with my views."

• Corrado Gini - "Focusing on the problem of the degeneration of the Italian race, Gini had a tremendous influence on Benito Mussolini's (1883-1945) political campaign, and shaped Italian social sciences for almost two decades. He was also a committed racist, as documented by a series of indisputable statements from the primary literature. All these findings place Gini in a linking position among early Italian eugenics, Fascism and official state racism."

• A. James Gregor - "In 1959, Gregor joined with Robert E. Kuttner to found the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), where Gregor acted as secretary. According to Gregor, the organization was founded to restore "an intellectual climate in the U.S., and throughout the Western World, which would permit a free and open discussion of racial ... problems." The organization was funded by segregationist Wickliffe Draper to oppose the civil rights movement.[4] As part of this group, Gregor was also an assistant editor of, and contributor to, Mankind Quarterly, the organization's journal."

• George A. Lundberg argued in Mankind Quarterly for the right to discriminate.

• Friedrich Keiter - Nazi anthropologist

• Frank C. J. McGurk - American racist employed by various academic establishments like Villanova University

• R. Travis Osborne - pro-segregationist, director of the Pioneer Fund and was one of 52 signatories of Mainstream Science on Intelligence, a public statement written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal as a response to what the authors viewed as the inaccurate and misleading reports made by the media regarding academic consensus on the results of intelligence research in the wake of the appearance of The Bell Curve earlier the same year.

Several of the 52 signatories, including Gottfredson, went on to become prominent members of the International Society for Intelligence Research. Mainstream Science is posted to the ISIR website and called a "classic."

When Kuttner wasn't trying and failing to demonstrate a scientific underpinning for traditional race classifications, he was succeeding at being an extreme racist.

From Kuttner's Wikipedia entry:

Kuttner opposed miscegenation and believed it was "unnatural", only found amongst zoo animals.[2] He described his own position as "scientific racism". He identified as a Nordicist and argued against racial equality.[1] Kuttner stated that Negroes were racially inferior, they had failed to build and create civilization and they lacked intelligence.[1] He testified in Congress to oppose school integration.[3] Anthropologist Robert Sussman described Kuttner as a "lifelong neo-Nazi".[2]

Kuttner collaborated on racial ideas about "biopolitics" with Eustace Mullins.[1] He wrote for Roger Pearson's Northern World, the floundering The American Mercury and was an editor of the Mankind Quarterly. He edited the essay collection Race and Modern Science in response to the 1967 document Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice issued by UNESCO. Race and Modern Science was negatively reviewed by Sherwood Washburn, who described it as a "useful source book for racists. Anthropologists need not bother with it."[4] 

From neo-Nazi to Arthur Jensen to the International Society for Intelligence Research. Of course the ISIR has many many other racist and neo-Nazi contributors, but Jensen is the most important.