I never believed "race science" was anything more than an attempt to, in the words of anthropologist Marvin Harris, "biologize inequality," but the Winegard brothers have been as careful as Steven Pinker not to say anything obviously, viciously racist, like using the N word, no matter how vigorously they defended the race science of The Bell Curve. They always maintained a little bit of plausible deniability, which could be convincing to those who haven't been tracking their careers for many years.
But a couple of tweets by Bo Winegard, a contributing writer and a member of Quillette's team, from July 30 of this year are about as racist as they come.
Bo Winegard thinks it isn't racist to "want to preserve a country's racial demographics."
But national race quotas is the essence of racism.
Just think for a moment what it would mean to attempt to "preserve" a country's racial demographics.
Once you determined the correct racial demographic mix you would have to restrict immigration by race. But what if a race increased or decreased too much via childbirth? Would the excess members of a race be expelled from the country? Or would the women of the decreased demographic race be forced to have more children?
I'm sure the people who want to have an "honest negotiation in the political sphere" about racial quotas would have plenty of ideas for the final solution to that problem.
Bo Winegard admits in his tweet that race quotas "can take ugly forms" - but when has such a race-based quota social policy ever not taken an ugly form? It's impossible for a race-based quota to be otherwise.
Then there is the issue of who counts as which race. As Bo and Ben Winegard and "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell wrote in Quillette:
...racial categories are like film categories (e.g., drama, horror, comedy)... The amount and the granularity of film categories depend upon the interests of the people using them. Your friend might use four (horror, comedy, drama, and science fiction), whereas Netflix might use an apparently limitless and startlingly specific supply
In other words, anything goes, because racial categories depend on "the interests of the people using them." No matter how much people like Steven Pinker claim that race is a biological reality, there is no empirical race classification system. Even race science promoters can't agree amongst themselves which race categories are "real."
We can easily imagine the kind of interests of people who agree with Bo Winegard. Both he and his brother Ben consider "Western Civilization" and "the West" to be important enough to mention them as things they care about, in their Twitter profiles. Those terms are usually used to mean Europe, in other words, white people.