When we last discussed Bret Stephens here at Pinkerite, it was in reference to Steven Pinker and three other right-wing hereditarians with ties to Koch funding sources, making dramatic claims of censorship over a Bret Stephens column.
There had been a controversy over Stephens' citation of the often-debunked, highly speculative paper from 2005, the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis co-written by Henry Harpending, a white nationalist and Gregory Cochran, a right-wing creep.
More recently I talked about the plutocrat-funded war on the 1619 project.
And now we see Bret Stephens firing another shot in the endless hereditarian war on Black history. You can't be more obvious you are fighting for the hereditarian side than by citing Quillette, as Stephens does, in his piece for the NYTimes.
I wrote a comment on the article and my comment was published.
Like all who hold hereditarian views - which he all but admitted when he cited in one of his columns the Natural History of Ashkenazis paper (co-written by a white nationalist) - Bret Stephens is hostile to discussing the history of Black people in the United States. The 1619 project includes an excellent piece on the Black wealth gap, which explored the various methods used to steal Black wealth. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/racial-wealth-gap.html
Many people were unaware of the extent of the looting of Black wealth, and until recently many people did not know about the various race massacres perpetrated on successful Black communities, like Tulsa.
If you don't know of all the many ways that Black people were thwarted in the past 150+ years in their efforts to make a better life, you are more likely to believe the hereditarian claim that the reason Black people failed to thrive in the US, post-Emancipation, is due to their own bad genes. An idea that people like Andrew Sullivan have been promoting since at least The Bell Curve, published in 1994.
The fact that Stephens cites in this piece Quillette, a right-wing rag devoted to promoting hereditarian beliefs, is a dead give-away exactly where Bret Stephens is coming from.
The Right is waging a plutocrat-funded war on Black history for the hereditarian cause and Bret Stephens and Quillette are part of it.
https://www.pinkerite.com/2020/09/jerry-coyne-railing-against-1619.html