"Hereditarian" is a term used for those who believe that an important aspect of human socio-economic hierarchies is genetics. So, for example if you have good genes, you're on top.
Cofnas' Guide is a political manifesto justified by race pseudoscience, which is a major branch of hereditarianism. The Guide suggests that "woke" can be fought by striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and re-segregating society.
Yes, that would be completely impossible without a dictatorship of Nazi proportions. And if Cofnas was just some random kook with Fourth Reich fantasies it wouldn't matter much. But hereditarianism is not a belief only held by those on the far-right fringes. This is a belief that has been promoted by celebrity academics, most prominently by American author and psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden, described by Steven Pinker as a "left-leaning hereditarian;" and by British scientist and media personality Adam Rutherford.
Celebrity hereditarians
Rutherford and Harden attempt to distance themselves from race pseudoscience, but it is built on hereditarianism. The pseudo-scientific belief that Black people are genetically inferior is known as the "hereditarian hypothesis."
Steven Pinker is also an hereditarian, but he is lower-key these days in his promotion of hereditarianism than Rutherford and Harden. Pinker published his own hereditarian manifesto The Blank Slate 24 years ago but since then his primary strategy is to claim he is opposed to racism, while simultaneously promoting the careers of an endless-seeming parade of rightwing political operatives who also happen to be extreme racists, from Steve Sailer to Richard Hanania. And of course appearing on neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard'a Aporia podcast.
Pinker, Rutherford and Harden are important nodes in the international hereditarian network because they use their respectability and celebrity to promote hereditarianism in the name of behavioral genetics.
And they will not respond to questions about their hereditarian claims nor their connections to race pseudoscience, preferring instead to block and insult critics.
...DNA-based research failure provides additional evidence that the critics of twin studies, adoption studies, and the heritability concept were right all along. As the behavioral genetic paradigm unravels, the social and behavioral sciences should begin working on a new post-behavioral genetics developmental paradigm.
And yet, she denounces those who ignore genes in stronger terms than Dr. Murray is ever likely to have used:It’s stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that will go nowhere. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations.Bravo for Prof. Harden. Let her words ring out throughout the social sciences and in the halls of government.
Nathan Cofnas acknowledges Harden's usefulness to his cause by dropping her name into the last paragraph of his hereditarian race war manifesto (my highlight):
But race realism crumbles a central pillar of our moral–political system. Widespread acceptance of hereditarianism, especially among the elites, will undermine the reigning left–liberal order as we know it. Initially, many individuals will follow Kathryn Paige Harden’s lead and cling to the old value system even after the empirical claims that undergirded it are shown to be wrong. In the long run the Harden approach will be unsuccessful. When race realism is accepted, our cultural values will change. A new equilibrium will arise.Cofnas does not mention Harden anywhere else in his manifesto. No doubt he assumes his target audience does not need an introduction: the race pseudoscience network celebrated the article written by Gideon Lewis-Krauss in The New Yorker, promoting Harden's first book "The Genetic Lottery. " Lewis-Krauss summarizes the book:
...Harden argues that an appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort. She writes, “I think we must dismantle the false distinction between ‘inequalities that society is responsible for addressing’ and ‘inequalities that are caused by differences in biology.’ ” She cites research showing that most people are much more willing to support redistributive policies if differences in opportunity are seen as arbitrarily unfair—and deeply pervasive.
The extreme denialism of the old — recall they denied results from twins (together or apart), adoption studies, and everything else psychology related — has been replaced with a general acceptance of behavioral genetics, even enthusiastic. Here I am speaking primarily of Eric Turkheimer (who I have written about many times), and his former pupil Kathryn Paige Harden. These are both top tier behavioral geneticists...
...But they have not given up their political convictions, well, they are toned down somewhat, but not given up. Now it is chiefly aimed at the target that was always the main worry: group differences, in particular, race differences. So a kind of trade has happened where the most of behavioral genetics is now mainstreamish science (e.g. published in Nature Reviews Genetics), but the race differences have been further taboorized. Big players like Robert Plomin and Ian Deary have wisely (for their careers) avoided the topics, with a staunch focus on individual differences, chiefly between Europeans. It is a sensible move. Thanks to them we now have good behavioral genetics and intelligence research departments at Universities of Edinburgh, Colorado, Minnesota, Kings College London, and so on. Progress!
Are there actual white supremacist eugenicist scientist poseurs in today’s world? Yes. But outside the Fantasy Politics League of academia, a true Far Rightist like Emil Kirkegaard portrays Harden not as a fellow traveler but as a “woke behavioral geneticist” who, along with the likes of her teacher and sometimes co-author Eric Turkheimer, is among the cadres of “the psychometric left.”
Basile’s critiques of behavioral genetics do not tell us anything Harden has not already told us. Yet he figures her as a Scientific Calvinist, an ardent believer in genetic predestination engaged in what he calls “advocacy” for “pathologizing the behavior of every arrestee, restless schoolchild, and sexually active teen, and trying to eliminate it through medication or eugenics.” This grossly misrepresents Harden’s scientific and social arguments and contradicts what Harden writes in Original Sin. It is also at odds with what Harden has written on her Substack about eugenics and polygenic scores. It suggests that Basile is less interested in faithful representation than he is in the deliberate shaming of a woman scientist who has been shamed before.
Consider an arresting scene in Harden’s book, passed over by Basile. About to embark on a long-deferred vacation, a break after years of research on twins, Harden drops off her kids at her Evangelical mother’s house in Tennessee. She happens upon “an index card taped to the middle of the fridge, right above the ice dispenser,” with a “picture of White Jesus” and a note in her mother’s handwriting, “the top line underlined for emphasis”
undesirable unwanted
I am no longer grieving the loss of “what” Paige could have become -
Her choices—Her responsibility—Her consequences
“I feel humiliated,” Harden writes, “to be called out by name on my mother’s fridge. How many people have seen this scarlet index card”? She snaps a photo and texts it to a friend, who replies: “Oh holy FUCK. What do you even do with that?” Harden texts back, “I handled it super maturely by silently ripping it into tiny pieces and saying nothing.” Harden addresses her readers, asking: “What does it feel like for your identity to be collapsed into just one thing about you? For all your complexity to be flattened into one dimension? It feels wretched. Alienating, and bewildering, and sad.”
Lots of people have bad relationships with their mothers. Mine was a fanatical Catholic, so I have plenty of stories to tell. But nobody comes to this blog to read about my relationship with my mother, so why would I write about it here?
The reason Harden got a contract to write "Original Sin" is not because her personal life is so interesting, or that she's a great writer. She got the contract because she became famous for publishing a book that promotes hereditarianism and she got a glowing profile in the New Yorker out of it.
It's certainly odd that Harden felt so "humiliated" by her mother's refrigerator note, and worried about how many people saw the "scarlet index card," yet she decided to include it in her book, portraying her mother, to an audience far more vast than a family refrigerator, as a massive bitch.
Talk about shaming.
HDF operates the online magazine Aporia.[2] Matthew Frost founded Aporia in 2021 and sold it to Emil Kirkegaard.[2] Frost has stated that the magazine should be read "by the elite, people aspiring to the elite".[2]
Diana Fleischman is its podcast host.[7] She attended the 2023 Natal Conference with members of the New Right.[8] Bo Winegard, Aporia's executive editor, stated that he believed racial stereotypes were "reasonably accurate" and requested that his readers embrace "white identity politics".[2] Winegard was dismissed from his position at Marietta College.[2] In 2020, Winegard published a retracted paper which drew on Richard Lynn's flawed IQ data.[2] Winegard's race and intelligence research was criticized for resembling pseudoscience.[9][10]
Naturally Fleischman is also a fan of Nathan Cofnas.
Fortun describes, with admiration, Harden’s handling of questions of nature and nurture as her attunement to the “questions, uncertainties, and ambivalence” surrounding her science. What he sees as nuance and profundity, I would describe as doublespeak. Harden claims to accept the most obvious and prevalent criticisms of her field, in order to pretend that she has advanced beyond them. Notably, Arthur Jensen pursued the same rhetorical strategy in his notorious 1969 essay on race, IQ, and scholastic achievement (see page 42). This rhetoric lays the groundwork for one to say, once these criticisms are raised anew, “Yes, yes, I know all that already.” Fortun has obviously been won over by this strategy.For that reason, in my review, I did not focus on Harden’s assertions of the unsoundable depths of the nature-nurture problem (in fact, I felt that I was doing her a favor by not evaluating her work as philosophy). I focused instead on the strategic function her doublespeak serves, namely, to convince unsuspecting liberals of eugenic premises. Fortun happily accepts his role as one of those liberals.
