Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his international network of racists are in the NYTimes, finally

The New York Times has finally gotten around to paying attention to the international network of racist "researchers" and publications led by Emil Kirkegaard in an article published January 24: Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’:

Though Dr. Pesta later submitted updates on further research he wanted to do, none explicitly described the group’s true intentions, according to court records. The legal filings also show that another group member, Emil O.W. Kirkegaard, a right-wing blogger in Denmark, suggested Dr. Pesta submit misleading proposals to gain access to additional data sets “I reckon that if we mask the nature of the study with usual medical terms, one can ‘get away with’ a lot,” Mr. Kirkegaard wrote in an email. “Getting samples for analyses that one doesn’t publish (to preserve your reputation!) are still useful because they allow us to validate our beliefs privately.” In an interview, Dr. Pesta denied misleading the N.I.H. and defended his work. “I am not a eugenicist,” he said.

Dr. Pesta’s collaborators had a history of scrounging for data to support their fringe theories and of using unreliable methodologies. 

Bryan Pesta was mentioned in the report "Race Science, Inc."

"Bryan Pesta, a former recipient of Pioneer money who is now part of HDF’s underground research team."

HDF is Human Diversity Foundation, since officially renamed Polygenic Scores LLC, owned by Kirkegaard.

I was disappointed that the NYTimes does not mention "Race Science, Inc.," published by the British organization Hope not Hate. That article gives a fuller understanding of how these racists work together. Kirkegaard is basically Pesta's employer, and I expect that obtaining data under false pretenses is part of the job of an underground research team member.

Kirkegaard has long been a fan of taking others' data without permission, another useful fact about Kirkegaard left out of the NYTimes article.

I do like the fact that the Times article points out that the "science" done by these race scientists is pure bullshit, like them inventing an ethnicity called "USA Black." One of Kirkegaard's other employees, the neo-Nazi Bo Winegard (also mentioned in the Race Science Inc. article), along with his twin brother Ben, explained their race theories a decade ago in the gutter racist publication Quillette in an article called "The Reality of Race and the Abhorrence or Racism."

...racial categories are like film categories (e.g., drama, horror, comedy). Film categories are certainly real in the sense that they offer predictive power. If one knows that A Nightmare on Elm Street is a horror film, one can be reasonably certain that it will be dark, scary, and violent. But film categories are not immutable essences that perfectly sort movies into distinct types. A genre-based satire like Scream, for example, does not snugly fit into any of the traditional film categories. It might be horror; it might be comedy; it might be some previously unknown combination of the two. Furthermore, there aren’t a fixed number of film categories. 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. (See Daniel Dennett’s book for a variety of points and related examples centering on the topic of species). 

The same principles apply to racial categories. If one knows that Thomas is a Caucasian, one can be reasonably sure that Thomas has relatively light skin, and that he has recent ancestry in Europe.

The Winegards' use of "Caucasian," a scientifically obsolete term tells you exactly how scientific they are. But then, all of the Winegards' race science originates directly from the 18th century, which is when the term Caucasian was invented.

They explain in their article that their classification of human "races" is as scientific as film categories - that is, completely subjective, or as I pointed out when I wrote about the article, what some might call "postmodernist."

Steven Pinker is a big fan of that article.

So this is the type of dum-dum who is grabbing data without permission and trying to use it to justify their own racism.

The NYTimes article mentions a couple of other race science ghouls: John G. R. Fuerst  - believed to be an anti-Semite, not a surprise considering his connection to Kirkegaard; and Jordan Lasker. The NYTimes article mentions in passing the controversy of its using hacked data by political operative Lasker (aka "Crémeiux") to attack Zohran Mamdani during his successful mayoral candidacy.

The Times article also mentions another member of the international Neo-Nazi and race pseudoscience league, Michael Woodley of Menie, but not by name: 

The agency discourages “stigmatizing research” that could promote “negative stereotypes” or cause “social detriment.” That is, in part, a nod to eugenics, a discredited field of research asserting that certain races, usually white Europeans, are genetically superior. Such ideas — and the pseudoscientific studies that support them — have been used to justify violence, including by the gunman who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo in 2022.

The link for "pseudoscientific studies" goes to an archive of the NYTimes article called A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting which talks about how Woodley's racism was included in the manifesto of the gunman responsible for the 2022 slaughter in Buffalo. What the Times article doesn't mention is that Woodley is a participant in annual meetings of the gutter racist organization the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) and that several other frequent meeting participants were also cited by the mass-murderer. Kirkegaard has participated in ISIR meetings several times, most recently in 2024.

The January 24th Times article refers to its article about Woodley, but doesn't mention Woodley has a connection to Kirkegaard. You'd never know how large the Kirkegaard network is - or even that Kirkegaard is far more pernicious than just "a right-wing blogger in Denmark"  if you only read the NYTimes.

Emil Kirkegaard thinks the NYTimes is pro-race science and claims to be happy about the article. 

But Jordan Lasker is less happy.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the NYTimes, David French has just published an op-ed that whitewashes Bari Weiss' anti-woke grifter university in Austin although French does have some criticisms. French discusses Steven Pinker's now-broken connection to University of Austin as if Pinker is the exemplar of sweet reason and "centrism" and so French does not mention Pinker's connection to Kirkegaard.

In other Kirkegaard news, someone published a paper about the lawsuit for defamation brought by Kirkegaard, which Kirkegaard lost. The main purpose of the paper is to argue against the current British court compliance methodology. But it does say this:

A preliminary issue on single meaning and whether the publications were fact or opinion was tried before Julian Knowles J in 2019. He found the single meaning of each publication was not that Mr Kirkegaard had sexually abused children (as Mr Kirkegaard had pleaded). Instead, he agreed with Mr Smith that their meaning was that Mr Kirkegaard was a supporter of, or apologist for, child sexual abuse, which was a defamatory assertion of opinion rather than fact. As a result, he awarded Mr Smith half of his costs on the preliminary issue, some £13,500.

In light of these findings, given Mr Kirkegaard's previous statements on the subject, it was plain that his action would fail, and he discontinued shortly thereafter. The final cost order in Mr Smith's favour came to some £26,000 (and was endorsed with a penal notice).

During the time that Kirkegaard owed money to Smith, the Manhattan Institute's City Journal ran a hit piece about Smith, which Smith successfully sued to have removed. Steven Pinker had helped to promote that hit piece.

It's hard to believe that someone who cares about his career so much, as Steven Pinker certainly seems to care, would ally with an organization run by a terrible person like Emil Kirkegaard. I guess because Pinker loves race pseudoscience so much, he'll align with anybody else pushing it. 

Kirkegaard and his fellow hereditarians can be seen chatting about promoting race science on Kirkegaard's chat board, wondering if they could get Pinker to help out by setting up "an academic group of anonymous scholars."

But you'd never find out about that via the New York Times.

Gutter racists Steven Pinker and Scott Siskind team up to promote neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard

So the last post I wrote was focused on Eric Turkheimer's bet over hereditarian beliefs with Charles Murray and hereditarian Murray lost. Although of course he can't admit it.

Meanwhile, Steven Pinker is promoting hereditarian ghoul Scott Alexander Siskind's website Slate Star Codex- sorry, "Astral Codex Ten", while claiming that hereditarians have won. 

Because there is no data that will convince gutter racists like Murray and Pinker that their "hereditarian hypothesis" is incorrect.

Both Pinker and Siskind like to promote hardcore racists Emil Kirkegaard and Jordan Lasker (Cremieux.) 

We've already seen that Pinker has no shame about participating in the neo-Nazi magazine/podcast Aporia.

And in the Slate Star Codex post Pinker links to from X, Siskind does his part in promoting neo-Nazi ideology pretending to be science:

Emil and Cremieux argue that we know why this study found low heritability of IQ. It’s because you can’t give 347,630 people a full-length IQ test. So they gave these people a short crappy IQ-like test with a lot of random noise. Past studies estimated the reliability of this test at 0.61 (low). It’s easy to statistically correct for this; when you do so, you find that if the test had been better, this study would have estimated the heritability of IQ at 55%. This is still on the low end, but it’s already within the hereditarians’ estimate of 50 - 80%, and there are a few other biases that might be bringing it down too (eg healthy volunteer bias).

Emil of course is neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard. On the word "argue" Siskind links to Kirkegaard's blog.

Here's how we know that Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi.

Cremieux is Jordan Lasker, who works for Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi organization, as described in the Hope not hate expose, "Race Science, Inc." And when Lasker is not spending his time promoting race pseudoscience, he's a right-wing political activist as when he utterly failed to hurt the mayoral hopes of Zohran Mamdani.

Although there's so much overlap between right-wing politics and race pseudoscience, I'm sure it's all the same to Lasker. I've written about how hopelessly infused hereditarianism - especially behavioral genetics - is with racism. And while writing that series of posts, it was clear how much overlap there is with behavioral genetics and right-wing political views, when I found Abdel Abdellaoui calling Steve Pittelli's website, which critiques behavioral genetics, "a far left hate blog."

Right-wing beliefs are a perfect complement to race pseudoscience and vice versa. There will always be be an almost-perfect overlap between members of both categories.

Siskind has been an ally of Kirkegaard for at least nine years, you can see him promoting Kirkegaard back in 2016:

3. And Emil Kirkegaard crunches some numbers that broadly support the latest discussion on here about non-shared environment.

Prior to that he was expressing his agreement with racist kooks Steve Sailer and HBD Chick.

Here is where Siskind works, when he isn't spending his time promoting race pseudoscience and neo-Nazis. 

Imagine taking psychiatric advice from a racist who promotes race pseudoscience and neo-Nazis.

UPDATE: an excellent critique of Scott Siskind, from January 2024,  which mentions his support for race pseudoscience.

Is Matt Yglesias a more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinker or just a great big racist?

Since we were talking about the racist extremist Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) recently, I couldn't help noticing that "centrist" political pundit Matthew Yglesias was, right in the middle of the NYTimes controversy involving Crémieux, promoting a tweet by Crémieux over at the Bad Place.

I had been aware of Yglesias' alliance with racists before. I wrote about his support for Razib Khan, and his defense of Richard Hanania.

While promoting and defending racist ghouls, Yglesias claims to be concerned about racism and bigotry.

On his Substack (of course) Yglesias ponders:

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions. And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct. It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism.

But in this very same Substack post he includes extremist Curtis Yarvin, calling him "an influential and well-regarded voice on the MAGA right" while failing to mention his racism.

Yglesias appears to be doing all he can to normalize racists while claiming to be opposed to racism.

This has been Steven Pinker's strategy for a quarter of a century. Culminating most recently in aligning himself with and helping to mainstream the neo-Nazi organization run by Emil Kirkegaard.

Behavioral genetics promoter Eric Turkheimer responded to Yglesias:

Coming back to Yglesias’ concern with the manners of discussing group differences, I have a rule: All discussions of black-white differences in athletics are really about cognitive ability. If we accept that it is obvious that the predominance of Black people in the NBA is somehow the result of genetic differences, then it opens the door to having a similar discussion about why Black people have historically scored lower on IQ tests. This, I think, it the ultimate reason why Yglesias is uncomfortable with the topic, and I agree that he should be.

But genetic differences in cognitive ability are even more implausible than genetic differences in spelling or ping pong, for an obvious reason: there are massive environmental effects that compete with a genetic hypothesis. It isn’t especially easy to specify exactly how sports programs in Jamaica might go about producing top sprinters, but only bad-faith racists can deny the history of racism in the United States and around the world, beginning with slavery 500 years ago and proceeding through Jim Crow, segregation, and all of the reverberating cross-generational effects in the modern world. It is not possible to “control for” such massive environmental effects, and without doing so speculation about genetic causes is pointless.

I don’t mean to be too tough on Yglesias here. He is just trying to be reasonable about a very complex subject, and he doesn’t mention cognitive ability, although I think it is implicit in his concerns. There are many more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers, from Yglesias to Andrew Sullivan to Sam Harris to Jon Haidt, who try to establish their heterodox, pro-science, academic freedom bona fides by giving a fair shake to genetic explanations of race differences in behavior.

The last paragraph is the most telling -  "I don't mean to be too tough on Yglesias here..."

The "more or less well intended" Andrew Sullivan, Sam Harris and Jon Haidt have all demonstrated their devotion to race pseudoscience and to what I call the "American hereditarian assumption" which goes like this:

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,[143] segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,[144] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

Andrew Sullivan is clearly a racist, promoting and defending the absolute racist Charles Murray for the past thirty years, but even Ezra Klein refuses to call Sullivan a racist.

Not long ago Sullivan was promoting neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

The bar to being called a racist is very high for hereditarians, especially establishment white male hereditarians who make a living as opinion-havers.

Sam Harris promoted the hard-core racist rag Quillette while defending Charles Murray. The Quillette article he linked to, written by (now) Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard and his equally racist brother Ben, contains an example of the American hereditarian assumption in the wild:

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

This is evidence-free bullshit, but it impresses morons like Sam Harris.

Jonathan Haidt has flown under the radar more than Harris and Sullivan have, but he has demonstrated his race pseudoscience beliefs in talks; he's a defender of the garbage "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper written by a couple of racists although never proven or tested; and in the Jeffrey Epstein-funded Edge, in 2009 Haidt said:

Recent "sweeps" of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates. 

 

The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.) 

 

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

There are reasons to hope that we'll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism.

Like all respectable promoters of race pseudoscience Haidt would never use the N word, so most people will miss what he's getting at - although maybe his mention of "Bell Curve" will be a clue to some. 

But I understand what he's saying after all these years of reading the claims of race pseudoscience promoters: in 2009 Haidt believed that genetics studies would prove that there are fundamental genetic racial differences and that racists had been right all along - that Black people as a group have fewer "virtues" than other groups.

But instead of evidence for Haidt's version of the American hereditarian assumption, what we got from genetics studies was evidence of the utter failure of the claims of genetic behavioralists, as recently discussed by Jay Joseph on his (unfortunately Subtack) blog called The Gene Illusion:

Missing heritability is a term that human genetic researchers invented around 15 years ago to acknowledge unexpected causal gene discovery failure, and to describe the large discrepancy between heritability estimates derived from twin studies versus those derived from DNA-based (molecular genetic) methods such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Importantly, as behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer emphasized in his recent book (see my review here), GWASes of psychiatric conditions and behavioral characteristics such as educational attainment (EA, often seen as an IQ “proxy measure”) identify (potentially spurious) gene-behavior “associations” (correlations), not causes.

Later in the post, Joseph writes: 

Most likely, future commentators will tell a similar story about behavioral polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression. Alexander’s post merely continues (1) the 100-year fallacy of assuming that behavioral twin (and adoption) studies are based on sound assumptions and should be interpreted genetically; (2) the 55-year fallacy of assuming that twin studies are sound, so let’s spend billions of dollars trying to find the genes; and (3) the 15-year fallacy of believing that twin studies are sound while DNA-based methods failed, so “heritability must be missing.” It’s time to abandon behavioral and psychiatric research based on twin studies after a disastrous and harmful 100-year run. 

The "Alexander" mentioned in the paragraph above is Scott Alexander, real name Scott Siskind, yet another self-impressed dumbass who promotes race pseudoscience. His Slate Star Codex is a comfortable place for Steve Sailer to hang out and promote his racist extremism. 

And speaking of Steve Sailer:

Turkheimer may have done some good work, and may be publicly anti-racist, but he's a goddam fool to quickly absolve these pernicious ghouls of their racism.

As a result of Turkheimer's hands-off attitude towards racists, you can see Sailer is all over the comments section of the Turkheimer post about Yglesias. Turkheimer makes no response to Sailer, he just allows Sailer to promote his bullshit.

Also in the comments: "Slowly Reading" provides links to neo-Nazi Aporia and yes, of course to a tweet by Crémieux.

This acceptance, by people who should know better, of race pseudoscience promoters, as "more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers" is why I have to keep doing this blog.