Bo Winegard doesn't like his RationalWiki page

Bo Winegard published a piece in Medium today about his RationalWiki entry:

Needless to say, this is not a dispassionate account of my beliefs or my professional life. It’s an ideologically motivated smear job. To the best of my knowledge, I do not promote “pseudoscience.” I am certain that I am wrong about a number of things. But I am open to evidence. And I would never willingly promote something that I knew was false. I have made no attempt to “surround” myself with “white nationalists”. Most of my friends are liberal to progressive.

As so often with Winegard this paragraph is a combination of self-pity, self-regard and bullshit.

Winegard is not "open to evidence" because he is paid by Quillette (and probably others) to promote race science, and his tendency, like Claire Lehmann, to block critics of race science is one example of his refusal to listen to evidence and reason concerning race science.

From the Bo Winegard RationalWiki:

Winegard spends most of his time on Twitter talking about race and the alleged evils of liberalism.[citation NOT needed] He retweets Nathan Cofnas, Charles Murray, Noah Carl, Emil Kirkegaard, James Thompson and other alt-righter "race realists". Winegard identifies as a member of the alt-center which is basically an attempt by white nationalists in the alt-right to re-brand themselves as political moderates.[10]

However Winegard is correct there is a factual error in the article which includes this reference:

EvoPsych and Scientific Racism — a critique of Winegard's "Human Biological and Psychological Diversity" article by Steven Pinker on Freethought Blogs

As Winegard notes in his Medium piece:

Steven Pinker has never denounced my work, although it is certainly possible that he disagrees with some of my hypotheses.

I've never seen any evidence that Pinker disagrees with anything Bo Winegard has ever said, and in fact Pinker has enthusiastically recommended the work of the Winegards, in particular their defense of The Bell Curve and its claim of black genetic intellectual inferiority.

• Pinker recommends"On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism" by Bo & Ben Winegard & Brian Boutwell, June 2016
• Pinker recommends "A Tale of Two Bell Curves by the Winegards, March 2017
• Pinker recommending Bo Winegard's centrist article September 2017
• Pinker recommending Bo Winegard's centrist in October 2017
• Bo and Ben Winegard defend Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" in February 2018
• Bo Winegard and Noah Carl cite Pinker's "The Blank Slate" in their critical review of Saini's Superior: The Return of Race Science in June 2019

Bo Winegard really is a racist

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.

I've demonstrated many times how incoherent race "science" is, on this blog, and the Winegards' worship of "the West" is another case in point. Race science claims that "East Asians" are the smartest "race" although sometimes race science breaks Ashkenazi Jews into a separate race and then declares them to be the smartest race. You can watch white supremacist Stefan Molyeux and race science professional Linda Gottfredson defining and ranking races by intelligence in a Molyneux interview.

So why do Bo and Ben Winegard love Western Civilization so much, since by their own race science belief system, white people are at best the second most intelligent "race?" Why don't they align with Eastern Civilization, the civilization created by a smarter race? 

It doesn't make sense. But then, neither does race science, and people who promote it will inevitably be revealed as racist. As Bo Winegard has been revealed as a racist.

The race crackpottery of Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard part 1

Bo Winegard, fired for "science"
The image above shows Winegard
promoting one of his favorite terms, 
"Equalitaranism" also a favorite term
of Southern segregationists.

I've been thinking about the randomness of race classification systems quite a bit lately thanks to recently posting my interview with anthropologist Maxine Margolis.

Margolis has studied Brazil for decades and discussed the race classification there, which is very different from the system in the United States. In the interview she said: 

Brazil never had a history of legal segregation, the way of defining race in Brazil is very different from the US, there is no "one drop rule" in Brazil.  

Brazil has always classified people by two things: how they looked, so that full brothers and sisters could be classified differently in terms of race, if one was lighter skinned and the other was darker skinned. So how people look. Not who their parents no less grandparents, but also socioeconomic status. Darker people tend to be poor in Brazil, lighter people tend to be wealthier in Brazil. People who are mulattos, who are mixed-race tend to be seen as lighter if they are educated and of a higher social class. 

And Brazil has many, many racial categories not two, like in the US. And there is something like forty different racial terms in use in Brazil, based on how people look, their features, their hair type, their skin color, their lip type, etc. There are all kinds of combinations.

So various cultures have various folk classifications of "race." And nobody claims folk classifications are science. Except of course the proponents of race "science."

Bo and Ben Winegard and their biosocial criminologist pal Brian Boutwell promoted folk classification schemes as useful to science, as I discussed in my post I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and the "Biological Reality of Race." They wrote in their article for Quillette, "On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism" (my highlight):

Race, then, is not a platonic essence and racial groups are not discrete categories of humans. Instead, race is a pragmatic construct that picks out real variation in the world (which corresponds to shared ancestry) and allows people and scientists to make useful inferences.

The term "platonic essence" they most likely got from professional racist Steve Sailer. But notice that they say that "pragmatic" race categories allow people and scientists to make useful inferences.

This is the kind of sleaze you can expect from race science proponents: equating the understanding of race by non-scientists with scientists. And they expect their audience will be easily gulled by a simple conflation like that.

And considering their article was written for a Quillette audience, they were probably right.

And it must be noted that for all the Winegard brothers claiming that race is not "a platonic essence" and can be mixed and matched in any way, it does not stop them from promoting the notion that there are "black" people and that these "black" people are less intelligent, evolutionarily, than non-black people. Or per Winegard's favorite weaselly euphemism, "human population variation."

Bo Winegard is a race science stooge, so Marietta college did the right thing by declining to renew his employment with them. But there is no actual evidence that's why they declined.

An article at Inside Higher Ed, by Colleen Flaherty, basically pushes Winegard's side of the story calling on race science promoters to weigh in on poor Bo's plight, including Lee Jussim, Richard Haier and Nathan Cofnas. All Flaherty got out of Marietta was:

Marietta declined comment, saying Winegard’s case was a private personnel issue.

Which race science supporters interpreted as their free pass to claim virtually anything they wanted about the case.

Winegard published an article declaring his free speech martyrdom in the Right's favorite race science rag, Quillette. Breitbart promoted Winegard 's Quillette article and Areomagazine, (Quillette's twin sister) said:

Those progressives who consider the firing of Winegard to be a victory, might consider the precedent this sets for conservative policy makers empowered to make decisions about university funding and policy.

Ignoring the fact that what Winegard promotes is pseudoscience. But you can't outdo Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, whose article Hounding The Heretic Bo Winegard is illustrated by someone being burned at the stake.

The idea that this teratoma Bo Winegard promotes, a grotesquerie composed of 18th century belief, contemporary folklore and segregationist defenses, is actual science would be funny except that so many people on the Right believe it is science.

Or as some fool of a lawyer named Scott H. Greenfield put it: Bo Winegard, Fired for Science.

Unfortunately for Bo, the Right's plans to celebrate him as a martyred saint were foiled by the coronavirus. And by the time the pandemic is over the Right will probably have moved onto another grift.

But don't cry for Bo, he is still the house race science promoter at Quillette, and Charles Murray is pretty old. Once Murray is gone, Bo might have a chance at an even more lucrative slot in the generous world of wingnut welfare,  as resident race science promoter at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Right is willing to pay well for anybody who can put a veneer of science, no matter how transparent, on their racism.

Probably because Winegard wants to keep all avenues of potential income open, he recently wrote in Medium claiming race doesn't mean anything to him.

Unfortunately for him, you can still find him and his brother Ben in Quillette, claiming that The Bell Curve was correct about innate African American intelligence and they explicitly rule out the legacy of slavery:

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.

Bo Winegard is as sleazy as he is an intellectual failure. But to truly understand how unscientific, how shameless and how utterly stupid race science is, we must return to Steve Sailer, who has been a big influence on the Winegard brothers and their promotion of "human biodiversity" a term Sailer coined. We'll talk about Sailer in the Part 2 of the race crackpottery of Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard.

"On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism" reaches its apotheosis

Steven Pinker promoting utter crackpottery
to his thousands of followers who have
confidence in his scientific opinions

I saw a tweet about this story today from the Associated Press:

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Three couples planning to get married in Virginia have filed a federal lawsuit challenging a state requirement that they disclose their race on their marriage application. 

Civil-rights lawyer Victor Glasberg, who filed the lawsuit Thursday in Alexandria, says the requirement is a vestige of Virginia’s Jim Crow laws and that Virginia is one of only eight states requiring marriage applicants to disclose their race. 

One Virginia county, Rockbridge County, provided a list of more than 200 potential races to a couple that questioned the requirement. It included “American,” ″Aryan,” ″Moor” and “Mulatto,” according to the lawsuit.

This is a perfect example of the race classification system promoted by Ben Winegard, Bo Winegard and Brian Boutwell published by Quillette entitled On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism which holds that you can classify "race" any way you wish:

...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. But racial categories, like film categories, aren’t immutable essences that perfectly sort humans into distinct groups. There aren’t a fixed number of racial categories, and the number researchers use is partially a matter of convenience. One might start with five continentally based categories (i.e., Caucasians, East Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines) and then add more categories as one’s analysis becomes more granular (e.g. Ashkenazi Jewish, Mizrahi Jewish, and so on). These categories aren’t real in some metaphysical sense, but they are useful, and they do have predictive value.  In this, they are like many other constructs in the social sciences such as self-esteem, intelligence, and agreeableness. They represent traits that cluster together; they predict outcomes; and they can be quantified.

But the absence of an empirical standard to determine race does not prevent the Winegard brothers from supporting the race classification system in The Bell Curve, which claims that lower test scores of "black" people compared to "white" is due in part to innate inferior intelligence of "black" people. 

This is called the hereditarian hypothesis. In their article entitled A Tale of Two Bell Curves published in, where else, Quillette, the Winegard brothers write:

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. 

For these reasons, and many more, in a 1980s survey, most scholars with expertise rejected the environment-only interpretation of the racial IQ gap, and a plurality (45%) accepted some variant of the hereditarian hypothesis.

This logical disconnect, between believing there are "white" and "black" races whose test scores can be compared, while at the same time holding that there is no empirical basis - or even just a standard that hereditarians can agree on amongst themselves - for race classification is the incoherent, insane foundation of hereditarianism - also known as "race science."

And alleged scientists like Steven Pinker and Jerry Coyne both promoted "On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism" to their thousands of followers. I posted Pinker's tweet for the article above. Jerry Coyne wrote:

On to “race”, a loaded word if ever there was one. Browsing through Quillette, I found a short but very good 2016 article about race by Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard, and Brian Boutwell, “On the reality of race and the abhorrence of racism“. It’s one of the more sensible pieces on race written for a popular audience, and takes the position I mentioned above; as the authors say, “Promoting a tolerant cosmopolitan society doesn’t require denying basic facts about the world.” Or, as they say, using italics to emphasize their view, “Racism isn’t wrong because there aren’t races; it is wrong because it violates basic human decency and modern moral ideals.”

Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution thinks this utter crackpottery is "one of the more sensible pieces on race written for a popular audience."

So to be crystal clear: the race science view of race, promoted by Coyne and Pinker is that there are biological races but we can't say exactly what those biological races are.

But clearly Coyne believes in biology-based classification systems even for human ancestry.

And we know that Coyne believes that human races/ethnicities/ecotypes "evolved different traits."

“Race” (or “ethnicity”, if you like that word better) is simply a term for human “ecotypes”: groups of different evolutionary ancestry that have evolved different traits.

So why do the actual scientists of race science refuse to push for an empirical standard of biological race classification?

We see the results of the failure to come up with a standard for race classification in the Rockbridge County system with its list of 200 potential races including  “American,” ″Aryan,” ″Moor” and “Mulatto."

And if you say, well those Rockbridge County people doubtless weren't scientists - is their system any different from the one proposed by the Winegards and Boutwell and endorsed by Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker? After all, the Reality of Race article makes clear that each individual can invent their own classification system based on utility:

These categories aren’t real in some metaphysical sense, but they are useful, and they do have predictive value.

The government of Rockbridge County at some point decided that "Moor" and "Mulatto" were useful and have predictive value. And the "researchers" that the Winegards/Boutwell mention have no basis on which to tell them they are wrong. That's the beauty of the Netflix system of hereditarian race classification.

Now the question is whether proponents of race science are too mentally disorganized to understand the disconnect between claiming there are no clear race categories while at the same time claiming that different races "have evolved different traits" or if race science proponents understand the logic problem but are confident that the mentally disorganized people in their fan base don't understand the problem. And then there are those who like to hear that their bigotry is based on science, and so not racism at all, but rather an "abhorrence of racism."

I'm inclined to the stupidity rather than the malice hypothesis. But more research on the mental abilities of race science proponents needs to be done.

The actual sensible view of race is not from another piece of Quillette garbage but rather from one of the objecting brides-to-be:

In Arlington County, bride-to-be Ashley Ramkishun said she was told that if she objected to listing a specific race, she could list “other.” 

“We’re not others. We’re human beings,” she said.

Response to "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" ~ part 1

Originally posted to my personal blog January 20, 2018

It was my intention in this post to analyze the serious flaws of a piece published in Quillette on the issue of the existence of race as a biological reality but then I fell down the racist rabbit hole at Quillette. So I have to step back and discuss a few other things first.

Quillette is not some kind of peer-reviewed science periodical, but rather a right-wing/libertarian project by Claire Lehmann.

According to her bio, Lehmann is a psychology grad student drop-out who in addition to contributing to mostly right-leaning media outlets (National Review, Commentary, The Spectator) mentions writing for her own Quillette as one of her accomplishments.

Quillette opposes feminism - every article posted about feminism in Quillette is an attack on feminists. And of course it taps anti-feminist Susan Venker to write glowingly of Camille Paglia, buddy of Rush Limbaugh, whose entire claim to fame is based on attacking feminists.

I'll save you the time in reading Venker's take, which is, as always: feminists hate men.

Now typically I'd just ignore Quillette like I ignore the National Review or any other piece of right-wing trash (read about the National Review's history concerning the Civil Rights movement here), but it is used as a source frequently by Steven Pinker and Jerry Coyne. Meanwhile the third evo-psycho bro, Razib Khan, is contributor at Quillette.

And to my surprise and disgust I just realized that Jonathan Kay, who ghost-wrote Justin Trudeau's Common Ground and who I was inclined to respect and with whom I agree about the perniciousness of anti-cultural appropriation was also a contributor. Maybe I'll have to apologize to Jeet Heer, who called Kay a "rightwing provocateur." Although Kay claims on Twitter he's taking a break from Quillette.

In addition to Razib Khan, Quillette's go-to guys for opinions on race appear to be Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell (the authors of  On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism.)

The Khan piece I linked to early on in this post was co-authored by Boutwell.

Their bios at the end of the piece:

• Bo Winegard is a graduate student at Florida State University. Follow him on Twitter @EPoe187
• Ben Winegard is an Assistant Professor at Carroll College. Follow him on Twitter @BenWinegard
• Brian Boutwell is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University. Follow him on Twitter @fsnole1 (NOTE: his actual account appears to be FSNole57 )

The Winegards and Brian Boutwell are proponents of "human biological diversity" as demonstrated in this piece: Human Biological and Psychological Diversity.

Not surprisingly, Steve Sailer, Steven Pinker's old buddy, is a big fan of their work.

While looking for work in Quillette by the Winegard brothers and Boutwell I discovered the Winegards':  A Tale of Two Bell Curves which was published after the Reality of Race article.

Here is an excerpt:

Claim 4b: It is likely that some of the intelligence differences among races are caused by genetics.

This was the most controversial argument of The Bell Curve, but before addressing it, it is worth noting how cautious Hernstein and Murray were when forwarding this hypothesis: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might that mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.” (p. 311). This is far from the strident tone one would expect from reading secondhand accounts of The Bell Curve!

There are two issues to address here. The first is how plausible is the hereditarian hypothesis (the hypothesis that genes play a causal role in racial differences in intelligence); and the second is should responsible researchers be allowed to forward reasonable, but potentially inflammatory hypotheses if they might later turn out false.

Although one would not believe it from reading most mainstream articles on the topic (with the exception of William Saletan’s piece at Slate), the proposal that some intelligence differences among races are genetically caused is quite plausible. It is not our goal, here, to cover this debate exhaustively. Rather, we simply want to note that the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable and coheres with a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations . Whether or not it is correct is another question.

Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.

Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities. But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap. Even if researchers control for SES, the intelligence gap is only shrunk by roughly 30% (estimates vary based on the dataset used, but almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap). This is excessively charitable, as well, because intelligence also causes differences in socioeconomic status, so when researchers “control for SES,” they automatically shrink some of the gap.

Another argument that is often forwarded is that intelligence tests are culturally biased—they are designed in such a way that Black intelligence is underestimated. Although it would be rash to contend that bias plays absolutely no role in race differences in intelligence, it is pretty clear that it does not play a large role: standardized IQ and high stakes tests predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people. As Earl Hunt argued in his textbook, “If cultural unfairness were a major cause of racial/ethnic differences in test performance, we would not have as much trouble detecting it as seems to be the case.” (p. 425).

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.

For these reasons, and many more, in a 1980s survey, most scholars with expertise rejected the environment-only interpretation of the racial IQ gap, and a plurality (45%) accepted some variant of the hereditarian hypothesis. Although data are hard to obtain today, this seems to remain true. In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts), most scholars continued to reject the environment-only interpretation (supported by 17%), and a majority believed that at least 50% of the gap was genetically caused (52%). Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views. Publicly, most experts remain silent and allow vocal hereditarian skeptics to monopolize the press; privately, most concede that the hereditarian hypothesis is quite plausible. Here, we’ll leave the last word to the always judicious Earl Hunt: “Plausible cases can be made for both genetic and environmental contributions to [racial differences in] intelligence…Denials or overly precise statements on either the pro-genetic or pro-environmental side do not move the debate forward. They generate heat rather than light.” (p. 436).

Whatever the truth about the cause of racial differences in intelligence, it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable, cautiously worded, and testable hypotheses. Science progresses by rigorously testing hypotheses, and it is antithetical to the spirit of science to disregard and in fact rule out of bounds an entirely reasonable category of explanations (those that posit some genetic causation in intelligence differences among racial groups). The Bell Curve is not unique for forwarding such hypotheses; it is unique because it did so publicly. Academics and media pundits quickly made Murray an effigy and relentlessly flogged him as a warning to others: If you go public with what you know, you too will suffer this fate.

I find it odd that this article, published in March 2017 talks about how "if you go public with what you know, you too will suffer (a bad) fate" and yet don't even mention Razib Khan, who co-wrote a piece in Quillette with the bros' other co-author Brian Boutwell. Even though it's in the public record that Khan lost a job working at the New York Times thanks to the controversy about his racism.

Apologists for The Bell Curve never tell you that one of the major sources of claims used by "The Bell Curve" is itself racist. In Charles Lane's 1994 review of the Bell Curve he writes:

Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve’s bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828).2 But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of “racial history” founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.3 

Mankind Quarterly was established during decolonization and the US civil rights movement. Defenders of the old order were eager to brush a patina of science on their efforts. Thus Mankind Quarterly’s avowed purpose was to counter the “Communist” and “egalitarian” influences that were allegedly causing anthropology to neglect the fact of racial differences. “The crimes of the Nazis,” wrote Robert Gayre, Mankind Quarterly’s founder and editor-in-chief until 1978, “did not, however, justify the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact, nor of egalitarianism as ethnically and ethically demonstrable.”4

Gayre was a champion of apartheid in South Africa, and belonged to the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia.5 In 1968, he testified for the defense at the hate speech trial of five members of the British Racial Preservation Society, offering his expert opinion that blacks are “worthless.”6 The founders of Mankind Quarterly also included Henry E. Garrett of Columbia University, a one-time pamphleteer for the White Citizens’ Councils who provided expert testimony for the defense in Brown v. Board of Education;7 and Corrado Gini, leader of fascist Italy’s eugenics movement and author of a 1927 Mussolini apologia called “The Scientific Basis of Fascism.”8

I doubt that the readers of Quillette actually take the time to look at the hyperlinked references the Winegards provide in the piece.  However I did take the time, and the Winegards sources are primarily notorious scientific racists and their own work. I will review their sources in the next post.

The race crackpottery of Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard part 2

PART 1

Steven Pinker has not, as far as I have been able to discover, acknowledged the existence of Steve Sailer since 2011, although prior to that Pinker promoted Sailer's career, using him to support his position in a dispute with Malcolm Gladwell and even included him in a collection of "the best" science and nature writing.

But since 2011, no acknowledgement, and I have looked. Although Steve Sailer will tell you that he has had a big influence on Pinker.

Sailer has certainly been a big influence on the thinking of "human biodiversity" proponents like Bo and Ben Winegard.

The Winegards together with the Koch-supported Johnny Anomaly, can be seen promoting "human biodiversity" in this 2020 paper, which cites many of the biggest names in scientific racism including Linda Gottfredson, J.P. Rushton and Richard Lynn. No mention of Sailer though, even to mention he coined the term human biodiversity.

The Winegards like to use a Sailer term "platonic essence" to justify how, although they are certain that a category of humans called "black" exists, and that this category has special evolved traits, at the same time they deny the existence of clear-cut races. How nice to have things both ways, without being conscious of the logical disconnect.

But Pinker, who has also promoted the work of the Winegards, has pioneered the use of equivocation as a career choice.

The Winegards, in their A Tale of Two Bell Curves, included the results of a survey of, they claim, "expert opinion" on intelligence testing and Sailer was deemed to be the most reliable source.

However there isn't much else online linking the Winegards with Sailer. Which is not to say there is no evidence of a relationship. Last June Bo Winegard can be seen having a friendly exchange with Sailer, on Twitter, about movies.

Winegard must have a pretty friendly relationship with Sailer, not only because he engages in casual conversation with him in public, but because Winegard is aware that Sailer is radioactive, since Sailer is infamous as a racist.

Sailer himself acknowledged this recently on his Unz blog (also double-dipping at VDARE) by quoting someone else saying Winegard claimed in his Quillette podcast interview:

one of the triggers to his being fired was him liking a tweet by Steve Sailer…

Pinkerite has discussed the professional racist career of Sailer, in depth in a series of posts but I kept meaning to come back to one particular thing that Sailer said, which demonstrates the utter failure of race "science" as a science.

In my post The racist logic of Steve Sailer, I quoted Sailer from a VDARE article:

Q. But I see all these black people on TV being highly entertaining. They look pretty lively upstairs. Could IQ tests be missing something? 

A. Yes. IQ test questions, by their nature, must have fixed, objective answers. If African Americans are better at subjective, improvisatory responses than they are at objective problem-solving, then IQ will fail to predict fully their patterns of success in the real world. And, indeed, we see much evidence for that every time we turn on the TV (e.g., Oprah).  

Unfortunately, there aren't nearly as many jobs being entertainment or sports superstars as black youths seem to assume, so, overall, IQ remains a quite accurate predictor outside of the tiny sliver of celebrities.

The link to support Sailer's claim that African Americans have a "subjective, improvisatory" kind of intelligence is an article by Sailer himself from 1999 in the National Post of Canada available via the Wayback Machine.

The article contains gems of science such as:

Interestingly, while blacks tend to be more masculine in physique and personality than whites or East Asians, they are often better at typically feminine, more subjective cerebral skills like verbalization, emotional intuition and expression, sense of rhythm, sense of style, improvisation, situational awareness, and mental multi-tasking. Jordan's brain, for instance, enables him to anticipate his opponent's every move while simultaneously demoralizing his foe with nonstop trash-talking. (Try it. It's not easy.)

So Steve Sailer has a problem, which he presents as a frequently asked question, about his racist theories. The problem is that many black people seem very smart indeed.

So Sailer invents a special kind of intelligence for African Americans - "subjective and improvisatory" as opposed to "objective problem-solving." And Sailer declares in his 1999 article that blacks are better at "feminine, more subjective cerebral skills."

There is no scientific evidence that the abilities Sailer claims are black and female are mutually exclusive with objective problem-solving, never mind evidence that women and black people are innately less able to solve problems.

But the absence of evidence will never stop a bigot. Steve Sailer needed a "scientific" justification so he pulled one out of his ass.

And that's where Bo Winegard gets his science - from Steve Sailer's ass.

Although we don't know for sure the reason why Marietta College declined to keep Bo Winegard on its payroll, it has every right to regard Winegard as a crank and a charlatan who dresses up 18th century beliefs and the crackpot theories of Steve Sailer as "science" to try to make a buck.

He might be able to make a buck, but like the career of Steve Sailer, he won't make a buck from people who value intellectual excellence and serious scientific work. Bo Winegard's hope for a career as a race monger rests on the right-wing racist eco-system funded by the same wealthy, cranky, old white men who have supported Steve Sailer for decades. 

And from Winegard's perspective, why not? Shilling the contents of Steve Sailer's ass as "science" sure beats working for a living.

Standard IDW Hypocrisy

Bo Winegard blocked me on Twitter for criticizing his support for "human biodiversity."

Bo Winegard's HBD bona fides.

Human Biological and Psychological Diversity - co-written with Ben Winegard and "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell

On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism (in Quillette) - co-written with Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell

How conservative and white supremacist is Quillette? Part 2

As we discussed in Part 1, Claire Lehmann threatened via tweet to sue an Australian writer for opining that the publication she founded, Quillette, is a conservative website happy to publish authors known for promoting theories of white supremacy.

It was quick work to demonstrate that Quillette is widely considered to be a conservative website.

The white supremacy issue is a little more complicated.

The Anti-Defamation League has two similar but contrasting definitions of white supremacy.

One is white supremacy:

White supremacy is a term used to characterize various belief systems central to which are one or more of the following key tenets: 1) whites should have dominance over people of other backgrounds, especially where they may co- exist; 2) whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society; 3) white people have their own "culture" that is superior to other cultures; 4) white people are genetically superior to other people. As a full-fledged ideology, white supremacy is far more encompassing than simple racism or bigotry. Most white supremacists today further believe that the white race is in danger of extinction due to a rising “flood” of non-whites, who are controlled and manipulated by Jews, and that imminent action is need to “save” the white race.

The other is "traditional white supremacists"

Traditional white supremacists are one of the major segments of the white supremacist movement in the United States, as well as the oldest. The term is used to refer to a variety of groups and individuals whose white supremacy centers around or originated from the struggle to deny equal rights to African-Americans. Ku Klux Klan groups are the most common type of traditional white supremacist, but the movement also includes other groups, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, the League of the South, and others.

Quillette is devoted to race science, and the main focus of race science is the claim that black people are intellectually inferior to all other "races." Race science also believes Ashkenazi Jews are the most intelligent "race," a belief expressed in the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis published in 2005, which has been promoted by Steven Pinker.

The intellectual inferiority of blacks and the intellectual superiority of Jews are also white supremacist beliefs as demonstrated in segregationist Henry E. Garrett's article "The Equalitarian Dogma" published in Mankind Quarterly in 1961.

However, race science promoters can defend themselves against the charge of white supremacy by pointing out that they either consider Jews to be separate from whites, and consider Jews the most intelligent "race" or, in the case of the race science intelligence rankings that don't separate Jews from whites, East Asians are claimed to be genetically most intelligent. And so they don't, theoretically, believe whites are supreme.

But because they share many core beliefs, it is easy to mistake race science promoters for white supremacists, and there are certainly cases where race science promoters are also white supremacists, as in the case of one of the co-authors of the NHAI paper, the late Henry Harpending.*

So it is correct to say Quillette is happy to publish those who promote white supremacist theories.

To get an idea of how strongly race science promoters believe in the genetic intellectual inferiority of blacks, here are two examples, both by Quillette authors.

The first is a couple of selections from John Paul Wright, professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati College of Education Criminal Justice and Human Services, as well as its director of the graduate program in criminal justice. I've referenced these selections a lot on this blog because they are the plainest demonstration of the beliefs of race science.

In Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research edited by Anthony Walsh and Kevin M. Beaver (Quillette author) Wright said:

Page 149:
...Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially. 

Page 150:
From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality. 

The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.

It's important to note that Wright is a "biosocial criminologist" so not only does he believe blacks are intellectually inferior, he believes they are more inclined, genetically, to criminal behavior than other "races."

On his blog, Conservative Criminality, Wright expressed his antipathy for Black Lives Matter:

So, I’m inclined to see BLM as movement that is largely immoral even if it contains individuals who are moral. I’m inclined to view their general claims as largely hollow even if the occasional case supports their view. And I see more and more how their rhetoric and their actions are brining (sic) harm to people.

The second example is by Bo Winegard, former assistant professor at Marietta college and currently on staff at Quillette and his twin brother Ben who is currently Assistant Professor of Psychology at Carroll College. Bo and Ben Winegard wrote a defense of The Bell Curve in Quillette called "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" in which they agree with John Paul Wright, in so many words that "No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths" about the failure of African Americans to thrive, post-Emancipation:

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.

Bo Winegard can be seen promoting the work of John Paul Wright here.

Quillette has published many supporters of race science, several of whom have been previously mentioned on this blog. 

1. Johnny Anomaly
2. Rosalind Arden (author, staff member & sometime co-author with Linda Gottfredson)
3. Kevin Beaver
4. Brian Boutwell
5. Noah Carl
6. Cory Clark
7. Gregory Cochran
8. Nathan Cofnas
9. James Damore
10. David C. Geary
11. Richard Haier
12. David M. Haskell
13. Lee Jussim
14. Razib Khan
15. Geoffrey Miller
16. Kathrine Jebsen Moore
17. Adam Perkins
18. Steven Pinker
19. Robert Plomin
20. Jason Richwine
21. Todd "T.K." Shackleford
22. Michael Shermer
23. Ben Winegard
24. Bo Winegard (author and staff member)   
25. Colin Wright (author and staff member)
26. John Paul Wright
27. Toby Young (also Quillette's London editor)

There are probably others. I will add them as I find them.

For those who are wondering why Andy Ngo, who is currently listed in Quillette as Sub-editor, Contributing Writer, didn't make the list, it's because although he is a grifter and a Trump flunky, I have not found anything written by him about race science or associated theories. On the other hand, Emil O. Kirkegaard, while very much a proponent of race science, and who would seem to be a natural fit for Quillette, hasn't had a Quillette byline.

Several on the list have appeared on the video channel of Stefan Molyneux, who is described as a white supremacist by Vice, and Media Matters: Beaver, Boutwell, Haier, Haskell, John Paul Wright, Shermer, Richwine, Perkins and Damore.

I will look at more white supremacist-race science connections in a future post.

---

* In a blog called West Hunter, which Harpending shared with Gregory Cochran and in which Cochran still writes as of June 2020, Harpending published a post in 2012 called My friend the witch doctor in which he shared a colleague's thoughts, with apparent approval:

A colleague pointed out a few weeks ago, after hearing this story, that if (the belief in witchcraft) is nearly pan-African then perhaps some of it came to the New World. Prominent and not so prominent talkers from the American Black population come out with similar theories of vague and invisible forces that are oppressing people, like “institutional racism” and “white privilege”. 

The Native American/East Asian "race"

Part 1: Cleanup on Aisle 88
Part 2: Race Science: wronger than ever

Race science considers IQ tests to be expressions of innate, genetic-based intelligence.

They believe that there is a Native American race which, as a group, has a genetic-based intelligence rating of 87. They also believe there is an Asian race - which they sometimes subdivide into South, East etc. But they believe East Asians are, as a race, of high genetic-based intelligence, with a group IQ score of 105 or 106.

So it's rather inconvenient for race science that 23andMe groups Native Americans and East Asians together into something 23andMe calls a "global population."

Race science proponents will sometimes claim that when they say "race" they are merely referring to the geographic location from whence distinct populations derived. So Asian, European, African, Australian, Native American.

Leading race science critic John Jackson explains:

So why did natural philosophers begin classifying people into races? Because of European colonialism. The idea that people could be classified into fixed races came from the colonies and filtered back into the European continent. Scholars like Suman Seth and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra show how the race idea was inextricably linked to European colonialism and the need to justify the domination of the conquered and African slavery. The very idea of “race” was tainted from the very beginning. It was and is no humble biological concept but one that arose because of the necessity of justifying inequitable social arrangements. Quillette would have us shrug all of this off claiming “Enlightenment philosophers also took to classifying human differences for the mundane reason that such differences actually exist.” This is not only begging the question but is empirically false. There is an ugly history here and by hiding it Quillette is being irresponsible. 

False premise 2. Racial divisions are principled scientific categories. “The claim that [racial] divisions are arbitrary” is false.
How does Quillette know this? Because:

 Noah Rosenberg and colleagues found that human genetic variation largely corresponds to broad geographic regions and, more compellingly, that it closely matches Johann Blumenbach’s 1781 classification of human morphological variation into five races: Caucasians, Americans (Amerindians), Ethiopians (Africans), Mongolians (East Asians), and Malaysians (Oceanians).

The Quillette passage he is citing is a race science primer disguised as a book review by Bo Winegard and Noah Carl. 

According to the Wayback Machine, 23andMe had a sample report, available to the public that displayed its classification of Native American and East Asian at least as early as January 2017. The Winegard/Carl article was published in 2019 and doesn't mention it, at all, because it's likely they didn't look.

This is from Ben and Bo Winegard and Brian Boutwell, in a paper from 2017 called Human Biological and Psychological Diversity:

One can begin with broad, continentally-based categories: Caucasian, East Asian, Africans, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines (Wade 2014) They are broad, general categories, but they have some predictive value.

(They cite Nicholas Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance.)

But clearly they do not have "predictive value." They are dead wrong - East Asian and Native Americans are not genetically separate, in spite of being continentally separate.

These are the global populations listed by 23andMe, only one of which - European - aligns squarely with the traditional race science geographic scheme.

• European 
• Central & South Asian 
• East Asian and Native American 
• Melanesian 
• Sub-Saharan African 
• Western Asia and North African 
• Unassigned

23&Me explains this in a section of its website called 23andMe Reference Populations & Regions

The 45 Ancestry Composition regional populations are organized in a hierarchy, which reflects the genetic structure of global populations. For example, British & Irish is a part of Northwestern European, which is part of European.

These are all the populations listed by 23andMe for East Asian and Native American

Chinese & Southeast Asian

• Chinese
• Chinese Dai 
• Filipino and Austronesian 
• Indonesian Thai Khmer and Myanma 
• Vietnamese

Japanese and Korean
Native American
North Asian 

• Manchurian & Mongolian 
• Siberian

Here is what it says about Native Americans

Over the past few decades, researchers compared the DNA of indigenous Americans to populations from around the world, confirming a genetic link between the native peoples of Northeast Asia and the Americas.

Over 30,000 years ago, the ancestors of the first Americans began to form a distinct genetic population in Central Asia, and by ~25,000 years ago these ancient humans reached Beringia — a land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska — where they remained in isolation for millennia until the massive ice sheets covering North America began to recede near the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. Upon reaching Alaska, these ancient voyagers became the first humans (not to mention, the first member of the hominid family) to set foot in the western hemisphere.

Near the top of this post I said: So it's rather inconvenient for race science that 23andMe groups two completely separate "races" per race science tradition, Native American and East Asian, together into something 23andMe calls a "global population."

Rather it would be inconvenient if race science cared about data. As we have seen, race science is dependent on 19th century - or even 18th century concepts and race classification schemes.

I mentioned how important Rushton and Lynn are to race science and that is demonstrated in the 2017 Winegard/Boutwell paper, when the paper describes the human biodiversity "Research Program" in the first paragraph:

Here, we will lay out six basic principles of this new Darwinian paradigm (see also, Boyd and Richerson 1985; Cochran and Harpending 2009; Laland et al. 2010; Lynn 2006; Rushton 1995; Wade 2014).

Note also "Cochran and Harpending" because of course Winegards/Boutwell present the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis so well refuted by anthropologist Brian Ferguson as if it was settled science.

They aren't interested over-much in new information, for to practice race science all the information you need exists, virtually unchanged for hundreds of years.

Because in spite of claiming to care about genetics, humanbiodiversity, race science, etc. is a political project, not a scientific one. And it is lazy.

Yet just yesterday on Twitter, we see Ben Winegard claiming there are "many" of thousands of hereditarians doing excellent research. Pinkerite is blocked by Winegard, or course, and last time I checked nobody has asked him for evidence of this "excellent research" but it's pretty clear that Winegard is impressed by the likes of Richard Lynn, Jean-Phillippe Rushton, Nicholas Wade, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.

People who do lazy, pseudoscientific politics and claim it's science deserve to be (verbally) attacked.

Quillette doubles down on race science: Bo Winegard and Noah Carl

The Sami people ("Lapps") of northern Finland
were not considered  by Blumenbach to be
part of the "becoming" Caucasian sub-group.

Today we see a team-up of long-time Quillette-published proponent of race science and other forms of hereditarianism, Bo Winegard, and Noah Carl, who was in the news recently after he was dismissed from a Cambridge University college due to his "collaboration with far-right extremists."

Winegard and Carl teamed up to write a book review for Quillette of Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini.

I haven't read the book so I won't evaluate how accurately the review describes Saini's arguments. My impression of the book is that Saini made it as much about herself as about a critique of race science, with big glossy photos of herself with every article about the book, which dampened my enthusiasm for reading it. Plus I haven't had time.

The review itself is chock-full of the usual race science claims which I have been critiquing, but I want to focus on one section in particular:

The primary reason that natural philosophers began to classify humans into different races is that human populations look different from one another. Their skin colors, hair textures, facial structures, and stature all differ, often in predictable ways. Furthermore, these differences reflect their divergent geographical origins. 

The "philosophers" link is to work by Johann Frederich Blumenbach, whom I was just talking about recently in relation to carelessness in race science terminology and Blumenbach's invention of the term "Caucasian."

It's interesting to compare Blumenbach's description of "Caucasian" to Winegard's. In "The Anthropological Treatise of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach" he describes light skin as "most handsome and becoming" but he also includes "Eastern Asians" (which are now known as South Asians) and North Africans.

Caucasian variety Colour white cheeks rosy s 43 hair brown or chestnut coloured s 52 head subglobular s 62 face oval straight its parts moderately defined forehead smooth nose narrow slightly hooked mouth small s 56 The primary teeth placed perpendicularly to each jaw s 62 the lips especially The lower one moderately open the chin full and rounded s 56 In general that kind of appearance which according to our opinion of symmetry we consider most handsome and becoming To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns and those of Eastern Asia as far as the river Obi the Caspian Sea and the Ganges and lastly those of Northern Africa.

He says that Caucasians are all the way to the Ganges river, which is on the eastern border of India. As I mentioned in the other post, people of South Asian descent, considered Caucasian by Blumenbach, are sometimes called "black" in Great Britain.

Although Blumenbach loves those rosy cheeks, he also includes people with different skin colors and people outside of Europe as Caucasians, and excludes the entire eastern half of Russia.

Winegard uses the term Caucasian differently, in another article in Quillette, "On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism":

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. 

We see Winegard's approach - you create a category, "Caucasian" and then you see if a person can be placed into the category by looking at his skin color and checking the geography of his ancestors.

Winegard, who clearly knows the provenance of the word "Caucasian," has redefined Blumenbach's term - no longer may North Africans or Asians be considered part of the group, now a Caucasian must have light skin and come from Europe.

Winegard's redefining "Caucasian" for his own artisanal classification system is not an error though, it's deliberate - for Winegard's article, co-written with his brother Ben and "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell makes it clear that you can decide who counts as whichever race at your convenience:

But racial categories, like film categories, aren’t immutable essences that perfectly sort humans into distinct groups. There aren’t a fixed number of racial categories, and the number researchers use is partially a matter of convenience. One might start with five continentally based categories (i.e., Caucasians, East Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines) and then add more categories as one’s analysis becomes more granular (e.g. Ashkenazi Jewish, Mizrahi Jewish, and so on). These categories aren’t real in some metaphysical sense, but they are useful, and they do have predictive value. 

He mentions Ashkenazi Jews as a "granular" category, but other race science proponents, including Linda Gottfredson, whom Winegard mentions with approval in his Quillette article in defense of "The Bell Curve" counts Ashkenazi Jews as a distinct race, more intelligent than Caucasians as we see her doing in this interview with Stephan Molyneux.

In other words, Bo Winegard's race classification system is "Caucasians, East Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines" with Ashkenazi being presumably a granular sub-category of Caucasian, while for Molyneux and Gottfredson, the race classification system is "Ashkenazi Jews, Asians, Caucasians, Hispanics, Blacks and African Blacks."

As we see, again and again, sloppy, incoherent and "useful" race classification is the very essence of race science. Race science proponents don't even agree with each other on which races exist.

Winegard claims these hazy random ad hoc classifications are useful.

How are they useful? Unless your goal is the Libertarian one - to declare that some poor people, easily identified by the color of their skin, are just too genetically stupid to help via tax-payer funded social programs, and so we should therefore stop funding them.

In other words the policy proposal at the heart of The Bell Curve.

I will be getting back to my Bell Curve series soon, but first I will talk about anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson's critique of the claims of Ashkenazi intelligence (claims that were endorsed & promoted by Steven Pinker) that Molyneux uses to place Ashkenazim at the top of the racial intelligence hierarchy as well as Ferguson's critique of another theory endorsed by Pinker - and a discussion of Pinker's shamefully sloppy work.

Alt-right Quillette, equalitarianism & the White Citizens' Councils

(Excerpt reprinted from my personal blog from March 25, 2018)

Winegard doesn't use the term "egalitarianism" he uses the term "equalitarianism" with a QU in the article, entitled "Equalitarianism and Progressive Bias." Winegard writes:

Ben Winegard, David Geary, and I wrote a comment on a Behavioral and Brain Sciences’ article about political bias in 2015, in which we forwarded what we termed the “paranoid egalitarian meliorist” (PEM) model of progressive bias. I’ve come to believe that the name is inevitably and uncharitably pejorative (“paranoid” sounds bad even though it is descriptively neutral), so my colleagues and I have renamed it equalitarianism; however, I still think the basic model is accurate.

But Bo Winegard didn't invent the term equalitarianism. The term was used, with just as much contempt, by the mid-20th century segregationists of the southern United States. Carlton Putnam used it, cited in the book The Citizen’s Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction by Neil R. McMillen

Setting forth his ethnological assumption in an influential and widely circulated book, Race and Reason (1961), Putnam asserted that one need not have advanced scientific training to dispute theories of racial equalitarianism: “Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo… can compare this settlement with London or Pris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence…” That so few informed Americans saw things so clearly was compelling proof to Putnam that the nation had been victimized by a “pseudo-scientific hoax” popularized by such early exponents of racial equipotentiality as Franz Boas and several subsequent generations of like-minded anthropologists more devoted to “the demo-goddess of Equalitarianism” than to “the Goddess of Truth.”

The term "equalitarian" pops up quite frequently in this book, which is a history of The Citizens' Councils:

The Citizens' Councils (also referred to as White Citizens' Councils) were an associated network of white supremacist, extreme right,[1] organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South. The first was formed on July 11, 1954.[2] After 1956, it was known as the Citizens' Councils of America. With about 60,000 members across the United States,[3] mostly in the South, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of schools, but they also opposed voter registration efforts and integration of public facilities during the 1950s and 1960s. Members used severe intimidation tactics including economic boycotts, firing people from jobs, propaganda, and violence against citizens and civil-rights activists.  

By the 1970s, following passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s and enforcement of constitutional rights by the federal government, the influence of the Councils had waned considerably yet remained an institutional basis for the majority of white residents in Mississippi. The successor organization to the White Citizens' Councils is the St. Louis-based Council of Conservative Citizens, founded in 1985[3] to continue collaborations between Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist political agendas in the United States. Republican politician and past Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi was a member[4] while North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Georgia Congressman Bob Barr were both strong supporters of the Council of Conservative Citizens; David Duke also spoke at a fund raising event, while Patrick Buchanan's campaign manager was linked to both Duke and the Council.[5]  

In 1996, a Charleston, SC, drive-by shooting by Klan members of three African American males occurred after a Council rally; Dylann Roof, the perpetrator responsible for the murder of nine Emanuel AME church members in Charleston in 2015, espoused Council of Conservative Citizens rhetoric in a manifesto.[6]

Many of the modern proponents of hereditarianism and opponents of "equalitarianism" come from Southern states and work for colleges in the South. Bo Winegard seems to be practicing a slightly updated form of old-time Southern white racism.

Carlton Putnam wasn't considered a crazy racist radical, by the way, he was extremely respectable:

Carleton Putnam (December 19, 1901 – March 5, 1998) was an American businessman, biographer, writer, and segregationist. He graduated from Princeton University in 1924 and received a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) from Columbia Law School in 1932. He founded Chicago & Southern Airlines in 1933, which in 1953 was merged with Delta Air Lines. He would later serve as chief executive officer of Delta Air Lines and hold a seat on its board of directors until his death.[1][2]

Here we see that Henry E. Garrett published "The Equalitarian Dogma" in the pages of Mankind Quarterly, the ultra-racist publication supported by The Pioneer Fund, which also financially supported many of the scientific racialists whose work was used in creating The Bell Curve. I've written about Mankind Quarterly before.

The article points to IQ testing as the justification of innate black inferiority and rages against communism - just as the hereditarians at Quillette do.

The Mankind Quarterly archives are provided via The Unz Review - not for some historical edification but because Unz Review is a racist web site and seeks to preserve the views of Mankind Quarterly, which also published work by Richard Lynn, an important source for The Bell Curve.

The White Citizens' Councils and the editors of Mankind Quarterly would be very proud indeed of people who fight against "equalitarianism" - people like Bo Winegard and Claire Lehmann.