by Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology journal” focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and crime, and which experts describe as an outlet for scientific racism.
Related: The scientist cited in trying to make Claudine Gay of Harvard available to eugenicists has connections
At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters that Rufo has linked to in the “recommended” section of his own newsletter, which has more than 50,000 subscribers according to Substack. Rufo also appeared on the Aporia podcast, which published controversial interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics.
Rufo, a close friend of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called “wokeism,” has repeatedly described his goal as “colorblind equality,” but his ties to Aporia raise questions about Rufo’s proximity to extremists. .
Rufo has recently been credited in the conservative media and beyond for playing a key role in the former president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, who is Black.
The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions about his apparent endorsement of Aporia, and how he reconciled that with his “color blindness”. He did not directly answer any questions put to him but instead made a crude sexual insult to a Guardian reporter.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Guyanese and extremism, said, “Rufo hangs around with really bad people,” adding: “He can’t claim that this is a casual relationship.”
According to the newsletter’s own archives, Aporia was rebranded in March 2023 to Ideas Sleep Furiously, hitherto the personal newsletter of Briton Matthew Archer, now called Aporia’s “editor-in-chief”.
At that time, Aporia’s “newly appointed executive editor” Bo Winegard began his tenure with an article titled Human Biodiversity: A Moderate’s Manifesto, in which he discussed “purported evidence that human populations vary in information, as measured by IQ tests, partly due to genes”.
Their knowledge of race science is ‘human biodiversity’
Kevin Bird of UC Davis
“Human biodiversity” lends its name to both a movement and a research paradigm that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as “the latest iteration of a long tradition of scientific racism.”
Kevin Bird, a geneticist and postdoctoral research fellow at UC Davis, said that “‘human biodiversity’ is their epitome of race science”, and added that “scientifically, Winegard did nothing significant in this area”.
Marietta Georgia College fired Winegard, a psychologist, on his own account in March 2020 after a seminar he gave to a research group at the University of Alabama attracted protests and coverage in the student media.
In that talk an audience member said that Winegard told his listeners that “people in colder climates, because of differences in brain size, are more inclined to cooperate”.
Winegard continued to write in this vein on Aporia to this day. In a January 3 article on the site titled “Yes, we should talk about racial differences”, he wrote: “So, we need to be honest about race. And that means we begin to notice that, in the United States (and elsewhere in the world), different races have different average levels of intelligence as measured by IQ tests (and other measures of cognitive ability).
As proof of this claim, Winegard cites researchers including the late Richard Lynn—a white nationalist, according to the SPLC—and the late Arthur Jensen, whom the SPLC calls “arguably the father of modern academic racism.” modern”.
The Guardian asked Winegard about Aporia, his role in it and aspects of his previous controversies. He responded with one line: “Is Charles Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’ scientific racism?”
Another Aporia editor, Noah Carl, has previously been the subject of academic controversy.
Carl is a sociologist who was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge in 2018 after the college that recruited him discovered that he was simultaneously publishing racist-scientific articles in outlets known for peddling scientific racism, alongside with his more legitimate work in sociology.
One of the outlets that Carl published in, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to rehabilitate scientific racism”, according to writer Angela Saini. Funded for years by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, the journal has been described as “a cornerstone of the scientific establishment of racism”.
The other center, OpenPsych, is a platform founded by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who explicitly advocates a “science of race”, and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization which her leader at the same time. Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data Winegard withdrew.
For OpenPsych, where Carl was a prolific contributor, he wrote in a 2016 paper that racial stereotypes are “fairly accurate.”
Carl attended the London Eugenics Conference on Information (LCI) at least twice, according to leaked programs from 2015 and 2016. The 2016 program quotes 20th-century American psychologist Edward Thorndike on its cover: “Selective breeding can to learn to change the person, to keep safe, to promote justice or to be happy.”
Carl continued to write on the same themes at Aporia. In a November 2023 article titled “Surely Liberals Should Support White Nationalism?”, he said: “Is it hateful to advocate ‘voluntary segregation’ of the races? It’s weird, sure, and it doesn’t reflect my own opinion. But I wouldn’t say it’s scary.”
In addition to publishing their own work, Aporia editors provide a platform for others to express scientific racism.
This month, for example, Aporia published an article by Peter Frost, “The Goldilocks zone between inbreeding and outbreeding”, which argues that “outbreeding” between people who are genetically too far apart creates an increased risk of abnormal embryos.
All these ideas have been debunked time and time again.
Heidi Beirich from the Global Project Against Guyana and extremism
The argument rests in part on data collected in a 1929 study, “Race crossing in Jamaica”, published by Charles Davenport, which he casually introduces as the “Jamaica study”, and pretends to be neutral and reliable.
Davenport, however, was a prominent American eugenicist at a time when eugenics was informing public policy in the United States and beyond, leading to the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, and with forced sterilization programs in 30 states, some of which. which lasted until the 1960s.
Davenport wrote that “racial intermingling” – including “mixing of European races” – was a danger to American society, and also that “hybrid people are badly assembled and unhappy, unhappy, ineffective people”.
Of Frost’s article, Bird, the geneticist, called it “old-school race science.”
For Andrew Winston, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Guelph in Canada and a longtime critic of the narrowing of scientific racism in the field, such a nod to eugenics reflects a historical pattern.
“This kind of race science is always coming back into the mainstream, it’s heavily criticized, and then it fades a little bit, maybe, and comes back in some new form, depending on the social context general,” he said.
Extremism expert Beirich said: “All these ideas have been debunked time and time again. The danger here is that eugenics and scientific racism have historically been used to justify horrific acts including genocide.”
Other recent articles on Aporia include “The case for race realism” by Winegard, who reiterates that “fundamental race differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime … make large disparities in outcomes inevitable”; an article by Gregory Conner, a retired finance professor, who argues for inherent racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing high IQ among Jews has a genetic basis.
Aporia also publishes a podcast, in which Rufo was a guest on August 4, in which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.
Like the magazine, the podcast showed another way of proponents of eugenics and scientific racism.
For example, his episode on January 1 featured a debate between Charles Murray and Helmuth Nyborg on the topic “are multicultural societies doomed?”
Charles Murray – a white nationalist according to the SPLC – has been at the center of controversy repeatedly since 1994, when his book The Bell Curve argued that IQ determines class differences in the United States. Critics at the time pointed out that Murray and his co-author, Richard J Herrnstein, drew extensively on Richard Lynn and other authors at Mankind Quarterly.
Helmuth Nyborg is a Danish psychologist who was suspended and reinstated in 2006 as a professor at Aarhus University for his research linking gender and intelligence, and in 2017 he spoke at the American white nationalist conference Renaissance.
It’s no surprise to learn that someone who plays footsie with eugenicists is also willing to attack diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education
Heidi Beirich from the Global Project Against Guyana and extremism
In the Aporia podcast, Nyborg claimed to present scientific arguments against immigration and multiculturalism, saying at one point that “the more genetically heterogeneous a population is, the more important it becomes in terms of social disorder, or what you would call disturbance that social. , criminality and so on”.
In the episode published immediately after the Rufo interview, Winegard interviewed Steve Sailer, a blogger and founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute who has been described as a white supremacist.
When Rufo recommended the site to his readers, Bird said: “There’s nothing legitimate about biology or evolution or genetics that anyone has really published at Aporia,” adding: “People are being led there leading them towards unequivocal white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.
“There is nothing of value. There is no such thing as real mainstream science. There is nothing like a real discussion happening in the field. It can only be racist propaganda.”
Beirich said of Rufo’s connections that “it’s not surprising to learn that someone who plays like a Eugenicist is willing to attack diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education or a Black president at Harvard.”
By linking up with Aporia and appearing on her podcast, she said, “Rufo is helping to bring back and mainstream this despicable subject.”
