From The Guardian’s news section:
Activist who led ouster of Harvard president linked to ‘scientific racism’ journal
Christopher Rufo recommends a newsletter to his readers that has published several supporters of discredited genetics theory
@jason_a_w
Wed 31 Jan 2024 07.00 ESTThe rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.
At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on his own newsletter, which according to Substack has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which has published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics.
Rufo, a close ally of Florida’s 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 links to Aporia raises questions about Rufo’s proximity to extremists.
… Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said: “Rufo is hanging around with some seriously nasty people,” adding: “He can’t claim that this is a casual relationship.”
… At that time, Aporia’s newly appointed “executive editor”, Bo Winegard, commenced his tenure with an article, titled Human Biodiversity: A Moderate’s Manifesto, in which he discussed purported “evidence that human populations vary in intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, partially because of genes”.
“Human biodiversity” gives 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”.
… In a 3 January article on the site titled “Yes, we should talk about race differences”, he wrote: “Thus, we must be honest about race. And that means we begin by noting 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”.
The Guardian emailed Winegard questions about Aporia, his role there and aspects of his previous controversies. He replied with one line: “Is Charles Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’ scientific racism?”
Another Aporia editor, Noah Carl, has also been the subject of previous academic controversy.
One of the outlets Carl published in, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again”, according to the writer Angela Saini. …
Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform established by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who explicitly advocates “race science”, and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization once headed by Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s retraction.
For OpenPsych, where Carl has been a prolific contributor, he wrote in a 2016 paper that racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”.
… Aporia also publishes a podcast, which featured Rufo as a guest on 4 August, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.
Like the journal, the podcast has otherwise featured proponents of eugenics and scientific racism.
… Charles Murray – a white nationalist according to the the SPLC – has been the center of repeated controversy since 1994, when his book The Bell Curve argued that class differences in the United States are determined by IQ. Critics at the time pointed out that Murray and his co-author, Richard J Herrnstein, had drawn extensively on Richard Lynn and other authors at Mankind Quarterly.
In the episode published immediately after Rufo’s interview, Winegard interviewed Steve Sailer, a blogger and founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute who has been described as a white supremacist.
As I recall, our discussion included such inflammatory content as:
Q. Who is your favorite baseball player?
