The Atlantic: ‘Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ’

I saw this going viral, from The Atlantic: The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ (archive link so as to not give it any traffic).

As was evident during the Steve Sailer vs. Will Stancil Twitter ‘debate’ in January 2024 (if it can even be called a debate–it was more like a drubbing), is how bad the left are at arguing their positions. They cannot even marshal half-decent or convincing arguments for their side. Without academia, social media censorship, and the media in their corner, their arguments fall apart.

Other anonymous far-right accounts have accrued more than 100,000 followers by posting about the supposed links between race and intelligence. Elon Musk frequently responds to @cremieuxrecueil, which one far-right publication has praised as an account that “traces the genetic pathways of crime, explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Musk has also repeatedly engaged with @Eyeslasho, a self-proclaimed “data-driven” account that has posted statistics supposedly illustrating the inferiority of Black people. Other tech elites such as Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Paul Graham follow one or both of these accounts. Whom someone follows in itself is not an indication of their own beliefs, but at the very least it signals the kind of influence and reach these race-science accounts now have.

The author erroneously lumps Sailer , along with centrist-leaning accounts @cremieuxrecueil and @Eyeslasho with or as being sympathetic to the far-right, even though they deny such categorization, and such individuals have in fact criticized the far-right. Sailer was a proponent of the vaccines, and is ambivalent about Trump.

@Eyeslasho has criticized what he perceives to be the more paranoid or conspiratorial side of the MAGA-right. Such posts frequently get ‘ratioed’, like below:

It’s worth noting that pro-HBD position does not always lend itself to a right-wing interpretation. An example is obesity epidemic in America. The pro-HBD position happens to also be the left-wing one, which is that it’s not solvable by willpower or environmental (e.g. ‘eat less, move more’), but rather genetic (‘set point’ theory, slow metabolism, addiction, etc.). People have as much control over their weight as they do their IQ or height, which as the high failure rate of dieting shows, is not an entirely false assessment even if people want to think they have free will.

The left inherently fails by equating such inconvenient truths with racism, or ascribing such individuals as having ulterior racist motives, when anyone can verify and see that such observations and facts are not racist, but empirically and objectively true. Blacks underperform by a wide range of metrics, like educational attainment and income. They are also overrepresented in terms of violent crime. These are just the data that anyone can independently verify from unbiased sources. Calling Sailer a racist or his followers racist does not change this.

Nor does it imply a sort of hierarchy in which blacks are worse. Sailer himself praises black athletes and musicians for their contributions to society–it’s just that when it comes to STEM these contributions tend to be lacking, and that is okay. Not everyone can be good at the same things. Ethiopians and Chinese are underrepresented in the NFL or the NBA–so what.

If such facts are a pretext for racism and ought to be suppressed, then how can the left also claim to want to solve the very problems which are downstream from these realities if they cannot even acknowledge they exist? How can good-intentioned liberals seek to fix racial disparities if they cannot even acknowledge such disparities exist?

Race science is hardly a new idea. During Jim Crow, the idea was used as justification for sterilizing Black people. In Nazi Germany, the veneer of science and biology was used as a pretense for genocide. In recent decades, race science has chugged along in the U.S., mostly subterraneously. It has occasionally popped out into public view, in many cases to be met with swift condemnation. A version of that played out in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argues, in part, that race and intelligence are linked.

Also note how the author lumps Nazism with IQ science and race science, as if they are the same thing. Except that the Nazis had no use for IQ tests; this was mostly an American thing. The Nazis cared more about loyalty to the NSDAP and racial purity than intellectual superiority. Likely the Nazis knew that a hierarchy based on IQ would put Jews on top. At the same time, the Nazis were not necessarily opposed to diversity, and forged alliances with non-Germans and non-whites.

What makes the return of race science such a problem is that once the logic has taken hold, it is hard to root out: The natural order has already been settled. The poor are dysgenic and disgusting. The rich are heroic and smart. Everything is in its place.

Yeah, like Bill Gates, who is obviously endeared by the far-right. You can see how the premise of the article falls flat on its face.

So going back to the first point, what would be a better argument? The left can concede the point that although blacks are overrepresented in terms of violent crime, that other groups are overrepresented in terms of other types of crime, like computer crimes (e.g. hacks, identity theft, data breaches) or financial crimes. These crimes tend to have many more victims and higher amounts stolen on a per-perpetrator basis, whereas crime stats do not make such a distinction. A guy who robs a store or someone who steals from 10,000 people from a crypto exchange is still technically counted as ‘a single incident of crime’ as far as the stats are concerned. (I discuss this in more detail here). The crimes of SBF and Madoff had many more victims and a much higher dollar amount than a hoodlum who robs a store. So this would be countering Steve’s facts/data with other facts/data, instead of useless labels like racist.

Upon getting pushback, the author adds the clarification: “This article originally misstated that the X account @Eyeslasho has posted about the “genetic inferiority” of Black people. In fact, the account has not directly attributed group differences to biology.” Of course but it’s too late. The damage has been done. The media profits from spreading lies and then backtracks having already profited.