Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo has ties to a self-styled “sociobiology journal” that focuses on the presumed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, which experts have described as the origin of scientific racism.
Relating to: Scientist named in pressure to dismiss Harvard’s Claudine Gay has ties to eugenicists
At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters that Rufo linked to in the “recommended” section of his newsletter and had more than 50,000 subscribers, according to Substack. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which aired flattering interviews with advocates of scientific racism and eugenics.
Rufo, a close ally of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called “wokeness,” has repeatedly described his goal as “color-blind equality,” but his connections to Aporia suggest Rufo’s closeness to extremists It raises question marks.
Recently, Rufo has been credited in conservative media and beyond for playing a central role in the ouster of black former Harvard University president Claudine Gay.
The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions about his open support of Aporia and how he reconciled this with his alleged “colour blindness”. He did not directly answer any questions put to him, instead making a crude sexual insult to a Guardian reporter.
“Rufo is hanging out with some seriously bad people,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate & Extremism. “He can’t claim this was just a casual relationship.”
According to the newsletter’s own archives, Aporia was a March 2023 rebrand of Ideas Sleep Furiously; by then it was the personal newsletter of Briton Matthew Archer, now credited as Aporia’s “editor-in-chief”.
Around that time, Aporia’s newly appointed “managing editor” Bo Winegard began his tenure with an article titled Human Biodiversity: A Middle Grade Manifesto; “partly because of genes.”
‘Human biodiversity’ is their euphemism for race science
Kevin Birdof UC Davis
“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.”
Kevin Bird, a geneticist and postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis, said that “’human biodiversity’ is their euphemism for racial science,” adding that “scientifically, Winegard has never done anything significant in this field.”
Psychologist Winegard, for her part, was fired by Marietta College in Georgia in March 2020 after a seminar she gave to a research group at the University of Alabama sparked protests and student media coverage.
In this conversation, a listener reportedly said Winegard told his audience that “people in colder climates tend to be more cooperative because of differences in brain size.”
Winegard continues to write about Aporia in this vein to this day. In a Jan. 3 post titled “Yes, we should talk about race differences,” he wrote: “So we need to be honest about race. This means that in the United States (and elsewhere in the world) different races have different scores on IQ tests (and other cognitive ability tests). “This means that we will start by noting that people have different average levels of intelligence as measured by (measurements).”
As evidence for 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, her role in it, and aspects of her previous controversies. He responded 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 debates.
Carl is a sociologist who had his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge revoked in 2018 after the university that appointed him discovered that, alongside his more legitimate work in sociology, he had also published scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddling scientific racism.
Mankind Quarterly, one of Carl’s publications, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again,” according to author Angela Saini. The journal, which has been funded for decades by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, has been described as “the cornerstone of the institution of scientific racism.”
Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform founded by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who openly advocates “race science” and once served as a senior researcher at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization he runs. Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s retraction.
In a 2016 article for OpenPsych, to which Carl is a prolific contributor, he wrote that racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate.”
According to leaked schedules in 2015 and 2016, Carl attended the eugenicist London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) at least twice. The cover of the 2016 program quotes 20th-century American psychologist Edward Thorndike: “Selective breeding can change a person’s capacity to learn, whether to stay sane, to maintain justice, or to be happy.”
Carl continued to write on the same themes in Aporia. Published in November 2023, “Should liberals of course support white nationalism?” He concluded in his article: “Is it disgusting to advocate ‘voluntary separation’ of the races? It is certainly strange and does not reflect my view. But I cannot call it disgusting.”
In addition to publishing their own work, Aporia editors also provide a platform for others’ expressions of scientific racism.
This month, for example, Aporia published an article by Peter Frost titled “The Goldilocks zone between inbreeding and outbreeding.” This paper argues that “outbreeding” between people who are genetically very distant from each other increases the risk of abnormal embryos.
All these ideas have been refuted many times.
Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism
The argument is based in part on data collected in a 1929 study published by Charles Davenport called “Race passage in Jamaica”; he blandly introduces this research as “a Jamaican study” and regards it as unbiased and reliable.
But Davenport was a leading American eugenicist during the period when eugenics shaped public policy in the United States and beyond, leading to the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 and contributing to forced sterilization programs, some in 30 states. It continued until the 1960s.
Davenport wrote that the “intermixture of races”, including the “mixing of European races”, was a danger to American society, and also that “a miscegenated people is a people badly put together and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people.”
Bird, the geneticist, said Frost’s paper was “old-school race science.”
Such nods to eugenics reflect a historical pattern, according to Andrew Winston, professor emeritus of psychology at Canada’s University of Guelph and a long-time critic of the encroachment of scientific racism on the field.
“This kind of race science keeps coming back into the mainstream, it gets heavily criticized and then maybe it fades away for a while and then it comes back in a new form depending on the overall social context,” he said.
Beirich, an expert on extremism, said: “All of 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 Winegard’s “The case for race realism”; this article argues that “underlying racial differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime…make major outcome disparities inevitable”; an article by retired finance professor Gregory Conner arguing for innate racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing that the high IQ among Jews has a genetic basis.
Aporia also launched a podcast on August 4, featuring Rufo as a guest, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.
Like the magazine, the podcast featured advocates of eugenics and scientific racism.
For example, in the January 1 episode, Charles Murray and Helmuth Nyborg discussed the question “Is this the end of multicultural societies?” There was a discussion on the subject.
Charles Murray, a white nationalist according to the SPLC, has been the center of repeated debates since 1994, when his book The Bell Curve suggested that class differences in the United States were determined by IQ. Critics at the time noted that Murray and his co-author Richard J Herrnstein drew extensively from Richard Lynn and other writers in Mankind Quarterly.
Helmuth Nyborg is a Danish psychologist who was suspended and reinstated as a professor at Aarhus University in 2006 for his research linking gender and intelligence, and spoke at the white nationalist American Renaissance conference in 2017.
It’s no surprise to see that someone who has his feet on eugenicists is also happy to attack diversity, equity, and inclusivity in higher education.
Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism
On the Aporia podcast, Nyborg claimed to be making scientific arguments against immigration and multiculturalism, saying at one point: “The more genetically non-homogeneous a population is, the more critical it becomes in terms of social anomie or what you would call social malaise.” , guilt etc.
In the episode that aired immediately after Rufo’s interview, Winegard interviewed blogger and white supremacist Steve Sailer, founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute.
When Rufo recommended the site to readers, Bird said: “There’s really nothing legitimate about biology, evolution, or genetics published by anyone on Aporia,” and added: “Directing people towards this is tantamount to directing people to blatant white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.” income.
“There’s nothing of value there. There’s nothing that resembles real mainstream science. There’s nothing that resembles real discussions going on in the field. It can’t be anything other than racist propaganda.”
Beirich said of Rufo’s connections: “It’s not surprising to see that a person who keeps up with eugenicists is also happy to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education or the black president of Harvard.”
By linking to Aporia and appearing on his podcast, he said: “Rufo is helping to bring back and popularize this vile material.”