Guardian: "Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss"

This sounded fun until I read it and saw it was just Jason Wilson / Angela Saini et al's same old same old.

More huge international breaking news from The Guardian:

Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss

Group promoting ‘dangerous’ scientific racism ideology teamed up with rightwing extremist, recordings reveal

‘Race science’ group say they accessed sensitive UK health data

David Pegg, Tom Burgis, Hannah Devlin and Jason Wilson

Same old same old journalists such as Jason Wilson…

Wed 16 Oct 2024 09.00 EDT

An international network of “race science” activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur.

Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation [owned by the intelligent, energetic, and interesting Emil Kirkegaard]. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed “dangerous ideology” about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups. …

HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal.

After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.

While it remains a fringe outfit, HDF is part of a movement to rehabilitate so-called race science as a topic of open debate. Labelled scientific racism by mainstream academics, it seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime. Its supporters claim inequality between groups is largely explained by genetics rather than external factors like discrimination.

Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences.

The Guardian science denialist articles about the Science Menace always wind up quoting mostly the same small number of lightweights, such as Rebecca Sear, Angela Saini, Adam Rutherford, and Sasha Gusev. They never get any quotes demanding Science Denialism from heavyweights like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, or David Reich.

“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”. …

Trump, who has promised mass deportations should he win a second term as US president, told an interviewer last month: “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” In June Steve Sailer, credited with rebranding scientific racism as “human biodiversity”, was given a platform by the former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson on his podcast.

Of course, The Guardian would not stoop so low as to, you know, provide a link to this podcast that they are up in arms over. So, here’s my inflammatory, rabble-rousing two hour conversation with Tucker:

…The ideology rests on the false belief that “races” are separate and distinct. “Racial purity is a fantasy concept,” said Dr Adam Rutherford, a lecturer in genetics at University College London. …

Prof Alexander Gusev, a quantitative geneticist at Harvard University, said that “broadly speaking there is essentially no scientific evidence” for scientific racism’s core tenets.

The writer Angela Saini, author of a book on the return of race science, has described how it traces its roots to arguments originally used to defend colonialism and later Nazi eugenics, and today can often be deployed to “shore up” political views.

Notice two things: The Guardian’s Experts always turn out to be minor leaguers, and the minor leaguers don’t debate the crimethinkers, they just denounce them and demand censorship.