The Atlantic: Sailer and Epstein Are Racists!
Woo-hoo!
From The Atlantic:
THE EPSTEIN EMAILS SHOW HOW THE POWERFUL TALK ABOUT RACE
The files reveal the disgraced financier’s interest in “race science.”
FEBRUARY 12, 2026
by Ali Breland, Atlantic staff writer.
In February 2016 , after exchanging email pleasantries with the left-wing public intellectual Noam Chomsky and extending an invitation to his private island, Jeffrey Epstein recommended an article. “On a different note, you have encouraged me to look at data, no holds barred,” Epstein wrote before linking to “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” from the Right Stuff, an openly white-supremacist website and a pioneer of the online alt-right. The article argued that different races have differing levels of intelligence and that there is a genetic basis for the disparity.
Neither The Atlantic nor Google will link to such a hateful article. The very idea! So who knows anymore what it said?
The exchange was included in the Department of Justice’s latest public release of the Epstein files and is one of the clearest examples of the disgraced financier’s interest in “race science,” the pseudoscientific practice of ascribing racial inequities to genetics.
It is a way of thinking that has been refuted on multiple levels. IQ is a complex trait that results from a series of factors—many of them cultural and circumstantial—that are not neatly reduced to a specific gene or set of genes. Even if it weren’t, the consensus among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists is that race isn’t a biological phenomenon.
After all, Epstein merely bribed his way into being pals with many of the most famous Harvard and MIT scientists, who apparently have a deplorable tendency to not be true believers in the conventional wisdom as brought to you by The Atlantic. If only Epstein had bothered to be friends instead with Directional State Ethnic Studies obscurities who assure Ali Breland that Race Doesn’t Exist, they would have set him straight on The Science, unlike all those Cambridge superstars.
Race-science proponents tend to ignore all of this, as well as any other relevant context, and use correlations between race and IQ (and also things such as race and criminality) as evidence that racial stereotypes are in fact justified.
After all, just because race, IQ, and criminality are correlated doesn't mean that racial stereotypes are justified, because The Atlantic doesn’t care about empirical reality, but instead just which race is innately evil.
None of this mattered to Epstein, who recurrently expressed his interest in race science beyond this 2016 correspondence. The tranche of Epstein files also shows that in 2018, he repeatedly tried to get in contact with Charles Murray, a political scientist whose 1994 book, The Bell Curve, is one of the best-known texts to posit a relationship between intelligence and race. Epstein didn’t specify why he was trying to connect with Murray, but he claimed that they had met previously. (Murray told me over email that he had never received an email from Epstein and that it was possible that they’d met in passing at a conference reception at some point. If this ever happened, though, Murray had no memory of it, he said.)
Woo-hoo.
Epstein received Murray’s email address from his ideological fellow traveler James Watson, the late Nobel Prize–winning geneticist who was stripped of his titles in 2019
So Watson is no longer the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA?
after he doubled down on comments he’d made to a British newspaper in 2007 about how he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” He told the paper that he wished that all races were equal but that “people who have to deal with Black employees find this not true.”
In the late 1960s, Watson attempted, in the spirit of affirmative action, to hire a lot of black employees for his laboratory. That plan did not work out well.
Epstein liked to collect relationships with high-profile academics, but the emails suggest that he may have been drawn to Watson specifically because of his ideology. In his 2016 exchange with Chomsky, Epstein appears to endorse the perspective that improving the world “might require accepting some uncomfortable facts” about race and intelligence. Chomsky, who sustained his association with Epstein even after accusations that the financier had sexually abused children became well known, disagreed with Epstein on race science in their email exchange. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) Epstein references Watson in other emails, and he and Watson appear to have met several times.
The same year that Epstein tried to put Chomsky onto pseudoscientific racism, he was having similar discussions with Joscha Bach, an AI researcher. In one exchange, Bach told Epstein that Black children in the United States “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.”
Are they?
Paywall here.
