The Scientists Whom the SPLC Hates Most
Why does America's most lucrative hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, want you to fear and loathe psychologist Raymond Cattell, who was born in 1905?
The scandal-plagued Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a blacklist of 146 so-called “Extremists,” along with 83 “Groups” and 30 “Ideologies.” Note that this is somewhat but not completely different from its “Hate Map,” which lists 1,371 organizations that the SPLC hates.
Obviously, the “Extremists” blacklist is extremely biased politically. There are a handful of black individuals and groups, such as Louis Farrakhan (age 92), whom rich Jewish donors dislike. But violent leftist organizations like Rose City Antifa, which played a major role in countless nights of rioting in 2020,in Portland, Oregon, are of very little interest to the SPLC, unless rightwingers show up to brawl with them.
But there is a more general pattern: despites its colossal wealth, the SPLC is living in the past. It still hates the same people Morris Dees hated in Y2K. This becomes most obvious when you look at the birthdates of the scientists professors, and intellectuals in its blacklist of “extremist” individuals. Consider some of these “extremists:”
Linda Gottfredson, professor of psychology at the U. of Delaware, is 79. The SPLC hates her for mentioning the basic findings of psychometrics. The SPLC seethes:
Although she prefers to stay further away from the spotlight than her more flamboyantly racist colleagues, Gottfredson gained some degree of notoriety at the national level with the publication of her 1994 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” which was co-signed by 52 other scientists. “Mainstream Science” was Gottfredson’s contribution to the heated debate over the then-recent publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve, which used arguments recycled from eugenicists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis to claim that social inequality is caused by black genetic inferiority, especially in intelligence.
Gottfredson used “Mainstream Science” to make a variety of claims about the state of intelligence research and its relationship to racial policy. Among other things, Gottfredson stated that the intelligence of the average black adult in the United States was 85, one standard deviation below that of the average white adult.
Linda Gottfredson, who has a brother with a learning disability, is one of the very few American academics who work to raise awareness that half of our fellow Americans have an IQ below average. So, she argues, those of us with three digit IQs should be more self-aware of how we often make things overly difficult for the less cognitively facile.
What could be more hateful than that?
By the way, Einstein is popularly credited with the wise saying, “Everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler.” Ironically, Einstein himself didn’t express his idea as simply as possible, instead saying:
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”.
Henry Harpending, cultural and physical anthropologist at the U. of Utah, member of National Academy of Sciences, 1944-2016. The SPLC’s explanation for why they hate him still:
Henry Harpending was a controversial anthropologist at the University of Utah who studied human evolution and, in his words, “genetic diversity within and between human populations.”
Harpending is most famous for his book, co-authored with frequent collaborator Gregory Cochran, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, which argues that humans are evolving at an accelerating rate, and that this began when the ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians left Africa.
Arthur Jensen, professor of psychology at the U. of California, Berkeley and the leading IQ researcher of the second half of the 20th Century, 1923-2012.
William Shockley, winner of the Nobel in physics for co-inventing the transistor, 1910-1989.
Michael Levin, a professor emeritus of philosophy at City College of New York, is 82 years old. The SPLC hates him for his highbrow 1997 book on the philosophy of race, Why Race Matters.
Raymond Cattell, a giant of 20th Century psychology, 1905-1998, didn’t even make it to Y2K, but the SPLC still officially hates him. …
