Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology journal” focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have described as an outlet for scientific racism.
At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters that Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on its own newsletter, which Substack says has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics.
Rufo, a close ally of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called “wokeism,” has repeatedly described his cause as “colorblind equality,” but his ties to Aporia raise questions. about Rufo’s closeness to extremists.
Most recently, Rufo has been in conservative media and further acknowledged that he played a central role in the ouster of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who is Black.
The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions about his apparent endorsement of Aporia, and how he reconciled it with his alleged “colorblindness.” He did not respond directly to any questions put to him, but instead made a crude sexual insult towards a Guardian reporter.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said: “Rufo is hanging out with some seriously nasty people,” adding: “He can’t claim that this is a casual relationship.”
According to the newsletter’s own archives, Aporia was a March 2023 retrade of Ideas Sleep Furiously, until now the personal newsletter of Briton Matthew Archer, now as “editor-in-chief” of Aporia.
At that point, Aporia’s newly appointed “executive editor”, Bo Winegard, began his tenure with a articleentitled Human Biodiversity: A Moderate’s Manifesto, in which he discusses alleged “evidence that human populations differ in intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, partly due to genes”.
“Human biodiversity” gives its name to both a movement and a research paradigm that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described as the “latest iteration of a long tradition of scientific racism”.
Kevin Bird, a geneticist and a postdoctoral research fellow at UC Davis, said “‘human biodiversity’ is their euphemism for race science”, adding that “scientifically speaking, Winegard has never done anything of importance in this area” .
Winegard, a psychologist, was according to his own account fired by Georgia’s Marietta College in March 2020 after a seminar he gave to a research group at the University of Alabama drew protests and coverage in student media.
In that speech an audience member reportedly said that Winegard told his listeners that “people in colder climates, because of differences in brain size, are more prone to cooperation”.
Winegard has continued to write about Aporia in this vein to this day. In a January 3 article on the website entitled “Yes, we must talk about racial differences”, he wrote: “So we must be honest about race. And that means we start by noting that in the United States (and elsewhere in the world), different races have different average levels of intelligence as measured by IQ tests (and other measures of cognitive ability).
As proof of this claim, Winegard cites researchers including the late Richard Lynn – a white nationalistaccording to the SPLC – and the late Arthur Jensen, who the SPLC calls “arguably the father of modern academic racism”.
The Guardian emailed Winegard questions about Aporia, his role there and aspects of his past 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 past academic controversy.
Carl is a sociologist who was in 2018 stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after the college that hired him discovered that, alongside his more legitimate work in sociology, he was simultaneously publishing scientifically racist articles in shops notorious for peddling scientific racism.
One of the outlets in which Carl published, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again,” according to author Angela Saini. It has been funded for decades by the white nationalist Pioneer Fundand the journal was described as a “cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment”.
Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform created by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist which express advocates “racial science”and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization once led by Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s withdrawal.
For OpenPsych, where Carl has been a prolific contributor, he wrote in a 2016 paper that racial stereotypes are “fairly accurate.”
Carl attended the eugenicist London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) at least twice, according to leaked programs from 2015 and 2016. The 2016 program quotes 20th-century American psychologist Edward Thorndike on its cover: “Selective breeding can reduce human capacity change to learn, to stay healthy, to cherish justice or to be happy.”
Carl continued to write about the same themes at Aporia. In A November 2023 article titled “Surely Liberals Should Support White Nationalism?”, he concluded: “Is it abhorrent to advocate ‘voluntary separation’ of the races? This is strange, certainly, and does not reflect my own view. But I wouldn’t call it hideous.”
In addition to publishing their own work, Aporia editors provide a platform for others’ articulation of scientific racism.
This month, for example, Aporia published an article by Peter Frost, “The Goldilocks zone between inbreeding and outbreeding”, which argues that “outbreeding” between people who are too genetically distant from each other creates an increased risk of abnormal embryos.
The argument rests in part on data collected in a 1929 study, “Race crossing in Jamaica”, published by Charles Davenport, which it vaguely presents as “a Jamaican study”, and treats it as neutral and reliable.
However, Davenport was a prominent American eugenicist at a time when eugenics was informing public policy in the United States and beyond, leading to the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, and contributing to programs of forced sterilization in 30 states, some of which continued into the 1960s.
Davenport wrote that “racial miscegenation”—including the “mixing of European races”—was a danger to American society, and also that “a hybrid people is an ill-constituted people and a discontented, restless, ineffectual people.” .
Of Frost’s article, Bird, the geneticist, said it was “old school race science”.
For Andrew Winston, an emeritus professor of psychology at Canada’s University of Guelph and a longtime critic of the field’s encroachment on scientific racism, such nods to eugenics reflect a historical pattern.
“This kind of racial science keeps coming back into the mainstream, being heavily criticized, and then diminishing for a little bit, maybe, and then coming back in a new form depending on the general social context,” he said.
Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “All these ideas have been repeated over and over 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”, which reconfirm that “underlying racial differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime … make large outcome differences inevitable”; an article by Gregory Conner, a retired finance professor, arguing for innate racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing a high IQ among Jews has a basis in their genetics.
Aporia also publishes a podcast, in which Rufo appeared as a guest on August 4, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.
Like the journal, the podcast otherwise featured proponents of eugenics and scientific racism.
For example, the January 1 episode featured a debate between Charles Murray and Helmuth Nyborg on the topic “are multicultural societies doomed?”
Charles Murray – a white nationalist according to the SPLC – has been at the center of repeated controversy since 1994, when his book The Bell Curve argued that class differences in the United States are determined by IQ. Critics at the time pointed out that Murray and his co-author, Richard J Herrnstein, drew extensively on Richard Lynn and other writers at Mankind Quarterly.
Helmuth Nyborg is a Danish psychologist who was suspended and reinstated as a professor at Aarhus University in 2006 over his research linking gender and intelligence, and in 2017 he spoke to the white nationalist American Renaissance conference.
In the Aporia podcast, Nyborg claimed to have made scientific arguments against immigration and multiculturalism, at one point saying that “the more genetically inhomogeneous a population is, the more critical it becomes in terms of social anarchy, or what you that social disorder will call. , criminality and so on”.
In the episode published immediately after Rufo’s interview, Winegard interviewed Steve Sailer, a blogger and founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute who has describe as a white supremacy.
Regarding Rufo’s recommendation of the site to his readers, Bird said, “There’s nothing legitimate about biology or evolution or genetics that’s actually been published by anyone at Aporia,” adding, “To point people to it is to to point to unequivocal white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.
“There is nothing of value there. There is nothing resembling true mainstream science. There is nothing like actual discussions that take place in the field. It can be nothing but racist propaganda.”
Beirich said of Rufo’s links that “it is not surprising to find that a person who plays footsie with eugenicists also likes to attack diversity, equality and inclusion in higher education or a Black president of Harvard.”
Linking to Aporia and appearing on his podcast, she said, “Rufo is helping to bring this despicable material back and mainstream it.”
