This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
When we as scholars mention the “colonial gaze,” this harrowing account helps capture what we mean. Author Pamela Newkirk in The Guardian, revisits the life and death of Ota Benga, a young man kidnapped from the Congo in 1904, displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair, and later caged alongside an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo. He was a Mbuti (Congo pygmy).
His “exhibition”—billed as an ethnological and scientific display—drew more than 220,000 visitors in a single month. White spectators gawked, newspapers mocked, and scientific authorities defended the spectacle as an educational opportunity, invoking what are now long-discredited racial theories that framed African peoples as inferior or subhuman.
Benga’s story is not merely one of personal tragedy, though it is that in the most wrenching sense. It exposes the machinery of U.S. imperialism, white supremacy, and so-called “progressive” science in the early 20th century—a machinery in which leading scientists, museum officials, media outlets, and political elites collaborated to legitimize racial hierarchy.
Even in America’s most cosmopolitan city, decades after the abolition of slavery, Benga’s humanity was denied, his dignity trampled for entertainment, and his story distorted to fit colonial fantasies. He would eventually be freed from the zoo but never from the profound alienation of captivity, ending his life in 1916. Beyond heartbreaking.
We might like to think this history is safely behind us, but Benga’s story resonates in our present. The same gaze that reduced him to a spectacle persists today, operating in subtler yet insidious ways—in the policing of Black bodies, in the devaluation of African and Indigenous knowledges, racial profiling, anti-Critical Race Theory agendas, book bans, and in the separation of immigrant families and the caging of their children.
Let me be clear: the colonial gaze is not only about how the powerful look at the marginalized, but also about how that look shapes policy, culture, and the very boundaries of belonging.
I lament—and call out—how these colonial ways of knowing still lurk in the smug confidence of those who think “our American heritage," or right-wing policies can excuse cruelty, and in the complacent shrug of institutions that protect power over people.
In remembering Ota Benga—and other similarly dehumanized people like Ishi, a Native American who was the last of his Yahi tribe, or Sarah Baartman (referred toas "Hottentot Venus")—we confront the long arc of racial injustice in the United States. And with this, the urgent need to both give voice to the voiceless and dismantle the ideologies that made his captivity possible and that very much continue to haunt us today whenever we witness the callous treatment toward those deemed as "other."
Ota Benga (second from left) and fellow countrymen at the St Louis World’s Fair, 1904 Photograph: University of
South Carolina
In 1904, Ota Benga was kidnapped from Congo and taken to the US, where he was exhibited with monkeys. His appalling story reveals the roots of a racial prejudice that still haunts us.
In anticipation of larger crowds after the publicity in the New York Times, Benga was moved from a smaller chimpanzee cage to one far larger, to make him more visible to spectators. He was also joined by an orangutan called Dohang. While crowds massed to leer at him, the boyish Benga, who was said to be 23 but appeared far younger, sat silently on a stool, staring – sometimes glaring – through the bars.
The exhibition of a visibly shaken African with apes in the New York Zoological Gardens, four decades after the end of slavery in America, would highlight the precarious status of black people in the nation’s imperial city. It pitted the “coloured” ministers, and a few elite allies, against a wall of white indifference, as New York’s newspapers, scientists, public officials, and ordinary citizens revelled in the spectacle. By the end of September, more than 220,000 people had visited the zoo – twice as many as the same month one year earlier. Nearly all of them headed directly to the primate house to see Ota Benga.
His captivity garnered national and global headlines – most of them inured to his plight. For the clergymen, the sight of one of their own housed with monkeys was startling evidence that in the eyes of their fellow Americans, their lives didn’t matter.
As I read this and came up with all the labels for this piece, this development at UT-Austin is quite the smorgasbord.
eugenics, UT-Austin, race and IQ, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), scientific racism, white nationalism, scientific racism, Mankind Quarterly, neo-fascism, Great Replacement, extremism
I encourage people to read books and take courses that actually address how race is NOT a biological but rather a social construct. The very concept of race is a modern one that any close reading of the historical record reveals. In the U.S., according to race and ethnicity scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their book, "Racial Formation in the United States," race is something that is very unstable and that occurs within a historical and contemporary process of racialization.
I remember an Arab Studies colleague at UT speaking to my class after 9-11, telling me that for the first time in his life, he experienced getting treated racially. Indeed, 9-11 resulted in the Arab/Muslim community becoming a race like other Black and Brown people.
Racialization also happens regularly, if not casually, through everyday practices that result in the elevation of one race, color, or ethnicity over the other. That this is the norm is what not only gives racialization its power, but its invisibility. This gets complexified when adding sex, gender, ability, and other axes of demarcation.
I also urge readers to check out this earlier post of mine that lays it out all pretty well and that I encourage you to read:
Super disappointed that my university is opening the door to these discredited, white nationalist, neo-fascist frameworks. Whoever is responsible needs to take a course or two on race and ethnic relations themselves.
This is beyond shameful. It's downright disgraceful. A new low, for sure.
-Angela Valenzuela
Reference
Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial formation in the United States. Routledge.
The campus of the University of Texas at Austin. It is the second time the Natal conference has been held. Photograph: Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
by Jason Wilson, March 3, 2025, The Guardian
A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account, and the founder of a startup offering IQ screening for IVF embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.
Details of the conference have emerged as a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, lays waste US government agencies under the banner of his “Doge” initiative, with the blessing of Donald Trump.
Natalism in its current often rightwing iteration encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers.
The Natal conference website embeds a Musk post on X, reading: “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.” Musk, who reportedly has at least 13 children by four mothers, was in recent days confronted on X by musician Grimes and the rightwing influencer Ashley St Clair over his alleged neglect of the children he has fathered with them.
The conference, scheduled for 28-29 March, is being organized by Kevin Dolan, who the Guardian identified in 2021 as the person behind a Twitter account that was prominent in the far-right “DezNat” movement, and last year as the organizer of the first conference. It is the second time the conference has been held, and once again, the speakers roster runs from provocateurs who emerged from the “fascist fitness scene” to practitioners of “liberal eugenics”.
Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at Hope Not Hate, a British anti-hate non-profit, said that the pro-natalism beliefs informing the Natal conference was one of the crucial planks of “the modern race science movement”.
“It’s about having more babies,” he said, “but it’s important to ask whose babies. It’s about promoting the idea that certain people should have babies that have been improved with positive eugenics.”
Locating the Natal conference
On the ticketing page of the website for the conference, prospective attendees are told of the venue: “Register to see address.” However, in small print on the main page, prospective attendees are told that on day one they can “mingle with speakers and experts for dinner at the Bullock Museum of Texas History in Austin”, and the following day attend a “symposium at the AT&T Conference Center, featuring keynote speakers as well as a closed-door, facilitated ‘unconference’”.
A promotional email sent out by the organization said the conference had secured “discounted accommodations at the AT&T Conference Center for attendees”, accessible with a discount code. Standard tickets are $1,000, according to event’s ticketing page, but buyers are warned that purchases will “require approval”.
The Guardian emailed the University of Texas for comment on their venue hosting the conference.
Jordan Lasker, AKA ‘Cremieux’
One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but the Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics.
The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates.
On 27 November, Musk reposted a Cremieux comment on falling birthrates, adding: “With rare exception, all countries are trending towards population collapse.”
On 29 April, Cremieux posted: “Only about a third of the world even meets replacement rate fertility. This is the biggest problem of our time.” Musk responded: “Yes.”
Musk has also boosted or responded favorably to Cremieux posts on other rightwing hobby horses such as crime in Portland, Oregon, and allegations that Democrats had created loopholes in the asylum system.
Away from X, Cremieux runs a Substack also featuring posts on the supposed relationships between race and IQ. A prominently featured post there seeks to defend the argument that average national IQs vary by up to 40 points, with countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia at the high end and countries in the global south at the low end, and several African countries purportedly having average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment.
Those arguments, first made in a book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, are now so discredited that journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society and Psychological Science have retracted articles that relied on the data. In 2020, the scholarly European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association published a blanket condemnation of Lynn’s data alongside its code of conduct on its website, writing: “Any conclusions drawn from these data are both untenable, and likely to give rise to racist conclusions.”
Lynn, whose work Cremieux seeks to defend in the post, was a self-described scientific racist, and is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the most unapologetic and raw ‘scientific’ racists”.
Until his death in 2023, Lynn was a key figure in organized scientific racism. He served on the board of the Pioneer Fund, which funded “leading Anglo-American race scientists” for decades. He was editor of Mankind Quarterly, a long-standing “pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality”. He held a position on the advisory board of the Occidental Quarterly, a key platform for far-right intellectuals to express pseudo-scientific antisemitic views. He also presented at the American Renaissance conference, a white nationalist gathering where in 2002 he claimed higher rates of psychopathy and psychopathic behavior existed among Black populations compared to others.
Jordan Lasker has also sought to rehabilitate and employ Lynn’s work in papers published under his own name, perhaps most controversially in a co-written paper, Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability. One of his co-authors, Bryan Pesta, was later dismissed from his tenured professorship at Cleveland State University over the use of National Institutes of Health data in the paper.
Last October, the Guardian reported that Pesta had joined a video call with a network of race-science researchers who claimed to have “under the table” access to sensitive genetic data at the UK Biobank. Another of Lasker’s co-authors on Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability, Emil Kirkegaard, was the host of that video call.
Kirkegaard is a self-described eugenicist, explicitly advocates “race science”, and has credentialled himself as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization headed by Richard Lynn until his death.
Lasker’s role in running the Cremieux account has long been a subject of social media speculation, and recent efforts by some writers to further substantiate that identification have not been disputed by Lasker or the Cremieux account.
While previous investigations have focused on Lasker’s alleged history across several Reddit accounts, the Guardian obtained a scrape of the website of the 2024 Manifest conference via a source whose identity is being protected over fears of retaliation.
Last year, the Guardian reported that Manifest was held at a venue that FTX bankruptcy administrators alleged was partly secured with donations from the company Sam Bankman-Fried led into bankruptcy. Lighthaven, owners of the venue, subsequently denied that they had seen the money.
Source code from the site detailing conference registrations indicates that Cremieux, a guest speaker there, registered under an email associated with Lasker.
When the Guardian reached out on that Lasker-linked email to ask about the registration and other evidence pointing to his operation of the Cremieux, Lasker replied with a message containing a promotional code for discounted subscriptions to the Cremieux Substack.
Between the Guardian’s request for comment and Lasker’s response, the “neofascist lifestyle influencer” Charles Cornish-Dale, who posts under the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist, told his X followers that the Guardian was about to “doxx another anon”, that is to identify another pseudonymous rightwing influencer account.
Cornish-Dale was one of the influencers who responded with dismay after the Guardian identified Jonathan Keeperman as the man behind the “L0m3z” X account and rightwing publisher Passage Press last year. Later in the year, Cornish-Dale was himself identified as Raw Egg Nationalist by Hope Not Hate.
Cornish-Dale is a figurehead of the rightwing bodybuilding scene, and has been a keen promoter of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. He had nevertheless lived with his mother in sleepy south Dorset during the entirety of his career as a rightwing influencer, according to Hope Not Hate.
Cornish-Dale and Keeperman are both also slated to speak at Natal this year.
‘Liberal eugenics’
Other Natal speakers are affiliated with organizations that promote eugenicist ideas and practices.
Broadly, eugenics is a group of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of a human population. It became the basis of a popular movement from the late 19th century, and led to governments around the world adopting policies such as forced sterilization of disabled and mentally ill people. The field was discredited due to its association with racial policies in Nazi Germany, and many critics have attacked it as a pseudoscience.
One scheduled speaker, Jonathan Anomaly is a former academic and an advocate of what he has called “liberal eugenics”.
The Guardian reported in October that he was a senior staff member at Heliospect, a startup offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ even though screening embryos for these traits would be illegal in the UK.
On the podcast of “new right” figure Alex Kaschuta, in an episode published on Tuesday, Anomaly said of his company’s services: “What can you do? Well, through embryo selection, you’re going to be able to calculate polygenic scores that reduce disease, boost IQ at least a bit, and maybe more in the future.”
Diana Fleischman, another speaker scheduled to appear at Natal, is a podcast host and contributor at online magazine Aporia, as well as an academic evolutionary psychologist, according to her personal website.
The Guardian also reported last October that Aporia was at the center of an “international network of ‘race science’ activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics”.
One of Fleischman’s articles at Aporia is entitled “You’re probably a eugenicist”. On her Substack feed she has promoted excerpts from Aporia articles, including one on 29 November that used the Holocaust to bolster the claim that black people are innately less intelligence than whites: “If anti-black racism has such devastating effects on cognitive performance among blacks, why did the Holocaust leave no discernible impact on cognitive performance among Jews?”
The publication is operated by the Human Diversity Foundation, an organization registered in Wyoming by Emil Kirkegaard.
Aporia’s executive editor Bo Winegard was by his own account fired by Ohio’s Marietta College in March 2020 after, in a seminar hosted by the University of Alabama, Winegard reportedly said: “People in colder climates, because the differences in brain size, have more propensity for cooperation”.
Aporia editor Noah Carl was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after it emerged that alongside his academic work in sociology, he had simultaneously been publishing scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddling scientific racism, including Mankind Quarterly.
Returning to Natal for a second year running are also Malcolm and Simone Collins, the so-called “hipster eugenicists” who have become the prominent advocates of pro-natalism. The Guardian reported in November that the Collinses, after being approached by a man posing as a potential investor in their projects, produced a proposal for a city-state on the Isle of Man that “contained ideas that seem plucked out of a dystopian science fiction movie”.
The plan envisioned a society that would “grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents”, and be ruled by a periodically rotated “dictator”. They said the arrangement would make the British crown dependency a center for the “mass production of genetically selected humans”.
The previous month, Hope Not Hate published an investigation, also derived from undercover interactions with the Collinses, showing that “despite [their] rejection of the label, what the couple propose is often reminiscent of eugenics”.
The Guardian reported on the 2024 iteration of the Natal conference ahead of the event, detailing the far-right history of event organizer Dolan, and the prominent place of other speakers in eugenicist and far-right politics.
Politico reporting from the event, and revealed that long-time white nationalist activist Taylor, founder of the American Renaissance conference, had been in attendance.
Interesting. Not at all surprised that Christopher Rufo is ideologically allied with a long, discredited history of "scientific racism." It gives me pause to think that my university—specifically, the business school—heartily welcomed him to make a presentation last fall despite his not being a scholar (see Laying Siege to the Institutions), but rather for his political views. You can learn about his position against Critical Race Theory (CRT) in K-12 here which morphed into an attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices and initiatives in higher education.
I did attend his lecture, by the way. My short row of seats combined with another was the only color in the room. I also noticed the overwhelming presence of a whole bunch of elder white males—hopefully, mostly not UT faculty—even if a number were certainly present.
Regardless, I'm glad that Rufo's ties to eugenics and his clear belief in the superiority of the white race finally came out. Old beliefs nevertheless die hard, especially those that give folks a sense of entitlement, however false and misguided, at best. At worst, they take their false, discredited white supremacist notions to purposely propel hateful, divisive, and anti-democratic policy agendas and campaigns.
Christopher Rufo in Sarasota, Florida, on 25 January 2023. Photograph: Dirk/ZUMA Press via Alamy
The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.
At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on his own newsletter, which according to Substack has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which has published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics.
Rufo, a close ally of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called “wokeism”, has repeatedly described his goal as “colorblind equality”, but his links to Aporia raises questions about Rufo’s proximity to extremists.
Most recently Rufo has been credited in conservative media and beyond with playing a central role in the ouster of former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who is Black.
The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions on his apparent endorsement of Aporia, and how he reconciled that with his professed “colorblindness”. He did not respond directly to any questions put to him but instead made a crude sexual insult to a Guardian reporter.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said: “Rufo is hanging around 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 rebrand of Ideas Sleep Furiously, hitherto the personal newsletter of Briton Matthew Archer, now styled “editor in chief” of Aporia.
At that time, Aporia’s newly appointed “executive editor”, Bo Winegard, commenced his tenure with an article, titled Human Biodiversity: A Moderate’s Manifesto, in which he discussed purported “evidence that human populations vary in intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, partially because of genes”.
“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 a postdoctoral research fellow at UC Davis, said “‘human biodiversity’ is their euphemism for race science”, and added that “scientifically, Winegard has never done anything of note in this area”.
Winegard, a psychologist, was by his own account fired by Ohio’s Marietta College in March 2020 after a seminar he gave to a research group at the University of Alabama attracted 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, have more propensity for cooperation”.
Winegard has continued to write in this vein on Aporia up to the present. In a 3 January article on the site titled “Yes, we should talk about race differences”, he wrote: “Thus, we must be honest about race. And that means we begin 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 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, his role there and aspects of his previous controversies. He replied 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 controversy.
Carl is a sociologist who in 2018 was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after the college that appointed him discovered that alongside his more legitimate work in sociology, he had simultaneously been publishing scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddlingscientific racism.
One of the outlets Carl published in, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again”, according to the writer Angela Saini. It was for decades funded by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, and the journal has been described as a “cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment”.
Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform established by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who explicitly advocates “race science”, and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization once headed by Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s retraction.
For OpenPsych, where Carl has been a prolific contributor, he wrote in a 2016 paper that racial stereotypes are “reasonably 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 the 20th-century American psychologist Edward Thorndike on its cover: “Selective breeding can alter man’s capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy.”
Carl has continued to write on the same themes at Aporia. In a November 2023 article titled “Surely liberals should support white nationalism?”, he concluded: “Is it odious to advocate ‘voluntary separation’ of the races? It’s odd, certainly, and doesn’t reflect my own view. But I wouldn’t call it odious.”
As well as publishing their own work, Aporia editors provide a platform for others’ articulations 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 humans who are too genetically distant from one another 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 introduces blandly as “a Jamaican study”, and treats as neutral and reliable.
Davenport, however, was a prominent American eugenicist at the 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 persisted into the 1960s.
Davenport wrote that “race intermingling” – including the “mixing of European races” – was a danger to American society, and also that “a hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people”.
Of Frost’s article, Bird, the geneticist, said it was “old school race science”.
For Andrew Winston, a professor emeritus of psychology at Canada’s University of Guelph and a longtime critic of the encroachment of scientific racism in the field, such nods to eugenics reflect a historical pattern.
“This kind of race science keeps coming back into the mainstream, gets criticized heavily, and then diminishes it for a bit, perhaps, and then returns in some new form, depending on the general social context,” he said.
Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “All of these ideas have been debunked over and over again. The danger here is that eugenics and scientific racism have been historically used to justify terrible acts including genocide.”
Other recent articles on Aporia include Winegard’s “The case for race realism”, which reasserts that “underlying race differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime … make large outcome disparities inevitable”; an article by Gregory Conner, a retired professor of finance, which argues for innate racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing high IQ among Jews has a basis in their genetics.
Aporia also publishes a podcast, which featured Rufo as a guest on 4 August, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.
Like the journal, the podcast has otherwise featured proponents of eugenics and scientific racism.
Its 1 January episode, for example, featured a debate between Charles Murray and Helmuth Nyborg on the topic “are multicultural societies doomed?”
Charles Murray – a white nationalist according to the the SPLC – has been 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, had drawn extensively on Richard Lynn and other authors at Mankind Quarterly.
Helmuth Nyborg is a Danish psychologist who was suspended and reinstated in 2006 as a professor at the University of Aarhus 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 adduce scientific arguments against immigration and multiculturalism, saying at one point that “the more genetically inhomogeneous a population is, the more critical it becomes in terms of social unrule, or what you’ll call that social disturbance, 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 been described as a white supremacist.
On Rufo’s recommending the site to his readers, Bird said: “There’s nothing legitimate on biology or evolution or genetics that’s really been published by anyone at Aporia,” adding: “Pointing people towards that is pointing them toward unambiguous white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.
“There’s nothing of value there. There’s nothing that resembles real mainstream science. There’s nothing that resembles real discussions happening in the field. It can’t be anything other than racist propaganda.”
Beirich said of Rufo’s links that “it’s not surprising to find that a person who is playing footsie with eugenicists is also happy to attack diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education or a Black president of Harvard”.
By linking to Aporia and appearing on its podcast, she said: “Rufo is helping to bring back this despicable material and mainstreaming it.”
