The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. By Ali Breland

Read time: 9 minutes

“Race science” has returned.

An illustration of a marble bust of a head wearing a MAGA hat.

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Updated at 6:34 p.m. ET on August 20, 2024

“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows.

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.” Sailer, one of the most prominent peddlers of race science in the United States, has made a career out of noticing things. (Last year, he published an anthology of his writing titled Noticing.) He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs). Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.

Sailer has written for decades about race science, but his appearance on Kirk’s show—one of the most popular on the right—came amid a year in which he has earned newfound prominence. In June, he also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. The far right has long espoused outright racism and anti-Semitism, especially in the Trump era. But more right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding that bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification. They see race not as a social construction, but as something that can be reduced to genetic facts. Don’t take it from us, they say; just look at the numbers and charts.

Race science is hardly a new idea. During Jim Crow, the idea was used as justification for sterilizing Black people. In Nazi Germany, the veneer of science and biology was used as a pretense for genocide. In recent decades, race science has chugged along in the U.S., mostly subterraneously. It has occasionally popped out into public view, in many cases to be met with swift condemnation. A version of that played out in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argues, in part, that race and intelligence are linked.

More recently, after the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, early in the Trump presidency, race science was boosted by far-right figures such as Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer, though not to the extent or with the conviction it is now. In 2016, Spencer, the white supremacist who gained traction in the early Trump years, said that “race is genetically coherent,” but also that “it’s not just about genes and DNA” but about “the people and the spirit.” Both Molyneux and Spencer had real followings, but were treated as fringe oddities by the mainstream right. Molyneux, who once reportedly said that immigration is “akin to importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy,” was banned from YouTube in 2020. Spencer was also seen as politically radioactive, which curbed his potential influence.

What’s different now is that race science is moving into the open. Sailer may have once been a fringe oddity as well, but these days his views are broadcast to the millions of people who listen to Kirk and Carlson. Neither Carlson nor Kirk pushed back on Sailer’s views: “Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk told him. Over email, I asked Sailer why he believes he’s now accepted into relatively more mainstream circles after having been pushed to the margins for years. Society is “drifting back toward sanity,” he claimed.

Other peddlers of race science also have the ear of those in power on the right. Take Nick Fuentes, a 26-year-old white nationalist whose many followers call themselves “Groypers.” He has repeatedly argued that white people are intellectually superior, and praised people who believe in race science. In a single podcast interview in 2022, Fuentes said that “there is a genetic basis” for Black people committing criminal acts and that Black people are “more antisocial and have higher incidences of sociopathy and on average a lower IQ.” His ideology has proved so infectious among Gen Z that last year, disciples of his brand of politics appeared to have taken over dozens of campus conservative groups. He has also made inroads with elected Republicans; in 2022, Fuentes dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Like Fuentes, Bronze Age Pervert, a prominent far-right influencer on X who has dabbled with race science, is especially popular with young conservatives. His book, Bronze Age Mindset, reportedly became a popular read among congressional and White House staffers during the Trump administration. Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. Bronze Age Pervert’s real name is Costin Alamariu, and he holds a Ph.D. in political science from Yale. In a modified version of his thesis that he self-published last year to fanfare among the online right, titled Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, Alamariu writes that “Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.”

Other anonymous far-right accounts have accrued more than 100,000 followers by posting about the supposed links between race and intelligence. Elon Musk frequently responds to @cremieuxrecueil, which one far-right publication has praised as an account that “traces the genetic pathways of crime, explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Musk has also repeatedly engaged with @Eyeslasho, a self-proclaimed “data-driven” account that has posted statistics supposedly illustrating the inferiority of Black people. Other tech elites such as Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Paul Graham follow one or both of these accounts. Whom someone follows in itself is not an indication of their own beliefs, but at the very least it signals the kind of influence and reach these race-science accounts now have.

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

No matter how hard people try, however, race cannot be reduced to the results of an IQ test. There is more to the complicated genetic, cultural, economic, and historical realities of race than a few lines on a chart. When I asked Sailer to explain the links between race and intelligence, he said that he doesn’t “see strong reasons to assume that intelligence is all that different from a trait like height, which is clearly driven by both genes and environment.” He cited regions of Serbia and South Sudan as having tall populations despite being relatively poor, suggesting that health and nutrition are not the primary explanation for average national height.

Genetics may play some role in the average height in these two countries, but intelligence is not like height. As three prominent psychologists have written, “Modern DNA science has found hundreds of genetic variants that each have a very, very tiny association with intelligence, but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score.” Furthermore, that race is not a biological phenomenon is the consensus view among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists, building on generations of empirical research.

Despite this, race-science adherents remained undeterred. Attempts to legitimize racial animus have a clear purpose. Even though racism persists in the U.S., overt racism is still extremely unpopular. Attempts to advance racist beliefs have to work within that paradigm. Trump’s Muslim ban was racist, but it hid under justifications of national security and counterterrorism. Trump’s attempts to stake his claim as a “law and order” candidate are a revival of Richard Nixon’s similar strategy in the 1960s to energize racist voters without being racist out loud. When Trump has accidentally pierced the veil, as he did when he referred to predominantly Black nations as “shithole countries,” he has tried to deny having said so in the first place. Race science is used as a crowbar to try to overturn the idea that racism is bigoted. Instead, its adherents insist, they are simply acknowledging a cold, hard truth about the world.

This can be particularly attractive in an era of data fetishism. Numbers and metrics have become a codex through which everything is processed: Rotten Tomatoes percentages, box-office sales, Spotify streams, Instagram followers now play an outsize role in determining what is culturally valuable. People quantify themselves by obsessively tracking their sleep cycles, heart rates, and other types of health data. To a racist, race science offers a similar certainty to another thing that’s not actually quantifiable. Sailer has likened himself to a “statistics analyst.”

The allure of a supposed truth of racial statistics is about more than data, of course. For certain white people, it can be appealing to believe that you have been shut out by a “system that doesn’t recognize your genius, because it’s set to the demands of the grubby many,” as the conservative thinker Sohrab Ahmari, who has written about the creeping eugenic tendencies of right-wing youth, told me. DEI measures in the workplace may not be why a white person hasn’t succeeded in their career, but they become easy scapegoats. This feeling of racial aggrievement can fester at a time when the cost of housing, food, and health care have all hit new highs relative to income. Economic vulnerability helps keep ideas like race science fertile. Studies have shown that, in Europe, negative perceptions about the economy correlate with upticks in support for the far right.

For those at the top of society, a belief in a natural hierarchy can work in the opposite direction: as a justification of their genius. Bronze Age Pervert speaks to disaffected right-wingers who have not attained what they thought they would, but also to those rising through the ranks of elite conservative institutions for a similar reason: “Natural inequalities exist” and “certain men are naturally more fit to rule than others,” as the former Trump staffer Michael Anton summarizes what he calls “the most reasonable of BAP’s premisses.” In other words, we are rising through the ranks of the elite because it is our natural right to.

What makes the return of race science such a problem is that once the logic has taken hold, it is hard to root out: The natural order has already been settled. The poor are dysgenic and disgusting. The rich are heroic and smart. Everything is in its place.

UPDATE / CORRECTION: 

This article originally misstated that the X account @Eyeslasho has posted about the “genetic inferiority” of Black people. In fact, the account has not directly attributed group differences to biology.

About the Author:

Ali Breland is a staff writer at The Atlantic.