The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ

“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. {snip}

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. {snip}

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 about the genetic inferiority of Black people. Other tech elites such as Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Paul Graham follow one or both of these accounts. {snip}

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. {snip}

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