Earlier this week, we learned that a senior State Department official called Secretary of State Marco Rubio stupid. The insult was delivered using peculiar phrasing — “low IQ” — that’s actually quite telling about the nature and ideas of the American right today.
The official in question, Darren Beattie, is the acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy — a fairly important job. He is also a creature of the internet fever swamps with a history of offensive behavior: He was fired from his speechwriting job in the first Trump administration for giving a talk at a white nationalist conference.
On Monday, CNN’s KFile went through some deleted tweets from Beattie’s X account. Among many inflammatory statements the reporters uncovered, one stood out as especially embarrassing — a 2021 post where he insulted his now-boss in a number of vivid and explicit ways. On the list: a claim that the current secretary of state was “low IQ.”
For a normal person whose brain has not been poisoned by the internet, “low IQ” just sounds like an overly complicated way of calling someone stupid. But for those of us familiar with the online world from which Beattie hails, it rang a very specific bell. In those spaces, there is an obsession with the concept of IQ — not just intelligence in general, but this particular means of measuring it.
This preoccupation, is at its heart, about race: the idea that genetic racial inequalities in everything from income to incarceration are best explained by Black and Latino people having lower IQs than white and Asian people. This racism, recently repackaged as “race realism” or “human biodiversity,” was once mostly a province of the fringe right — so controversial that Jason Richwine, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, was forced to resign in 2013 after his history of race-IQ theorizing came to light.
But in the Trump era, this kind of thinking has become more mainstream — so commonly accepted, in fact, that insults like “low IQ” are part of the lingua franca of the online right. This is why Trump appointed Richwine to a government post in 2020, and why race-IQ theorists believe they’re winning the war of ideas in Trump’s second term.
“It is an open secret that [the tech right] is aware of race differences. Elon Musk frequently promotes HBD (human-biodiversity) X accounts,” writes Nathan Cofnas, a Cambridge philosopher who was sanctioned by his college for his openly racist beliefs last year.
“Among young (most millennial, virtually all zoomer) intellectuals on the right, race realism isn’t controversial.”
The right’s renewed IQ obsession, explained
Scientific racism is hardly a new thing, long predating even the infamous eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. In a 1787 essay, Thomas Jefferson bizarrely argued that Blacks were a “distinct race” because they “secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin.”
These arguments seek to naturalize social inequality: to point to a social arrangement, be it slavery or the racial wealth gap, and argue that it reflects deep and unchangeable truths about humanity rather than the contingent choices of social actors who create a hierarchy within humanity for their own (nefarious) purposes.
A central conceit of the modern race-and-IQ revival is that a right-wing position on race is intellectually indefensible without an appeal to biology. Mainstream conservative arguments blaming racial gaps on welfare or minority culture simply can’t survive serious scrutiny; the only intellectually serious right, they argue, is a racist right.
“All non-racism-based cultural explanations for race differences have fatal problems that most intelligent people immediately recognize,” Cofnas writes. “If it were true that the races were on average psychologically equal, the best explanation for disparities would be the continued existence, or the legacy, of white racism.”
To be clear: IQ is a legitimate scientific concept. There is a large body of psychological evidence showing that IQ tests do measure aspects of intelligence, and that people with high IQs are more likely to have higher incomes and succeed in cognitively demanding fields like academia or the law.
However, there is no real evidence for a genetically rooted IQ difference between racial groups — let alone a genetic gap large enough to explain persistent social inequalities. Whatever IQ gaps do exist between these groups are most likely products of inequality rather than causes of it. We have been having this debate in public for decades now, since at least the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve in 1994, and the evidence has increasingly pointed away from biological explanations.
Yet in the Trump era, this reality hardly serves as a constraint. The modern reject rejects the academic consensus on everything from the science of vaccines to the benefits of free trade. The same arguments about “woke academia” and “liberal bias” used to effectively dismiss established medical and economic research are now deployed against the biological and psychological evidence for human equality.
The Trump era has also demolished the moral constraints limiting the spread of these ideas.
What was once career-ending at even a conservative institution like Heritage — Richwine’s dissertation alleging that Hispanic immigration should be restricted because they were a low-IQ group — is now reasonably similar to the rhetoric you hear from the president of the United States. Just last year, for example, Trump argued that immigrants coming across the southern border were likely to become murderers because they had “bad genes.”
The decline of the right’s moral guardrails against racism did not just encourage anonymous racist trolling, but also helped acceptance of gussied-up racist thinking among its elite.
“I’d say that maybe half of the smartest conservative and libertarian writers at least suspect that there are genetic racial differences in IQ, or even take it for granted,” writes Richard Hanania, an influential tech-right pundit who used to post anonymously on white nationalist websites (a past for which he has apologized).
This is not the kind of sentiment you’ll see in columns by conservatives at the New York Times or the Washington Post. But behind the scenes, in right-wing group chats and salons, a race science renaissance is underway on the right. The use of “low IQ” as a common insult is merely the visible tip of the iceberg.
Recent Comments