Believing impossible things: Woodley and the Unz Foundation

In many of his articles Woodley is listed as an “Unz Foundation” fellow. Woodley fears his association with the Unz Foundation links him to Holocaust denial because, as has been well documented, Ron Unz, the money behind the foundation, is a Holocaust denier. Woodley et al. write that a “Ron Unz has unfortunately adopted objectionable views on the Holocaust, views that are most emphatically rejected by each author on this chapter.” Woodley and his co-authors accept the reality of the most well-documented genocide in the history of the planet! In other words, they meet the bare minimum view that literally anyone should hold to be in a civil and rational society. Besides, he continues:

Woodley of Menie was unaware that that site was to host Holocaust denial and related material and was oblivious to Unz’s personal views on this front at the time funding from the foundation was sought (early in 2017). Woodley of Menie no longer receives any funding from, or has any continued affiliation with, the Unz Foundation (the grant cycle expired early in 2020).

“Look, when I sought funding from Unz, I did no research at all about who I was getting involved with! I’m perfectly willing to lend my name to whoever is willing to buy it! And, it should be noted that, as soon as the money ran out, I stopped taking their money!” This is not necessarily the best way to boost confidence in Woodley’s judgment so he has another tack: “Examination of publicly available documentation shows that the Unz Foundation has given grants to people from across the ideological spectrum, including self-described communist Norman Finkelstein.” OK, let’s look at that “publicly available documentation” and see this wide variety of ideologies!

• Norman Finkelstein: Woodley trots out Finkelstein’s name as proof of Unz’s ideological diversity claiming Finkelstein is a “self-described communist.” The Unz Foundation awarded Finkelstein $110,000 between 2009-2014. This is not a name you want to invoke if you wish to distance yourself from Holocaust denial. Finkelstein has made a name for himself by denying the importance of the Holocaust as a signal event in the 20th century and he heaps praises on racist Holocaust denier David Irving, Naturally he expressed all these views at Unz well before 2017 when Woodley began taking Unz money. In one 2016 column FInkelstein defended the view that Israeli crimes were comparable to the those of the Nazis. For someone who wants to “emphatically” affirm that the Holocaust happened, Woodley picks a poor name to summon in his defense.
• Philip Giraldi ($108,000 between 2013-2018). An ex-CIA agent who thinks the Jews are behind all war, that Jews control the media, that Jews involved the US in war (here). He’s a regular columnist at Unz too.
• Paul Craig Roberts: ($144,00 awarded to Roberts personally, and another $54,000 to Roberts’s Insitute for Political Economy between 2008-14). Another antisemitic conspiracy monger who heaps praise on David Irving and blames Churchill, not Hitler, for beginning World War II. As an aside, Roberts also accuses Anthony Fauci and the “corrupt American Medical Establishment” of “mass murder” because he thinks the Covid vaccine actually caused rather than abated a pandemic.
• Thomas E. Woods, Jr. ($156,000 between 2008-12):Regular readers recognize this name: he’s the guy Objective and Non-Political scientists invoke to try to prop up their credibility when they’ve been associating with Ron Unz. You remember! The guy who works at the Ludwig von Mises Institute ($5,000 in 2008)? The place founded by Murray Rothbard who was a Holocaust denier? The neo-Confederate who regrets the North won the Civil War? The guy who claims the Fourteenth Amendment was illegally adopted and therefore there is no basis for states to provide equal protection of the law? The guy who relies on fascist writers like F.J.P. Veale in his historical work? Yes, that guy!
• There are some real leftist outlets that the Unz Foundation funded and they all share one thing: they are all firmly anti-Zionist or oppose Israel in some fashion. We need not automatically assume that anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic to conclude that the consistency of Unz’s funding showed no diversity in which leftists they fund: anti-Zionism appeared to be a prerequisite to receiving Unz’s money. Among the leftist outlets receiving funds were: Counterpunch ($185,000), The National Institute, Mondoweiss ($80,000), If Americans Knew ($10,000) and the Center for Economic Research and Social Change ($10,000).
• One more leftist connection was the Center for Study of Responsive Law, headed by Ralph Nader ($50,000). Nader and Unz ran for Harvard’s the Board of Overseers in 2016 and much was made of Unz’s ties to white nationalists. The next year Woodley began accepting money from Unz.

Is it possible that Woodley had no idea what kind of “research” the Unz Foundation funded? Yes, I suppose it is if you claim, as he does, that he did no research about the Foundation before writing up his application and then accepting its money. At best, he showed exceptionally poor judgment in accepting Unz’s money. Further, evidence of his inability to distinguish scholarship from its pretender is he now he now claims that Unz’s organizations explore both sides of controversial topics rather than what they obviously are: a firmly committed antisemitic and racist organization and, in no way supporting writers “across the ideological spectrum.” That Unz is somehow interested in objective scholarship is impossible to believe.

Believing Impossible Things: Woodley et al. on Eugenics

Woodley et al. are just scientists exploring the Scientific Truth and leftists are always smearing them with the “eugenics” label. They write: “Eugenics requires deliberate manipulation of human breeding, or of the human gene pool by other means, which is a separate practical issue apart from mere descriptive claims. Each member of the authorship team opposes eugenics for various reasons, collectively including moral, pragmatic, and religious ones, whatever the genetic facts may be.”

Like a magician performing a card trick, Woodley et al. are trying to misdirect you with this definition that restricts “eugenics” to eugenic policies. But they are clumsy magicians and the misdirection fails. Compare the definition above to the definition in the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science offered by the same authors (Woodley & Sarraf): “The term eugenics refers to both intellectual and political efforts at altering human heredity… As an academic field, eugenics involved study of intelligence, character, and health, and indeed its pursuit early in the twentieth century spurred many significant developments in psychometrics, anthropometrics, and statistics” (p. 2413). Since Woodley et al.’s research is overwhelming concerned with the “study of intelligence, character, and health” at the genetic and group level, it would seem this is fit (pun intended) description of their work.

Woodley and Sarraf dance around “eugenics,” claiming it should be restricted to a political program when they want to insulate themselves from criticism; and claiming it is an intellectual pursuit innocent of any political program. Is is possible to say that they are completely innocent of old-fashioned concerns about the unfit outbreeding the fit and thus bringing civilization itself to an end? Not really. In his entry on “Dysgenic concerns” in that same encyclopedia, Woodley concludes, “It is clear also that patterns of selection and mutation accumulation, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, may justify dysgenic concerns with respect to several traits.”This is clearly a eugenic idea.

Circling back to Unz once again. If Woodley is an apolitical and neutral scientist, why would an antisemitic Holocaust denier be interested in funding him? We can see that the Unz Foundation funded quite a lot of popularizers of race science but no research at all:

• Gregory Cochran ($600,000, )
• Razib Khan ($218,000, was also a regular columnist at Unz).
• Steve Sailer ($128,000, also a regular columnist at Unz)

That well-known scientific racists blog at Unz is significant since Unz is the only respected media outlet among racial hereditarians:

Only two media outlets received positive ratings, the blogs of Steve Sailer (M = 7.38, N = 26 ratings) and Anatoly Karlin (6.10, N = 10 ratings). Unfortunately, the survey did not consider James Thompson’s blog Psychological Comments, which was just beginning when the survey was administered. All three blogs are currently hosted by The Unz Review (p. 5).

Considering that Unz funded, and publishes, nothing but eugenic/racist columnists and conspiracy theorists, is it possible that Unz funded Woodley because Woodley was an objective scientific researcher? Or, is it much more likely that Woodley received funding because Woodley’s research would fit nicely into to Unz’s ideological worldview?

Believing Impossible Things: Woodley et al. on Racial Hereditarianism and Racism

Nothing annoyed Woodley et al. more than thinking their research program should be considered racist or part of a reactionary political program:

Any effort to show that hereditarianism is not mere right-wing activism will be difficult to get off the ground if ‘racism’ is immediately inferred from hereditarianism, and the former is necessarily considered right wing or sufficient to render someone right wing. As indicated earlier, we proceed on the assumption that hereditarianism is not intrinsically racist or right wing and that both racism in general and ideologies such as racial nationalism and supremacy in particular can occur on the political left or right.

It is certainly true that racism is not the sole province of the right. The Progressive movement of the early 20th century was certainly plagued by it and many of the leftist causes funded by Unz are marked by antisemitism. But, given that human inequality is a guiding assumption of right-wing politics, we are much more likely to find racism on today’s political right. Woodley et al. make the point obvious in their piece with its constant tirades against “criticisms [of the hereditarian research program that are] embedded within a program of egalitarian activism/left-wing activism,” and the “popular morality that seems to emerge in highly modernized societies and which is especially championed by the political left.” Or, “Belief in equality among certain demographic groups (defined by class, sex, and/or race) is a key feature of contemporary leftism” and “The terms ‘leftist’ and ‘egalitarian’ will be used in this piece more or less interchangeably.” The authors largely remain silent on how these remarks conflict with their previously asserted claim that racism could as easily be accommodated by the left as the right.

The authors also do not do much to document that the criticism of their racial hereditarian research program owes to leftist ideology rather than to scientific researchers simply recognizing crappy science when they see it. They point to “openly Marxist academics,” who wrote two books for popular audiences: specifically Mismeasure of Man (1981) and Not in Our Genes (1984) as somehow infecting the sciences with Marxist dogma. Pointing to two popular books allows them to ignore the overwhelming scientific rejection of the key ideas of the racial hereditarian research program. Is it possible that the communities of human geneticists, biological anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and the vast majority of psychologists were captured by the Marxists who wrote books four decades ago and let it infect their research? Or, is it much, much more likely that racial hereditarian research is far outside the bounds of scientific respectability and thus roundly criticized and condemned?

Believing Impossible Things: Racial Hereditarian Researchers Are Not Responsible for Their Research Being Used by the Far Right

Woodley et al. claim to decry the misuse of their totally innocent research program:

Elements of the political right clearly misunderstand and misapply science in these areas for ideological reasons. For example, some of these persons seem to believe that measured intelligence (IQ) is some sort of omni-determinative variable in the social world, almost fully explaining social success across many important domains—the reality of the generally small-to-moderate-magnitude relationships of IQ to these outcomes is somehow lost on them (see Strenze, 2015). Conversely, there are still Nazi sympathizers and adherents of variant National Socialist ideologies who emotively and irrationally reject intelligence research, tending especially to spurn it as “Jewish” (Cofnas, 2020 discusses the historical basis of this in National Socialism).

This claim could elicit much more sympathy from the reader if Woodley, Sarraf & Peñaherrera-Aguirre didn’t cite as authorities Nazi sympathizers and other far-right activists. For example, those same authors wrote: The Rhythm of the West: A Biohistory of the Modern Era AD 1600 to the Present. The first thing to notice is that the book is part of the “Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies Monograph Series.” This journal was founded by Roger Pearson and in 2017 he was still listed as the General Editor:

Why wouldn’t neo-Nazis and white nationalists look upon these authors as supporting their concerns about the lower races outbreeding the higher races? The book was published by a leading defender of Nazi race science and that is exactly what the book argues:

On the matter of Occidental civilization’s future prospects, these are the most pertinent facts.

All Western countries have sub-replacement fertility (CIA, 2015; inducing diminution of their relative human biomass) and hence diminishing group-level evolutionary success. It is unambiguous that the g.h of Western populations has been in decline since industrialization (Sarraf, 2017; Kong et al., 2017; note that, per Woodley, te Nijenhuis, Must & Must, 2014, it is unclear whether g has any environmental component). The weight of evidence therefore leaves little doubt that the genetic substrata of the most advanced nations are eroding, and, troublingly, demands on cognitive capital will only grow with the need to support so many people as global population continues to balloon (even though those of European descent are becoming relatively lesser in number; CIA, 2015). The West is left in an ever more parlous state, for its putative thriving in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, often considered the zenith of human development, may in fact be coasting on the waning inertia of pre-industrial eugenic selective pressures. Challenging environments and ecologies prior to the industrial revolution conferred to intelligent persons a comparative fitness advantage; this advantage culminated in the historical apotheosis of g.h in the 19th century, which enabled the industrialism that provided the objective and material fundament of technological Western civilization. (p. 20)

Since “Occidental” civilization is pretty much the only civilization, the end of it because of the deterioration of the genetic gene pool means the death of humanity: “It should be stressed that despite our emphasis on the health and future of Occidental civilization, the fears about civilizational meltdown expressed in this study apply to all of humanity” (p. 99). It is no “misuse” of this kind of research for a white nationalist to claim that their fears of “The Great Replacement” are scientifically true since that is exactly what Woodley and his colleagues are arguing.

The argument that racial hereditarian research stands outside far-right politics is simply unsupportable. Woodley et al. cite as authorities:

• Edward Dutton: A frequent co-author with Woodley, et al. Also one of Unz’s regular columnists and who has published a book with fascist publisher Arktos Media.
• Arthur Jensen: Who cited Nazis and neo-Nazis as “authorities” in his notorious 1969 paper on race and IQ. Who worked with Roger Pearson, neo-Nazi Jürgen Rieger, and white supremacist Jared Taylor.
• Philippe Rushton: Who helped David Duke write his autobiography and was a regular speaker at the white nationalist American Renaissance conferences.
• Jan te Nijenhuis: Who spoke at a neo-Fascist rally urging a program of racialized eugenics.

Here’s a more comprehensive bibliography of racial hereditarian researchers collaborating with far-right political actors. Woodley et al. claim that pointing out these collaborations are unwarranted “guilt by association” attacks:

We consider recent controversies related to these areas of inquiry. Crucial among these is an attempt to brand science on population differences as part of a particular form of rightist political activism, aiming to insert justifications for “White nationalism” and related ideologies into scientific, political, and public discourse. Unfortunately, the coherence of this thesis depends heavily on guilt-by-association allegations and suppression of conflicting evidence.

If racial hereditarian researchers don’t want to be associated with white nationalism I suggest that they stop working alongside white nationalists. For example, if Woodley doesn’t want people pointing out he received money from the antisemitic Ron Unz, he shouldn’t have taken money from Unz. If he doesn’t folks to know he gave an interview with white nationalist Stephan Molnyneux, then he shouldn’t have given that interview.

The final, most laughable claim made by Woodley et al. is: “It would be ideal if efforts were made to depoliticize social science in particular to the greatest extent possible, but a more productive course of action might involve critical introspection and the active pursuit of lines of research that challenge potential misconceptions.” There is abundant evidence that racial hereditarian researchers actively collaborate with reactionary racial ideologues and have for decades. They are not brave truth-tellers but defenders of a racial order long since abandoned by both scientists and civil society. If they were serious about “depoliticizing” social science the first step they should take is to abandon racial hereditarian research. Until they do that, there is no reason to believe they are good-faith members of the scientific community.

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