History’s Greatest Martyr Speaks
By 
I actually enjoyed Byron York’s piece on Jason Richwine, the deposed Heritage Foundation hack who is dismayed that you can be called a white supremacist merely for arguing that people of color are intellectually inferior. Shockingly enough, his mentor was another giant in the field of racist junk science:
Richwine got in touch with me over the weekend, wanting to talk. In a long discussion Sunday, I began by asking about his interest in the topic of race and IQ. How had that started? He had read Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve” when he was a student at American University in Washington, Richwine said, and was fascinated by the author’s approach to a complex topic. The son of an engineer and a bookkeeper from the suburbs of Philadelphia, Richwine was quantitatively inclined. After graduating from American in 2004 with bachelor’s degrees in math and political science, he was accepted into graduate school at Harvard, where the focus of his research was the question of group intelligence.
While Richwine was at Harvard, Murray visited Cambridge and Richwine told him about his research project. The result was a two-year fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where Murray has long been a scholar.
My favorite bit, though, is definitely this:
Richwine published the rebuttal in a relatively new website, AlternativeRight. Why there? For several reasons, Richwine told me. First, The American Conservative declined to publish the response on its own site, which left Richwine looking for a place to post. Second, he had met AlternativeRight’s founder Richard Spencer at an AEI event. And third, Spencer asked Richwine to write for him. “There was a new website called AlternativeRight,” Spencer recalled. “I thought it would be like a paleo-conservative website. I had seen that [former National Review writer] John Derbyshire had also published something there … Later on, it took on a more extreme version.”
That is true, but assessments of AlternativeRight at the time of its founding pegged it as a white nationalist site. The site’s editors “hide their sexist and racist ideologies behind the gloss of sweet-sounding, pseudo-intellectual terms,” wrote Tim Mak, then a reporter for David Frum’s old site FrumForum. “Instead of spouting racism, Alternative Right is engaging in the much more respectable-sounding analysis of ‘human biological diversity’ and ‘socio-biology.'” Mak’s article appeared the same week Richwine published his piece for AlternativeRight.
Yes, it’s obviously inconceivable that a site could publish John Derbyshire and yet be run by racist crackpots! It’s a real shame that this babe in the woods has become victim to Political Correctness (TM).