The Bedbug and the Bell Curve
By 
Just one heckuva job by James Bennet:
The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”
Is the junk science paper Stephens cites co-authored by and celebrated by white nationalists? The answers are unlikely to surprise you!
I'm not qualified to assess the scholarship of the 2006 study that Bret Stephens cites. I'll merely note that a.) its title, "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," rings alarm bells & b.) one of its co-authors, the late Henry Harpending, was a White Nationalist. pic.twitter.com/R7Sq5cQuxr— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) December 28, 2019
Literally the first positive tweet I’ve seen about the Bret Stephens piece since it came out last night and it’s from a dyed in the wool white supremacist. pic.twitter.com/wYTF6zuaHU— David Weiner (@daweiner) December 28, 2019
Of course, this crap hangs on Bennet not just because of the bizarre choice to hire Stephens but because he allowed this particular column to appear in his section. And apparently he’s considered to have an inside path to replace Dean Baquet when the latter leaves, which would truly be a wish-on-a-monkey’s-paw outcome. I can’t wait for the introductory column in which Bennet gives extensive praise for the way the political desk covered the 2016 campaign but says that they should have really devoted more resources to investigating Hillary Clinton’s email server.
Bret Stephens is mediocre even at being terrible. He’s a dull person’s idea of an interesting writer, a dumb person’s idea of an intellectual, a sociopath’s idea of a man of virtue, and a legacy’s idea of someone who succeeds on merit.
He is celery. Racist celery.— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) December 28, 2019