JD Vance Is Awfully Close With These Race Science Guys
Government data is being used to normalize and mainstream race science
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This is a story of how the bad-faith sausage gets made, a miserable little tale of how ideologically-committed right wingers use bad faith arguments to change public discourse around long-settled issues, and how their nightmarish proximity to power means, unfortunately, we have to care about it.
Bad Faith Times readers know this isn’t the first time I’ve analyzed (and fretted about) how bad-faith tactics have been expertly wielded to wrench far-right political views into the political and cultural mainstream. Back in February 2024, for example, I wrote about fraudulent scientific research – financially backed by right-wing astroturf groups – creating the legal legitimacy right-wing judges needed to erode abortion rights in the US. It’s tricky shit, and it works.
The impact of this expensive and highly coordinated attack on science goes beyond court rulings and laws passed on the state level. The establishment of the right’s farcical unreality as reality itself is now fed into AI chatbots, meaning everyday folks – normies – are inundated with right-wing propaganda posing as objective facts and figures. Yes, they hear from their favorite chatbot, a zygote is in fact a fully human person worthy of constitutional rights.
You might be unfortunate enough to know that race science is hot right now in fascist online circles. On X, the official communications platform for international fascism, hundreds of accounts with huge followings post about supposed scientific findings proving without a doubt that they were right all along: White people are naturally more intelligent than all other races.
Their priors were pristine, they say. Shame on you for ever doubting them, they say, with their X posts reaching hundreds of thousands if not millions of social media users who then absorb this race science toxin as part of their daily media diet. Log on to check the score and highlights from last night’s game and get a face full of faulty data legitimizing white supremacy. The owner of X, after all, is big into race science.
Denny Carter
The New York Times (here's a gift link) this week offered some valuable if horrifying insight into how race science is being reanimated by far-right zealots posing as scientists, hacking federal government data, pretending to really, truly care about the health and well being of Brown and Black folks, and publishing half-baked research papers on race-based intelligence, which are then funneled into X’s fascist online environment and into the brains of journalists and politicians who spend all day playing on the diseased playground of Elon Musk’s blackpilled mind.
The (very) long story short: Race science freaks gained access to what was supposed to be private data from a NIH project tracking children's brain development, shared it amongst other race science freaks, and used the data to underpin published studies on the superiority of the white race.
That Vice President JD Vance cavorts with quite a few sketchy, racist, sexist, homophobic, and very openly and plainly fascist accounts on the X platform formerly known as Twitter is an open secret – one that, for whatever reason, does not interest the Beltway media. So maybe it’s not entirely shocking that Vance – as NYT mentions at the very bottom of its story on race scientists misusing federal data – follows and interacts with Jordan Lasker, who opines frequently on X about the brain sizes, IQs, and other measures proving that Black and Brown human beings are inferior to the white man (Lasker recently told his 300,000 X followers that Trump’s Department of Justice needed to “go after” UCLA because the university had admitted too many Latino students for his liking, and he’s obsessed with birth rates, another fertile ground for bad-faith political actors).
