CANCEL DARWIN:

[O]ver time, Harris withdrew from expressing his opinions through platforms designed to ensure a minimum level of intellectual integrity. He began blogging and then started an enormously popular podcast, his principal medium for the past seven years. He stopped publishing peer-reviewed research papers. He opted not to submit articles to media outlets that imposed some editorial control over what they publish. Instead, he created a small media empire that enabled him to say whatever he wants, whether or not the message is misleading, the claims are factually erroneous, the reasoning is fallacious and so on. In other words, he figured out a way to bypass intellectual accountability -- to opine as much as he wants about topics he doesn't understand without peer-review, editorial oversight or other quality-control measures.

Like Trump, Harris seems wholly uninterested in getting things right. He claims to care about intellectual honesty and good scholarship, yet he consistently spouts misinformation on his podcast that could easily be corrected if only he were to engage -- sincerely, and in good faith -- those who disagree with him (very often actual experts on the topics of racism, feminism, social justice and so on). Indeed, so far as I can tell, Harris has become one of the greatest sources of misinformation on social justice issues in the United States today. His contribution to scientific racism -- his boosting the visibility of claims like Black people are almost certainly dumber than white people for genetic reasons -- will no doubt be one of his greatest, and darkest, legacies.

Consider this anecdote from a few years ago. I was in Sweden for a two-month-long workshop. During lunch one day I was speaking to a professor at the local university and the uncomfortable topic of race and IQ came up. He told me that he has come to embrace (in his words) the "racist view," according to which white people are intellectually superior to Black people because of evolution. He further told me that it is only once one accepts this view that white folks can be genuinely empathetic toward Black people. That is, by recognizing that "they can't help it," we can take on the burden of helping them out.

Over the course of an excruciating two hours (in every moment of which I wanted to defenestrate myself), I explained the problems with "IQ" as a metric of intelligence and went over some of the data about how horrifically widespread heavy-metal poisoning and malnutrition is in poorer regions of the world. By the very end, he told me that I had nearly talked him out of the "racist view."

The point here is this: Literally the first thing I asked when he explained his "racist view" was, "Why do you think that?" And his response was: "Well, I mean, listen to Sam Harris. Listen to his interview with Charles Murray. Listen to the points that he made in his podcast interview with Josh Zepps." Indeed, so far as I know, the Zepps podcast was Harris's most explicit statement that affirmed his racist convictions. To quote him in full:

And as bad luck would have it, but as you absolutely predict on the basis of just sheer biology, different populations of people, different racial groups, different ethnicities, different groups of people who have been historically isolated from one another geographically, test differently in terms of their average on this measure of cognitive function. So if you're gonna give the Japanese and the Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans and Hawaiians ... you're gonna take populations who differ genetically -- and we know they differ genetically, that's not debatable -- and you give them IQ tests, it would be a miracle if every single population had the exact same mean IQ. And African Americans come out about a standard deviation lower than white Americans. A standard deviation for IQ is about 15 points. So, if it's normed to the general population, predominantly white population for an average of 100, the average in the African American community has been around 85.

There is simply no other interpretation of this than "Black people are genetically dumber." What's worse is that Harris presents this as if it's the unavoidable, obviously true inference from the indisputable facts. This is where the Trumpian strategy of avoiding peer-review, editorial oversight, and quality control comes into the picture with force: There are profoundly strong reasons for rejecting all of this. Yet Harris' adoring audience of mostly white men (including a lot of Trump supporters) would never know this listening to him.

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