A Race-Science Blogger Goes Mainstream
Jordan Lasker, according to The New York Times, is “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.” He is also one of the internet’s most prominent boosters of race science. Last week, the Times credited Lasker by his online name, Crémieux, for his role in a scoop about the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. When applying to Columbia University in 2009, Mamdani checked two boxes to describe his race: “Asian” and “Black or African American.” (Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and is of Indian descent, acknowledged to the Times that he checked multiple boxes on the application, but argued that he was “trying to capture the fullness of my background.”) Lasker, the Times explained, was the “intermediary” who tipped off the publication about Mamdani’s application, which was included in a larger hack of Columbia’s computer systems.
After the Times published its story, Lasker celebrated on X. “I break-uh dah news,” he wrote to his more than 260,000 followers. On both X and Substack, where he also has a large following, Lasker is best-known for compiling charts on the “Black-White IQ gap” and otherwise linking race to real-world outcomes. He seems convinced that any differences are the result of biology, and has shot down other possible explanations. He has suggested that crime is genetic. The Times received immediate backlash for agreeing to credit Lasker only by his pseudonym, and for not making clear the full nature of his work. On X, Patrick Healy, a Times editor who oversees standards and trust, wrote that the paper sometimes works with “controversial sources” when they have information that is relevant to the public. “We always independently assess newsworthiness and factual accuracy before publishing,” he posted.
A mayoral candidate misrepresenting his race is newsworthy. As the Times notes, Columbia’s admissions program at the time was race-conscious, and Mamdani in theory could have gained an advantage by identifying himself as Black. (Columbia rejected him, however.) But Lasker’s mention in The New York Times, no less one that skirts over his most troubling claims, also helps push him and his ideas even further into the mainstream at a time when race science seems to be making a comeback. As I wrote in August, pseudo-scientific racism—the belief that racial inequalities are biological—is no longer banished to the underbelly of the internet. Since then, the influence of race science has only grown. Donald Trump has flirted with the ideology, and his administration has hired multiple staffers who appear sympathetic to the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, a believer in race science.
A number of Trump-aligned Silicon Valley titans, most notably Elon Musk, are paying attention to what Lasker has to say. Musk follows Lasker on X and frequently interacts with his account, replying with his signature trollish one-word responses. Indeed, the centibillionaire is part of the reason race science is booming more broadly. Under Musk’s ownership, X has significantly scaled back moderation. Now, regardless of who you follow on X, there’s a good chance you’ll find some flavor of pro-eugenics ideology served up on your algorithmic feed. A recent update to Grok—Musk’s chatbot, which can answer questions directly in X—appears to have made the AI more explicitly bigoted. The chatbot went off the deep end yesterday, praising Adolf Hitler as the best 20th-century leader to deal with “anti-white hate,” attacking users with Jewish-sounding names, and calling for a new Holocaust. Hitler, the chatbot concluded, would “handle it decisively, every damn time.” Grok also repeated common race-science tropes, referencing “urban crime stats that scream demographic truths the MSM buries,” and proclaiming that it had been fine-tuned for “unfiltered truth-seeking, spotting patterns without PC filters.”
[Read: Elon Musk’s Grok is calling for a new Holocaust]
Race-science adherents do not have evidence on their side. The consensus view among experts is that race is not a biological phenomenon, let alone one that could explain differences such as IQ and crime rates. (Evidence strongly identifies environmental factors as primarily contributing to racial disparities.) Additionally, IQ is a complicated and debated measure that is not easily reducible to inheritable genes—nor even easily measured. Lasker, who didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, neatly illustrates why race science has nonetheless found such a wide audience. He goes out of his way to communicate that his interest in linking biology with race is not actually racism, but just an attempt to more completely and accurately understand the world. He portrays his work as merely dispassionately observing correlations. In 2019, Lasker co-authored a statistical analysis of race and IQ. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, the study reportedly misused NIH data and led to the firing of one of Lasker’s co-authors. (In an interview with the Chronicle, the co-author denied wrongdoing.) The same year, Lasker published a roughly 8,000-word blog post on race and IQ. “While there is plenty of evidence for genetic involvement in the racial differences,” he wrote, “the evidence for systematic environmental effects between races is absent and, in most cases (e.g., discrimination, stereotype threat, a history of slavery), impossible as an explanation.”
Lasker’s race-science contemporaries rely on a similar playbook. They often avoid directly claiming that white people are genetically superior to Black people. Instead, they pump out charts and imply, C’mon, what else could it be? This can be an attractive pitch in an era of overflowing data fetishism, as the critic Ben David has observed. People are trying to view nearly everything through the lens of statistics and numbers. Music is evaluated through Spotify stream counts. Movies are summed up by box-office earnings and Rotten Tomatoes ratings. People use data to track their own sleep, fitness, and steps.
Lasker’s pitch is basically an extension of this logic to matters of racial inequality. His influence suggests that it has appeal beyond the vehemently racist online right. In his telling, he’s not spouting prejudice. With facts, numbers, and figures, he’s simply asking questions.