Why are some prominent liberals cozying up to race scientists?

The New York Times’ recent report on Zohran Mamdani’s Columbia University application raised a lot of questions, such as: In what universe does this fall under the umbrella of news that’s fit to print? Why did the paper of record report on hacked materials it obtained from a quasi-anonymous online race scientist, given its prior refusal to report on other hacked materials of questionable provenance? And most importantly for our purposes — even if we concede that Mamdani’s college application was indeed newsworthy and acknowledge that journalists’ sources will at times include people with retrograde or abhorrent views — why was the Times deferential to the source at the expense of accuracy, obscuring his actual beliefs and agreeing to refer to him by a pseudonym even though his identity had previously been reported elsewhere?

This latter note may seem like a minor quibble, but it points to a broader phenomenon: the subtle creep of race science into mainstream political discourse. The Times obtained Mamdani’s Columbia application from “an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X,” whom reporters described as “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about IQ and race.” A quick Google search is all it takes to reveal that the person behind the Crémieux account is almost certainly Jordan Lasker, a lapsed academic and ardent advocate of eugenics. It’s technically true that Lasker/Crémieux “writes often about IQ and race” in the same way that it’s technically true that Donald Trump “speaks often about immigration.” It would be far more accurate to say that Lasker writes about how Black people are inherently and congenitally less intelligent than white people.

Egregious as it was, this incident is not isolated, nor did it come out of nowhere. The idea that race and IQ are connected — what’s known as “race realism” or “human biodiversity” — has become conventional wisdom on the right in the years since Trump was first elected. The notion of “human biodiversity” underpins the Trump administration’s efforts to do away with both affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. If success is downstream from intelligence and intelligence is determined by race and heredity rather than access and opportunity, then inequality is the product of biology, not policy. And if inequality is the product of biology, any attempts to eradicate it will be ineffective at best and, at worst, will elevate the inferior at the expense of their superiors. This is not a new argument; it is the thesis of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s controversial 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve and, more broadly, the intellectual heir of the centuries-old tradition of scientific racism.

Prominent liberal institutions have — for the most part, anyway — not yet endorsed the 21st-century iteration of race science, but they have helped launder it into the mainstream nonetheless by legitimizing its proponents while simultaneously obscuring their actual beliefs. In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, Democrats have scrambled to come up with an explanation for both Kamala Harris’ loss and the Republican Party’s gains with voters of color. The prevailing opinion among a certain cohort of liberal commentators is that voters are tired of identity politics and want politicians to focus on kitchen-table issues. This was already the prevailing opinion before the election, but now it has a flashy new title: Abundance. The idea, as presented by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their new book of the same name, is that Democrats should be the party of more: more housing, more jobs, more opportunity, more clean energy, more prosperity. But to get there, they argue, we must do away with onerous regulations that impede progress.

The Abundance tent is an intentionally big one. It’s partly a bid to win over disaffected voters who defected from the Democratic Party, as well as conservatives who feel abandoned or betrayed by MAGA’s economic policies. In this sense, Abundance isn’t too different from Democrats’ post-January 6th efforts to woo Never-Trump Republicans by pivoting to the center. But Abundance liberals are also seemingly entering into political alliances with race scientists.

Take, for example, Thompson’s appearance on Richard Hanania’s podcast. Hanania, for those who are unfamiliar (I’m so jealous of you by the way), is an erstwhile member of the tech-right and author of The Origins of Woke, a 2023 book about how “wokeness” originated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Years before he was a published author, Hanania blogged under the name Richard Hoste. Shielded by his nom de plume, he described himself as a race realist, called for the compulsory sterilization of “low IQ” people, and described himself as an opponent of “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” Hanania apologized for these writings after they were unearthed by HuffPost, saying they were from a time when he “truly sucked.” None of this affected Hanania’s career much, in part because of conservatives’ opposition to cancel culture and in part because the tech-right is almost entirely made up of race realists.

Hanania and Thompson may seem like strange bedfellows. But Hanania’s relationship with the tech-right has fractured since Trump returned to office. Last December, Hanania took Elon Musk’s side in a fractious online debate over H-1B visas. Hanania, after all, is a race realist, not a popular racist. The majority of H-1B recipients are from India and China. I won’t get into the intricacies of race scientists’ intellectual hierarchies, but suffice to say they believe some Asian groups are smarter than some white groups, with variations based on ethnicity and caste. (This is in fact a common defense among the human biodiversity crowd; they can’t possibly be racist if they believe East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are the intellectual elite.) Hanania is a defender of “elite human capital” — also the title of his forthcoming book — no matter their skin color, which means he supports high-skilled immigration even if, as the nativist right claims, it comes at the expense of white American workers.

The nativists seem to have won that debate, at least for now. Musk is no longer in Trump’s ear, while Stephen Miller and other America First types continue to dictate Trump’s immigration policies. Hanania told Semafor’s Ben Smith that he left Marc Andreessen’s Signal group chat — which Hanania helped fill with prominent right-wingers — in 2023 after it became a “vehicle for groupthink.” He even claims to regret voting for Trump. He is now on a sort of apology tour. He has disavowed many of his former allies, described MAGA as having an IQ problem, and has accused Trump of “unprecedented” corruption. It makes sense, then, that Hanania would be looking to forge new alliances.

Thompson’s willingness to engage with Hanania, on the other hand, is a bit harder to parse. Abundance is best described as a book by liberals for liberals; it’s a roadmap for a sort of utopian tech-futurism. The book is both about the nitty-gritty of deregulation — Thompson and Klein argue that liberals’ affinity for bureaucracy and red tape has stalled growth, leading to a shortage of housing, jobs, and overall prosperity — and an effort to remake the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2024 election.

As part of their promotional tour, Thompson and Klein have put forth a theory on why Kamala Harris lost the popular vote. The Abundance authors are part of a growing chorus of liberal technocrats who claim that Harris’ deference to “The Groups” came at the expense of appealing to actual voters who are primarily concerned with the cost of living and are put off by Democrats’ emphasis on race and identity. To get the “solarpunk future” of Thompson and Klein’s dreams, Democrats must not only do away with overzealous regulation but also eschew culture war issues and the nonprofits that espouse them. Still, an abundant future is not a nationalist one — in fact, it relies on an influx of immigrant laborers with specialized skills, or what Thompson has described as “immigration-as-recruitment.” This future dovetails nicely with Hanania’s desire to eradicate DEI, as well as his support of high-skilled immigration.

Klein and Thompson, to be clear, are not race scientists, proponents of human biodiversity, or cryptofascists. They are avowed liberals — Klein is a Times columnist and Thompson worked at The Atlantic until recently — who are trying to salvage what’s left of the Democratic Party by giving it a pro-deregulation facelift. Unlike Trump’s mass deportations and total dismantling of the federal bureaucracy in the name of ending DEI, Abundance is not underpinned by scientific racism or eugenic ideology. But its figureheads certainly don’t stand up against it, and may even think that doing so is a waste of time better spent forging alliances with people across the ideological spectrum.

In a few months, Klein and Thompson will headline an Abundance conference organized in part by the Foundation for American Innovation, a conservative think tank that helped co-author Project 2025. Abundance means more of everything, including more of the tired Democratic strategy of forging a coalition by making overtures to repentant conservatives — including unrepentant racists who see entire swaths of the population as inherently and biologically inferior.