A data scientist promoted by the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute thinktank, and other conservatives as an expert critic of the former Harvard president Claudine Gay has co-authored several papers in collaboration with a network of scholars who have been broadly criticized as eugenicists, or scientific racists.
Rufo described Jonatan Pallesen as “a Danish data scientist who has raised new questions about Claudine Gay’s use – and potential misuse – of data in her PhD thesis” in an interview published in his newsletter and on the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal website last Friday.
He did not tell readers that a paper featuring Pallesen’s own statistical work in collaboration with the eugenicist researchers has been subject to scathing expert criticism for its faulty methods, and characterized as white nationalism by another academic critic.
The revelations once again raise questions about the willingness of Rufo – a major ally of Ron DeSantis and powerful culture warrior in Republican politics – to cultivate extremists in the course of his political crusades.
The Guardian emailed Rufo to ask about his repeated platforming of extremists, and asked both Rufo and the Manhattan Institute’s communications office whether they had vetted Pallesen before publishing the interview. Neither responded.
In Rufo’s interview, Pallesen is characterized by Rufo as one of the “outsiders” willing to “critique Harvard from beyond its walls”, a group in which he also includes himself and the Substack blogger Chris Brunet. Pallesen then alleges “very basic” errors in Claudine Gay’s PhD dissertation and a paper based on it, related to her claim that the election of Black representatives reduces white voter turnout.
Rufo later asked Pallesen what the supposed lack of academic criticism of Gay’s work said about “the state of academia as a whole”, and Pallesen replied: “Research that aligns with woke claims tends to find easier acceptance.”
Neither he nor Rufo mentioned the searching criticisms of Pallesen’s own statistical reasoning after he published a paper with three fringe authors whose work has been likened to discredited forms of eugenicist racial science.
The 2019 paper is entitled Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans. It argues that the high cognitive abilities of Ashkenazi Jews are “significantly mediated by group differences in the polygenic score” – that is, genetically caused. They speculate that “culture-gene coevolution” may influence “Jewish group-level characteristics” like high cognitive abilities.
The basis of the paper was an interpretation of publicly available data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, one of the longest-running population surveys in the US.
Pallesen’s co-authors were Emil Kirkegaard, Michael Woodley and Curtis S Dunkel.
The paper was demolished in a direct response from academics from universities including Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin, who wrote that “researchers have been warning against using polygenic scores for comparisons across race/ethnic groups for some time now, and a closer look at the data results [in Pallesen paper] provides another illustration of why”.
The lead author of the paper criticizing Pallesen’s paper is Jeremy Freese, a professor of sociology at Stanford. Freese was also part of a team that integrated genetic data into the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study – the same data the original paper draws on.
In a telephone conversation, Freese said that “we were moved to write something because the paper seemed to mistake correlation for causation in a question that obviously deserved more care”.
Freese added: “The problem we pointed out didn’t take a detailed interrogation to notice.”
Aaron Panofsky is the director of, and a professor in, UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics, and one of the authors of the paper How White Nationalists Mobilize Genetics, which includes the Pallesen-co-authored paper in its survey of the misuse of genetic data by scientific racists.
On the paper’s claims about Jews’ innately high intelligence, Panofsky said that this was a persistent trope among white supremacists that “fits into a larger narrative about Jewish conspiracies and the idea that Jews are controlling the problems of the world from behind the scenes”.
The paper Pallesen co-authored repeatedly cites Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology academic whose antisemitic publications argue that Jews engage in a “group evolutionary strategy” that explains their financial and cultural successes, and that antisemitism is an understandable reaction to this phenomenon.
Panofsky added: “The other three authors – one of them is a psychologist and I don’t think the others have relevant degrees. But Pallesen has degrees in biology and statistical genomics. He should know better.”
Indeed, Pallesen’s co-authors on this and other papers are not all trained social scientists, and some are notorious promoters of a revived scientific racism.
Emil OW Kirkegaard is a Danish writer with a degree in linguistics – not a biological or genetic field – and no higher degree. He is a self-described eugenicist, explicitly advocates “race science”, and is a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization headed by Richard Lynn, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a white nationalist.
According to WhoIs records, Kirkegaard was the registrant of the website for UISR’s journal Mankind Quarterly between 2017 and February 2023, after which point the WhoIs was anonymised. Mankind Quarterly, which like UISR was funded by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, is widely held to be a cornerstone in the recent revival of scientific racism.
Kirkegaard is the founder of OpenPsych network, whose journals have been described as “pseudo-scientific vehicles for scientific racism”.
Michael Woodley has a PhD in ecology, and though he claimed an academic affiliation when the paper was published, he can no longer do so. The British-born writer came to broad public attention when a paper in which he claimed that humans could be divided into subspecies was cited in the manifesto of the mass shooter who murdered 10 Black people outside a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022.
After the link between Woodley’s work and the mass shooting came to light, hundreds of academics signed a petition asking that Woodley be stripped of his academic affiliation at Belgium’s Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with a petition organizer telling the New York Times about Woodley’s “history of spreading racist, white supremacist theories”.
At that time Woodley also claimed an affiliation with the Unz Foundation, which is financed by the California software entrepreneur Ron Unz, who also publishes the Unz Review. In 2018 the Anti-Defamation League pointed to Unz Review’s “increasingly racist and anti-Semitic content”, in a year in which Unz himself “denied the Holocaust, endorsed the claim that Jews consume the blood of non-Jews … claimed that Jews control the media, hate non-Jews, and worship Satan”.
The other co-author, Curtis S Dunkel, is a psychologist who was affiliated with Western Illinois University (WIU) on the paper but is billed as an independent researcher on recent publications and on the ResearchGate website. The Guardian contacted WIU for clarification. A spokesperson said: “Curtis Dunkel is no longer an employee at WIU”, adding: “I cannot comment on the reason for his departure.”
Dunkel, along with Kirkegaard and Woodley, spoke at the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) in 2016, according to leaked conference schedules. Dunkel’s paper was entitled Sex Differences in Brain Size Do Translate into Difference in General Intelligence, and the abstract suggests that Dunkel claimed that women were less intelligent than men by an equivalent of 4 IQ points on average.
The LCI conference was held in secret at University College London (UCL) between 2014 and 2017. After news of the conference’s existence – and the extremist nature of its content – was reported in 2018 by a UK magazine and London Student, the UCL student newspaper, it erupted into a mainstream media scandal. UCL disowned the conference.
The London Student noted that 82% of known LCI attendees had written for Mankind Quarterly, the scientific-racist journal.
Pallesen has co-authored several papers with Woodley, Kirkegaard and others who have published in Mankind Quarterly or who appeared at LCI, including Heiner Rindermann and Noah Carl. These co-authors and others like Satoshi Kanazawa have faced scandals arising from their research activities.
Asked whether this network was attempting to revive scientific racism, Panofsky, the UCLA professor, said: “Absolutely. It has long been a movement in the sense that there has always been a small cluster of scientists who worked and coordinated very closely to keep this alive.
“There has been a kind of generational turnover,” he added. “Kirkegaard is kind of one of the central figures in a network that is trying to reconstitute this movement and to connect it to far-right politics.”
The Guardian emailed Pallesen at the email provided on his CV with questions about criticisms made of his statistical work, the extremist entanglements of his collaborators, and how he would characterize his own political beliefs.
He responded by in effect disowning what he called “the Jewish paper”, claiming: “I only helped with a sub-part of the data work. I did not design the method, co-write the paper, or support its conclusions.”
He added: “I agree with the criticism that the paper is flawed in its methods and conclusions. I have written to the journal and asked if they can withdraw my name from the paper.”
On his beliefs, Pallesen wrote: “I am not a white nationalist, a scientific racist, or any type of racist. I would describe myself as interested in good science.”
When pressed on why he had allowed his name to be added to a paper he did not agree with, Pallesen responded with a line he attributed to ChatGPT, the AI chat application: “In the context of scientific publishing, co-authorship should be based on contribution to the research, not necessarily agreement with the final conclusions of the paper.”
Pallesen did not answer questions about posts on his X account, however, which raise doubts about his disavowals of racism and scientific racism.
In recent months, he has posted views including that “Non-Western migration to Northern European countries is morally indefensible”; “Black men have gotten less criminal, but are still vastly more criminal than whites”; and “Even illegal immigrants can see the damage immigration does to Danish society”.
Besides the interview with Rufo and City Journal, Pallesen has been forwarded as an expert by outlets such as the Daily Caller and the Daily Mail.
Rufo’s pursuit of Gay is widely credited in helping bring about her resignation.
