Recent hit pieces on Aporia

A response from the Editors

Written by Noah Carl and Bo Winegard.

You may have seen that the Guardian recently published a big exposé on “race science”. Then about a week later, Britain’s Channel 4 broadcast an hour-and-a-half-long documentary on the “far right”. Much of the material for these two offerings came from footage obtained by an undercover journalist who works for the left-wing activist organisation Hope not Hate. Posing as an investor, he secretly filmed himself talking to various individuals, including our former editor-in-chief Matt Archer.

For readers who aren’t familiar with Hope not Hate, it’s essentially Britain’s equivalent to the SPLC. Courageously standing against the emotion of “hate”, they paint anyone expressing an opinion that’s even slightly right-wing as “racist” or “far right”. Earlier this year, they published an article on the “State of Hate” that characterised Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party (which oversaw record levels of immigration) as harbouring a “Radical Right insurgency”. And in the midst of England’s anti-immigration riots, their CEO falsely claimed that a Muslim woman had been doused with acid.

As for the Guardian’s “criticisms” of us, none of them comes close to a serious scientific or philosophical argument. Their exposé is basically one long point-and-sputter, featuring all the usual epithets: “dangerous”, “discredited”, “far right” etc. They couldn’t even get basic things right. For example, they claim we believe in the “genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups”. Yet Bo wrote an article last year saying the exact opposite.¹

Top: Guardian claim. Bottom: what Bo wrote in Aporia.

They do quote several “experts” to attack the bogeyman of “scientific racism”. As you may have noticed, this is a wholly bad-faith tactic.² Redefining your opponents’ views as something negative doesn’t actually qualify as refuting them. It would be like us labelling the views we disagree with as “scientific communism” and then pointing out that there’s no good evidence for “scientific communism”. In terms of Paul Graham’s disagreement hierarchy, they barely progressed beyond name-calling.

One of the people they enlist is Adam Rutherford (excuse us, Dr Adam Rutherford) who boasted on Twitter that he “helped with” this “incredible investigation”. Remarkably, he then criticised Ed Dutton for putting out a “doxxing request” after Dutton asked his supporters for information about the undercover journalist. When Noah and Diana pointed out to Rutherford that the investigation he “helped with” involved doxxing, he claimed he didn’t know what they were talking about. We still can’t be sure if he was just playing dumb or genuinely can’t see the hypocrisy.

Another issue with the Guardian article is that a substantial part of it is dedicated to a guy called Erik Ahrens, who has never been an employee of Aporia or the Human Diversity Foundation (an organisation owned by Emil Kirkegaard). The reason Ahrens got mixed up in this is that, at the time Matt was secretly filmed by the undercover journalist, he and Ahrens were working together on an unrelated project. Incidentally, Matt’s departure from Aporia in August had nothing to do with the exposé; he left of his own accord before we all found out about it.

Normally, we wouldn’t give two hoots about another lazy hit piece. Unfortunately, our funder was named in the recent coverage and has now stopped funding us. This was surely the activists’ aim all along: they want less debate; we want more. What this means is that we’ll have to rely more on paid subscriptions going forward.³ We may need to start paywalling our articles in addition to the podcast and research round-up. Hence we’d be grateful if you would consider buying a paid subscription. Don’t let the enemies of free speech win.

We will be open and upfront: each of us made about $40,000 from Aporia last year.⁴ (For comparison, the CEO of Heterodox Academy was paid around $500,000.) We are not in this for the money, but we do need to earn a living. Our goal is to promote good-faith discussion around important and neglected topics, including immigration, identity, reproductive enhancement and human biodiversity. We hope that’s something you’ll support.

Noah Carl and Bo Winegard are the Editors of Aporia.

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1. We published another article by Joel Carini arguing against the notion that some people are superior to others.

2. It’s an example of the straw-man fallacy.

3. Paid subscriptions covered about a third of Aporia’s costs, with the other two thirds covered by the Human Diversity Foundation.

4. This is below the median for US workers.