Bo Winegard

Bo Winegard.
The colorful pseudoscience
Race & Racialism
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Hating thy neighbour
Divide and conquer
Dog-whistlers
v - t - e
The simplest theory, of course, is hereditarianism, which is dismissed by the establishment because of their superstitious belief in egalitarianism. The Darwinian revolution has not fully triumphed because the attachment to equality remains.
—Bo Winegard in 2024[1]

Bo Winegard (1980–)[2] is an American hereditarian psychologist,[3] white nationalist,[4][5] and pseudoscientist[6][7] associated with the online "race realist" community.[8] He writes discredited racialist pseudoscience articles for the right-wing online magazine Quillette[9][10][11] and surrounds himself with white nationalists and racists, but complains if he is labelled either of these, instead preferring the made-up terms "ethno-traditionalist", "cultural nationalist", and "racial realist". He is currently the executive editor of the far-right magazine Aporia.[12][13] He has called "diversity" a scam and has commented that the Great Replacement theory is "largely an accurate description of reality".[14]

He was Assistant Professor of Psychology at Marietta College, but was fired in March 2020.[15][16] Winegard believes that race is a biological reality, genetic factors predominantly explain group-differences in IQs, and skull shapes and measurements can determine human races by continental ancestry.[17] He promoted these dubious-to-pseudoscientific ideas in a Quillette review in June, 2019.[11][18]

Winegard is a supporter of so-called scientific racism, writing "empirical facts cannot be sexist or racist".[19] Winegard has described white supremacist Arthur Jensen as his "intellectual hero".[20] Bo Winegard's twin brother is Ben Winegard, an opponent of Black Lives Matter.

Despite for years falsely claiming RationalWiki had misrepresented his politics as 'white nationalist', Winegard openly came out as a white nationalist in November 2023, writing a dialogue in Aporia that he supports "white identity politics", is sympathetic to a "free association" segregation of races and wants to preserve "white civilisation".[4] In 2024, Winegard co-authored an article for Aporia admitting that he believes racial stereotypes are "reasonably accurate".[21]

Making up his politics

Winegard is somewhat flip-floppy on politics, resembling typical "centrist" anti-SJW Internet figures such as Sargon. In June 2019, he claimed to be a political centrist and opposed to conservatism.

I generally don't share the political beliefs of conservatives, because I am too liberal on a number of issues, but I don't like progressivism either. So I float around somewhere in the center.[22]

In August 2019, however, he described himself as a conservative.

Agreed as a moderate conservative.[23]

In the same month he also identified as supporting the right:

Somebody needs to create the right-wing alternative to Rage Against the Machine, a band that rages about order and disciplined markets and Edmund Burke. That would be truly alternative and unique. And the band wouldn’t be making millions while calling for the Marxist revolution.[24]

And yet, Winegard still labels himself "alt-center". And despite his insistence that he is too liberal, his tweets often fall opposite of standard liberal positions (though they may try to imply moderation through advocating vaguely liberal-sounding ideas):

I am an immigration restrictionist in the Rich Lowry sense of the word.[25]

Winegard now identifies as both white and nationalist.[5]

It makes me white AND a nationalist.[5][note 1]

In February 2020, Winegard posted that he was leaving the Democratic Party.[27]

So, the left has become more and more alien to average Americans. It promotes ludicrous beliefs that even very liberal people who are not among the initiated find distressingly bizarre. Many of my older friends are completely astonished at how strange Democrats sound today.[28]

In March 2020, Winegard posted that he opposes political correctness.[29]

Racialism

My view is that whites should simply embrace "whiteness," and argue that since whiteness created Western Civilization, whiteness is pretty cool.
—Bo Winegard Executive editor of Aporia.[30]

Make more white babies…

Winegard frequently tells white people to breed more on Twitter:

If we owe the future a decent planet, don't we also owe it more children? So many people have been terrified into believing that more children will destroy the planet. But the opposite is likely true: When the population shrinks, it leads to many deleterious outcomes.[31]

Winegard clarifies his above comment and concern is specifically only countries below sub-replacement fertility (2.1 TFR), meaning (excluding a few countries in East Asia i.e. Japan, Singapore and Korea), the whole of Europe.[32] This a key obsession of white nationalists (such as Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch terrorist attacks, whose manifesto called for white Europeans to increase their fertility rates above 2.1).[citation needed]

In September 2020, Winegard criticised a OnePlanetOneChild advert that promotes one child families, writing:

Complete nonsense. If every family in the West had only had one kid, then the West would fall apart quite quickly. Do we really hate ourselves so much that want to disappear from the globe?
—Bo Winegard[33]

Winegard has no children of his own despite being 40 years old and has been criticised for hypocrisy by his own Twitter followers.[34]

Ethno-traditionalism

Bo Winegard, "cultural nationalist"

Winegard has defended white nationalism, albeit under a different name:

There are people who are what Eric Kaufmann calls ethno-traditionalists who fear rapid demographic change. I don't think it's useful or morally laudable to call them racists or white nationalists.[35]

Note what Winegard calls "ethno-traditionalists" are virtually indistinguishable to white nationalists.

After receiving criticism and being described as a white nationalist, Winegard further repackaged his ethno-traditionalism:

I made cultural nationalism because it sounds better than ethno-traditionalism[36]

1/ Thread. In defense of cultural nationalism.

Nationalism is a divisive topic. Many progressives view it as a moral failure, a lapse into atavism that we should strive to overcome. I disagree. Here's why.[37]

Re-labelling and repackaging white nationalism as "ethno-traditionalism" or "cultural nationalism" is a popular strategy among white nationalists since these terms are more palatable to the public, while there is a stigma attached to the term "white nationalism".

Admiration for Jared Taylor

In November 2024, Winegard retweeted someone's admiration for Jared Taylor and added his own praise for the white supremacist: "Jared Taylor is unfailingly polite, thoughtful, and well-spoken. It's a sign of the barrenness of status quo intellectuals that they refuse to engage with his arguments."[38]

Human Biological and Psychological Diversity

Winegard with two other co-authors, including his brother Benjamin (aka Ben) Winegard, published a peer-reviewed paper titled "Human Biological and Psychological Diversity" defending race in Evolutionary Psychological Science.[39] The article section "Race and Human Populations" is rebutted below.

Winegard et al. 2017Rebuttal
The same basic principles apply to humans. Evidence from a variety of disciplines, including genetics, anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology, indicates that human populations evolved distinctive features after spreading from Africa and settling in different ecological and climatic niches (Bellwood 2013; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; Molnar 2006; Wade 2014). Although such human biological variation is often ignored by social scientists, it is not really a matter of dispute among researchers in the relevant disciplines.One would have to ask what any of this has to do with race. The fact there are different human populations with "distinctive features" (in terms of disparate frequency e.g. population x has >70% blue coloured eyes, but population y, <1%) has never been denied by anyone; in terms of genetics, see ancestry-informative marker. As was noted by a biological anthropologist decades ago: "There are undoubtedly no two genetically identical populations in the world; this has nothing to do directly with the validity of race as a taxonomic device."[40]


And because human populations do vary, they can be clustered and classified. The construct of race allows researchers to do this.Curiously at least one source Winegard et al. quote disagrees, see above (meaning they probably never even read the literature they cited); Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994) The History and Geography of Human Genes reject clustering populations into large race groupings e.g. "The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise" (p. 19); the eminent population geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza was an outspoken critic of race.


One can begin with broad, continentally based categories: Caucasians, East Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines (Wade 2014). They are broad, general categories, but they have some predictive value. Importantly, there is nothing real in some metaphysical sense about this categorization. It is simply a pragmatic classification system that captures some differences in the world and allows researchers better to make sense of the pattern of human variation (Wade 2014).Winegard et al. don't provide a single example of a broad continental race category being useful to a field of science or having some predictive value. This is because continents are too diverse e.g. "If you're doing a DNA study to look for markers for a particular disease, you can't use 'Caucasians' as a group. They're too diverse."[41] Similarly, Tishkoff & Kidd (2004) warn: "it is imperative to move away from describing populations according to racial classifications such as 'black', 'white' or 'Asian'… there can be considerable genetic heterogeneity within a region, it is most useful to be as specific as possible about geographic origins, ethnicity or tribal affiliation."[42]


Evolution Working Group seminar

On October 24, 2019, Winegard gave a controversial seminar "The Evolution of Human Diversity" for the Evolution Working Group at the University of Alabama. His research was criticized as racist and for "resembling the pseudoscience employed by eugenicists."[6]

Thomas Tobin, co-chair of the Evolution Working Group, released a statement that apologized for the event and admitted it was a "mistake to invite this speaker".[6] Part of the statement read:

We, the members of the Evolutionary Working Group (EVOWOG), want to make clear that we do not endorse the views expressed by Dr. Winegard, which are non-scientific. We want to apologize to anyone who attended the talk, as well as anyone in the campus and local community who felt unwelcome because of the subject of the seminar.[6]

A student at the seminar called Winegard a racist. “OK, that’s fine,” Winegard said in response.[6]

Fired from Marietta College

In March 2020, Winegard was fired from his job as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Marietta College. He later threw a tantrum on the right-wing Internet rag, Quillette, stating that "many people disagree with my views about human population variation, about conservativism, about immigration, about economics, indeed about almost everything," and complained his sacking was an attack on academic freedom.[16] Yeah, right.

Winegard has alleged that an anonymous person sent emails to his college department containing screenshots of some of his offensive tweets. He blames these emails for his sacking.[43] This person, AfroSapiens (an anti-racist activist), later posted a screenshot of one of the emails he sent to Marietta College.[44]

Various alt-right, conservative, and white nationalist bloggers have supported Winegard and attacked the college: Rod Dreher, Steve Sailer, and Toby Young.[43][45] Dreher incorrectly stated that "Marietta College fired him because he had become the target of a woke mob."[46]

The college has not released any public statement.

Opposition to diversity

Winegard dislikes racial diversity which he claims is "anti-white" and spends a lot of time on his Twitter complaining about it:

At some point, people will realize that "diversity" just means "fewer whites."[47]

Diversity is code for “deviation from meritocracy that results in fewer white people.”[48]

Diversity is a pleasing disguise for anti-white policies. That's why a picture of wealthy black liberals is celebrated for being diverse, and a picture of wildly different whites is denigrated for lacking diversity.[49]

Diversity in action! Of course, diversity means fewer whites and fewer males; otherwise, people would not use the term "diversity." They would just use the term "meritocracy."[50]

Caring about demographics is racist, of course, unless you think that countries should have more diversity. Then it is noble and morally righteous.[51]

So long as one translates diversity as "As few white people as possible," this makes complete sense.[52]

RationalWiki

Bo Winegard interviewing white supremacist Steve Sailer for Aporia in 2023
It was nearly impossible for me to get a job in the first place. Do you think anybody would hire me now? RationalWiki follows me everywhere.
—Bo Winegard after his sacking.[53]

Winegard dislikes RationalWiki, claiming this page is mendacious and somehow contains lies and misrepresentations, despite not actually pointing out what these are.[54][55]

As an example, Winegard complains that RationalWiki describes him as a pseudoscientist:

To the best of my knowledge, I do not promote “pseudoscience.” I am certain that I am wrong about a number of things. But I am open to evidence. And I would never willingly promote something that I knew was false.

However, Winegard's views on race are rejected by mainstream science and are highly dubious, using flawed methodologies, so pseudoscientist is hardly an inaccurate description.

Winegard further complains, "I have made no attempt to “surround” myself with “white nationalists”. Most of my friends are liberal to progressive." However, this claim appears to be contradicted by a glimpse of his social media: most of his tweets fixate on race, and he commonly retweets individuals associated with the HBD online movement who hold alt-right political views.

List of alt-righters/homophobes/racists/race realists Winegard retweets

A paper written by Huw C. Davies and Sheena E. MacRae for the Race & Class journal in 2023 noted:

Bo Winegard, with fellow author Ben Winegard, implies that certain races can be distinguished by their IQ because ‘genes play some role in cognitive differences between human populations’, that ‘race is a perfectly reasonable construct that picks out real patterns of human variation’, and refer in their response to critics of these statements to a ‘well-documented black-white IQ gap’.130 Among others, they cite Jensen, Herrnstein and Lynn in this regard. Winegard et al. make the argument that there is a black-white IQ gap because Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection suggests there should be one. This argument has been dismissed by peer-reviewed and evidence-based science.[7]

See also

External links

Notes

  1. You made me become a Nazi![26]

References

  1. Bo Winegard on Twitter. Archived.
  2. Benjamin M. Winegard CV of Bo's twin (archived from July 30, 2020).
  3. Quillette Podcast 19 – Assistant Psychology Professor Bo Winegard on Hereditarianism, Centrism and the Great Awokening. Quillette. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  4. 4.0 4.1 Should Whites Embrace White Identity? A Dialogue: White identity is healthy and is the only realistic way to protect Western Civilization? by Bo Winegard (Nov 11, 2023) Aporia Magazine. Winegard wrote a fictional Socratic dialogue between Philo (c. 20 BCE–c. 50 CE) and Cleanthes (c. 330 BCE–c. 230 BCE), with Philo arguing for "white identity" and Cleanthes arguing against "identity politics". The concept of white people did not exist in ancient times, so the dialogue appears to be a veil for Winegard to argue that his particular view of white identity is at least benign and reasonable since the two fictionalized philosophers do not come to an agreement in the end.
  5. 5.0 5.1 5.2 I’m a nationalist not because I think nationalism is necessarily great, but because I think all the alternatives are worse. by Bo Winegard (Nov 7, 2019) Twitter (archived from 13 Nov 2019 19:01:58 UTC).
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Evolution Working Group on hosting Bo Winegard: ‘It was our mistake’. "Winegard’s research, which discusses psychological differences across human populations, has been criticized for resembling the pseudoscience employed by eugenicists."
  7. 7.0 7.1 C. Davies, Huw; MacRae, Sheena E. (2023-05-15). "An anatomy of the British war on woke". Race & Class. SAGE Publications. doi:10.1177/03063968231164905. ISSN 0306-3968. S2CID 258736793.
  8. Why Racists (and Liberals!) Keep Writing for Quillette. "Quillette contributors Ben Winegard, Bo Winegard, Brian Boutwell, and John Paul Wright have all either said they are part of the HBD movement or used the term to describe their own research."
  9. Bo Winegard. Quillette, Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  10. Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard. Quillette. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  11. 11.0 11.1 When Quillette’s Latest Attempt to Legitimise Race Science Met Actual Scientists. Uncommon Ground. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  12. "About Aporia". Aporia Magazine.
  13. Activist who led ouster of Harvard president linked to ‘scientific racism’ journal. theguardian.com.
  14. The Diversity Scam. Aporia Magazine.
  15. Bo Winegard. Marietta College. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  16. 16.0 16.1 "I've been fired.", Quillette. Retrieved 7 March 2020
  17. 1/ Do you dispute the overwhelming evidence from forensic anthropology @dylanmatt? This appears an attempt to besmirch Quillette by making a vaguely true but misleading claim. First, it was an article. Not articles : )] by Bo Winegard (5:44 PM - 9 Aug 2019) Twitter (archived from August 20, 2019).
  18. Superior: The Return of Race Science—A Review. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  19. The terms "scientific sexism" and "scientific racism" are profoundly misleading. Empirical facts cannot be sexist or racist. It's important to separate real racism and real sexism from perfectly legitimate scientific hypotheses. by Bo Winegard (6:48 AM - 4 Jun 2019) Twitter (archived from August 19, 2019).
  20. "Arthur Jensen, my intellectual hero, had a demanding intellectual moral: be transparent about one’s sincerely held intellectual beliefs. I think that a laudable goal. And I try, to my limited abilities, to adhere to it". Bo Winegard.
  21. Aporia gets a hit piece in the Guardian. Aporia Magazine.
  22. 10. I generally don't share the political beliefs of conservatives, because I am too liberal on a number of issues, but I don't like progressivism either. So I float around somewhere in the center. by Bo Winegard (1:27 PM - 8 Jun 2019) Twitter (archived from August 20, 2019).
  23. Agreed as a moderate conservative 😃 by Bo Winegard (2:05 AM - 19 Aug 2019) Twitter (archived from August 20, 2019).
  24. Somebody needs to create the right-wing alternative to Rage Against the Machine, a band that rages about order and disciplined markets and Edmund Burke. That would be truly alternative and unique. And the band wouldn’t be making millions while calling for the Marxist revolution. by Bo Winegard (5:12 AM · Aug 14, 2019) Twitter (archived from August 19, 2019).
  25. 2. I am an immigration restrictionist in the Rich Lowry sense of the word. But, I am not dogmatic about this, and I would happily discuss. I might change my mind. 3. I am pro choice and pro gay marriage and pro socially tolerant policies in general by Bo Winegard (1:21 PM - 8 Jun 2019) Twitter (archived from November 16, 2019).
  26. Cartoon: You made me become a Nazi! by Matt Bors (August 08, 2018 · 5:00 AM PDT) Daily Kos.
  27. 1. Thread. Leaving the Democratic party. My long path from the left to the center (and even, gasp, to the right on many issues). For most of my life, I was a member of the left. I voted for Democrats in every election. But, around 2015, I started to change. by Bo Winegard (5:36 AM - 29 Feb 2020) Twitter (archived from February 29, 2020).
  28. 19. So, the left has become more and more alien to average Americans. It promotes ludicrous beliefs that even very liberal people who are not among the initiated find distressingly bizarre. Many of my older friends are completely astonished at how strange Democrats sound today. by Bo Winegard (5:36 AM - 29 Feb 2020) Twitter (archived from February 29, 2020).
  29. I really don’t like political correctness. It stifles debates. And it ruins jokes and a sense of charity. But I don’t think the answer is a reactive “f*ck PC” attitude either. Model the discourse you’d like to see. Irritating the prudes is too easy to consider an accomplishment. Bo Winegard.
  30. Bo Winegard on Twitter. Archived.
  31. Ha! Well, at least replacement level fertility would probably be good, but I've read some reasonable criticisms of this idea, so I'm working through the literature in my free time. by Bo Winegard (8:29 AM - 7 Aug 2019) Twitter (archived from May 29, 2019).
  32. No, I think that is correct. But it's driven mostly by specific spots on the planet (mostly around the tropics). In Europe and much of Eastern Asia, fertility is below replacement (which is, I think, 2.1 births). by Bo Winegard (06:54 - 6 Aug 2019) Twitter (archived from May 29, 2019).
  33. https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1309539261251760130
  34. Bo you keep pushing this, but you don’t have children of your own and have never been a parent, correct? Can you possibly know the challenge of being a great parent in 2020 (of even one child, but especially multiple children) if you haven’t? Why promote it on others? by Jacob Jackson (10:23 AM - 25 Sep 2020) Twitter (archived from September 25, 2020).
  35. There are people who are what Eric Kaufmann calls ethno-traditionalists who fear rapid demographic change. I don't think it's useful or morally laudable to call them racists or white nationalists. by Bo Winegard (12:10 PM - 14 Aug 2019) Twitter (archived from May 29, 2019).
  36. I made cultural nationalism because it sounds better than ethno-traditionalism 😃 by Bo Winegard (8:10 AM - 21 Aug 2019) Twitter (archived from November 16, 2019).
  37. 1/ Thread. In defense of cultural nationalism. Nationalism is a divisive topic. Many progressives view it as a moral failure, a lapse into atavism that we should strive to overcome. I disagree. Here's why. by Bo Winegard (7:01 AM - 21 Aug 2019) Twitter (archived from November 16, 209).
  38. Jared Taylor is unfailingly polite (November 12, 2024) Bo Winegard Twitter/X (Archived January 25, 2025)
  39. Bo Winegard, Benjamin Mark Winegard and Brian B Boutwell, Human Biological and Psychological Diversity, Evolutionary Psychological Science (2017) 3:159–180, January 2017.
  40. Geographic and Microgeographic Races by Marshall T. Newman. Current Anthropology, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Apr., 1963), pp. 189-207. (see Jean Hiernaux comments on pages 197-198).
  41. Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows Natalie (August 22, 2000) New York Times.
  42. Implications of biogeography of human populations for 'race' and medicine by Sarah A. Tishkoff & Kenneth K. Kidd, Nature Genetics 36, S21-S27 (2004). doi:10.1038/ng1438.
  43. 43.0 43.1 PODCAST 80: Bo Winegard on Losing his Job as an Assistant Professor.
  44. Here is the letter sent to Bo Winegard's department. Afrosapiens.
  45. Bo Winegard Fired For Liking Sailer Tweet. VDARE.
  46. Hounding The Heretic Bo Winegard. Rod Dreher.
  47. https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1629147907101274113
  48. https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1674325816031715328
  49. https://archive.ph/P06Ur
  50. https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1752324393194123629
  51. https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1637464039214252033
  52. https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1738274210487939520
  53. No. I didn't want to be fired. However, I *did* realize that it was possible. Still, I really thought I could avoid it. It was nearly impossible for me to get a job in the first place. Do you think anybody would hire me now? RationalWiki follows me everywhere. by Bo Winegard (6:51 AM - 7 Mar 2020) Twitter (archived from 7 Mar 2020 18:32:46 UTC).
  54. I wrote a response to my RationalWiki page because too many people were taking it seriously. medium.com/@winegabo/resp… by Bo Winegard (4:46 AM - 13 Nov 2019) Twitter (archived from 14 Nov 2019 11:25:58 UTC).
  55. Response to RationalWiki by Bo Winegard (Nov 13, 2019) Medium (archived from December 16, 2019).
  56. https://archive.ph/Ba67B
  57. 57.0 57.1 https://archive.ph/WHFYe
  58. https://archive.ph/XzKal
  59. https://archive.ph/akSqP
  60. 60.0 60.1 https://archive.ph/PjKt5
  61. http://archive.ph/bzYWF
  62. https://archive.ph/9phiw
  63. https://archive.vn/2Ezqb