A Danish data scientist touted by rightwing activist Christopher Rufo as an expert critic of former Harvard President Claudine Gay collaborated with several scholars broadly criticized as eugenicists.
Jonatan Pallesen was cited by Rufo in his newsletter and in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal website last Friday, yet Rufo neglected to mention that Pallesen's own work was co-authored with eugenicist scientists—and subject to separate expert criticism for faulty methods. Rufo platformed and interviewed Pallesen, who claimed there were “very basic” errors in Claudine Gay's PhD dissertation.
Gay, who is Black, wrote her dissertation on Black voters and electoral politics. She was also the first Black president of Harvard in its nearly 400-year history. Gay resigned from her post after six months on the job, after a controversial congressional hearing in which she appeared to dodge questions about whether Harvard would protect students who seemed to call for the genocide of Jews. Gay and the two other university presidents who formed the congressional witness panel faced extensive backlash and calls for their resignations; Rufo launched an investigation into Gay's scholarly work shortly after.
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In her resignation letter and an essay in the New York Times, Gay defended her scholarship and indicated that anti-Blackness motivated attempts to remove her. “Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument,” she wrote. “They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”
Gay was widely accused of being an antisemite, or at least protecting antisemitism, after her congressional testimony. Yet her supposed "expert critic" Pallesen co-authored a paper peddling deeply antisemitic Jewish conspiracy theories about the innate cognitive abilities of Ashkenazi Jews. The paper was immediately flattened by academics from the likes of Stanford and Georgetown for pushing racial pseudoscience, as it alleged that “culture-gene evolution” could influence “Jewish group-level characteristics” such as intelligence or cognitive ability.
Aaron Panofsky, a UCLA professor who co-authored the paper titled “How White nationalists mobilize genetics,” characterized Pallesen's paper as an attempt to revive scientific racism. He explained to the Guardian that its claims about the innateness of Jewish high intelligence “fits into a larger narrative about Jewish conspiracies and the idea that Jews are controlling the problems of the world from behind the scenes.”
Panofsky also noted that Pallesen's co-authors are not all trained social scientists, although Pallesen himself holds degrees in biology and statistical genomics. “He should know better,” Panofsky said.
Pallesen denied that he was a white nationalist or a supporter of scientific racism. In recent months, he has made a number of inflammatory posts on X, formerly Twitter, including claims that “Non-Western immigration to Northern European countries is morally indefensible” and that “Black men have gotten less criminal, but are still vastly more criminal than whites.” The data scientist added colorful graphs to his posts to illustrate his claims.
Rufo's allegations of plagiarism and the controversial congressional hearing are widely seen as the major catalysts to her resignation. During an independent review, Harvard found a few instances of inadequate citation but said that Gay was not in violation of its research misconduct standard.
