Blog

Recently, I took a poke at Eric Turkheimer. And now he’s ready with a retaliation:

Eric is trying a guilt by association attack by tying me to Roger Pearson who supposedly wrote some anti-semitic things. Actually, Pearson didn’t write the articles he mentions as far as I can tell. Turkheimer probably read Wikipedia, which says:

Roger Pearson at the Institute for the Study of Man. Eugenicist and anthropologist, founder of the Journal of Indo-European Studies,[25] received over a million dollars in grants in the ‘eighties and the ‘nineties.[2][20] Using the pseudonym of Stephan Langton, Pearson was the editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966–67 to conduct “a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question,” which included articles such as “Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa,” “Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power,” and “Swindlers of the Crematoria.”.[20] The Northern League, an organization founded in England in 1958 by Pearson, supported Nazi ideologies and included former members of the Nazi Party.[2]

So it appears that Roger Pearson was the editor of a magazine that published the above titled articles. I was unable to find out who actually wrote the articles, but the Swindlers one might be Harry Elmer Barnes who used the phrase as well. Pearson is known to have used pseudonyms, so perhaps one of them was written by him, but prima facie, it appears Turkheimer got it wrong in his tweet.

But even granting that Pearson wrote one or more of the articles, the attack still fails because I did not actually proudly advertise support for Pearson. I don’t think I’ve ever read his works, except for maybe some articles in Mankind Quarterly, and I didn’t have Pearson in mind when I wrote my tweet. Specifically, as I wrote in my reply:

Where did I say I was in support for Pearson specifically? I had in mind Jensen, Gottfredson, Bouchard, Lynn, Eysenck, Humphreys, Gordon, Osborne, Shuey, Vernon & Shockley. I am not familiar with the others’ work. Besides, factually incorrect about Pearson, he was the editor.

Every single one of those I had in mind were prominent scientists. All but 2 of them were signers of the Mainstream Science on Intelligence letter (Jensen, Gottfredson, Bouchard, Lynn, Eysenck, Humphreys, Gordon, Osborne, Vernon). Shuey and Shockley had already died (1977 and 1989) but Shuey would likely have signed too. Neither do they show any particular hostility towards Jews as Turkheimer seems to be implying. Jensen and Eysenck were both partially Jewish, and Lynn has written a book praising Jewish achievements while being quite skeptical about MacDonald’s theory. I don’t know of any writings about Jews by the other authors.