So out in ATMB I had some rather choice words to say about Quillette, and some people quite vigorously disagreed with me:
I’m a little surprised that this is news. Quillette is incredibly racist. They might occasionally publish decent material (don’t ask me to link any, I can name more decent reporting from Fox News off the top of my head), but their most high-profile work is the stuff that goes viral for entirely the wrong reasons.
Let’s start with the most recent case. This isn’t about racism per se, but it does help give us a look at the kind of ideology and standards Quillette is working with.
That’s Quillette’s founding editor attacking a journalist for… asking her if she fact-checked a study she ran an article on. A study published by “ProgDad”, a notorious right-wing troll. A study whose actual methodology was pretty obviously fucking garbage, and which for some reason only the far-right fell for. And uh…
But for conservative media, the endorsement of peers within its narrow confines is all the expertise necessary for publication. Quillette writer Andy Ngo, who called attention to Lenihan’s work on Twitter and whose work Lenihan cites in his article, insisted that the legitimacy of Lenihan’s findings was self-evident from Lenihan’s Twitter posts. **Human Events publisher Will Chamberlain told CJR that it considered Quillette a “reputable outlet” and would not independently fact-check work appearing on its site **when commenting on it “in broad terms.” CJR did not receive responses to emailed requests for comment from PJ Media’s Tyler O’Neil, RT’s Margarita Simonyan, or Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari. It seems unlikely that anyone reading these publications will encounter the sort of media criticism that dogs the steps of reporters for mainstream news outlets.”
Hmmmmmm.
Also, when called on exactly this, Claire’s response was… let’s just say “impolite”. Because, as we all know, when you’re an editor, telling a journalist who is criticizing you for taking a right-wing troll at their word to, quote, “Kiss my ass” is totally routine. 
But okay, that’s just showing that the senior editorial staff is really fucking bad at their jobs and wear ideological blinds the size of trash-bin lids - the same you could say for basically any right-wing media source at this point. What about the racism?
Well, I linked to this in the other thread, but apparently it went unnoticed. Here’s Andy Ngo, editor at Quillette, defending craniology, because Quillette ran an article defending… “race science”. Fucking really:
Angela Saini’s new book, Superior, is a cautionary tale about the historical legacy, and putative return, of what she calls “race science.” As far as we can determine, there are four main theses running through the book:
[ol]
[li]‘Race’ is not a meaningful biological category[/li][li] Genes can only contribute to population differences on certain “superficial” traits[/li][li] Studying whether genes might contribute to population differences on non-superficial traits is tantamount to “scientific racism”[/li][li] Almost everyone interested in whether genes might contribute to population differences on these other traits is a “scientific racist”[/li][/ol]
To be blunt, we disagree with all four of Saini’s main theses, as we shall explain in this article.
Yikes.
Furthermore, these differences reflect their divergent geographical origins. In fact, researchers can classify human variation by continent quite accurately using only data from the human skull.
Super fucking yikes! That’s the paragraph that Andy Ngo was defending. Here’s an actual scientist pointing out some of the many issues in that article. And, just for comparison, here’s how an actual news outlet covered the book in question.
This is not the first time Quillette has dabbled in “race science”. Nor should it surprise anyone, because the founding editor, Claire Lehmann, is a notorious fucking racist (and anti-feminist, and transphobe, and all-around competitor for “worst person in Australia”, but this mostly about the racism). She’s been quoted as saying “nationalism is the antidote to racism”, which, given the contents of her publication, seems… totally wrong.
The idea that Quillette is somehow not “alt-right” (read: nazi), despite being founded by the alt-right and parroting alt-right talking points seems a bit silly to me. So let’s run through some of Quillette’s other greatest hits.
It Isn’t Your Imagination: Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals - in which Quillette touts a “study” claiming that it found “a list of every prominent individual or political party known to have been banned from Twitter since its founding”, which is a list of 22 people, of which they claim 21 are Trump supporters. The actual list includes David Duke, the American Nazi Party, Gavin McInnes (founder of the terrorist group “the Proud Boys”), and quite a few other prominent fucking nazis.
On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism - in which Quillette defends race as a biological category, something you’ll note actual biologists won’t do, but Nazis necesarily must believe.
https://quillette.com/2017/06/11/no-voice-vox-sense-nonsense-discussing-iq-race/ - in which Quillette defends The Bell Curve (fucking really)
Getting Voxed: Charles Murray, Ideology, and the Debate on IQ - in which Quillette continues to defend The Bell Curve, this time by Brian Boutwell, seen here on known neo-nazi Stefan Molyneux’s podcast. Boy, weird that you can find connections like that on a website like this, right? Weird.
Shall I continue? I don’t spend much time reading Quillette, for the same reason I don’t spend much time reading Breitbart - nearly every time I interact with them, it’s because they’re being racist as fuck. But on the whole, Quillette was founded by a neo-nazi who used to work for Rebel Media, is run by her and a handful of other neo-nazis such as Toby Young, and just generally full of exactly the kind of racist shit you’d expect from those people. The idea that this is somehow “controversial” shows how little a great many people have looked into the publication, its history, and its founder. Quillette is the thinking man’s Breitbart News - racism and all. But then, what do you expect from someone who worked for The Rebel Media, an outlet created and run by neo-nazis on what they call a “counter-jihad”. They’re not even very smart - they just manage to look smart for the dumb motherfuckers who decide to spend time there.
Oh hi, SlackerInc, didn’t see you there.
The quote in question, while engaging in a controversial area of inquiry, contains nothing that I can see justifying such a response, with no elaboration. (Personally, I would go further and call it spot on.)
