Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Land’s “biological factuality of the Caucasian sub-species” is nothing of the sort; its non-existence is as settled science as the anthropocene extinction. More broadly, the entire idea of scientific racism (and neoreactionaries, with their deep ties to the technolibertarian/“rationalist” tradition, are deeply “scientific” in their racism, with “human biodiversity” being their current code word of choice127) is a preposterous house of cards consisting of people desperately trying to bludgeon science back into supporting discredited Victorian ideas about why black people are inherently less intelligent than white people. This ends up being a sort of Goldilocks-style farce in which various scientific definitions of “race” are tried on only to, without exception, either divide populations too finely to actually make the desired generalizations or to create categories so broad as to be genetically meaningless. Race, as employed in the colloquial sense, is a clumsy attempt to classify people based on general patterns of physical appearance (most notably melanin levels) correlating to geographic distribution during the period where Europe was mapping/conquering the world.