Scientific racism today must be seen and rejected for what it truly is
—a hollow attempt to dress discrimination in the garb of science and reason

Across Europe and the U.S., racist and anti-immigrant groups have embraced
long-discredited ideas that races constitute biologically separate groups
differing in everything from intelligence to birthrate.

With immigration a defining topic in fractious debates on both sides of the Atlantic,
#scientific #racism is now explicit in right-wing discourse.

In October an exposé in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed a network dedicated to proliferating race science worldwide had received years of funding from Silicon Valley.

That same month came Donald Trump’s comment decrying immigration as
“a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

In June it was revealed that a U.K. Reform Party candidate had previously insisted that sub-Saharan Africans were lowering IQ in the country.

But while its modern advocates rebrand scientific racism as “human biodiversity,”
such insidious euphemisms are just attempts to give a veneer of respectability to hateful, pseudoscientific beliefs.

These beliefs have a dark history tied to the racial pseudoscience of #eugenics,
and its popularity sadly continues unabated.

On social media, avowed racists misrepresent genetic research to bolster the narrative that white people are intrinsically superior.

In the rarefied world of Silicon Valley, race science has made a dark renaissance,
elevated by Google and other search engines.

(In response to a request for comment from Scientific American, a representative of Google cited a statement from the company that had been included in a Wired article on this subject:
“Our goal is for AI Overviews to provide links to high quality content so that people can click through to learn more,
but for some queries there may not be a lot of high quality web content available.”)

Last year a then forthcoming book,
"The Origins of Woke", by right-wing author #Richard #Hanania was lauded by tech industry figures
#David #Sacks and #Peter #Thiel.

That same year the Huffington Post reported that Hanania had previously written under a pseudonym for white supremacist websites.

He then wrote an essay in which he claimed to give “an explanation for why I wrote such things,
and why I no longer hold such views.”

But critics suggest those views are reflected in his book and in racist comments he has continued to make,
including his suggestions that people of color need aggressive policing and more incarceration.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silicon-valley-is-reviving-the-discredited-and-discriminatory-idea-of-race/

Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody!

And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:

using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.

These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing.

They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large.

They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy.

Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic.

And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion
(with a 6,200-square-foot guest house)
that serves as the home address of secretary of education #Betsy #DeVos,
or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by #Robert #Mercer, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist #Stephen K. #Bannon.

(Mercer’s daughter, #Rebekah, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)

The source of Mercer’s wealth is Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor,
which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades.

After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman,
Mercer became co-CEO with #Peter #Brown, his longtime research partner.

At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino
—one that moves billions of dollars around the world.

Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.

Renaissance is spectacularly successful
—Investopedia named Renaissance Institutional Equities, the LLC’s largest entity,
the top-performing hedge fund of 2016,
after it yielded investors a return of 20 percent for the year.

Mercer’s genius as a data and systems geek is part of the super-secret sauce of this “quant fund”
that turned other people’s assets-minus-liabilities into riches for his investors.

It’s like a very complicated version of counting cards at the blackjack table.

But the best-performing fund at Renaissance is one that only its employees can join
—and indeed they must in order to actualize their full compensation package.

Bloomberg’s Katherine Burton described the employee-only Medallion fund as
“finance’s blackest box.”
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar
But some dollars are different, because of how their owners obtain them and move them about.

These are the dark dollars of private companies, dollars slithery in their expert avoidance of taxes, their paths rendered invisible by the absence of footprints.

Critics of the Trump White House point to the obscene levels of wealth that you find among the inner circle of President Trump’s appointees and associates.

Just as striking, though, is the provenance of all this loose cash:
Trump’s trusted advisers have come into much of this wealth through private companies,
whose financial balance sheets and so much more are shielded from public view.

At least ten of Trump’s close political associates, including some of his cabinet picks, hail from the carefully shrouded world of private capital.

Private companies play by a different set of rules than those governing firms that trade their shares on stock exchanges.

Unlike their publicly traded counterparts, private companies don’t have to worry about facing irate shareholders.

That’s because a private company’s principals have chosen those shareholders, who are often drawn from a founder’s family.

No proxy fights or hostile takeovers to worry about; no bending to the will of big institutional investors.

This is not to say that there are no big donors to Democrats who don’t also get their dough from private companies.

For example, Democrats have long enjoyed the largesse of the Pritzker family, who took their Hyatt Corporation public only in 2009.

Until then, it was a closely held private company.

But no Democratic administration was ever dominated by the owners of privately held entities,
and no administration of either party has ever represented so much wealth derived from such secretive entities.

Little in the way of financial disclosure is required of privately held companies. When it comes to financial regulation, these companies reap the benefit of the government’s failure to call them to account.

The same is true of private companies as large as the Koch Industries conglomerate or as adorably tiny as a startup founded by a lone millennial in a stocking cap.

Sanctums of Privilege

This is not a screed against private companies. As a red-blooded American, I revel in tales of heroic entrepreneurship
—of hatched-in-the-garage ideas that yield their underdog executors an unlikely pot of gold.

This is, rather, a scream, the wail of a blues tune sung to my fellow red-blooded Americans:

Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody!

And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:

using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.

These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing.

They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large.

They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy.

Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic.

And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion
(with a 6,200-square-foot guest house)
that serves as the home address of secretary of education #Betsy #DeVos,
or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by #Robert #Mercer, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist #Stephen K. #Bannon.

(Mercer’s daughter, #Rebekah, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)

The source of Mercer’s wealth is Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor,
which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades.

After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman,
Mercer became co-CEO with #Peter #Brown, his longtime research partner.

At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino
—one that moves billions of dollars around the world.

Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan