The IQ wars have broken out again, with skirmishes between the policy journalists at Vox, the popular podcaster Sam Harris, and the battle-scarred veteran, Charles Murray. The context seems unique this time in the wake of the 2017 campus clashes between antifa and the “alt right” and the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. For those who have followed the conflict over the decades, it can seem like eternal return. Questioned recently about the resurgence of the race and IQ wars, one educational psychologist asked, “When did they ever go away?”

But there is something different about the present battle. Though the fact has escaped notice in the United States, the last few years have seen the globalization of the IQ wars. Arguments from the far-right fringes have entered mainstream politics, not just when the world’s most powerful leader states his preference for Norwegian immigrants over Haitians and Africans but in the site of the twentieth century’s most murderous racist project: Germany.

For the last fifty years, the keepers of the flame of the idea of genetically based racial differences in intelligence have been the small group of psychologists and sociologists affiliated with the Pioneer Fund. Founded in 1937 for the “improvement of the white race,” the fund has been headed since 2013 by the notorious racial psychologist Richard Lynn, most recently in the news for his involvement with a secret eugenics conference held at the University College London.