Race science should be disqualifying. Yet for The Bulwark, Will Saletan’s flirtation with the stuff may be less a concern than a credential.
His 2023 series The Corruption of Lindsay Graham was high-quality liberal slop. The Bulwark special project strengthened the company brand and established Saletan as a systemic critic – not just a Trump hater.
We liked the series at the time. It presented a compelling narrative, both morally and tactically. But three years down the line – with Trump having won not only the primary but the 2024 election under a popular vote majority – Saletan’s analysis of Graham and the Republican party doesn’t ring quite so true. It whitewashes Graham’s record and fails to address the core systemic realities that birthed Trumpism in the first place.
We set out to understand what led Will Saletan to this intellectual blind spot, only to discover a major controversy in which he argued repeatedly on behalf of race science and neglected to ever recant or repudiate his argument. When confronted, Saletan apologized for relying on racist sources and for misleading his audience. But he never acknowledged that eugenicist pseudoscience exists solely to advance white supremacy, nor the real impact his own work had on discriminated minorities.
In the 21st century, for a liberal public intellectual to laud race science should be summarily disqualifying. For the Republican operatives at The Bulwark, it appears to have been a credential. Watch the discussion and judge for yourself.
Previously, on Certain Thoughts:
Mamdani the Prophet Has Arrived
At a June 18 Get Out the Vote rally, New York’s superstar mayor Zohran Mamdani made waves not only by calling out AIPAC, but by naming the organization’s malign influence in the starkest of terms: monsters.
MAGA Dems Rip Off Mask
At Christmastime in 1992, Tom Cruise defended military fratricide in the blockbuster feature A Few Good Men. By the Fourth of July the following year, he was onboarding as the mob’s in-house tax attorney in The Firm.
