Jedidiah Carlson is a leftist activist, employed as a research associate at UT Austin. Carlson first made a name for himself by warning that the scientific literature might be read by the wrong people. He alarmingly reported that 1-5% of the audience of population genetics paper might be “right-wing nationalists”, based on certain keywords on their Twitter profiles. This fear reflects the attitude of many academic gatekeepers, who believe that scientific content should not be available to the public. Carlson seemed particularly worried that non-scientists may form their own “journal clubs” where they study academic papers and – God forbid – draw their own conclusions.
Carlson is engaging in an age-long leftist tactic: he uses the appropriation of the science by right-wing extremists to call for a complete shutdown of research in controversial topics. His ultimate goal (along with his associate, Kevin Bird is to put a full stop to any science that implicates biology and human behavior. Carlson (whose wife, Emma Beyers-Carlson, is a psychologist) has attacked the field of behavioral genetics on many occasions. The Buffalo shooting gave him the perfect excuse to silence his academic enemies. In a Nature commentary (which Carlson himself suggested should be adorned with a sensational picture of the massacre), he and others used the shooting to call for more censorship of politically incorrect viewpoints. They explicitly targeted social science genomics, referring to the seminal genetic association studies of educational attainment and intelligence. He asserted that “every decision made by funders, IRBs and journal editors” should take into account the potential use of scientific findings by extremists. This of course is an unreasonable standard that is not applied to any other area of science.
Carlson has publicly supported the cancellation of Bryan Pesta, a professor at Cleveland State University who conducted research on racial differences in intelligence. On a Twitter thread, he praised the “early-career researchers” who managed to get Pesta fired by compiling a list of minor bureaucratic violations. One might wonder if Carlson was more directly implicated in the case…
In the aftermath of the event, Carlson has been touring academic intuitions to lecture them on how to self-censor. The flyer of a recent talk that he gave in London resembles the aesthetics of Antifa direct action posters, which is not a coincidence. Writing for Science for the People (an outlet which hosts titles such as “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis”), Carlson advances the notion of “activist-scientists”, who work hand-in-hand with “frontline activists” to confront right-wingers. Science of the People is a Communist organisation that has existed since the 1970s, whose members have been responsible for physical attacks on dissident scientists, most notably E.O. Wilson. In his piece, Carlson glorifies the Marxist scientists of the 1930s and 1940s who were on the streets throwing Molotov cocktails at Fascists. Here you should not that Carlson is based in Minneapolis, the center of the catastrophic 2020 riots, which claimed the lives of 19 people.
It is clear how Carlson perceives science: as a vehicle to advance his Communist ideology. His academic idol is J.B.S. Haldane, the renowned geneticist who also happened to be a die-hard Stalinist and likely a Soviet spy. Just like Haldane, who whitewashed the murder of his colleagues by the Soviet regime, Carlson is less interested in the pursuit of truth, and more interested in maintaining ideological hegemony.