The Epstein Emails Show How the Powerful Talk About Race
In February 2016, after exchanging email pleasantries with the left-wing public intellectual Noam Chomsky and extending an invitation to his private island, Jeffrey Epstein recommended an article. “On a different note, you have encouraged me to look at data, no holds barred,” Epstein wrote before linking to “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” from the Right Stuff, an openly white-supremacist website and a pioneer of the online alt-right. The article argued that different races have differing levels of intelligence and that there is a genetic basis for the disparity.
The exchange was included in the Department of Justice’s latest public release of the Epstein files and is one of the clearest examples of the disgraced financier’s interest in “race science,” the pseudoscientific practice of ascribing racial inequities to genetics. It is a way of thinking that has been refuted on multiple levels. IQ is a complex trait that results from a series of factors—many of them cultural and circumstantial—that are not neatly reduced to a specific gene or set of genes. Even if it weren’t, the consensus among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists is that race isn’t a biological phenomenon. Race-science proponents tend to ignore all of this, as well as any other relevant context, and use correlations between race and IQ (and also things such as race and criminality) as evidence that racial stereotypes are in fact justified.
None of this mattered to Epstein, who recurrently expressed his interest in race science beyond this 2016 correspondence. The tranche of Epstein files also shows that in 2018, he repeatedly tried to get in contact with Charles Murray, a political scientist whose 1994 book, The Bell Curve, is one of the best-known texts to posit a relationship between intelligence and race. Epstein didn’t specify why he was trying to connect with Murray, but he claimed that they had met previously. (Murray told me over email that he had never received an email from Epstein and that it was possible that they’d met in passing at a conference reception at some point. If this ever happened, though, Murray had no memory of it, he said.)
Promoting contemptible perspectives on race is probably nowhere near the most depraved things Epstein did; he was, after all, a registered sex offender charged with child trafficking. But Epstein’s views are notable given his long-standing influence on some of the most powerful and influential Americans. His conversations from a decade ago provide clues as to how race science was picked out of the boneyard of history and reanimated into a force that’s influencing U.S. politics right now.
Epstein received Murray’s email address from his ideological fellow traveler James Watson, the late Nobel Prize–winning geneticist who was stripped of his titles in 2019 after he doubled down on comments he’d made to a British newspaper in 2007 about how he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” He told the paper that he wished that all races were equal but that “people who have to deal with Black employees find this not true.”
Epstein liked to collect relationships with high-profile academics, but the emails suggest that he may have been drawn to Watson specifically because of his ideology. In his 2016 exchange with Chomsky, Epstein appears to endorse the perspective that improving the world “might require accepting some uncomfortable facts” about race and intelligence. Chomsky, who sustained his association with Epstein even after accusations that the financier had sexually abused children became well known, disagreed with Epstein on race science in their email exchange. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) Epstein references Watson in other emails, and he and Watson appear to have met several times.
The same year that Epstein tried to put Chomsky onto pseudoscientific racism, he was having similar discussions with Joscha Bach, an AI researcher. In one exchange, Bach told Epstein that Black children in the United States “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.” In another email to Epstein, Bach wrote that “given average brain size difference” between men and women, “the small difference in average IQ is surprising.”
[Read: The far right is becoming obsessed with race and IQ]
Bach appears to have since changed his mind. In a recent Substack post explaining his emails with Epstein, Bach claimed that he has never said “that people of different races have different cognitive abilities” and wrote that “every ethnic group contains highly capable individuals” and that no one “should be discriminated against because of their ancestry.” Over email, Bach further clarified to me that “the concept of race is not suitable to capture cognitive and behavioral differences between individuals.” He said that “scientific discussion about the heritability of traits can be important for the creation of a more fair and equitable society, it is important to understand the nature and limitations of our minds, but they are very complicated and not my area of research.”
Other names that pop up in Epstein’s emails: He reached out to Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor who has written about research that argues that Ashkenazi Jews are innately intelligent. (Pinker has disavowed Epstein and denied that he ever visited Little Saint James, Epstein’s island. He attended at least two events that Epstein was also present at. “I only had one conversation with him, and found him to be not only odious but intellectually deeply unserious, despite the praise from so many of my colleagues, and his own pretensions,” Pinker told me over email. He also said that he doesn’t believe that there is “good evidence that average racial or ethnic differences have a genetic component.”) Epstein also tried to meet with Richard Dawkins, who has made comments claiming that race is a biological reality; Dawkins did not respond to a request for comment.
In the past several years, race science has gained traction on the right and in parts of Silicon Valley’s elite circles. Elon Musk, for example, has repeatedly replied to the @cremieuxrecueil account, run by Jordan Lasker, an independent researcher who has been credited by a right-wing publication for tracing “the genetic pathways of crime, explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Musk has also engaged with an account that posted statistics supposedly illustrating the inferiority of Black people. In November, The Guardian reported that perspectives defending race science were embedded in Musk’s Wikipedia competitor, Grokipedia. Musk and his representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
[Read: Elon Musk updated Grok. Guess what it said? ]
In 2023 and 2024, respectively, Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson interviewed Steve Sailer, a prominent race-science proponent. President Trump—who once considered Epstein a close friend and is referenced in many emails—has toyed around with the concept for years. In a November 2024 interview with the right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump said that some of the migrants coming across the southern border were genetically inferior. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of whom were murderers? Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” Trump told Hewitt, citing an incorrect number. “You know, now a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” When I reached out to the White House, the spokesperson Abigail Jackson told me in an emailed statement that “President Trump is right—dangerous criminal illegal aliens exploited Joe Biden’s open border and flooded our country.”
[Read: Donald Trump flirts with race science]
Meanwhile, Trump’s deportation campaign appears to target people from countries and cultures that he seems to think are inferior. During a Cabinet meeting in December, Trump said of Somalis, “I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you,” adding that the U.S. will “go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” He said this while the Department of Homeland Security was targeting Somalis in Minnesota.
Arguing that intelligence and adjacent traits are biologically determined served a clear function for a man like Epstein, who treated women as disposable and subordinate. And it’s equally unsurprising that the powerful people with whom he cultivated relationships might attempt to come up with a natural, objective explanation and rationale for their perch at the top of society.