Though these two classes (the mainstream and the fringe) are very different, each contributes to the public confusion that directly or indirectly feeds the racist pseudoscience machine. For example, though the Buffalo terrorist was deeply entrenched in the alt-science world, his screed featured cherry-picked, out-of-context figures and data from mainstream science—published in Nature, about genes associated with “educational attainment”—to support his worldview. This is consistent with the work of scholars who have documented that white nationalist circles consume the mainstream genetics literature at a high rate.
The mainstream research that aims to resolve relationships between genes and traits that we care about…
