After his conviction, sex offender Jeffrey Epstein maintained relationships with multiple Silicon Valley elites who promoted eugenics and racist pseudoscience, emails show.
British website the Byline Times has been conducting a running series on Epstein’s ties to Silicon Valley, and one of its most recent reports looks into Epstein’s emails to several artificial intelligence researchers. In them, the men discuss the purported merits of racist pseudoscience, mass death, fascism and theories about the supposed difference in women’s and men’s cognitive skills.
Analyzing emails that Epstein’s estate turned over to the House Oversight Committee, the report digs into, for example, one 2016 email in which tech researcher and influencer Joscha Bach suggests that Black kids’ brains “are slower at learning high-level concepts” but adds that they maintain high motor skills that make them better adapted “to a more hunting/running style of life.”
In other emails, Bach tells Epstein that there are hardly any women in math because it “does not yield social attention,” that climate change might be “a good way of dealing with overpopulation” and that fascism, while discomforting to him personally, is “probably the most efficient and rationally stringent way of governance, if someone could pull it off in a sustainable way.” (Bach recently told the Boston Globe that he has since reached different conclusions and that “Race is itself not causal in cognitive differences of course, and later research brought me to my current view that race is NOT causal for differences in development, and race is NOT a determinant of IQ in children or adults.”)
The Byline report also highlights the money exchanged between Epstein and an AI-obsessed philosopher named Nick Bostrom, who has a history of racism and financial ties to Elon Musk. Epstein helped fund an organization (formerly known as the World Transhumanist Association) that Bostrom co-founded that focused on enhancing human capabilities using developing technologies, which Epstein appeared to see as related to a creepy eugenics project of his own.
Bach and Bostrom did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment. As the Byline report sums up: Epstein’s exchanges with thinkers like Bach, in other words, were hardly aberrations. They flowed out of a shared environment in which extreme ideas about hierarchy, optimisation and human worth were debated casually among individuals building the core infrastructure of the digital age. Epstein’s ties to the world of science and technology have been well documented. But the emails released by House members last month reveal the kind of bigoted, pseudoscientific conversations that he was having behind the scenes.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. Recommended
