John G.R. Fuerst

John Fuerst... frequently posts anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook. When questioned about his popularity on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront, he stated that he had 'no beef against… neo-Nazis'.

Does John Fuerst even have a background in science, or is he another Emil?

John Fuerst aka Gerard Fuerst (online alias: Chuck) is a HBD pseudoscientist, anti-Semite and white nationalist who publishes racist pseudoscience in the far-right Mankind Quarterly and OpenPsych pseudojournals. He's obsessed with racialism and pretty much only talks about that single topic, dedicating whole blogs to fixate on "racial differences" e.g. Human Varieties, Occidental Ascent and Race, Genes and Disparity. In 2015, he published a book (over 100 pages) The Nature of Race: the Genealogy of the Concept and the Biological Construct’s Contemporaneous Utility arguing for the existence of biological human races against the scientific consensus they don't exist.

Fuerst is a "research fellow" at Bryan J. Pesta's lab at Cleveland State University and the white supremacist Ulster Institute for Social Research. From 2019, Fuerst was publishing under the name John G.R. Fuerst but in 2021 dropped his first name and submitted a manuscript as Gerard R. Fuerst. This is likely to do with the fact searching "John Fuerst" on Google produces this page that exposes his anti-Semitism and racist views.

Racism and anti-Semitism
An anti-Semitic crank, Fuerst spends his time attacking Jewish people on Twitter:

If you simply point out the fact Fuerst is a racist and anti-Semite with alt-right/white nationalist political views, by quoting his own internet posts, he is known to harass you by repeating his favourite word "defamation" and making bogus legal threats in an attempt to silence people (such as the writers of this article) who have merely documented his internet postings. Presumably, the reason Fuerst doesn't want to be described as a racist, alt-righter, or white nationalist is that he's trying to make a name of himself as a "scientist" and he realises no one will take him seriously if they know his far-right political biases; for this reason, he is deeply unhappy about the top Google-search rank of this article by searching his name that exposes his agenda:

Careful. Repeating defamation is defamation. Hard to sue RW sock puppets -- not so tenured professors who make public claims under own name.

The evidence Fuerst is an anti-Semite, racist and white nationalist stems from Facebook comments he wrote which reveal he thinks a group composed mainly of Jews are behind "massive non-white immigration" to US, that an Israeli lobby controls the Republican Party who are "moral signalling" against "white Christian" America, but that Trump is a not a part of the "Jewish Coalition" and is a patriot (Fuerst says he voted for and supports Trump):

Fuerst also describes the anti-Semitic article "Jewish Hypocrisy" from Neo-Nazi website Counter-Currents as "excellent" (though he would prefer it with qualifiers like "a disproportionate number of") and quotes the following:

In another racist post, Fuerst describes "non-whites" as "misbehaving invaders" to Western countries like Germany:

Furthermore, Fuerst argues "blacks are cognitively less apt" and seems to be an apologist for colonialism:

He also uses alt-right glossary terms such as "cuck", argues conservatives should outbreed liberals and is a fan of the alt-righter Stefan Molyneux:

This of course is ignoring the fact that there are plenty of liberals whose parents were/are conservative, and vice versa.

The Nature of Race
In his paper The Nature of Race: the Genealogy of the Concept and the Biological Construct’s Contemporaneous Utility (2015) (published in Open Behavior Genetics, one of the OpenPsych pseudojournals), Fuerst argues for the utility of race as a categorization when applied to humans but says he is agnostic or non-committal concerning things such as behaviour and IQ, writing, "the case for average congenital biological racial differences in intelligence or other behavioral traits... the issue is presently undetermined." He, therefore, says he is arguing for a so-called thin version of racialism, as opposed to hereditarianism. In his view, his ideas about race are moderate since he doesn't propose any form of racial hierarchy or racism. However, there are a number of problems with taking Fuerst seriously about this:


 * Kevin MacDonald, an external OpenPsych reviewer for The Nature of Race, is a virulent anti-Semite and white nationalist.
 * In an email exchange about The Nature of Race, Professor of Philosophy Jonathan Kaplan remarked "Fuerst is an intellectually dishonest racist... I'm sure he has written a 100+ page article &mdash; he really seems to have nothing but time and racist animosity driving him."
 * Fuerst was involved in a long debate about race on the OpenPsych forum with an ex-editor from RationalWiki named Krom who arrived independently at the same conclusion as Kaplan, that Fuerst is a racist. Fuerst's posts on OpenPsych also seem to defend hereditarianism.
 * In 2014, Fuerst wrote a blog post "Why Racialism is Sensible", asserting: "A substantial global cognitive hereditarian hypothesis is robust yet not established. If global cognitive differences are only 40-60% heritable, we would still have moderate to large congenital cognitive differences, thus vindicating racialism (qua racial hereditarianism)." In his post-Fuerst criticizes an anti-racialist blogger for not "address[ing] the evidence in support of racialism, understood as the view that genes condition important outcome differences between racial groups" (i.e. hereditarianism).
 * Fuerst has published in the racist pseudo-scholarly journal Mankind Quarterly that is known for publishing controversial hereditarianism research.
 * On his Google Scholar and ResearchGate pages, Fuerst describes himself as a research fellow of the Ulster Institute for Social Research. This phony institute was founded by an outspoken proponent of hereditarianism, Richard Lynn. The Ulster Institute for Social Research received over $600,000 in grants from the Pioneer Fund between 1971 and 1996; the Pioneer Fund is a US-based organisation dedicated to promoting white supremacism, and whose founding members had Nazi sympathies. The Ulster Institute for Social Research publishes the Mankind Quarterly.
 * Fuerst chose to publish The Nature of Race in an OpenPsych pseudojournal that supports hereditarianism; the latter is confirmed by a former reviewer who left one of the journals after complaining about the bias of the reviewers and editors, i.e. he points out all are "friendly (at least not hostile) to the hereditarian position regarding racial differences". This is one of the reasons OpenPsych journals are bogus and unreliable.
 * The Nature of Race has been generally ignored by academics and scientists, most (like Kaplan) regard Fuerst to be a racialist crank; support for Fuerst's book appears to be confined to HBD websites, as well as alt-right and white nationalist blogs, wikis and forums, such as "Human Biological Diversity Reading List" (Fuerst's book is listed under: "New to HBD? Requisite materials for novices" ), VDARE, Stormfront, Rightpedia and Metapedia. When Krom raised concerns about this on OpenPsych, Fuerst responded "I have no beef against SFer's or neo-Nazis". Go figure.

Motte and bailey strategy
Fuerst's thin racialism is a motte and bailey strategy: in his published work, Fuerst presents and defends a more moderate (but still scientifically invalid) position on race (the motte), while his underlying racist view is a lot more unreasonable and less-defensible (the bailey). Fuerst's bait and switch method is not a new tactic by HBD bloggers. For example, euphemisms are often adopted such as "race realism" by white nationalists and Fuerst similarly tries to present himself as being 'merely interested in human biodiversity' (hence his blog-title "Human Varieties").

Recent activity
After his anti-Semitic and racist comments were exposed, Fuerst is much less active on Facebook and Twitter. In March 2019, Fuerst published a pseudoscientific racialist paper with Emil Kirkegaard and Richard Lynn in the open access Psych journal.

In 2020, Fuerst reappeared on a new Twitter account @FuerstJgr, but quickly deleted it; extant discussions show he was primarily tweeting about race. Curiously, he seems to have had a falling out with his colleague Emil Kirkegaard. Kirkegaard had criticised him for making a tweet too anti-Semitic for even his taste:

I have however angrily scolded you for posting stuff that's counterproductive to research (such as this tweet). If you insist on publicly identifying as the village idiot, there is only so much I can do to prevent that.

MDPI paper rejection
In October 2021, Fuerst complained on Twitter (now posting under the account name "Human Varieties") that MDPI rejected a manuscript he submitted because of political correctness.🇱🇮 He then proceeded to post a bizarre anti-Semitic rant:

I find it works for jews a lot, so I plan to give it a whirl.

Come on. Jews still complain about being kicked out of Egypt... 5000 years ago. And it hasn't cost them success. So I think I can get away with complaining about getting kicked out of MDPI ..., 2 days ago.