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Bryan Pesta
The colorful pseudoscience Race & Racialism |
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Hating thy neighbour |
Divide and conquer |
Dog-whistlers |
“”Dr. Bryan Pesta, had committed a rash of violations to the Data Use Certification Agreement. The NIH subsequently ordered Pesta to destroy any copies of the dataset by June, 2021, revoked his permission to use any NIH data for any ongoing projects, and banned him from accessing NIH data for 3 years, their strongest sanction against a researcher for misusing dbGaP data in the history of the database.
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—Kevin Bird on Pesta's unethical conduct.[1] |
Bryan J. Pesta is a far-right hereditarianism pseudoscientist and member of the white nationalist Human Diversity Foundation who has been widely criticized for unethical research conduct.[1][2][3] Pesta has admitted to receiving money from the neo-Nazi Pioneer Fund.[2][4] He has supported racist stereotypes and pseudoscience that black men have the biggest penis size and lowest intelligence.[note 1]
Pesta is also an anal bleacher, self-described "racial realist" and former editor-in-chief of Psych who has published in the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly.[3][5][6] He was a Professor of Graduate Business Programs at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio until he was fired in March 2022 for unethical conduct specifically for violating data-use from the National Institutes of Health by uploading restricted data to an "unapproved online forensic DNA-phenotyping service".[3] The NIH also conducted an independent investigation and issued sanctions against Pesta for his misconduct including banning him from using their data for three years. Despite his, he filed a lawsuit against the CSU who he claimed unfairly fired him.Do You Believe That? He of course lost.[7] Pesta has controversially published racist pseudoscience with white nationalists John Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard and Jordan Lasker.[3]
In 2020, Pesta published research in the Intelligence journal on racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence. The University of Virginia psychologists Evan Giangrande and Eric Turkheimer responded, stating that the work of Pesta and his colleagues in this paper served "as an example of how racially motivated and poorly executed work can find its way into a mainstream scientific journal, underscoring the importance of robust peer review and rigorous editorial judgment".[4] In December 2022, Pesta became a writer for the right-wing magazine Quillette.[8]
Academic background[edit]
Pesta's academic background is primarily in business management and psychology, with a master's degree in labor relations and human resources from Cleveland State University and Ph.D. in psychology with a concentration in cognitive aging from the University of Akron.[9][3] He has published some legitimate research in reputable psychology journals such as on memory and the link between religion and intelligence.[10][11] He is an atheist.[12]
Race and intelligence[edit]
Pesta is active in promoting discredited theories about race and intelligence, despite having no publicly known credentials in relevant fields such as biology or genetics. For instance, he pals around with Emil Kirkegaard and other racialist pseudoscientists, serving on the editorial board of one of Kirkegaard's OpenPsych pseudojournals, (co-)authoring three articles in these journals and reviewing four others,[13] further coauthoring a recent article with Kirkegaard in the overtly racist Mankind Quarterly.[14] He used to edit Wikipedia's article about race and intelligence back in 2010.[15] In 2019, he returned to create Michael A. Woodley of Menie's Wikipedia article (which was deleted in 2022).[16]
Pesta controversially co-authors pseudoscientific race and intelligence papers with white nationalist John Fuerst.[17][18][19] In 2019, Pesta and Fuerst founded the Human Phenome Diversity Foundation, an organization whose mission it to "support scientific research on human phenotypic and biological diversity".[3] According to Angela Saini:
The Pioneer Fund’s U.S. tax records show that its most recent grant was given in 2019, totalling $15,000 to support an organization known as the Human Phenome Diversity Foundation, based in Ohio. This foundation’s president was listed as Bryan Pesta, then a tenured business professor at Cleveland State University in Ohio. In 2016, Pesta published a paper in which he predicted that as the IQ level required to do a job increases, “the percent of White and Asian workers will increase, while the percent of Black workers will decrease.” This was published in Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal edited by a right-wing blogger with no known reputable academic affiliations, who is — like Pesta — a contributor to The Mankind Quarterly.[4]
2020 meta-analysis[edit]
In 2020, Pesta co-authored a meta-analysis "Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence" with white nationalists John G. R. Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard, Jan te Nijenhuis and Jordan Lasker.[20] Their meta-analysis was heavily criticized as a "racially motivated and poorly executed work" by Evan J. Giangrande and Eric Turkheimer:
In 2020, Pesta et al. published an article entitled "Racial and Ethnic Group Differences in the Heritability of Intelligence: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis" in the journal Intelligence. The authors framed their analysis as an examination of the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, which holds that the heritability of intelligence varies as a function of socioeconomic status. Pesta et al. concluded that the heritability of intelligence does not differ across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. They claimed their results challenge the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis and support the hereditarian position that mean differences in IQ among racial and ethnic groups are attributable to genetic differences rather than environmental disparities. In this commentary, we outline severe theoretical, methodological, and rhetorical flaws in every step of Pesta et al.'s meta-analysis. The most reliable finding from Pesta et al. is consistent with the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis and directly contradicts a hereditarian understanding of group differences in intelligence. Finally, we suggest that Pesta et al. serves as an example of how racially motivated and poorly executed work can find its way into a mainstream scientific journal, underscoring the importance of robust peer review and rigorous editorial judgment in the open-science era.[21]
The meta-analysis has been cited as an example of bad science in the paper "Confronting the “Weaponization” of Genetics by Racists Online and Elsewhere".[22]
International Society for Intelligence Research[edit]
Pesta was a speaker at the International Society for Intelligence Research in 2010.[23]
Psych journal[edit]
Because OpenPsych was heavily criticized by the media in 2018 for its association with eugenics and white supremacy, most racialists stopped publishing in it. In 2019, Pesta who served on their editorial board, became "Special Issue Editor" of Psych's Beyond Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability.[24] The project was set up to validate J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen's pseudoscientific hereditarianism research.[24]
In July 2019 over a controversy with Richard Lynn, the Psych journal no longer publishes racist pseudoscience.[25] Pesta no longer sits on the Editorial Board.[26]
Bryan J Pesta's lab[edit]
Between 2019 and 2022, Pesta claimed on ResearchGate to operate a laboratory at Cleveland State University.[27] There were only two "research fellows" of the lab, John Fuerst and Emil Kirkegaard. On 18 October 2022, Kirkegaard claimed the laboratory never existed: "Everybody who uses ResearchGate knows that it will occasionally suggest that recent work was done by some lab, if you click yes to that, it will auto-generate one of these fictive labs."[28] However, this is contradicted by the fact Pesta specifically listed his lab as Cleveland State University under "institution" when he could have left it blank.[29] According to ResearchGate: "A lab is a group of scientists, led by a senior researcher, who conduct experiments and research together on a specific topic. You can now quickly set up your lab on ResearchGate to showcase the work your lab is doing."[30] If Pesta did not want to mislead people into thinking he ran a laboratory at CSU, he should have not typed in that place as the lab's institution.
Penis size[edit]
“”He is a white, British Cocker Spaniel. I also have a black, American Cocker Spaniel. The white cock is larger than the black cock. Odd...!
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—Bryan Pesta[31] |
Pesta has supported racist stereotypes and pseudoscience black men have the biggest penis size. This is despite the fact peer-reviewed studies have disproven this.[32][33] In reality, there is no reliable clinical data showing racial variation in penis size. A 2007 study of 115 men from Nigeria found that the average stretched penis length of Nigerian males was 13.37cm, and the median stretched penis length found was 13cm.[34] A 2015 systematic review of 15,521 men found "no indications of differences in racial variability", and it is not possible to draw any conclusions about penis size and race from the available literature.[35] Despite this, Pesta promotes racist sexual myths that black men have a large penis size and low intelligence. Former students from his classes at Cleveland State University have stated he often told offensive penis jokes.[3]
Recent activity[edit]
Pesta continues to publish racialist pseudoscience with John Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard, and Jan te Nijenhuis.[17]
In March, 2022 Pesta was fired from Cleveland State University for misconduct and what the CSU described as the “most serious and longest such ban in NIH history”:[36]
Despite nearly a dozen publications over more than a decade arguing for the intellectual inferiority of Black people, Pesta earned merit pay for research and eventually promotion and tenure at Cleveland State. Finally, this year, after researchers at other institutions filed complaints, the university fired him.[3]
As of November 2022, Pesta claims to be unemployable in the United States and is begging for donations from the far-right community:
Not surprisingly, I have suffered rather severe financial and emotional consequences because of CSU’s illegal firing of me. I am also hated there, and I am completely unemployable in academics anywhere in the USA.
I would sincerely appreciate any financial assistance you might provide here.[37]
Various racists and white nationalists such as Emil Kirkegaard, Charles Murray, and Steve Sailer at The Unz Review have supported Pesta.[37]
Despite claiming to be in a bad financial situtation and begging for donations, public records show before being fired from Cleveland State University, Pesta's annual salary was $172,775 which is 278 percent higher than the average salary at the same university.[38] Pesta has set up online crowdfunds and has recieved more than $10,000 in donations.[39]
On March 16, 2023 Pesta filed a lawsuit against Cleveland State University and six defendants who work at the university including the president of the CSU. Pesta's attorney, Frederick C. Kelly, previously was hired by white nationalist Peter Brimelow.[40] Pesta is seeking "money damages and injunctive relief against all defendants."[41] Pesta claims his sacking was a violation of his First Amendment rights to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of association.[42] Pesta also seeks a bizarre declaratory judgment:
Declaring that the hereditarian hypothesis into the long-standing racial gap in IQ is worthy of study, but is presently under assault for reasons wholly removed from valid scientific criteria; and
b) Declaring that to those, like Pesta, who advance a hereditarian hypothesis in the study of race, genetics, and intelligence are entitled to academic freedom; and
c) Declaring that CSU in particular must extend full academic freedom to any, such as Pesta, who advance a hereditarian hypothesis in the study of race, genetics, and intelligence
His lawsuit has been supported by various far-right websites including Steve Sailer's blog column at The Unz Review.[43]
Emil Kirkegaard, Pesta's main attack-dog, has harassed various individuals on social media mentioned by Pesta in his complaint for a civil case by calling them "terrorists".[44]
As of 2024, Pesta is still publishing articles with Emil Kirkegaard for the racist Mankind Quarterly and OpenPsych pseudojournals.[45] Despite being fired from Cleveland State University in 2022, Pesta still lists the university as his affiliation for OpenPsych.[46]
Loss of frivolous lawsuit[edit]
Pesta's claim his First Amendment rights were violated when he was fired from Cleveland State University never had any factual basis. The case was easily won by the defendants and the judge in an order granting summary judgment for the defendants wrote: "Pesta’s theory is not supported by the facts. The evidence submitted to the Court overwhelmingly supports Defendants’ version of the events."[47] Ultimately the judge agreed with the CSU that Pesta was justifiably fired for misconduct (improperly accessing and using data from the NIH). The judge also criticized John Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard, and Jordan Lasker, for "trying to coverup the true reason for accessing the NIH data". Similar to Pesta, Kirkegaard has a history of filing and losing frivolous lawsuits.
Cleveland State University officials didn’t violate the First Amendment rights of a tenured professor the school fired after he published a controversial article that concluded that there’s an IQ gap between the races, a federal court said. The record showed that Bryan J. Pesta was fired because of ethical lapses and for violating the school’s academic and integrity standards while researching his article, not in retaliation for his speech, Judge Dan Aaron Polster said Monday for the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, granting summary judgment to the school officials.[7]
As of 2025, Pesta has filed an appeal.[48]
Anal bleaching[edit]
Bryan Pesta has written disturbing posts that have defended the practice of anal bleaching:
Only suckers pay doctors to anal bleach. The home kits now work wonders, and are much cheaper. 10% carbamide peroxide lasts at least three months and will make your ass as white as Augusta National.
The kit comes with a starfish-shaped wafer that you manually press on your bum to mold it into an exact replica. It's a like a mouth piece where you then boil the wafer so that the ass cast gets set.
Once the cast has cooled (important!), apply the peroxide and then bonding sealer to the ass side of the wafer. Carefully turn the wafer over (try not to get the peroxide on your fingers as it's dangerous) and un-peel the sticky tape on the other side.
Apply the wafer to your bathroom vanity, just about at anus height (if you're not sure your anus' height, you can make a test mark just by bending over and rubbing your ass up against your vanity in a kissing-like motion).
Stand facing the other way, as if you were balancing on top of parallel bars spread 4 feet apart. Bend over, and looking backwards (men only, if your boys are blocking the view, tape them first to either thigh), line up your asshole with the wafer taped to the vanity.
Then, gently at first, spread your asscheek (grab the inner cheeks, plams facing outwards; from there move both hands outward, as if each were pulling back a bow to shoot an arrow). It's best at this point to fatigue the sphincter muscle by rapidly repeating this motion for a few minutes to an hour.
Slowly hop backwards til you can feel your rectum wet from the peroxide. In one quick movement, both release your hands from your stretched ass checks and then flex your kegle muscle. Boom, it's in and already working.[49]
Human Diversity Foundation[edit]
Pesta is a member of the white nationalist Human Diversity Foundation.[2] According to an undercover investigation by Hope not Hate:
Several of the team are known in the world of scientific racism, and had contributed to Aporia or had in the past been funded by Pioneer. Chief among them is Bryan Pesta, who between 2019 and 2022 received Pioneer money and was dismissed from his academic position at Cleveland State University in February 2022 for misusing genetic data in his research.[2]
Pesta had also received funding from Andrew Conru:
Conru has also funded Bryan Pesta, a former recipient of Pioneer money who is now part of HDF’s underground research team. In legal depositions that Pesta made as part of an investigation into his misuse of genetic data, he said: “There’s a guy who created the website Adult Friend Finders [sic], and he’s given us $50,000.” Conru founded the sex and dating website, Adult Friend Finder. The transcripts were made public through a legal challenge mounted by Pesta against Cleveland State University for unfair dismissal.[2]
See also[edit]
- Anatoly Karlin — similar racialist pseudosience promoter who believes black men have larger penis sizes
- Edward M. Miller — another black cock obsessed white supremacist
Notes[edit]
- ↑ This view also held by Emil Kirkegaard and Richard Lynn is not supported by any scientific evidence.
References[edit]
- ↑ Jump up to: 1.0 1.1 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2024.1345631/full Archived at: https://archive.ph/U83uL
- ↑ Jump up to: 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Race Science Inc. Undercover in The Human Diversity Foundation, the million-dollar race science company by Harry Shukman & Patrik Hermansson (Oct. 16, 2024) Hope Not Hate. Archived.
- ↑ Jump up to: 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Standifer, Cid (October 13, 2022). "Racial Pseudoscience on the Faculty". Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on October 15, 2022. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
- ↑ Jump up to: 4.0 4.1 4.2 Draper’s Millions: The Philanthropic Wellspring of Modern Race Science. race.undark.org. Archived.
- ↑ Mankind Quarterly Volume 56, Number 3, 2016
- ↑ Mankind Quarterly Volume 58, Number 4, 2018
- ↑ Jump up to: 7.0 7.1 https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/professor-fails-in-suit-over-firing-for-racial-iq-gap-article Archived at: https://archive.ph/6Zn1Q
- ↑ Bryan J. Pesta
- ↑ "Bryan J Pesta". Cleveland State University. Archived from the original on November 23, 2021. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
- ↑ His Google Scholar profile
- ↑ The bright, the dim, and the in-between
- ↑ Atheists' MySpace page restored after hacking incident
- ↑ OpenPsych profile
- ↑ An S Factor Analysis on the Provinces of Vietnam: Relationships with Cognitive Ability, Ethnicity, and Latitude
- ↑ Wikipedia Talk: Race and Intelligence
- ↑ Bpesta22: User contributions. Wikipedia.
- ↑ Jump up to: 17.0 17.1 Bryan J Pesta. ResearchGate.
- ↑ Bibliometric Keyword Analysis across Seventeen Years (2000–2016) of Intelligence Articles
- ↑ Does intelligence explain national score variance on graduate admissions exams?
- ↑ Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis. sciencedirect.com.
- ↑ Race, Ethnicity, and the Scarr-Rowe Hypothesis: A Cautionary Example of Fringe Science Entering the Mainstream. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
- ↑ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.4925
- ↑ The International Society for Intelligence Research 11th Conference. isironline.org.
- ↑ Jump up to: 24.0 24.1 Beyond Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability. Bryan J. Pesta.
- ↑ Prof who lost emeritus status for views on race and intelligence has paper flagged
- ↑ Editorial Board
- ↑ Bryan J Pesta's Lab Archived from the original on May 3, 2019.
- ↑ https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1582212274101817345
- ↑ https://archive.is/GXYXa#selection-709.0-711.26.
- ↑ https://explore.researchgate.net/display/support/Labs
- ↑ Bryan Pesta on Twitter
- ↑ "Oversized Penile Length In The Black People; Myth Or Reality". (2007). JC, Orakwe., GU, Ebuh. Tropical Journal of Medical Research. 11(1): 16-18.
- ↑ Mondaini, Nicola; Gontero, Paolo (2005). "Idiopathic short penis: Myth or reality?". BJU International. 95 (1): 8–9. doi:10.1111/j.1464-410X.2005.05238.x. PMID 15638885.
- ↑ Orakwe, J C; Ogbuagu, B O; Ebuh, G U (29 August 2007). "Can physique and gluteal size predict penile length in adult Nigerian men?". West African Journal of Medicine. 25 (3): 223–225. doi:10.4314/wajm.v25i3.28282. PMID 17191423.
- ↑ Veale, David; Miles, Sarah; Bramley, Sally; Muir, Gordon; Hodsoll, John (2015). "Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15 521 men". BJU International. 115 (6): 978–986. doi:10.1111/bju.13010. PMID 25487360.
- ↑ https://www.ideastream.org/education/2023-03-22/fired-cleveland-state-professor-files-suit-alleging-violation-of-his-first-amendment-rights
- ↑ Jump up to: 37.0 37.1 Dr. Pesta Appeals for Your Help
- ↑ https://govsalaries.com/bryan-pesta-84518083
- ↑ https://www.givesendgo.com/G9END
- ↑ https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000016f-8dbd-dcf7-a96f-cdbd7ffa0000
- ↑ https://dockets.justia.com/docket/ohio/ohndce/1:2023cv00546/295763
- ↑ Pesta v. Cleveland State University et al
- ↑ Tenured Professor Bryan J. Pesta Sues for Being Fired for His Breakthrough Study of the Causes of the Racial Gap in Average IQ
- ↑ https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1636677442826797057
- ↑ An S Factor Analysis on the Provinces of Vietnam: Relationships with Cognitive Ability, Ethnicity, and Latitude. mankindquarterly.org.
- ↑ https://openpsych.net/paper/77/
- ↑ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67021659/73/pesta-v-cleveland-state-university/
- ↑ https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/case_reports/rptPendingDistrict_OHN.pdf
- ↑ Designer vaginas. skepticalcommunity.com. Archived.