In Part 11 of Accountable, Slater details how Jon, one of the boys in Charles’s circle, fell into the online world of “race realism,” a pseudoscientific ideology used to justify bigotry, often presented under the more neutral-sounding label “Human Biodiversity,” or HBD. In legitimate scientific usage, human biodiversity refers to the genetic and biological variation found among human populations. Within far-right discourse, however, the term has been appropriated to promote the false claim that socially defined racial groups possess innate and relatively fixed differences in intelligence, personality, criminality, and social behavior. HBD advocates frequently represent these claims as objective but “forbidden” truths suppressed by academics because of political correctness, allowing prejudice to be recast as intellectual courage. This ideology continues the tradition of 19th-century scientific racism and eugenics associated with Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883 and sought to apply theories of heredity to human intelligence and social status. 

The Human Biodiversity Institute was founded in the mid-1990s by the American political writer Steve Sailer, who subsequently organized an invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group involving fringe or controversial journalists, commentators, scientists, and academics. Through this discussion forum, Sailer rebranded and adapted older hereditarian and eugenic arguments for the emerging online right. Researchers Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta, and Nicole Iturriaga describe HBD as a movement that collects and produces hereditarian claims about racial differences and circulates them as revelatory “red pills” (Panofsky, Aaron et al. “How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 175, 2, 2021). The HBD movement popularizes its ideas by circulating misleading data on forums like Reddit and 4chan, the same platforms that shape the boys’ “edgy” humor in Accountable. 

The scientific community has overwhelmingly debunked HBD claims. The American Society of Human Genetics, for instance, issued a 2018 statement condemning any attempt to link genetics to racial supremacy, confirming that such ideas use “discredited or distorted genetic concepts to bolster bogus claims” (Genet, A. J. H. “ASHG Denounces Attempts to Link Genetics and Racial Supremacy.” American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 103,5, 2018). Phenomena like the Flynn effect, which shows IQ scores rising globally over time due to environmental factors like improved nutrition and education, further invalidate genetic determinism. By exploring Jon’s descent into this digital rabbit hole, Slater shows how easily teenagers can be influenced by sophisticated misinformation that masquerades as objective science, providing a rationale for the hateful “jokes” that devastated their classmates.