Sir Francis Galton not only invented Racism but he also invented the means to talk about racism without other people hearing.

From Who Needs Facts? by Steve Sailer.  He is commenting on the backing away by our punditry from the ideal of being empirical rationalists.  The new position is more of kow-towing emos; if the facts are discordant with the sweet dreams, then suppress the facts.  

His main point is well established if not accepted by the punditrocracy.  

It is a throw-away line that astonishes me.

For instance, last week, MSNBC talking head Mehdi Hasan, author of the New York Times best-seller Win Every Argument, became outraged that comedian Bill Maher had pointed out the high rate of black-on-black killings in Chicago. Hasan tweeted:

White people kill other white people at almost the same rate black people kill other black people & yet you never hear anyone complaining about ‘white on white crime.’ These aren’t points of sage wisdom from Maher. They are classic racist dog whistles.

(One of these days, some progressive is going to notice that the dog whistle was invented by Sir Francis Galton, who also invented eugenics.)

No way!

Galton was one of those polymathic Victorian thinkers and scientists who seemed to have a finger in many, many scientific pies, making notable contributions to most of them.  From Wikipedia:

Sir Francis Galton, FRS FRAI (/ˈɡɔːltən/; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), was an English polymath in the Victorian era. He was a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism; Galton was knighted in 1909.

Galton produced over 340 papers and books. He also developed the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. He was a pioneer of eugenics, coining the term itself in 1883, and also coined the phrase "nature versus nurture". His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.

As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology, as well as the lexical hypothesis of personality. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. He also conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none due to its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for. His quest for the scientific principles of diverse phenomena extended even to the optimal method for making tea.

As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale. . . .He was Charles Darwin's half-cousin.

He is, owing to his work in statistics and the measurement of human attributes (and variability in those attributes), anathema to anyone of the Woke persuasion today.  Forget the inventions and the groundbreaking discoveries - he is now persona non grata.  

Which brings us back to Sailer's claim.  Social Justice Progressives, usually lacking any direct evidence of people's racism, misogyny, islamophobia, etc., usually rely on the weak-ass claim that someone is dog-whistling.  They are not saying anything evil so Social Justice Progressives instead have to claim that their innocuous words are an unheard dog whistle for evil thoughts.  

It is patently absurd to ascribe motives to people without evidence, but it is all Social Justice Progressives have to work with, so that is what they use.

A Social Justice Progressive without an accusation of dog-whistling is like a voiceless songbird.  

So to discover that the actual instrument for their favorite metaphorical rhetorical tool, accusations of dog-whistling, was invented by the same person whom they tend to view as evil incarnate?  Astounding.

And yes, it does appear that Galton was the inventor of the dog-whistle.  Back to Wikipedia, this time under Dog Whistle:

A dog whistle (also known as silent whistle or Galton's whistle) is a type of whistle that emits sound in the ultrasonic range, which humans cannot hear but some other animals can, including dogs and domestic cats, and is used in their training. It was invented in 1876 by Francis Galton and is mentioned in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, in which he describes experiments to test the range of frequencies that could be heard by various animals, such as a house cat.

The upper limit of the human hearing range is about 20 kilohertz (kHz) for children, declining to 15–17 kHz for middle-age adults. The top end of a dog's hearing range is about 45 kHz, while a cat's is 64 kHz. It is thought that the wild ancestors of cats and dogs evolved this higher hearing range in order to hear high-frequency sounds made by their preferred prey, small rodents. The frequency of most dog whistles is within the range of 23 to 54 kHz, so they are above the range of human hearing, although some are adjustable down into the audible range.

To human ears, a dog whistle makes only a quiet hissing sound.[6] The advantage of the dog whistle is that it doesn't produce a loud irritating noise for humans that a normal whistle would produce, so it can be used to train or command animals without disturbing nearby people. Some dog whistles have adjustable sliders for active control of the frequency produced. Trainers may use the whistle simply to gather a dog's attention, or to inflict pain for the purpose of behaviour modification.

In the world according to Social Justice Progressives, Sir Francis Galton not only invented Racism but he also invented the means to talk about racism without other people hearing.  

Truly astonishing.