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Jason Richwine might have written that "No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites," but he is not some kind of bigot, he says in his first interview since cutting ties with the Heritage Foundation. "The idea that I am some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth extremist never even crossed my mind," Richwine told The Washington Examiner's Byron York. "The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life." Richwine and Heritage parted ways in the wake of the controversy over his past writings on the relationship between race and IQ. Richwine was a co-author of a Heritage report that argued that reforming immigration laws would be costly to the country.

Richwine says his passion for outlining the case for racial inferiority is rooted in his love of data not racism. At a 2008 panel, Richwine ranked races by IQ: "Decades of psychometric testing has indicated that at least in America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks." Now, he tells York, he's not sorry for those comments. "I don't apologize for any of the things that I said," he says. But he does wish he'd put an asterisk on the entire sentence so it doesn't sound like he's endorsing the idea that some ethnic groups are just biologically destined to be less intelligent than others. He would have noted that "there is a nuance that goes along with that: the extent to which IQ scores actually reflect intelligence, the fact that it reflects averages and there is a lot of overlap in any population, and that IQ scores say absolutely nothing about the causes of the differences -- environmental, genetic, or some combination of those things.