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Notes -
You are putting too much weight on second-hand and third-hand quotes. Even when not outright made-up, such quotes tend to be some mixture of out of context and paraphrased in a way that changes their meaning. This is especially true when the people passing along the quotes strongly disagree with even the things the quoted person has actually said, or when you are concerned about something different from the person passing it along. Even when being honest, people tend to repeat the meaning they heard, not the actual words that were said.
For example, lets say he makes a joke that some people think is offensive, will the people telling this to a reporter and the reporter writing both make it clear in the paraphrase used and the context mentioned that he was joking? If the person repeating it thinks making such jokes is "racist", and furthermore that Watson is a "racist crank" anyway because of his comments regarding the IQ gap, he probably thinks it doesn't matter whether the comment is a joke or not. Whether joking or serious, the comment carries the same meaning: "I am racist". (Similar to this misquote from a now-ex Washington Post reporter, to her the fake Charlie Kirk quote and the real one conveyed the same meaning.) Then you come along looking for whether Watson is "kooky" and suddenly it actually matters a lot whether something is a pet theory he passionately believes in, a speculative hypothesis he entertained for a couple sentences, or an outright joke that he never even seriously suggested. Even without deliberate dishonestly, the witness and the journalist can lossily encode his statements in a way that conveys the information their ideology cares about but drops or distorts the information people with different beliefs care about.
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