Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web, Race Science and the Jeffrey Epstein files: "Steven Pinker is also a friend."

Steven Pinker praising "bad boy" Alan Dershowitz
in the October 2013 Harvard Law School video on
Youtube titled: "Celebrating Alan Dershowitz: teacher"
--------------------------------------------------------------

If you do a search in the Justice Department's Epstein files on the name "Pinker" you will see the name is mentioned 416 times. 

In a few cases the name is not connected to Steven Pinker - his sister Susan appears a few times and at least one other person named Pinker is mentioned, but the vast majority of mentions are Steven Pinker.

The most important information about Pinker's connection to Epstein has long been known:  Pinker helped Epstein's lawyer Alan Dershowitz defend Epstein in 2007.

The phrase "had sex with Dershowitz" appears 53 times in the Epstein files, as in:

• "This makes [redacted] the second woman to allege that she had sex with Dershowitz at the behest of Epstein..."

• The second time that I had sex with Dershowitz was at Epstein's house in Palm Beach. During this encounter, Dershowitz instructed me to both perform oral sex and have sexual intercourse.

• I had sexual intercourse with Dershowitz at least six times. The first time was when I was about 16, early on in my servitude to Epstein, and it continued until I was 19.

A lot of the documents in the Epstein files are duplicates or at least the information is duplicated across many documents. And to be fair, I only did a half-assed job of searching every file in which Pinker's name appears. So I could have missed something. But still, I did find some items of interest:

On March 28, 2012 Pinker received an email from Epstein's assistant:

Hello Steven. Jeffrey Epstein will be making a trip up to Harvard on Sunday April 15th. He is wondering if you might be around and available to meet with him?

To which Pinker responded:

Unfortunately I'm out of town that day, but if Jeffrey is around on Monday the 16th, I'll be back and would be delighted to meet with him.

This was five years after 2007, when Pinker had helped Dershowitz defend Epstein, and four years after Epstein pled guilty to state charges: one count of solicitating prostitution and one count of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18.

In his response to Jeffrey Epstein's request, on June 23, 2015, to give Pinker's email address to Stephen Hawking, infamous sex pest Lawrence Krauss (his full name appears 5,209 times in the Epstein files) wrote:

Thanks. I don't normally give out email addresses, even to friends... but I guess since Jeffrey flew stephen on a plane it is ok.

An article published in the NYTimes a couple of months ago discusses Krauss's and Robert Trivers's connections to Epstein. They sound like a delightful couple of guys:

In 2018, Mr. Epstein forwarded Mr. Krauss a list of attendees for the Women in the World Summit, a convention of female leaders and activists. Mr. Krauss responded, “Let’s do a men of the world conference,” and listed men accused of misconduct: Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken and Woody Allen.

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers is also mentioned in the new tranche of emails. In 2015, he told Reuters that Mr. Epstein had given him about $40,000 for his research. And he defended Mr. Epstein, saying girls mature sooner than they used to. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.

John Brockman, the guy who edited the Epstein-funded Edge, wrote to Epstein on June 2, 2011:

Strangely, the usual billionaire crowd is not showing up for this one, so I am running hard to revision it as a serious science event, inviting more third culture intellectuals and also the global press (NYTimes, WSJ, NYorker, Economist, etc.) Ultlimately it will be a much stronger and more important event, but it's not the one advertised to you. The list status is below. (Btw, I hope you will come (Martin and Pinker would be very happy if your showed up) but will understand if you want out.

I believe Martin refers to Harvard professor Martin Nowak.

Brockman sent this email to Epstein on May 3, 2015:

I saw your boys, the Dersh, and Larry Summers, at a dinner Pinker had for Rebecca's birthday. Poor guy, he's going out for his wife, and then, the day before the event, Ilarry, his father dies. And while his whole family was in Montreal and in mourning, he persevered with smile on his face and only his close friends knew.

I talked to the Dersh - what a story! David Boies!! What's going on? Didn't talk to Summers.

Summers is a well-known good buddy of Epstein. "the Dersh" is of course Alan Dershowitz.

On February 8, 2012, Epstein wrote to Brian Boyd:

i look forward to sponsoring your dream work . 75k. we will work out the details.. Steve Pinker is also a friend. ( since you seemed to hold him in high regard )

Boyd is a University of Auckland professor  who "met disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for breakfast, and later discussed the fee that Epstein offered to pay him to write about Nabokov’s novel Lolita."

Epstein acknowledges his "colorful past" in this letter to Bill Gates on December 4, 2013:

1. I remembered I did speak to your cfo in the past , but I believe he thought at that time that my colorful past could become an issue . the time is now ripe. 2. the event in April 4-6 0 will be with Pinker, venter . sr martin rees frank wilcek, . 6 or 7 nobel prize winners. lawrence krauss. richard dawkins...

Perhaps the most pathetic figure out of all the celebrity intellectuals collected by Epstein is Stephen M. Kosslyn, who wrote to Epstein on January 3, 2013:

Dear Jeffrey:

Thank you very much for your note, which means a lot to me. You are probably not aware of this, but I consider you one of my only real friends -- you don't want anything from me, don't try to push any agendas on me, and you care about me. The feeling is mutual.

Imagine having a rapist psychopath as one of your only real friends.

Of course you knew there would be a connection between Kosslyn and Pinker, evident in an article that is included in the Epstein files:

...Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker credits Kosslyn, his former graduate adviser, with breathing new life into another venerable institution. "The Harvard University psychology department had been a backwater, coasting on its reputation, before Steve reinvigorated it in the 1990s with an aggressive program of hiring young mid-career scientists, which vaulted the department into the front ranks," says Pinker, who joined the department in 2003. Pinker also cites Kosslyn's leadership through the financial crisis as evidence that he's the right peron to turn around the Stanford center: "I'd be surprised if Steve didn't make the center financially viable and intellectually vibrant within a few years:'

What damn fools these self-impressed academics are. 

I have not spent much time on this Pinkerite blog discussing Pinker's connection to Epstein, although most people are far more interested in that than in Pinker's 25 years - at least - of promoting hereditarianism and professional racists like Steve Sailer and Razib Khan, and writing for the racist publication Quillette and appearing on the Neo-Nazi podcast Aporia (owned by Emil Kirkegaard, a pedophilia apologist.)

But it's clear that Epstein pleading guilty to raping kids did not bother him at all. I noted in the last post that Pinker's racist ally Claire Lehmann has a history of not caring about pedophilia and is a huge fan of Camille "North American Man/Boy Love Association" Paglia.

Pinker is a fan of Paglia too, mentioning her in his Blank Slate as one of the good (i. e. misogynist) "feminists."

I think that Pinker, like many in his wealthy "celebrity intellectual" cohort, believes that moral and ethical concerns don't apply to him. That's why he screams "guilt by association" whenever anybody mentions the awful people he allies with.

So why wouldn't he be delighted to meet with Epstein in 2012? 

Why wouldn't Jeffrey Epstein consider him a friend?

Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web, Race Science and the Jeffrey Epstein files

Well that didn't last long. I called Claire Lehmann the voice of reason last month, but now, the woman who won the International Society for Intelligence Research's Constance Holden journalism award is ho-humming her way through one of the biggest stories of the year, if not the decade.

Claire Lehmann has a history of not caring if someone is pro-pedophilia as can be seen in her praise of Camille Paglia, who loves pedophilia so much she bascally declared it one of the pillars of Western Civilization.

Lehmann's circle of ghouls and grifters jumped in to agree with her about the lack of entertainment value from the Epstein files.

So who are these people who find underage rape by famous men so terribly tiresome?

Well there's Cathy Young, who mostly doesn't find underage rape interesting but she found it absolutely fascinating when a creepy guy published his ex-girlfriend's personal information in order to harm her as much as possible. Young seems to have a real fondness for Eron Gjoni, to the point where she appears to be trying to rehabilitate him, even though at the same time she got him to admit that he had no regrets about his grotesque and indefensible invasion of privacy.

I am convinced that Young has a serious case of internalized misogyny, right along with Lehmann, Paglia and Young's based Gamergate comrade, Christina Hoff Sommers, which is why, I believe, Young gets the maximum enjoyment out of seeing women, especially young women, in emotional pain.

She's also chummy with professional racist Razib Khan.

I've also mentioned Damon Linker on this blog. He's a thinktank creature who was mad that Trump was brought to justice, if only temporarily a few years ago. He's written for Lehmann's own gutter racist publication Quillette and signed the Harper's letter with the rest of the grifters and race pseudoscience promoters.

But let's not forget Matt Taibbi, who also finds stories about rape such a chore. Which is surprising, because apparently Taibbi used to find tales of rape hysterically funny and entertaining enough to write about in detail. 

Taibbi is part of Lehmann's far-right racist gang these days, which, considering all the misogyny in this crowd, is a perfect fit.

To most everybody's amazement, Lehmann was yeeted from X of all places, apparently for being bored with underaged-rape. Lehmann can be seen on Linked In complaining about it.

I find it amazing, all the people whose real names and jobs are displayed on Linked In, going public with their awfulness by supporting a gutter racist like Claire Lehmann. 

The suspension did not last long, and Lehmann is back on X now, which is the right-wing safe space, most of the time, and so a perfect home for her.

But what about Steven Pinker and Jeffrey Epstein?

I will be writing about that soon.

Steven Colbert at his best

 His entire monologue on January 26 was devoted to the execution of Alex Pretti by Trump thugs.

But of course it isn't only one demented old rapist who has caused all this misery and death. The entire Republican Party has enabled the Trump monstrosity every single step of the way. 

The Republican Party must be punished for a generation to keep it from doing fascism again any time soon.

Personally I think the Republican Party has disgraced the memory of Abraham Lincoln so badly, it should disband in shame. But they have no shame.

Jimmy Kimmel's monologue was also very good, and I especially liked his reference to the necessity of the 25th Amendment.

Both monologues ran the video of Pretti delivering a eulogy for a recently deceased veteran, praising the vet for making a sacrifice for freedom. "Today we remember that freedom is not free."

We should all memorize that speech.

And then vote every single Republican out of office.

Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his international network of racists are in the NYTimes, finally

The New York Times has finally gotten around to paying attention to the international network of racist "researchers" and publications led by Emil Kirkegaard in an article published January 24: Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’:

Though Dr. Pesta later submitted updates on further research he wanted to do, none explicitly described the group’s true intentions, according to court records. The legal filings also show that another group member, Emil O.W. Kirkegaard, a right-wing blogger in Denmark, suggested Dr. Pesta submit misleading proposals to gain access to additional data sets “I reckon that if we mask the nature of the study with usual medical terms, one can ‘get away with’ a lot,” Mr. Kirkegaard wrote in an email. “Getting samples for analyses that one doesn’t publish (to preserve your reputation!) are still useful because they allow us to validate our beliefs privately.” In an interview, Dr. Pesta denied misleading the N.I.H. and defended his work. “I am not a eugenicist,” he said.

Dr. Pesta’s collaborators had a history of scrounging for data to support their fringe theories and of using unreliable methodologies. 

Bryan Pesta was mentioned in the report "Race Science, Inc."

"Bryan Pesta, a former recipient of Pioneer money who is now part of HDF’s underground research team."

HDF is Human Diversity Foundation, since officially renamed Polygenic Scores LLC, owned by Kirkegaard.

I was disappointed that the NYTimes does not mention "Race Science, Inc.," published by the British organization Hope not Hate. That article gives a fuller understanding of how these racists work together. Kirkegaard is basically Pesta's employer, and I expect that obtaining data under false pretenses is part of the job of an underground research team member.

Kirkegaard has long been a fan of taking others' data without permission, another useful fact about Kirkegaard left out of the NYTimes article.

I do like the fact that the Times article points out that the "science" done by these race scientists is pure bullshit, like them inventing an ethnicity called "USA Black." One of Kirkegaard's other employees, the neo-Nazi Bo Winegard (also mentioned in the Race Science Inc. article), along with his twin brother Ben, explained their race theories a decade ago in the gutter racist publication Quillette in an article called "The Reality of Race and the Abhorrence or Racism."

...racial categories are like film categories (e.g., drama, horror, comedy). Film categories are certainly real in the sense that they offer predictive power. If one knows that A Nightmare on Elm Street is a horror film, one can be reasonably certain that it will be dark, scary, and violent. But film categories are not immutable essences that perfectly sort movies into distinct types. A genre-based satire like Scream, for example, does not snugly fit into any of the traditional film categories. It might be horror; it might be comedy; it might be some previously unknown combination of the two. Furthermore, there aren’t a fixed number of film categories. The amount and the granularity of film categories depend upon the interests of the people using them. Your friend might use four (horror, comedy, drama, and science fiction), whereas Netflix might use an apparently limitless and startlingly specific supply. (See Daniel Dennett’s book for a variety of points and related examples centering on the topic of species). 

The same principles apply to racial categories. If one knows that Thomas is a Caucasian, one can be reasonably sure that Thomas has relatively light skin, and that he has recent ancestry in Europe.

The Winegards' use of "Caucasian," a scientifically obsolete term tells you exactly how scientific they are. But then, all of the Winegards' race science originates directly from the 18th century, which is when the term Caucasian was invented.

They explain in their article that their classification of human "races" is as scientific as film categories - that is, completely subjective, or as I pointed out when I wrote about the article, what some might call "postmodernist."

Steven Pinker is a big fan of that article.

So this is the type of dum-dum who is grabbing data without permission and trying to use it to justify their own racism.

The NYTimes article mentions a couple of other race science ghouls: John G. R. Fuerst  - believed to be an anti-Semite, not a surprise considering his connection to Kirkegaard; and Jordan Lasker. The NYTimes article mentions in passing the controversy of its using hacked data by political operative Lasker (aka "Crémeiux") to attack Zohran Mamdani during his successful mayoral candidacy.

The Times article also mentions another member of the international Neo-Nazi and race pseudoscience league, Michael Woodley of Menie, but not by name: 

The agency discourages “stigmatizing research” that could promote “negative stereotypes” or cause “social detriment.” That is, in part, a nod to eugenics, a discredited field of research asserting that certain races, usually white Europeans, are genetically superior. Such ideas — and the pseudoscientific studies that support them — have been used to justify violence, including by the gunman who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo in 2022.

The link for "pseudoscientific studies" goes to an archive of the NYTimes article called A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting which talks about how Woodley's racism was included in the manifesto of the gunman responsible for the 2022 slaughter in Buffalo. What the Times article doesn't mention is that Woodley is a participant in annual meetings of the gutter racist organization the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) and that several other frequent meeting participants were also cited by the mass-murderer. Kirkegaard has participated in ISIR meetings several times, most recently in 2024.

The January 24th Times article refers to its article about Woodley, but doesn't mention Woodley has a connection to Kirkegaard. You'd never know how large the Kirkegaard network is - or even that Kirkegaard is far more pernicious than just "a right-wing blogger in Denmark"  if you only read the NYTimes.

Emil Kirkegaard thinks the NYTimes is pro-race science and claims to be happy about the article. 

But Jordan Lasker is less happy.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the NYTimes, David French has just published an op-ed that whitewashes Bari Weiss' anti-woke grifter university in Austin although French does have some criticisms. French discusses Steven Pinker's now-broken connection to University of Austin as if Pinker is the exemplar of sweet reason and "centrism" and so French does not mention Pinker's connection to Kirkegaard.

In other Kirkegaard news, someone published a paper about the lawsuit for defamation brought by Kirkegaard, which Kirkegaard lost. The main purpose of the paper is to argue against the current British court compliance methodology. But it does say this:

A preliminary issue on single meaning and whether the publications were fact or opinion was tried before Julian Knowles J in 2019. He found the single meaning of each publication was not that Mr Kirkegaard had sexually abused children (as Mr Kirkegaard had pleaded). Instead, he agreed with Mr Smith that their meaning was that Mr Kirkegaard was a supporter of, or apologist for, child sexual abuse, which was a defamatory assertion of opinion rather than fact. As a result, he awarded Mr Smith half of his costs on the preliminary issue, some £13,500.

In light of these findings, given Mr Kirkegaard's previous statements on the subject, it was plain that his action would fail, and he discontinued shortly thereafter. The final cost order in Mr Smith's favour came to some £26,000 (and was endorsed with a penal notice).

During the time that Kirkegaard owed money to Smith, the Manhattan Institute's City Journal ran a hit piece about Smith, which Smith successfully sued to have removed. Steven Pinker had helped to promote that hit piece.

It's hard to believe that someone who cares about his career so much, as Steven Pinker certainly seems to care, would ally with an organization run by a terrible person like Emil Kirkegaard. I guess because Pinker loves race pseudoscience so much, he'll align with anybody else pushing it. 

Kirkegaard and his fellow hereditarians can be seen chatting about promoting race science on Kirkegaard's chat board, wondering if they could get Pinker to help out by setting up "an academic group of anonymous scholars."

But you'd never find out about that via the New York Times.

Legal Eagle weighs in

Legal Eagle makes excellent points:

Some people are yelling get out, some are yelling get out of the car. 

You can also see clearly from Mr. Ross's vantage point that Ms. Good is looking all the way away from him as she backs up and also turns the wheel all the way to the right. In other words, turning to get out of that situation and not towards any of the agents. You can also tell from the footage that the engine is revving at this time, indicating that the car is going to speed up, but at the same time this is all taking place at a very low rate of speed, close to 0, as she's doing what is obviously a 2-point turn. 

At the same time that another agent appears to be lunging into the driver's side door in an effort to apparently turn the wheel to the left towards the agents. You can also see Ross switches his phone from his right hand to his left. That frees up his right hand to pull out his firearm. 

But it's also clear that he never drops the phone and continues recording in his left hand while simultaneously taking his firearm out with his right hand and shoots at least twice. It also seems pretty clear that the reason he was arguably in front of the car was for video recording purposes, and that at any time he could have gotten out of the way. 

And I will opine at this time that holding your cell phone in one hand while firing with the other seems pretty reckless, if not depraved indifference to human life.

Republican Party - the party of cold-blooded murder

Trump is evil, but he couldn't have the power to do his fascism without being aided and abetted by the Republican Party, the party of pure evil. VOTE THEM ALL OUT!!! 

Ice Agents Can Be Charged with Murder

 On Wednesday afternoon, ICE agents carrying out an operation in south Minneapolis were briefly obstructed by a car blocking traffic. ICE agents approached the female driver, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, yelling, “Get out of the fucking car,” and one of them attempted to open the driver’s-side door. After the driver backed up to turn around and move, another agent drew his gun and unloaded three shots into the car. The car barreled into a light pole about 100 feet down the road, and the driver was quickly pronounced dead.

The Majority Report: 

ICE Kills Woman With Gunshots To The Face

And of course the psychopathic puppy-killer Kristi Noem immediately smears the dead woman.

ICE even refused to allow medical personnel through for 15 minutes - MURDER!!!

Killing of Renee Good

ICE agents also prevented a bystander who identified themselves as a physician from providing medical aid to the driver. No medical aid was provided for about 15 minutes and when medical first responders arrived, their vehicles could not access the site because of the ICE vehicles and they had to walk to the driver.^[16] One witness also reported seeing the shooter walk away from the scene and get in an ICE vehicle.^[9][10] United States Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem stated the ICE agent who fired the shots was treated at a hospital and later released.^[17]

UPDATE: the ICE agent is identified as Jonathan Ross. 

More evidence that Ross is a cold-blooded killer.

UPDATE 2: wow, gutter racist Claire Lehmann as the voice of reason - these are strange times.

Jamelle Bouie on Bari Weiss - she was hired to be a regime censor

Bouie details what an absolute grifting right-wing fraud Bari Weiss is. 

It was obvious to me how evil Bari Weiss is when she published her Intellectual Dark Web article, and was a major reason why I started this blog.

NYTimes columnist Bouie is a long-time critic of the race pseudoscience gang, even linking to my personal blog over ten years ago when racist Razib Khan was on the verge of being hired by the New York Times. Which is most likely why Khan hates Bouie so much.

Weiss of course was an employee of the New York Times, which helped boost her grifting right-wing reactionary career, leading to the destruction of CBS news. Unfortunately the only alternative to the New York Times is the even-worse, oligarch owned and controlled Washington Post. 

That's what happens to mainstream journalism in an age of oligarchs and fascism. 

How it started:

How it's going.

 

Moral of the story: grifters gonna grift.

Oh, so that's how Peter Thiel knows so much about the antichrist.

TAX THE RICH!

  

 Great speech by Bernie Sanders prior to swearing in Mamdani.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Happy Mamdani New Year!

This goes out to all the reactionaries and hysterics and race pseudoscience promoters like Claire Lehmann and Bari Weiss, freaking out over Mamdani.

The vocal track comes from Mamdani schooling Andrew Cuomo during a debate. It is magnificent.

Does the Genetic Literacy Project think Adam Rutherford is a "postmodernist"?

I had come across the "Genetic Literacy Project" website before and knew it was an organization of true believers of race pseudoscience, but they didn't seem interesting enough to write about.

Until I just noticed they ran an article about Adam Rutherford, published two years before my series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?" (single page version on Medium) in which they point out that in spite of his often-stated opposition to racism, Rutherford's hereditarian beliefs are quite similar to those of gutter racist Charles Murray.

This is something I noticed myself.

If you've been analyzing hereditarian/far-right media as long as I have, it doesn't take long to figure out that Genetic Literacy Project is on Team Right-wing Race Pseudoscience, simply by reading the article How to argue about ‘race’: Charles Murray and Adam Rutherford are not so far apart by Patrick Whittle which includes this passage 

Adam Rutherford, on the other hand, is an outspoken critic of both systemic racial inequality and of the sort of intellectual racism that The Bell Curve is seen to represent. As his strong social justice beliefs are clearly evident in his personal social media accounts, he is also often simplistically linked to the post-modernist concept of ‘race’ as largely a social construct.

The keyword there is "post-modernist." Actual postmodernism had its greatest popularity in 1970s-80s, and outside of perhaps obscure corners of Academia, almost nobody talks about it today except for the far-right.

For example, gutter racist Claire Lehmann, the founder of far-right and racist Quillette, the ideological twin of the Genetic Literacy Project, uses the term while being platformed by Yascha Mounck, back in May, moaning about "woke":

...but I was very familiar with postmodernism, the denigration of objective truth and empirical investigation. I thought that these philosophies were nihilistic and could only lead to a bad place.

An article in Medium by Michael Barnard discusses the strange, seemingly anachronistic use of the term as an all-purpose bogeyman by the far-right:

Postmodernism is mostly just a form of artistic criticism, but conservative intellectuals are constantly attacking it these days. Liberals are perplexed by the attacks, if they think about them at all. What the heck is going on? 

On the right side of the political spectrum (by most standards), we have statements like these: 

• “Postmodernism, in many ways — especially as it’s played out politically — is the new skin that the old Marxism now inhabits.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Obama is the first postmodern president.” — Ben Shapiro
• “These folks form the current Far Left, including those who would be described as communists, socialists, anarchists, Antifa, as well as social justice warriors (SJWs). These are all very different groups, but they all share a postmodernist ethos.” — Michael Aaron
• “Between the Carybde of pseudo-empiricism and the Scylla of postmodernism.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• “Since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we’ve seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities. It’s come to dominate all of the humanities — which are dead as far as I can tell — and a huge proportion of the social sciences.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Everything to the postmodernists is about power.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Is postmodernism inherently authoritarian?” — Zane Beal

And to be clear, "‘race’ as largely a social construct" is not a "post-modernist" concept, it is a scientific concept that race pseudoscience true believers like Whittle don't like.

The Genetic Literacy Project website does include articles by people opposed to hereditarianism and race pseudoscience, but those seem to always be reprints of articles by people unconnected to the Genetic Literacy Project. 

The most strongly pro-hereditarian articles are written by people associated with the Genetic Literacy Project. For example, Patrick Whittle is listed as a contributing columnist on its Our Team page. Whittle has written for... wait for it... QUILLETTE! Surprise surprise! 

On his own website, Whittle lists an article written for the Genetic Literacy Project in 2019 that has since disappeared from the GLP website, but can still be found via Archive.org. The article, Genetics and race: How do we have this awkward conversation? argues:

In sum, then, anyone discussing genetics and race must be conscious of the connotations and impact of words. And this is especially true when engaging in dialogue with those with a standard social science conception of ‘race’, one in which human evolved biology is seen as irrelevant to social issues — a paradigm, moreover, in which the very idea of human biological difference is treated with the utmost suspicion. Given this latter mindset — and the human tendency towards righteous indignation — it is hardly surprising that many liberal-minded people react badly when confronted with arguments about human difference that they perceive (rightly or wrongly) as morally offensive. If worthwhile or meaningful discussion of genetics and race is to proceed, therefore, it is beholden on geneticists and their ilk to take this into account — not through political timidity but through simple courtesy and common-sense.

In the process of making the case for "human biological (racial) difference," Whittle uses the evergreen hereditarian fallacy that anti-hereditarians are basically knee-jerk hysterics who only care about the morality of hereditarian claims, and never mind the scientific failure of hereditarian claims.

This argument has been used since at least when segregationist Carlton Putnam was using the term "Equalitarian" to attempt to smear Civil Rights proponents. The term has lately been adopted by racists like Bo Winegard, once an editor for Quillette, now working for neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's network. 

Hereditarians manage to shamelessly make this argument by simply pretending the scientific arguments don't exist. Winegard could be seen doing this in Quillette in 2019, and more recently Kathryn Paige Harden tried that old trick.

Now let's have a look at some of the other Genetic Literacy Project team members.

Jon Entine, executive director, has also written for Quillette and has been on the American Enterprise Institute's payroll. His Wikipedia entry mentions the controversy over the organization's connection to Monsanto: 

"US Right to Know, an advocacy group funded in large part by the Organic Consumers Association,[23][24] raised concerns after the GLP ran a series of articles in 2014 supportive of crop biotechnology after the scientists had been encouraged to do so by American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto.[25] The GLP said the authors were not paid for their articles. Entine remarked that he had total control of the editing process and that there was nothing to disclose.[25] " 

In 2020 and 2021 the GLP received US$741,183 and US$494,075 in donations, respectively.[26] 

Note 26 links to the Genetic Literacy Project's 2021 annual report which lists the Charles Koch Foundation (68.5K in 2020) and the infamous Donors Trust (25K in 2021) as donors.

According to SourceWatch:

Bloomberg and The Progressive have reported that lawyers suing Monsanto state in court documents that companies funnel money to the Genetic Literacy Project in order to "shame scientists and highlight information helpful to Monsanto and other chemical producers."[2][3]

Entine is a long-time fan of race pseudoscience. In an editorial about his book in the New York Times, "A Feckless Quest for the Basketball Gene," Jonathan Marks begins:

You know what they say about a little knowledge. Here's some: The greatest sprinters and basketball players are predominantly black. Here's some more: Nobel laureates in science are predominantly white. 

 

What do we conclude? That blacks have natural running ability and whites have natural science ability? Or perhaps that blacks have natural running ability but whites don't have natural science ability, because that would be politically incorrect?

Or perhaps that we can draw no valid conclusions about the racial distribution of abilities on the basis of data like these. That is what modern anthropology would say.

But it's not what a new book, ''Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It,'' says. It says that blacks dominate sports because of their genes and that we're afraid to talk about it on account of a cabal of high-ranking politically correct postmodern professors -- myself, I am flattered to observe, among them.

The book is a piece of good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism (those dang perfessers!) that plays to vulgar beliefs about group differences of the sort we recall from ''The Bell Curve'' six years ago. These are not however, issues that anthropologists are ''afraid to talk about''; we talk about them a lot. The author, journalist and former television producer Jon Entine, simply doesn't like what we're saying. But to approach the subject with any degree of rigor, as anthropologists have been trying to do for nearly a century, requires recognizing that it consists of several related questions.

Writing for AEI, Entine could be seen promoting that failure of race pseudoscience, the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.

Entine and Whittle are the worst, but other team members have shown their comfort with, if not outright allegiance with, race pseudoscience:

Henry I Miller, listed as Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar has written for Quillette.

Steve E. Cerier, contributing columnist has written for Quillette.

And although the Genetic Literacy Project claims innocence over any connections to the food tech industry, one of its team members,  Dr. S. Eliza Dunn (Halcomb) is listed as Co-host of GLP Facts & Fallacies Podcast and Video. According to her Linked In profile she works for both Monsanto and Bayer.

It seems pretty obvious that not only is Genetic Literacy Project devoted to, if not outright owned by the food technology industry, it is firmly devoted to promoting racist pseudoscience bullshit as part of this alleged "genetic literacy."

Far-right race pseudoscience promoter Heiner Rindermann attacks Eric Turkheimer

 

Andrew Y was an ally of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and other members of the race pseudoscience network, but has since broken away. I subscribe to Andrew's channel now, and you should too if you want to oppose international race pseudoscience and neo-Nazis.

In his most recent video, Andrew discusses psychologist Heiner Rindermann, current ally of Kirkegaard, and his attack on psychologist Eric Turkheimer. I recently discussed Turkheimer's bet with Charles Murray (which Murray is on the verge of decisively losing.)

The summary included with the Andrew Y video says:

Prof. Heiner Rindermann produced a racist book summary for Blitzwissen in 2023 and worked with me on far-right videos in 2024, knowing fully well that I was a nazi activist. He is linked to race scientist Emil Kirkegaard, whose girlfriend runs far-right business Liegent (US version of Blitzwissen) together with the current Blitzwissen owner. This is evidently a neonazi network with ties to academia, business, and AfD supporters like Mathilda Huss, who let Kirkegaard live on her Potsdam property from 2021 to 2024.

Andrew Y is a valuable source of reporting on the race pseudoscience network because of his background with them. Most recently he testified that Emil Kirkegaard is involved in the company Herasight, and also claimed that Kirkegaard talked about hiring someone to assassinate a legal adversary.

I hope Andrew Y's work is picked up on by mainstream journalists.

Rindermann had a profile on RationalWiki - here is the archived version - that was censored in the past year, apparently as part of an effort by Kirkegaard and his allies to clean up their online image by suppressing facts about their careers in racism. Possibly in order to clear the way for Herasight to be considered a mainstream and not-at-all racist organization.

So Rindermann, with the enthusiastic approval of Emil Kirkegaard, decided to post a character assassination of Turkheimer, ending by calling him "evil." All because Turkheimer has criticized the work of Rindermann and members of his race pseudoscience and neo-Nazi gang.

Rindermann calling somebody else evil reminds me of the time Kirkegaard attacked me and Kirkegaard's (at the time) legal adversary (the one Kirkegaard allegedly talked about having killed) - as a couple of nuts, while imagining himself, Emil Kirkegaard, neo-Nazi kingpin, as a solid citizen. 

These extremists live on the other side of the looking glass.

You can get a good idea of how far-right and fringe Heiner Rindermann is by looking at his profile on Google Scholar to see the people he co-authors papers with, including this one from Intelligence, formerly a hard-line race pseudoscience publication affiliated with the International Society for Intelligence Research. The paper is a who's who of far-right race pseudoscience promotors, several with direct connections to Kirkegaard: Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre, Aurelio-José Figueredo, Geoffrey F Miller, Noah Carl, Fróði Debes, Craig L Frisby, Federico R Leon, Guy Madison and Thomas R. Coyle. 

Rindermann, Madison and Coyle have all been board members of ISIR. Until recently, Coyle was president of ISIR.

Rindermann is a contributor to Kirkegaard's OpenPsych pseudo-science journal and signed onto a defense of OpenPsych along with Davide Piffer, seen here in this tweet from 2020 being incredibly racist.

And Rindermann is the author of this retracted paper - the retraction notice states:

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article. After publication, concerns were raised about the methodology and dataset used in this research. Independent post-publication peer review has confirmed fundamental flaws in the use of student assessment studies as a measure of IQ or cognitive ability, and in the prominence of individual examples taken from the author's life.

The author Heiner Rindermann disagrees with this retraction.

What a piece of work. As of today Turkheimer has not responded to Rindermann, although I would certainly understand if he never does, since the attack is basically Rindermann having a meltdown, and hardly worth taking seriously. If Turkheimer does respond I will report it here.

Steven Pinker & Jeffrey Epstein & Bari Weiss & Larry Summers & Trump

Pinker and Epstein, apparently on the "Lolita Express"

Although Pinker has claimed to be opposed to Trump, the second Trump atrocity has been in some respects very good for Pinker:

• His "woke" enemies in Academia have been fired or intimidated into silence, thanks to the Trump administration

• Legislation targeting trans people is being promoted by the Trump administration

• Pinker is a long-time ally of Bari Weiss.

•  She is now controlling CBS News, a result of Trump allies/appeasers wanting to curry favor with Trump. And before Weiss completely destroys CBS News, she's making sure to help boost the career of Pinker by putting him in one of her ill-regarded Town Halls.

And although Pinker has criticized Weiss' The Free Press, that doesn't stop him from being a contributor to that right-wing piece of crap.

Well, I've said it a million times - Pinker is a weasel. He only cares about promoting his career and promoting race pseudoscience, and if ethical consistency is an impediment to either, he will jettison ethical consistency. 

A striking aspect of Pinker's intellectual output, long noted by critics, is his habit of promoting two mutually exclusive propositions, or as critics have often called it "wanting to have things both ways."

It seems the only thing that has done any damage to his career at all is his association with Jeffrey Epstein.

Salon:

When Weiss isn’t suppressing reporting on torture, she is busy transforming CBS into a platform for the fringes of the right. Along with hosting a town hall featuring Erika Kirk, Weiss has tapped noted associates of the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including the attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz and psychologist Steven Pinker, for collaborations. This also comes as Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, was spotted this weekend dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after refusing to defend his agency’s independence in congressional testimony.

But as we see, thanks to Weiss boosting his career, even the Jeffrey Epstein connection has not significantly hindered his career.

Another long-time ally of Pinker, Larry Summers, was an extremely close friend of Epstein, asking him for advice on how best to sexually harass one of his professional colleagues.

Recently someone has shared a brief video clip of Pinker with Epstein on what appears to be the "Lolita Express" (see above.) It's funny how many images of Pinker and Epstein there are, considering Pinker claimed to try to keep his distance.

As Inside Higher Ed wrote:

Pinker’s response begins with what he calls an “annoying irony” about Epstein: that “I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him and always tried to keep my distance.”

“I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante -- he would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data.”

Still, he said, because “Epstein had insinuated himself with so many people I intersected with,” and since “I was often the most recognizable person in the room, someone would snap a picture; some of them resurfaced this past week, circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments.” He said that most joint engagements were before Epstein’s arrest, but one was after he served his sentence.

Regarding the 2007 letter, Pinker wrote that Dershowitz is a friend, “and we taught a course together at Harvard. He often asks me questions about syntax and semantics of laws, most recently the impeachment statute.” While he was representing Epstein, Dershowitz “asked me about the natural interpretation of one of the relevant laws, and I offered my opinion; this was cited in a court document.”

Pinker is friends with Trump's "confidant" Alan Dershowitz, lately seen encouraging Trump's dreams for a third term. Deshowitz was "part of the legal team that negotiated Epstein’s 2007 non-prosecution agreement in Florida and later represented him as allegations mounted in civil suits."

Pinker will be speaking to some of the wackiest crackpots of all, Randroids (aka "Objectivists") at their Summer Conference in 2026.

Back in 2013, on my personal blog, I did a deep dive into the career of Ayn Rand, with a focus on her magnum opus "Atlas Shrugged." I began with a pretty low opinion of Rand, but still, I was stunned by how bad "Atlas Shrugged' was on every level - literary, political, geographical and logical. And also by how much her "philosophy" was shaped by her mother giving away her favorite toy, a mechanical chicken, when she was five years old. 

Yes, in spite of the specter of Jeffrey Epstein, and Pinker's alleged dislike of Trump, Pinker and his allies are doing well during the second Trump administration.

Bari Weiss & CBS News suppress information about Trump torture camps

Good reactions from the Majority Report, who are long-time critics of Weiss.

   

 Meanwhile, on Bluesky, the spiked 60 Minutes report has been posted. 

Everybody hates Bari

 

Well as I was saying, CBS News, under the horrific new leadership of Bari Weiss, decided to promote a company that appears to be funded at least in part by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

And now there are the lousy ratings for her town halls.

Wonkette:

It turns out that Bari Weiss is bad at everything. Shockingly, being an uninteresting contrarian with no nose for news, zero discernible personality, and a perpetual stick up your ass about all the things in the beginning of this sentence don’t quite equip you to be the editor-in-chief of CBS News, the network that used to be home to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

Oh, and she isn’t very good on TV, which sucks, since it turns out all she really wants is to be on TV.

The hilariously lousy ratings for her “town hall” with JonBenet Scamsey or the Widow of Chucky or whatever you want to call the equally un-compelling Er*ka K*rk have apparently convinced Weiss that when you’re running a network into the ground, the only proper course of action is to keep digging. So she’s going to do more “town halls,” with equally un-compelling guests, about subjects nobody who matters cares about. They are, on the other hand, the kinds of subjects hopelessly online weirdos like Bari Weiss care about. So look forward to more ratings bonanzas!

The article includes a link to an article where CBS staffers complain about Weiss:

CBS News staffers are less than thrilled with the idea of Bari Weiss, the network’s new editor-in-chief, booking herself as the moderator for a televised town hall that will feature Charlie Kirk’s widow.
“How embarrassing,” one network staffer told The Independent. “Bari’s been Editor-in-Chief for five seconds and has revealed that all she really wants is to be on TV herself.”

Connie Chung could recently be seen ripping the right-wing owned, courtier-lead incarnation of CBS News a new one.

And it looks like Bari's university, the still-unaccredited University of Austin, dedicated to providing a safe space for right-wingers is headed south:

The school, founded in part by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and then-ex New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, promised to upend the traditional university model, which its founders believed had become unwelcoming of dissenting opinions and open inquiry. And proud to never accept government funding, UATX announced earlier this year that a massive donation from libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass would make tuition free forever.

But quietly, it appears that things in anti-woke paradise are not what they seem. According to an analysis from the Chronicle of Higher Education, many of the people who joined UATX at the beginning of the project have departed, either by choice or due to public disagreements with the school's trajectory. Among the group of nearly 20 university employees that have left UATX this year were individuals in vital roles including the president, the provost, the executive director of admissions, and operations staffers.

Lonsdale is (surprise surprise!) a huge asshole.

The article also mentions Weiss' sugar daddy Harlan Crow, who did his best to corrupt the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile Bari's reactionary ghoul gang, The Free Press is still shitting itself over Mamdani.

Bari has been failing upwards her whole life, at this point she can either only go down - or get a job with the Trump administration. 

UPDATE December 22: Everybody hates Bari EVEN MORE

Apparently Weiss spiked a story that was bad for Trump:

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

The only thing that Weiss has ever been good at is telling wealthy right-wing men what they want to hear, to get money out of them.

Even Glenn Greenwald