The Free Press - the right-wing racist Bari Weiss grift

Bari Weiss calling her media outlet "The Free Press" is about as accurate as Donald Trump calling his media outlet "Truth Social." But many people are stupid and willing believers of right-wing grifters and fascist traitors.

I recently predicted in a comment on Threads that NPR's former editor Uri Berliner will soon reappear as either an employee of Weiss; running a right-wing plutocrat-funded Substack; or as a member of a right-wing think tank. So far my comment has received 223 likes. People are finally beginning to recognize the right-wing grift that was practiced by Weiss herself.

Weiss threw a fit and quit the New York Times, claiming it was too liberal and Uri Berliner quit NPR for the same reason. Weiss quit not long after she had a chance to promote her good buddies as "The Intellectual Dark Web." 

In 2020 I discovered Quillette's former editor Toby Young (recently seen on the racist Substack Aporia) complaining that the big article Weiss was planning about him and other far-right racists - no doubt another excuse to complain about liberals and the left - was not going to be published since Weiss had quit.

I suspect that the NYTimes refused to run a second "Glory of the IDW & friends" article and that is one of the reasons Weiss quit. 

Weiss has done very well for herself since then - financially, if not reputationally - by making friends with a bunch of right-wing activist billionaires, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and most notoriously, that corrupter of Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court, Harlan Crow, Weiss's "Sugar Daddy." 

"The Free Press" has a soft spot for filthy, treasonous, would-be dictator Trump, as discussed in this New York Magazine article.

Berliner hasn't yet revealed his new career as a right-wing grifter, but I'm keeping a look out. I took a look at "The Free Press" writers list to see if he is there yet, but did not see him. But as you might have guessed, the list is full of right-wing ghouls, grifters and racists, many of whom have written for far-right racist Quillette:

• Francesca Block - right-winger who claims on Twitter that her working for right-wing propaganda outlet "The Free Press" means journalism is not dead. I assume she was hired on the basis of her work for the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, writing articles like "Meet the American millionaire Marxists funding anti-Israel rallies."

• Nellie Bowles - wife of Bari Weiss. She's a big fan of stochastic terrorism-promoting psychopathic LibsofTikTok. 

• Katherine Boyle is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is a leader of techno-fascism. So I should add Marc Andreessen to the list of Bari Weiss's right-wing billionaire pals.

• Margi Conklin - hyper-natalist Nazi-sympathizer Elon Musk better not find out about Conklin's refusal to have children. Conklin is managing editor of "The Free Press" and doesn't appear to have written anything for it yet. Unfortunately for Margi, her husband Christopher Yates has nice things to say about NPR - the current target of the Uri Berliner-lead attempt to defund public radio. Margi's bosses better not find out!

• Matti Friedman - appears to write exclusively about Israel, and was accused by the Associated Press of lying when Friedman claimed the AP was biased against Israel. Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him for this round of Israel-Gaza hostilities. Attacking critics of Israel is Bari Weiss's oldest and possibly favorite public cause.

• Martin Gurri - right-wing ghoul, works for the Koch-funded and -controlled think tank the Mercatus Center, author at the disgraceful, sued-for-libel City Journal and denier of systemic racism (of course.)

• Rob Henderson - right-wing racist ghoul who loves Peter Thiel oh so much, has written for Quillette. Pals around with neo-Nazi Richard Hanania.

• Coleman Hughes - a reliable source of attacks on all Black-related issues such as reparations and the 1619 Project and is a defender of race pseudoscience in Quillette. 

• Eli Lake - claims to be anti-Trump but often defends Trump and others on the far right. Promotes Quillette on Twitter.

• Walter Kirn - business partner of disgraced journalist  and infamous misogynist Matt Taibbi.

• Douglas Murray - British white supremacist, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. I've mentioned him quite a few times on this blog. Current Affairs writes: "...as earlier critics of his work have noted, he packages white supremacist and xenophobic ideas in a way that makes them more palatable to the mainstream." Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him. Murray has written for Quillette, of course.

• Joe Nocera - token liberal, but maybe he's becoming right-wing now for that easy post-retirement grifter income.

• Vinay Prasad - anti-vax crackpot - "In October 2021, Prasad prompted social media controversy when he published a blog post comparing the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response to the beginnings of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich."

• Olivia Reingold - the Trump-loving Republican Security Council are big fans. Reingold can be seen on Twitter promoting the "Twitter files" lies and defending hiring far-right racist piece of shit political hack Ben Shapiro a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Reingold claimed hiring Shapiro would "legitimize" Politico. To understand what a far-right ghoul Reingold is, it helps to learn more about Shapiro at the always excellent Some More News. 

• Peter Savodnik has written for racist Quillette, taking up the standard right-wing racist political line that systemic racism must not really exist because "we certainly can’t experience systemic racism, not in the way that “experience” is understood by philosophers or, for that matter, judges." I have no doubt that Savodnik is, like Quillette and its founding editor Claire Lehmann, an "hereditarian."

• Abigail Shrier - right-wing ultra-ghoulish trans-phobic political operative. So perfect for the Bari Weiss grift. Quillette author, naturally.

• Rupa Subramanya - right-wing Canadian idiot, big fan of Julian Assange and Elon Musk, "slave to (her) cat." Hates Justin Trudeau, of course.

• Suzy Weiss - sister of Bari Weiss, so unsurprisingly a right-wing grifter, enjoying that sweet nepotism.

• Oliver Wiseman - defender of that weasel Steven Pinker for the far-right Libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education. That says it all.

• Leighton Woodhouse - right-wing ally of far-right nuclear power shill and climate change denier Michael Shellenberger

• Emily Yoffe - odious right-wing grifter who has written for the equally odious "Persuasion" and  prefers to blame drunken women for rape.

So there you have it - all the far-right favorites: racism, neo-Nazism, Trumpism, transphobia, anti-vax crackpottery, misogyny, climate change-denialism, stochastic terrorism and worship of far-right activist billionaire sugar daddies. 

What a toxic brew.

Jesse Singal defends Jon Haidt - all the racists approve

By some miracle, a discussion of the career of Jonathan Haidt, in the New Yorker, actually included a mention of Haidt's support for race pseudoscience:

Haidt had risen to public-intellectual fame in the early two-thousands via his work on positive psychology, but “Coddling” turned him into a folk hero in a frequently specious war against cancel culture, winning him fans among the revanchist likes of Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, and Jordan Peterson. He has often taken a both-sides approach to political conflict that equates leftist activism with deadly right-wing extremism. (A section in “Coddling” that deals with the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists and the counter-demonstrators it drew, in Charlottesville, is an especially egregious example of this tendency.) He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism—and the purported accuracy of stereotypes.

To understand just exactly how racist Haidt's beliefs are, it's useful to know that Jesse Singal, infamous transphobe and supporter of Steve Pinker, immediately jumped in to defend Haidt and then ALL THE RACISTS jumped on Singal's thread to shout amen, including the most infamous racists, Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard and Emil Kirkegaard.

As is written in "The Heritability Fallacy" a paper published in 2016:

The term ‘heritability,’ as it is used today in human behavioral genetics, is one of the most misleading in the history of science. Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait. Because we already know that genetic factors have significant influence on the development of all human traits, measures of heritability are of little value, except in very rare cases. We, therefore, suggest that continued use of the term does enormous damage to the public understanding of how human beings develop their individual traits and identities.

But hereditarians benefit from the confusion over the term and so they will never drop it.

But being stupid and wrong has never prevented a mediocre white man from becoming a celebrity intellectual, just ask Steven Pinker.

Elon Musk's Hitler Problem

 Another great one from Some More News. Also mentioned in this video: Jordan Peterson and Andy Ngo.

More anti-trans hatred promoted by the NYTimes

Carole Hooven - hardcore hate-monger
-------------------------------------------------

Oh look, Steven Pinker's protégée, the right-wing grifter Carole Hooven and right-wing grifter Alex Byrne, are promoted in today's NYTimes with their predictably transphobic op-ed piece "The Problem with Saying 'Sex Assigned at Birth'." 

The two grifters whine about the phrase "sex assigned at birth" and at the end, actually fall back on brevity as their last argument:

Meanwhile, we can each apply Strunk and White’s famous advice in “The Elements of Style” to “sex assigned at birth”: omit needless words.

Carole Hooven and Alex Byrne are not simply word Nazis - they are huge fans of the monstrously evil "Kiwi Farms" as I have documented on this site. Byrne has gone so far as to use illustrations in his own book from Nina Paley, a horrific hate-monger who glorified Kiwi Farms in her hateful Gender War cards. 

And Hooven was seen promoting racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard a couple of years ago on Twitter.

But just my calling Hooven a protégée of Pinker should be enough to clue you in that she is a horrible far-right grifter who makes a living by spreading hatred and evolutionary psychology pseudoscience. In addition to the NYTimes she just published in racist right-wing ghoulish Quillette. More evolutionary psychology twaddle - of course. Pinker has a long history of promoting racists and other horrible people, like Steve Sailer, Razib Khan and most recently Richard Hanania.

I suspected Hooven and Byrne were married - I found out for sure thanks to the article Alex Byrne vs. transgender people. Oh how adorable, a husband-wife hate-monger team. Reminds me of the grifting ivermectin ghouls Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, those lovers of game theory.

Meet Coel Hellier, apologist for white supremacist Johann Blumenbach and race pseudoscience

I'd never heard of Hellier until he decided to publish in right-wing hereditarian garbage rag
Quillette, specifically to defend race pseudoscience.

Hellier is a professor of astrophysics - what is it about physicists that make them such absolute assholes? 

Biologists, like Robin May who has a PhD in mammalian cell biology, agree that race is bullshit - but physicists always think they know more than anybody else about everything. 

Just like that idiot Sabine Hossenfelder.

And like Hossenfelder, Hellier is impressed by hereditarian charlatan Steven Pinker, who is a psychologist for chrissakes - psychology is the softest of all the sciences. But Pinker, like many a white male mediocrity, is convinced that he has all the answers on any given topic, although he's often been accused over the course of his career of advocating for two opposing beliefs at the same time.

And he's a hard-core, if weaselly, hereditarian.

Hellier attempts to rehabilitate Blumenbach:

After citing many examples of “negroes of capacity,” whom he considers comparable  to the inhabitants of “well-known provinces of Europe’’, he concludes that:  

there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro.

Those do not read like the thoughts of a man motivated by a desire to establish a racial hierarchy that would justify slavery.

Blumenbach got a lot right. And he drew his conclusions, as a scientist should, from a thorough analysis of the anatomical evidence. 

If you are the kind of person who is too ignorant or lazy to bother to find out anything about Blumenbach on your own - in other words, Quillette's target audience - you might simply accept Hellier's insistence that Blumenbach was a real scientist and not at all a racist.

But anthropologist Marvin Harris has the goods on Blumenbach:

...Johann Blumenbach in Germany and Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in France, were in their own fashion white supremacists. Both believed that Adam and Eve had been white (God’s image!). Both regarded the emergence of other types as a form of “degeneration.” But unlike the racists of the nineteenth century and thereafter, both Blumenbach and Buffon believed that the degenerative course of raciation could be reversed and that under proper environmental control all the contemporary forms of man could be made to revert to the original...

But then Harris is merely an anthropologist not a professor of astrophysics, so presumably Hellier dismisses anything he says.

Hellier is a right-wing extremist who promotes Republican political operatives like failed scientist Colin Wright and evil Trump-ghoul Christopher Rufo. He's part of idiot Lee Jussim's racist reactionary gang too. He published a piece in the Heterodox STEM Substack (where racists and Nazis are welcome) which is run by far-right reactionary Dorian "I hate feminism" Abbot. And can be seen retweeting all kinds of reactionary idiots like the Bo Winegard-promoting Jerry Coyne.

And he's an anti-trans fascist. What did you expect?

Thanks for reading, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard - are you still hiding out from the law at Das Landhaus Adlon?

Apparently racist weirdo Emil O. W. Kirkegaard hate-reads Pinkerite, as I discovered today.

He included a screen cap of my previous post, but of course did not include a link to my site because he's a chickenshit loser.

It's so good to know that my website has the ability to annoy a Nazi POS, even a little.

Kirkegaard is mad at me and Oliver Smith because back in 2016 racist crackpot Richard Lynn told Kirkegaard that he could say he's affiliated with The Ulster Institute for Social Research, which Kirkegaard continued to do until at least September 2023, but Smith told me, with evidence, that very recently the Ulster Institute says Kirkegaard is NOT affiliated. And I found Smith's evidence credible.

Hey Kirkegaard, if there's confusion over your affiliation, the source of the problem is at the Ulster Institute. Here's a thought - contact them and get them to send you a letter explaining what happened some time between 2016 and 2024, to cause your disaffiliation, and then share it publicly.

Unless of course you are lying - and you already knew Ulster Institute no longer considered you affiliated but you kept on making the claim anyway, because contrary to your phony insouciance, an affiliation with the Ulster Institute does mean something.  It makes it look like you have a bona fide institutional affiliation, which might impress someone who does not know anything about the Ulster Institute.

I'll bet that's how Kirkegaard got invitations to the International Society for Intelligence Research until Abdel Abdellaoui blew the whistle on him for having no credentials.

You have to laugh at Kirkegaard's reply to his rightwing ghoul friends like "Based Psychologist" concerning the fact that the Manhattan Institute settled out of court over its defamatory article.  Kirkegaard downplays the fact that the Manhattan Institute recognized it had no legal grounds to stand on, and would be publicly embarrassed by the story in the media (not to mention the potential reputational risk of being associated with Kirkegaard) if they went to court, which is no doubt why they settled. 

In my post I speculated that the Manhattan article was published at the behest of Kirkegaard. Even though he posted a screen cap of my saying this, I notice Kirkegaard does not deny it.

It's also funny that Kirkegaard complains that Smith is "causing trouble" when Kirkegaard has devoted his life to promoting racism and in addition, avoids paying his legal bills by taking refuge with Nazis. 

 

So what exactly is the deal with Emil O. W. Kirkegaard?

Emil Kirkegaard is an international man of douchbaggery, and last I focused on him, was possibly hiding out from the law in Germany.

Kirkegaard has claimed an association with the Ulster Institute for Social Research, a racist organization associated with the infamously racist publication Mankind Quarterly.

However, Oliver Smith, while trying to track down Kirkegaard because Kirkegaard owes him money (due to a legal judgement against Kirkegaard) received a letter from the Ulster Institute saying:

...but (Kirkegaard) is not, as he claims, affiliated to the Ulster Institute.

Who would have guessed that Emil Kirkegaard is a liar?

Smith shared the letter, see below.

Smith was the subject, probably at the behest of Kirkegaard, of a smear campaign by the Manhattan Institute and City Journal. When Smith fought back through the courts, the article was removed and then the Manhattan Institute settled out of court with Smith.

For some reason Steven Pinker isn't tweeting about that, after he was fully onboard the smear campaign.

 

Self-admitted stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik revealed as astounding ignoramus

Per the Advocate:

The internet lit up over the weekend when a 53-minute long interview with right-wing extremist Chaya Raichik went viral. Taylor Lorenz, a technology columnist for TheWashington Post who has followed internet culture for years, spent almost an hour asking Raichik a range of questions about Libs of TikTok and the hate the social media account has generated, only for Raichik to not really seem to be able to answer most of them — and at one time Raichik awkwardly shows Lorenz a video of oral sex.

In an era where social media platforms have become the battlegrounds for ideological wars, few figures have stirred as much controversy as Raichik, the 29-year-old woman behind the Libs of TikTok account. Known for her incendiary posts targeting the LGBTQ+ community, Raichik has amassed a following of millions that hang on her every tweet and tirade against what she perceives as the radicalization of gender and sexuality in society.

Here is the interview. Raichik is monstrously evil and was promoted by Bari Weiss.

 

A peek inside techno-fascist clown college - The New Inquiry profiles the University of Austin

I laughed and laughed at the pretentious yet oafish, resentment-driven nitwits at the university funded by fascists and techno-fascists, described in the New Inquiry's article An American Education: Notes from UATX.

But at least it contains confirmation that the "Intellectual Dark Web" has always been about techno-fascism and a "natural aristocracy." Techno-fascists Joe Lonsdale and Marc Andreessen are featured:

For all of UATX’s supposed concern about “the culture,” the soul, the ethic of America, what at last constituted its core was this limitless faith in the goodness of the free market and entrepreneurship, of accumulating capital by endlessly making new products. Integral to this faith was a conviction about who merited such wealth and the political power that accompanied it. This who came into focus toward the close of the entrepreneurs’ talk. “There’s something very scary in our society—where this idea of a natural aristocracy,” Lonsdale said at the end, “has like really fallen out of favor.” Here it was, for a flash unconcealed by euphemism: “a natural aristocracy.”

At some level, Lonsdale—who displays the verbal intelligence of an 18-year old fratboy and who, moments later, would declare that when founding a company “you want whatever unfair advantages you can get”—doesn’t care about “natural” ability. What the author of tweets claiming “average black culture” is “broken” cares about is justifying existing economic and racial inequality and those, like himself and Andreessen, who reap massive rewards from it.

By the way, Andreessen and Lonsdale are not unlikely to reap some financial rewards from their very participation in UATX. Consider it. Andreessen and Lonsdale champion AI at UATX. Two weeks later, Bari Weiss publishes an article by Andreessen in The Free Press, “AI Will Save the World.” Wait another week or so. UATX then uploads a video recording of the Andreessen-Lonsdale talk, titling it, “Will AI Save the World?” Lonsdale posts the same video to his YouTube channel, where it gets almost 45k views, and tweets a clip from it, which gets over 700k. The upshot: a billionaire and a millionaire whose VC firms have a tremendous financial stake in AI get to widely broadcast the value of their securities. In the grand scheme of business strategy, this chain of events may be minor, but it represents just one of the many channels through which UATX’s founders and friends reinforce their wealth and influence.

But Peter Boghossian was there to provide laughs:

It happened to be Father’s Day, so when Peter (Boghossian), in between lauding UATX’s rigorous admission standards, mentioned a son, I wished him a happy one.

“Oh thanks,” he said. “I got jack and shit.” Muzak dribbled out of the hotel sound system.

“Shuttle’s here!” Loren Rotner, Assistant Chief Academic Officer, soon said, looking up from his phone. We all stood.

Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?”

I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful.

“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.

It should be noted that Boghossian is pushing 60. What an absolutely pathetic loser he-man wanna-be. 

Boghossian shows up a little later...

Pano Kanelos, president, stood up. It was time for the opening remarks. Our chatter lulled, and he began to speak in gentle, benevolent tones. He told us that we weren’t starting a university; we were a university. This is what a university looks like: people coming together for conversations, much like the ones we’d been having over our complimentary chicken dinners. “Dia-logue,” he said. “From the Greek, logos.” Two rational beings, engaged in rational discourse. He smiled. We smiled. And with little further ado, he introduced Peter, whom the other students had not yet had the good fortune of meeting. Peter, Pano told us, was “kicking butt in the righteous name of freedom.”

Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”

What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.

He turns his back to the audience, hunches slightly and strides, stroking his chin. He is Rodin’s thinker set in manic motion; he is a relentless logician in his study at midnight; he is a frantically philosophical gremlin … —BAM! He wheels around and stalks forward and slings his index finger out toward a student, demands of him whether climate change is real?! and how certain is he?! and why?!—BOP! He points at another student, asks whether gender is a social construct, whether trans women are women?! He cites Socrates and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He staggers and weaves: as a boxer dances, so Peter lectures. He is the professor you never had; he is a squall of raw intellect; he is Robin Williams in the Dead Poets Society, but ripped. He is putting a gun to the head of your most precious assumptions.

Oh man, if you created a character like that in a play, nobody would buy it.

Seth Dillon, the sociopath who funds the psychopath Chaya Raichik of LibsofTikTok was perfectly described:

Up next, Mr. Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, or “the Onion for evangelicals,” as New Yorker writer Kalefa Sanneh has nicely put it. (They have headlines like, “Man Caught Drinking Bud Light Insists He’s Not Gay.”) Dillon spoke about “Canceling Comedy” the evening of the second day. Scoffing at opposition to “punching down” in comedy, he raised his eyebrows and leered and smirked. He demonstrated an impressive command of alliteration: “Nothing,” he said, “undercuts lunacy and lies like laughter.” He licked Mr. Elon Musk’s boots, exclaiming that “the world’s richest man took matters into his own hands,” bought Twitter, “and declared comedy legal again.” In his beard and suit, he was a spectacular manchild.

It's so hard to decide who is more repulsive, Dillon or Boghossian. But wait, here comes Rob Henderson and Richard Hanania!

Unlike most of the previous speakers, he was not alone on stage but sat facing UATX professor Rob Henderson. This gave some unsuspecting students the impression that the two might argue. Perhaps Henderson and Hanania disagreed about something. Perhaps the “constructive debate” advertised by UATX’s website was imminent. As if conscious of this expectation, Henderson put on a funny little voice and asked Hanania if he could define the word “woke,” cleverly saying, “I think being woke just means you’re a good person.…” Hanania obliged Henderson, providing his personal genealogy of the term, before launching into a frantic invective against Affirmative Action and DEI. Following some warped line of thought whose only logic was that of racism, Hanania burst out that he’d “rather punish people for something they have no control over—the color of their skin” than because “their parents run around smoking crack!”

Other obnoxious freaks who get shout-outs include Katie Roiphe, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Jordan Peterson, Dorian "I hate feminism!" Abbot, and the queen bee of sleazy, sugar-daddy-handout hypocrisy herself, Bari Weiss.

Oh and does "liberal" Steven Pinker still subscribe to Richard Hanania on Twitter/X?

You bet he does.

Mary Trump responds to Jon Stewart's BS

(Southern accent) "I'm jus' a lil ole comedian!"
____________________________________________________

Mary Trump is the good Trump. She hates her Uncle Donald.

She had an excellent response to Jon Stewart's predictable defense of his both-sidesing Biden last week. 

I say predictable because he had previously teamed up with his fellow millionaire celebrity Susan Sarandon in presenting her critics as assholes who unfairly blamed her for Trump.

Mary writes:

In his response, Stewart joked about the backlash he received from Democrats:

“I just think it’s better to deal head on with what’s an apparent issue to people. I mean, we’re just talking here.”

That’s when Stewart referred to my statement that “not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy.”

“It was one fucking show!” Stewart exclaimed. “It was 20 minutes. But I guess, as the famous saying goes, ‘democracy dies in discussion.’”

“But look,” Stewart added with a Southern accent, “I have sinned against you. I’m sorry,” before he insinuated the pushback was propaganda.

In other words, instead of engaging with my actual critique, he set up a straw man. He didn’t defend his false equivalency — he pretended my objection to his comment was that he had made a comment at all.

Besides, Jon Stewart is not just a comedian trying to nail his tight ten at the Comedy Cellar on open mic night. By his own design, he puts himself out to be a serious player and influencer in American politics.

Exactly. He's a serious enough player to say:

“I very much wanted to have some kind of place to unload thoughts as we get into this election season, and I thought I was going to do it over at, they call it, Apple TV+,” he said. However, he added, “they felt that they didn’t want me to say things that might get me in trouble.” 

But when he gets criticism for his thoughts, he falls back on (Southern accent) "who me? I'm jus' a lil' ole comedian."

I would subscribe to Mary Trump's work, but unfortunately she's still on Nazi-loving Substack.

Both Steven Colbert and John Oliver are consistently outshining Stewart.

UPDATE: really good piece at WBUR about how Stewart screwed up:

Biden is old. But he is not corrupt, incompetent or criminal. He believes in democracy. For Stewart to compare the two men in this way distorts reality in the precise manner right-wing propagandists do. He should be ashamed of spouting this kind of claptrap. 

 

And clearly, he is, because he devoted an entire segment in his second show to trying to laugh off the backlash to his first show. That’s how you know Stewart has messed up — he tries to gaslight his critics by accusing them of overreacting.

But here’s the thing Stewart knows, deep in his heart: The political fate of this country isn’t a joke — especially for our most vulnerable citizens. If you’re an immigrant fleeing violence in your homeland, if you’re a young woman impregnated by your rapist, if you’re a transgender child, if you’re a person of color living in a community with white supremacists, the difference between a Biden and Trump presidency is a direct threat to your life, not a punchline.

Racists agree: Lee Jussim is the best

I received a heads-up recently about Lee Jussim's book, "Social Perception and Social Reality" on Amazon.

Lee Jussim is a failure of a psychology professor at Rutgers University whose work (which as far as I can tell involves screaming "stereotypes are real!" over and over again) is so insignificant that the only people who pay attention to him are racists.

He's an absolute disgrace to Rutgers. 

I've mentioned on this blog that among Lee Jussim's biggest fans is the hardcore racist organization American Renaissance. Although being a hardcore racist organization does not stop Donors Trust from giving it money.

Here is the American Renaissance blurb, displayed right there on Amazon, for Jussim's "Social Perception and Social Reality."

American Renaissance has published pieces from Quillette, including work from the Winegard twins, Gregory Cochran and Jerry Coyne. Lee Jussim has also written for the racist, "hereditarian" Quillette. Of course.

The book got a five star rating on Amazon, from seven people, and five people gave reviews. There are no other ratings, by the way. All five people who have read Jussim's book think it's just the greatest.

Jussim could also be seen at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

He's also a buddy of hardcore racist and "biosocial criminologist" John Paul Wright.

Jussim is a devoted member of the racist-right mob, as you can see from his Twitter timeline. He admires people like Bari Weiss and Jonathan Haidt. Also, Jussim appears to have an obsessive hatred of Claudine Gay.

The racist-right loves Bari Weiss so very much. I guess because she knows how to get funding from disgusting  billionaire sugar daddies like Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow.

The actual problem with Jon Stewart

You can tell how Trump-friendly Jon Stewart's both-sides monologue was, on his return to the Daily Show, by all the right-wing ghouls who approved - like Elon Musk.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman testifies that Biden is fine, based on talking to him in-person. Unlike Stewart.

Jon Stewart's monologue was a classic example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

He suggested voting against Trump (the good) was less important than people, in some ideal world, using all their time and energy to fight every day for good causes (the perfect.)

This from a guy who shows up for work one day a week.

Classic Sarandon-style aiding and abetting the very very bad.

Although I have occasionally praised Stewart on this blog, I have had misgivings about Jon Stewart. 

First, when he was promoting the Wuhan Lab conspiracy, and then, even more when he made a video with Susan Sarandon, with the message that anybody who criticized Sarandon for her statements during the 2016 campaign stupidly believed that she single-handedly gave the election to Trump. 

But fascists loved his monologue.

Steven Colbert showed how it should be done - you can criticize Biden without piling on and both-siding, while reminding people that TRUMP IS A RAPIST.

Aporia - the most prominent bunker full of racists on Substack

There is an entry up on Rational Wiki for Aporia now, and it could not be more timely, since mainstream media has finally caught on to how extreme Aporia is.

Only a few months after Jonathan Katz got the word out about how cozy Substack is with Nazis.

I wrote about how the Substack founders are big fans of race pseudoscience promoters a couple of years ago.

The Rational Wiki entry for Aporia demonstrates that Aporia is a gathering place for the usual right-wing and racist, transphobic and misogynist ghouls who are also associated with the International Society for Intelligence Research, and Quillette and the Unz Review and the Manhattan Institute.

I can't believe Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer haven't shown up yet - so many of their fellow hereditarians are there.

From the Rational Wiki entry:

The staff of Aporia Magazine are proponents of HBD, i.e. hereditarianism and racialism[34]:Editor-in-Chief: Matthew Archer, a hereditarian[35] who wants to increase "native fertility" in European countries,[36] dislikes immigration and has strong links to far-right individuals. He has defended the discredited racist research of Emil Kirkegaard and Richard Lynn.[10][11][37] In December 2023, Archer attended a meeting with Edward Dutton.[38]Executive editor: Bo Winegard, a hereditarian known for his pseudoscientific views about race.[39] He was Assistant Professor of Psychology at Marietta College until but was fired in March 2020.[40] Winegard has written many controversial articles for Aporia advocating "race realism" and white identity politics.[3][4][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51] In November 2023, he wrote a dialogue for Aporia supporting "white identity politics", is sympathetic to a "free association" segregation of races and wants to preserve "white civilisation".[41] Winegard is also a writer for Quillette.[52]Editor: Noah Carl, a sociologist who in 2018 was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after it was discovered he had been publishing racist papers.[53][54][55] For example, Carl had written papers for Emil Kirkegaard's controversial OpenPsych pseudojournalsand a paper for the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly.[56][57] At Aporia, Carl spends most of his time complaining about immigration and multiculturalism.[58][59][60][61][62][63] As of 2024, Carl is still involved with Kirkegaard's OpenPsych journal as an editor and reviewer.[64][65][66]Podcast host: Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist and anti-transgender activist, also known for her criticism of veganism.[67][68] Fleischman was a speaker at the far-right pro-natalist Natal Conference in 2023 with far-right extremists including Kevin Dolan and Raw Egg Nationalist.[69][70] She openly identifies as a eugenicist.[71][72]

 

 Magazine writers

Eugenicists and far-right influencers who have written articles for Aporia, include: Jonathan Anomaly, a eugenicist who has written articles for Quillette and co-authored papers with Bo Winegard.[73][74] For Aporia, he has co-authored an article with Diana Fleischman and Ives Parr defending embryo selection.[75] Anomaly was a speaker at the far-right Natal Conference in 2023.[69][70]  

 

Edward Dutton, a white supremacist, anti-vegan and transphobe who writes articles for the white nationalist site VDARE and The Unz Review.[76][77] He is regular speaker on neo-Nazi Mark Collett's podcast Patriotic Weekly Review.[78][79] He has written articles for OpenPsych and has a long history of collaborating with white nationalist Richard Spencer.[80]In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League noted that "Richard Spencer currently co-hosts a podcast, called Radix Live, with Edward Dutton that often features explicit racist rhetoric and furthers antisemitic conspiracies".[81] Dutton was investigated by the University of Oulu and found guilty of scientific misconduct due to plagiarism.[82] PZ Myers has described Dutton as a racist fraud.[83] For Aporia, Dutton wrote an article on the Flynn Effect citing discredited research of Michael A. Woodley of Menie.[84] 

 

George Francis, a HBD pseudoscientist, interracial porn addict and close friend of white nationalist Emil Kirkegaard who is obsessed with researching black men's penis size.[85]Francis has written papers for OpenPsych.[86] For Aporia, he has written an article arguing that black men have the biggest penis size (based on a useless sex worker survey he conducted) and Africa needs to manufacturer larger condoms.[87] 

 

Peter Frost, a far-right anthropologist and HBD pseudoscientist[88] who was interviewed by the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance.[89] Frost has authored articles for the alt-right website The Unz Review[90] and papers for OpenPsych.[91] For Aporia, he has written articles defending the existence of biological races.[92][93][94]

James Thompson, a psychologist and HBD pseudoscientist who holds sexist and racist opinions. Thompson has written that "if women are really important for business success, surely this would show from the very beginning, when companies are being formed" and and "if women were crucial they would innovate and overturn established male businesses with their fresher management techniques".[95] He is a regular columnist on the The Unz Review.[96] One of Thompson's articles for Aporia is titled "Why are black children 11 times more likely to be strip-searched?".[97][98] In another article for Aporia he argued that intelligence research is more important than combating climate change or curing cancer.[99][100]

Joseph Bronski, a pseudonym of a HBD pseudoscientist who writes papers for OpenPsych.[101][102] He wrote an article for Aporia claiming geniuses in society have disappeared.[103] He is certainly no genius himself.

Ives Parr, a eugenicist who supports embryo selection and has criticized trans rights.[75][104] Also a hereditarian and an Arthur Jensen fan.[105]

Ben Winegard, a critic of Black Lives Matter who has written for Quillette with his brother.[106] Winegard has written an article for Aporia criticizing psychotherapy.[107]

 

Podcast

As with the writers, Aporia's podcast speakers have included plenty of racists and unpleasant individuals:Malcolm Collins, a eugenicist and pro-natalist who attended the far-right Natal Conference in 2023.[69][70][108]

Charles Murray, a political scientist best known for co-authoring The Bell Curve. Murray has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist and "one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the Black and Latino communities, women and the poor."[109] He appeared on the Aporia podcast with Helmuth Nyborg, titled "Are Multicultural Societies Doomed?".[110]

Helmuth Nyborg, a retired developmental psychologist who supports HBD pseudoscience and attends neo-Nazi and white nationalist events. Nyborg was interviewed by white supremacist Stefan Molyneux in 2016.[111] Nyborg was a speaker at the Scandza Forum (Guide to Kulchu) in 2019 and attended the event in 2023 with Edward Dutton and Emil Kirkegaard.[112][113]Nyborg was personally interviewed by Aporia[114] and appeared on the podcast with Charles Murray.[110]

Jonathan Anomaly[115]

Edward Dutton[116]

Emil Kirkegaard[117]

Dimitri van der Linden[118][119]

Christopher Rufo[120][121][122][123]

Richard Haier[124]

Toby Young[125]

Simone Collins[126]

Heather Mac Donald[127] a Fellow of the Manhattan Institute. 

 

Richard Hanania[128][129] 

 

Alex Kaschuta[130], an anti-vegan and transphobe who has commented that trans children is "pedophilia with extra steps".[131] Kaschuta is the host of The Subversive Podcast which has featured eugenicist and pro-natalists such as Simone and Malcolm Collins, far-right anti-vegan activist Raw Egg Nationalist and white supremacists such as Anatoly Karlin and Steve Sailer.[132][133][134][135] 

 

Steve Sailer[136][137] 

 

J. Michael Bailey[138][139], a controversial professor of psychology who has a history of writing offensive comments about bisexual, homosexual and transgender people.[140] He has commented that "evolutionarily, homosexuality is a big mistake" and claimed that bisexual men do not exist as all men are either "gay, straight, or lying".[140] Bailey was a member of white supremacist Steve Sailer's Human Biodiversity Institute.[141]

 

Amy Wax[142], a controversial law professor who has has a history of making racist and white supremacist statements.[143] Wax has publicly stated that "on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites" and the country is "better off with fewer Asians" as long as they tend to vote for Democrats.[144] Wax invited white supremacist Jared Taylor to speak to her students.[145] Wax has stated, "Let us be candid. Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white, for now; and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites."[146] Penn Law School's dean, Theodore Ruger, called Wax's statements about Asians "racist", "white supremacist", and "diametrically opposed to the policies and ethos of this institution".[147] In 2023, Penn Law initiated disciplinary proceedings against Wax.[147] 

 

Gregory Clark (Greg Clark)[148], a controversial economic historian who advocates eugenics and hereditarianism. Aporia describes Clark as "one of the world's most important hereditarian scholars".[148] Clark has written for Quillette.[149] He dismisses cultural, economic and social dimensions of inheritance and has been accused of misusing evolution.[150] An article in 2014 noted that Clark "says African Americans’ long, difficult struggle hasn’t been caused by discrimination. Because French Canadians also have struggled to progress, and have not faced racism, discrimination can’t be the reason African Americans have had trouble. Therefore, it must be a problem of genes".[150] In 2021, Clark was a scheduled speaker at the Adam Smith Business School in Glasgow but the event was postponed amid pressure from student groups.[151][152] Clark's eugenics research is cited on Emil Kirkegaard's website.[153]

Nathan Cofnas[154][155] 

 

Razib Khan[156][157], an advocate of hereditarianism who attended the International Society for Intelligence Research conference in 2023.[158] 

 

Gavan Tredoux[159], a eugenicist who has written biographies of Francis Galton and JBS Haldane.[160] 

 

Zac Kriegman[161], a former director of data science at Thomson Reuters who alleges he was fired for questioning Black Lives Matter.

Welcome to Black History Month 2024

We know Black history is important because the race pseudoscience network, also known as hereditarians, is dedicated to erasing it, in order to claim that the Black American inability to thrive since slavery is due entirely to their bad genes.

Linda Gottfredson, the queen of hereditarianism, admitted this is exactly what hereditarians believe:

Rushton and Jensen's (2005) hereditarian hypothesis is that Black-White differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g) are "substantially" genetic in origin.[2]

Gregory Clark, a regular at International Society of Intelligence Research conferences made it explicit per the Economist review:

 (Clark's) work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

I called it the "American hereditarian assumption" in my Rational Wiki entry on E. O. Wilson. The AHA holds that:

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,[148] segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,[149] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

I first became aware of the hereditarian desire to erase history via Razib Khan in his Unz Review column:

So I have to take issue when The New York Times posts articles with headlines such as White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier. What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population.

If we "removed all the history" we would not be aware that the reason the people with partial African ancestry did not move into the general "white" population was because of the "one-drop rule."

It's significant Khan wrote this for Unz Review. Extremist Ron Unz is an important figure in the 21st century race pseudoscience network. He has not only platformed racists like Khan and Steve Sailer, he's outright given them money to promote race pseudoscience. On top of that, he was a student of E. O. Wilson, the grandfather of contemporary race pseudoscience.

Another important influence on 21st century hereditarianism is Arthur Jensen, who claimed that because Black children, growing up during the Jim Crow era did not improve test performances due to a handful of education remediation programs, it meant that Black Americans were essentially genetically, intellectually inferior.

Richard Haier, "mainstream" scientist and one of Jensen's most devoted disciples, promotes the hereditarian belief that intelligence = money. Haier implies that the reason Black Americans have less money is because they are less intelligent.

The denial of Black history is a pillar of hereditarianism in the United States and recently the race pseudoscience network, via Christopher Rufo, has made denial of Black history an important pillar of the Trump-era Republican Party.