Pinkerite's second anniversary

Pinkerite's second anniversary was November 17 and it seems that very little has changed in the world of Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Science in the past two years. 

The first Pinkerite blog post was about Steven Pinker defending race science promoter Linda Gottfredson.

The most recent post is Steve Pinker having kind words for the far-right, race science promoting Quillette.

But a few things have changed since Pinkerite's first anniversary:

• Quillette staff member Bo Winegard has proven to be a hard core bona fide racist.
• Quillette staff member Andy Ngo went from a right-wing grifter on the fringes of the political world to a right-wing grifter at the center of the Republican/Trump party's bogus "law and order" campaign.
• Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Guiffre's testimony provides details that seem to point to Steven Pinker spending time on Epstein's island.

Some Pinkerite accomplishments this year:

• Interview with Maxine Margolis.
• Added race science info to infamous race science promoter John Paul Wright's Wikipedia page.
• Begun adding Natural History column "The Human Strategy" written by anthropologist Marvin Harris in the 1970s.

Top posts of the second year:

• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 1: Race essentialism - 2.24K
• I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and the "biological reality of race" - 1.58K
• The Brian Ferguson Interview - 1.4K
• Stephen Jay Gould v The Bell Curve - 608
• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 584
• The Native American/East Asian "race"  560
• The mind of a racist, part 1: Steve Sailer, promoted by Steven Pinker - 535
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 2: She broke US labor law and bragged about it - 522
• Meet the IDW's rightwing Christian extremist sugar daddy Michael O'Fallon - 454
• James Lindsay and his allies - more shameless IDW hypocrisy - 422
• Four Koch toadies defend race science - 360
• The Maxine Margolis Interview - 315
• Yes, Kevin Drum, Quillette is defending phrenology - 247
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 3: She supports micro-revenge - 239
• How conservative and white supremacist is Quillette? Part 1 - 218
• The mind of a racist, part 3: Steve Sailer and the Unz Review - 215
• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 201
• Quillette, Andy Ngo and the Trump campaign - 201
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 4: Her easily debunked claim about Jackie Robinson - 191
• The Bell Curve Part One: there goes the ball game - 184

I was surprised that my series on Why Robin DiAngelo is Bad, published in June 2019 suddenly became popular in 2020. It seems that bigger media hitters than Pinkerite had discovered how wacky DiAngeloism is and began to criticize the concept of "white fragility." 

It's nice that I'm not a lone voice howling in the wilderness about DiAngelo any more. I will be writing a follow-up on DiAngelo soon.

Steven Pinker still supporting right-wing, race science promoting Quillette

 Quillette is thrilled that Steven Pinker is praising its trash "analyses." Quillette has at least one actual racist on its staff - Bo Winegard, as well as right-wing extremist, Trump-loving grifter Andy Ngo.

Quillette is a complete shitshow. No wonder Peter Thiel loves it.

Peter Thiel Met With The Racist Fringe As He Went All In On Trump

Pinkerite predicts!

 Now that Trump has nothing left and will soon lose the power of the presidency it was predictable that Trump would look to his pal Andy Ngo, the keeper of the ANTIFA grifting flame to promote the "law-and-order" tactics of the most lawless POTUS ever seen.

In fact it was so predictable that I predicted it a week ago.

Andy Ngo has been accused of doctoring a video in an attempt to portray a right-wing thug as a victim.

The Human Strategy: A Trip Through Ma Bell's Zoo

The second installment of Marvin Harris's column for Natural History Magazine, "The Human Strategy" appeared in the April 1972 issue and it's an odd one. Harris tackles the question of why some animal names are used as human surname (zoonymics) while others are not. It's the only work by Harris I've ever seen accompanied by illustrations.

I've posted it below as images and here is a link to a complete PDF of the article.

The first installment of "The Human Strategy" can be found here.

"Defending Western Civilization" is a dog whistle for white supremacy

The latest news about The Proud Boys in Raw Story:

Civil war brewing inside Proud Boys as top leader says he’s done pretending he isn’t a Nazi

It begins:

The far-right Proud Boys gang has long denied that it is a white nationalist organization and has instead claimed that it only exists to defend “Western Civilization.”

However, Newsweek reports that some members of the group are ready to openly embrace being a racist organization and are dropping any pretenses of wanting support of non-white people.

And ends:

(Kyle Chapman) also made clear that he believed talk of defending “Western Civilization” was really just a racist dog whistle all along.

“We recognize that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race,” he wrote.

"the West was built by the White Race" is the most likely reason Quillette staff member and obvious racist Bo Winegard and his brother Ben Winegard declare their love for "the West" and "Western Civilization" in their Twitter profiles.

So what are the connections between the Proud Boys and the Intellectual Dark Web?

Joe Rogan hosted Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes.

Stefan Molyneux - named by Bari Weiss herself as connected to the Intellectual Dark Web - interviewed Gavin McInnes

Mike Cernovich, another named member of the IDW organized a "freedom party" with McInnes and Molyneux 

Ebony Magazine points out that Gavin McInnes and Razib Khan write for the racist Taki's Magazine - Khan's career has long been supported by Steven Pinker 

Both Quillette founder Claire Lehmann and Gavin McInnes worked for right-wing extremist nut job Ezra Levant's Rebel Media.

There are likely more. 

Speaking of McInnes - he likes to portray himself as a decent family man victimized by the Left, often mentioning his wife - who appears to be as extremist as he is - but McInnes made a less than wife-guy appearance in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Why the Alt-Right’s Most Famous Woman Disappeared:

(Lauren) Southern finished on set and ordered an Uber to the airport for her flight home to Toronto. Partway through the ride, her phone rang. It was McInnes. Southern listened to him closely for a few seconds.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this at all,” she said, laughing uncomfortably. Then her face tightened. “See, the thing is, because my moral compass tells me you have a wife and kids, it’s not even in my realm of consideration.” McInnes, according to Southern, had just reiterated an offer he’d made the night before, when she’d been out with him and a group of other far-right friends: “You know you want to fuck me; I’m your childhood hero.”

(When reached for comment, McInnes stated, “As a married man, I have never sexually propositioned Lauren Southern or any other woman.”)

With a grimace, Southern hustled him off the phone. She was speechless for a moment. “Send help,” she said feebly. “Help.”

But really considering how incredibly misogynist Gavin McInnes is - and I don't mean he hates feminists I mean he despises women and especially women's bodies (McInnes is obsessed with ovaries) - you have to wonder what the hell is wrong with Gavin McInnes' wife.

Grifter James Lindsay makes common cause with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer

 Will any of the people who endorsed his book say anything about this? Steven Pinker? Jerry Coyne? Andrew Sullivan?

2020 Bingo

 

The Human Strategy

Thanks to being made aware of the Guide to Marvin Harris Papers yesterday - thank you Brian Ferguson -  I found the original article Big Bust on Morningside Heights written in 1968 by Marvin Harris for The Nation magazine. It was found on Archive.org.

I also was made aware, thanks to the Guide, that Harris had a column in Natural History Magazine called The Human Strategy and I was able to find it, also on Archive.org and I will be sharing it as I find and process each month's column.

The first of them "Warfare Old and New" is available as one PDF and as images below.

Warfare Old and New appeared in the March 1972 edition of Natural History.

Checking out the Guide to the Marvin Harris papers, 1945-2001

Source tweet

Marvin Harris died on this day, nineteen years ago, and today anthropologist Brian Ferguson (I interviewed him in 2019) happened to email me with a link to the Guide to the Marvin Harris papers, 1945-2001 at the Smithsonian Institute Virtual Archives. 

Ferguson reports that the Guide was arranged by anthropologist David Price.

Price shared this photo of Harris on Twitter - wow I didn't realize Harris went through a hippie stage.


I have a few small gripes about the Guide:

The name of anthropologist Maxine Margolis (who I also interviewed) is misspelled "Margoline" in the Sources Used section.

Harris's article for The Nation is written as "Big Busts on Morningside Heights" but the original article was Big Bust - singular. The article with original title is available on archive.org.

I also think the biographical notes should at least make a reference to Harris's appearances on the Charlie Rose show and in a video by Hazel Henderson. I have provided excerpts from both here on Pinkerite. 

A less minor issue is that the Biographic Notes section should, in my opinion, include a mention of Ferguson's role in Harris's refining the emic/etic concept to include the mental/behavior dimension, which I discussed with Ferguson in the interview.

But Price deserves credit for arranging this, it's an important addition to Harris's legacy. Harris is a huge influence on Pinkerite, especially concerning Steven Pinker's race and gender essentialism.

Jerry Coyne finally semi-wakes up

It's been obvious for months that grifter James Lindsay is on board the Trump train, but Jerry Coyne managed to remain obtuse - deliberately or otherwise - until Lindsay literally declared he was voting for Trump and then not even Coyne could play dumb anymore.

But for some reason it bothers Coyne not at all that Lindsay works with - and probably for - religious extremist Michael O'Fallon. I think it's most likely O'Fallon's influence - cash transactions or otherwise - that explains why Lindsay supports Trump.

Coyne certainly was aware of New Discourses, the project run by O'Fallon, Lindsay and Coyne's friend Peter Boghossian.

PZ Myers notes that James Lindsay was a speaker at a conference run by O'Fallon.

Lindsay is also a shameless hypocrite - but then Coyne is Steven Pinker's leading fan boy and occasional mouthpiece and Pinker is shameless too.

You have to wonder if Coyne will ever regret his fervent support for such an obvious con man and grifter like Lindsay, or if Coyne is just as shameless as Pinker and Lindsay.

NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam is part of the media gentlemen's agreement on the career of Steven Pinker

I wasn't surprised that Steven Pinker, in his latest media appearance, this time on a podcast with National Public Radio's 

social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, was not asked about his long-time and ongoing support for race science.

I was surprised that the interview wasn't about Pinker's free speech martyrdom, for a change, but rather focused on Pinker's Panglossian schtick, which, although full of his usual specious arguments is probably the least objectionable of all of Pinker's causes.

As Pinkerite has noted, there is clearly a gentlemen's agreement in the media to refrain from embarrassing Steven Pinker by asking him about his support for race science, a support so extreme he promoted the career of professional racist Steve Sailer for about a decade and has never disavowed Sailer.

Steven Pinker is a know-it-all intellectual mediocrity who has written for right-wing race science promoting Quillette while also promoting the work of many Quillette race science authors including racist Bo Winegard; is a stout defender of race science extremist Linda Gottfredson; is often criticized in reviews of his work for his tendency to "have it both ways" and was caught by anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson misrepresenting studies about prehistoric violence. 

Pinker supports grifting frauds like James Lindsay, and promotes a hobbled pseudo-science called "evolutionary psychology."

On top of all that, even his most devoted fan boy, Jerry Coyne, won't declare with absolute certainty that "Stephen," the bike-riding enthusiast Harvard professor who shows up in the testimony of Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims, is definitely not Pinker.

And Pinker is gob-smackingly, utterly shameless.

So why do men in the media work so hard to protect Steven Pinker from criticism while blowing sunshine up his ass? Why are they so invested in promoting Pinker as a celebrity intellectual?

You can understand why a Koch beneficiary like Conor Friedersdorf and Pinker's professional twin Freakonomics Steve D. Levitt would  be invested in promoting the celebrity intellectual career of Pinker, but I expect something better from the partially public-supported National Public Radio.

I suspect the primary reason Pinker shows up everywhere from the United Nations to Koch-funded events is pure laziness. Steven Pinker has an impressive PR machine and it is easy for media schedulers to say yes to another Pinker media inquiry, instead of making an effort to go out and find the less media-groomed, who actually know what they are talking about and are not part-time political operatives like nuclear energy lobbyist Pinker.

But as to why they refuse to bother him with questions on his activities in support of race science and even bona fide racists is still a mystery. The media has no problem asking Andrew Sullivan about his support for race science. Perhaps Pinker's PR team makes them agree in advance not to ask Pinker embarrassing questions? Or are people in the media so awed by Pinker's status as celebrity intellectual - a status that the media itself granted Pinker - that they dare not trouble him with questions on topics he'd rather not discuss?

Reviewing David Reich's methods

Fantastic deep dive in the New York Times from January 2019 that I missed  - Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. 

I hadn't been aware of Lewis-Kraus, even though I had read and liked his article about the Slate Star Codex for the New Yorker. I found he is highly esteemed, if a Twitter search on his name is any indication - lots and lots of praise for his work, which has covered a wide range of topics. To my amazement, he doesn't yet have a Wikipedia page, something I will find time to remedy soon.

The Lewis-Kraus DNA article focuses on David Reich and his dominance in the field of genetics. I've been interested in Reich since I discovered many hereditarians think Reich is on their side thanks to Reich's March 2018 NYTimes op-ed. This in spite of Reich's statement that race is a social construct. 

However, Lewis-Kraus makes an excellent point about Reich's op-ed:

He was careful to differentiate the idea of a genetic population from the old idea of race, which he agreed was a social rather than biological fact. But he nonetheless gave comfort to those who maintain that on the deepest of all levels our destiny is written into our genetic signature. It was hard not to see that conviction reflected in the findings of Reich’s papers, which seemed to blithely recapitulate discredited theories of Pacific expansion, making categorical claims not only about four individual skulls but about the shape of human history — claims that were essentially indistinguishable from the racialized notions of the swashbuckling imperial era.

Even more important to me, Lewis-Kraus provided a perfect illustration of the problem of trying to understand human societies strictly through genetics, which is something hereditarians Razib Khan and Sam Harris would like very much to do.

Lewis-Kraus:

A thought experiment might help to illustrate this. Imagine that the written history of our current era were lost to time, and paleogenomicists of the future were trying to explain the peopling of North America on the basis of a few bones that dated from between the 16th and 20th centuries. If these bones included the descendants of British, Spanish and French colonists as well as those of Yoruba slaves, the researchers might conclude that European migrants arrived together with African migrants and that their “sex-biased admixture” created the people known henceforth as Americans. From our perspective, those geneticists wouldn’t exactly be wrong about all this — but nobody would accuse them of being right, either.

That David Reich appears to indulge in the same type of thinking as Khan and Harris is a sign he might be more aligned with the hereditarian point of view than I previously realized. And Lewis-Kraus demonstrates that Reich is seemingly getting special treatment by the big science magazines, to the detriment of researchers using different methods and to the possible detriment of science itself:

I sat in the dark next to Frederique Valentin, a French bioarchaeologist who was an author on Reich’s original Vanuatu paper; it was she who made the final contribution that rescued the effort, the Tongan petrous bone. As it turns out, in 2015 she submitted a manuscript to Nature that made an almost identical argument to Reich’s. She had reached the same conclusions upon examination of the cranial morphology of the exact same skulls, which she believed more closely resembled those of Asians than those of Papuans. But her paper was rejected by Nature. As far as she or many others could tell, the only difference between her conclusions and Reich’s were those of methods — hers old, theirs shiny and new — and rhetorical grandeur. I asked if she thought that Reich’s definitive statements about Lapita origins were warranted.

“A small sample,” she replied, “is only representative of itself.”

The controversy over paleogenomics was becoming a near-ubiquitous presence in archaeology journals, and Bedford, as an author on all three Vanuatu papers, had recently written the introduction to an academic forum on the subject, in the journal Archaeology in Oceania. The evident differences between the two competing follow-ups put him in a bit of a bind, because his name was on both of them. “Both papers,” Bedford maintained, “arrive at a similar conclusion,” that initial Austronesian settlement was followed by a Papuan gene flow. But as the introduction continued, it became increasingly clear that he could not, in fact, at all believe that both could be right, and he tipped his hand in favor of the Jena paper, with its emphasis on an “incremental and complex” process that accorded much better with the artifactual record as he had spent his career understanding it.

There may be good reasons why the hereditarians think Reich is one of their guys.

The plutocrat-funded war on Black history continues with Bret Stephens

When we last discussed Bret Stephens here at Pinkerite, it was in reference to Steven Pinker and three other right-wing hereditarians with ties to Koch funding sources, making dramatic claims of censorship over a Bret Stephens column. 

There had been a controversy over Stephens' citation of the often-debunked, highly speculative paper from 2005, the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis co-written by Henry Harpending, a white nationalist and Gregory Cochran, a right-wing creep.

More recently I talked about the plutocrat-funded war on the 1619 project.

And now we see Bret Stephens firing another shot in the endless hereditarian war on Black history. You can't be more obvious you are fighting for the hereditarian side than by citing Quillette, as Stephens does, in his piece for the NYTimes.

I wrote a comment on the article and my comment was published.

Like all who hold hereditarian views - which he all but admitted when he cited in one of his columns the Natural History of Ashkenazis paper (co-written by a white nationalist) - Bret Stephens is hostile to discussing the history of Black people in the United States. The 1619 project includes an excellent piece on the Black wealth gap, which explored the various methods used to steal Black wealth. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/racial-wealth-gap.html

Many people were unaware of the extent of the looting of Black wealth, and until recently many people did not know about the various race massacres perpetrated on successful Black communities, like Tulsa. 

If you don't know of all the many ways that Black people were thwarted in the past 150+ years in their efforts to make a better life, you are more likely to believe the hereditarian claim that the reason Black people failed to thrive in the US, post-Emancipation, is due to their own bad genes. An idea that people like Andrew Sullivan have been promoting since at least The Bell Curve, published in 1994. 

The fact that Stephens cites in this piece Quillette, a right-wing rag devoted to promoting hereditarian beliefs, is a dead give-away exactly where Bret Stephens is coming from. 

The Right is waging a plutocrat-funded war on Black history for the hereditarian cause and Bret Stephens and Quillette are part of it. 

https://www.pinkerite.com/2020/09/jerry-coyne-railing-against-1619.html

What the IDW is really all about and the Dunning-Kruger effect

Married couple Bret Weinstein and Heather E. Heying are, along with Eric Weinstein, the leading exemplars of the Intellectual Dark Web so it's no surprise they are also exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect. As described in the Forbes article The Dunning-Kruger Effect Shows Why Some People Think They're Great Even When Their Work Is Terrible:

Coined in 1999 by then-Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the eponymous Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias whereby people who are incompetent at something are unable to recognize their own incompetence. And not only do they fail to recognize their incompetence, they’re also likely to feel confident that they actually are competent.

Bret and Heather appear to be having a competition on Twitter today to determine which one of them is the biggest exemplar of Dunning-Kruger.

First Bret tells the International Chess Federation how chess works:

Then Heather tells Mathematical Association of America how math works.

These two are truly the perfect combination of stupidity and arrogance.

Meanwhile Eric Weinstein, founder of the IDW, explains what the IDW is all about, which aligns exactly what I've been saying about the IDW all along: it's about claiming Black people as dangerous and violent.

Now is a good time to mention that Eric Weinstein is the Managing Director of Thiel Capital.

Peter Thiel Met With The Racist Fringe As He Went All In On Trump

Some random anonymous Black guy uses bad words and says mean things about the police. And this is presented by Eric Weinstein as somehow "what comes next" for tech platforms and universities.

It's likely that those are references to two of the IDWs grifts - the "tech platforms" refers to the James Damore Google letter grift, and the universities refers to the Evergreen grift. 

This tweet truly does reveal for all to see what the "Intellectual Dark Web" is about. 

That and helping exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger make a living. For as Heying said about the Evergreen grift, quoted by Bari Weiss, in Weiss's big IDW profile:

The exile of Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying from Evergreen State brought them to the attention of a national audience that might have come for the controversy but has stayed for their fascinating insights about subjects including evolution and gender...

“Our friends still at Evergreen tell us that the protesters think they destroyed us,” Ms. Heying said. “But the truth is we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom.”

The quote also demonstrates the way IDW grifters portray their perceived enemies - Heying makes a claim about what the protestors think, not based on evidence, but rather based on what "our friends tell us."

Bo Winegard really is a racist

I never believed "race science" was anything more than an attempt to, in the words of anthropologist Marvin Harris, "biologize inequality," but the Winegard brothers have been as careful as Steven Pinker not to say anything obviously, viciously racist, like using the N word, no matter how vigorously they defended the race science of The Bell Curve. They always maintained a little bit of plausible deniability, which could be convincing to those who haven't been tracking their careers for many years.

But a couple of tweets by Bo Winegard, a contributing writer and a member of Quillette's team, from July 30 of this year are about as racist as they come.

Bo Winegard thinks it isn't racist to "want to preserve a country's racial demographics."

But race quotas is the essence of racism.

Just think for a moment what it would mean to attempt to "preserve" a country's racial demographics.

 Once you determined the correct racial demographic mix you would have to restrict immigration by race. But what if a race increased or decreased too much via childbirth? Would the excess members of a race be expelled from the country? Or would the women of the decreased demographic race be forced to have more children? 

I'm sure the people who want to have an "honest negotiation in the political sphere" about racial quotas would have plenty of ideas for the final solution to that problem. 

Bo Winegard admits in his tweet that race quotas "can take ugly forms" - but when has such a race-based quota social policy ever not taken an ugly form? It's impossible for a race-based quota to be otherwise.

Then there is the issue of who counts as which race. As Bo and Ben Winegard and "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell wrote in Quillette:

 ...racial categories are like film categories (e.g., drama, horror, comedy)...  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 

In other words, anything goes, because racial categories depend on "the interests of the people using them." No matter how much people like Steven Pinker claim that race is a biological reality, there is no empirical race classification system. Even race science promoters can't agree amongst themselves which race categories are "real."

We can easily imagine the kind of interests of people who agree with Bo Winegard. Both he and his brother Ben consider "Western Civilization" and "the West" to be important enough to mention them as things they care about, in their Twitter profiles. Those terms are usually used to mean Europe, in other words, white people.

I've demonstrated many times how incoherent race "science" is, on this blog, and the Winegards' worship of "the West" is another case in point. Race science claims that "East Asians" are the smartest "race" although sometimes race science breaks Ashkenazi Jews into a separate race and then declares them to be the smartest race. You can hear white supremacist Stefan Molyeux and race science professional Linda Gottfredson defining and ranking races by intelligence in a Molyneux interview.

So why do Bo and Ben Winegard love Western Civilization so much, since by their own race science belief system, white people are at best the second most intelligent "race?" Why don't they align with Eastern Civilization, the civilization created by a smarter race? 

It doesn't make sense. But then, neither does race science, and people who promote it will inevitably be revealed as racist. As Bo Winegard has been revealed as a racist.

Two IDWs spread a lie to help Trump's Reichstag Fire campaign strategy

Vulture reports on two IDWs spreading a lie 

Joe Rogan Is Already a Headache for Spotify

The first involves a brush with misinformation. On Thursday, The Joe Rogan Experience published an episode with Douglas Murray, the conservative British political commentator, in which Rogan repeated a claim, derived from a conspiracy theory, that “left-wing people” have been arrested for intentionally causing wildfires in Oregon. That conspiracy theory had already been debunked by several mainstream news sources by the episode’s publication, and while Rogan’s citation of the claim seemed to be more of an aside contributing to the flow of the episode’s conversation on Murray’s “madness of crowds” ideas, the whole thing nonetheless added up to a situation where a piece of misinformation — which might be inflammatory or harmful, depending on how you interpret the impact mechanics of misinformation — ended up being spread further by an extremely popular podcast that’s now being paid for, hosted, and distributed by a major audio streaming platform.

Rogan’s recitation of the conspiracy theory turned out to be inadvertent, and to his credit, Rogan issued an apology over his social media accounts the next day, explaining that he had been misled by an article that he had read.

Here’s the version of the statement that went out over Twitter:

Pinkerite has never mentioned the activities of Douglas Murray, but he is a genuine named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, and certainly just as right-wing and sleazy as Rogan.

And it makes sense that two IDWs would spread a lie that helps Trump. I am convinced that many members or friends of the Intellectual Dark Web are working directly or indirectly with the Trump campaign.

Back in May I expressed my doubts about Rogan succeeding on the Spotify platform, due to his bigotry. So I wasn't surprised to read in Motherboard:

Some staff inside the company feel alienated by Spotify's hosting of certain The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) episodes, according to copies of some of the questions presented to the meeting obtained by Motherboard. The news signals how Spotify, as it moves into the podcasting space beyond music, is facing content moderation decisions more commonly associated with social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Spotify has already removed JRE episodes with some right-wing figures, including Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes.

Meanwhile Hillary hating extremist Glenn Greenwald defends Joe Rogan. The IDW and the far Left have much in common, as I have noted previously - in fact in the same article in which I discussed Rogan's deal with Spotify.

 

Andy Ngo's pro-Trump friends caught planning violence

 The Guardian published the story today:

z

Revealed: pro-Trump activists plotted violence ahead of Portland rallies

Leaked chat logs show Portland-area pro-Trump activists planning and training for violence, sourcing arms and ammunition and even suggesting political assassinations ahead of a series of contentious rallies in the Oregon city, including one scheduled for this weekend.

The chats on the GroupMe app, shared with the Guardian by the antifascist group Eugene Antifa, show conversations between Oregon members of the Patriots Coalition growing more extreme as they discuss armed confrontations with leftwing Portland activists, and consume a steady diet of online disinformation about protests and wildfires.

At times, rightwing activists discuss acts of violence at recent, contentious protests, which in some cases they were recorded carrying out. At one point, David Willis, a felon currently being sued for his alleged role in an earlier episode of political violence, joins a discussion about the use of paintballs.

Where other members had previously suggested freezing the paintballs for maximum damage, Willis wrote: “They make glass breaker balls that are rubber coated metal. They also have pepper balls but they are about 3 dollars a ball. Don’t freeze paintballs it makes them wildly inaccurate” [sic.]

Andy Ngo and David Willis can be seen together in an image in this tweet.

The Claire mentioned in the tweet is long-time Andy Ngo enabler and employer, Claire Lehmann.

Here is Claire Lehmann pushing the lie about a "chemical attack" which I think was invented before the event, planned by Ngo and his enablers as part of the usual grift.

Ngo was caught making common cause with Patriot Prayer last year, reported in Rolling Stone:

The source told the Mercury that Ngo and Patriot Prayer have an “understanding” that the group offers him protection when he covers rallies in exchange for favorable coverage. While this has not been confirmed, and Ngo strongly denies these allegations, an audio conversation between members of the Proud Boys, released by Willamette Week seemed to confirm that such discussions between Ngo and the Proud Boys had occurred, as one man is recorded saying that Ngo was attacked on June 29th because he refused an offer of protection. “Andy Ngo was fucking told that if he wanted protection from the PBs [Proud Boys], he went in with us and he went out with us,” the man says.

When reached for comment, Ngo directed Rolling Stone to his attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who refuted the allegations made by the Portland Mercury. “There have been suggestions made by that story and others that he is part of that group or embedded in that group or took protection from that group, which is absolutely false,” she tells Rolling Stone.

Harmeet Dhillon is not only Ngo's lawyer, she is a Republican committee woman and a rabid Trump supporter.

Jerry Coyne railing against the 1619 project again

If there is one thing that race pseudo-science promoters of the Intellectual Dark Web and their friends absolutely hate, it's people talking about Black American history. And that's because history is the most important weapon against the claim of hereditarians like Coyne, that the reason for African American failure to thrive post-Emancipation is due to their genetic inferiority.

So race science promoters will grab at any excuse to attack the 1619 project as Quillette, the leading media outlet for race pseudo-science, has done. Coyne expresses his love for Quillette's race war yet again. And he even admits that his argument is nit-picking bullshit.

Now some will argue that this is a trivial change, and to that I’d say: “Are you kidding? July 4, 1776 is an iconic date in American history, and the NYT wants to change it to August 20, 1619, so that the founding of America coincides with the arrival of the first slaves.”

It's a perfectly valid argument that 1619 was a founding moment in the creation of the United States of America. And nobody thinks it is meant to literally replace July 4, 1776. 

Coyne's is a stupid concrete-thinker argument, but stupid arguments are the only kind that addled-brained creeps like Jerry Coyne and his IDW friends can come up with. 

They don't give a damn that many articles in the 1619 project provide extremely important information and perspectives on the history of African Americans as I have discussed on this blog. They just want to stop those damn Black people from talking about their history.

I do have one gripe with Nikole Hannah-Jones and friends, and it's that they seem oblivious to the fact that the Intellectual Dark Web is an organized and extremely well-funded project of the Right to attack Black Americans through race science, and the 1619 project would of course be one of their targets. And they are attacking it endlessly. I don't think Hannah-Jones & company were sufficiently prepared for the attacks.

The Intellectual Dark Web and its friends like Jerry Coyne are at war with civil rights and human rights defenders.

Anybody who does anything in support of Black Americans must be constantly aware there is a war going on, and make preparations for the inevitable attacks from the Koch-funded  Charles Murray to the Mark Carnegie-funded Quillette to the Peter Thiel-funded Eric Weinstein, to the Michael O'Fallon-funded James Lindsay. 

And their leader is Donald Trump.

Trump blasts 1619 Project as DeVos praises alternative Black history curriculum

So is this what Heather Heying meant by "we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom"?

Heather Heying made that statement in Bari Weiss's 2018 IDW article. 

It's been pretty clear since even before the article that Heying and her husband Bret Weinstein and her brother-in-law Eric Weinstein are opportunistic grifters, and more recently they are probably working for the Trump campaign like so many other members of the IDW appear to be: Joe Rogan, James Lindsay, Andy Ngo and Bari Weiss herself.

But even I could not guess how stupid and sleazy they would turn out to be. 

Per Business Insider:

Unity 2020 is the brainchild of former Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein, a charter member of the "intellectual dark web" (IDW) who is probably best-known for being the target of a student-led mob on campus in 2017. Unity 2020 isn't a party; it's "a grassroots presidential campaign to restore patriotic, courageous & capable leadership to the United States," according to its website.

Fundamental to the Unity 2020 ethos is the belief that the country faces certain doom if either President Donald Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden wins the election in November. The idea, then, is that a "patriotic" bipartisan ticket can save the day.

The "student-led mob" story was very likely one of the earliest free speech grifts of the Intellectual Dark Web, before they even decided on their little club's name.

Somehow, mysteriously, the IDWs of the Unity 2020 grift can't see a difference between Trump, a treasonous, corrupt, pussy-grabbing monster from hell and a middle-of-the-road standard politician like Joe Biden.

Heying could be seen hawking the "both sides are bad" on Twitter recently. It's so funny to see such a conscience-deficient sleazeball like Heying proclaiming anybody else to be guilty of playing to "basest instincts." 

The continuing dishonesty of Bret Weinstein was on display a little later in the Business Insider article:

A self-described "radical progressive," Weinstein said: "Economic inequality, growing past a certain point, tends to trigger revolts." But he added, "The focus on race on the BLM left is going to drive the entire nation to a place that it has been in the past, where race was a primary feature of how we viewed each other. And anybody who understands the United States knows that moving in that direction will be negative and not positive."

How stupid would someone have to be to buy Weinstein's story that he's a "radical progressive?"

I have to say, though, that Heying and the Weinstein brothers did get me to agree with an actual Libertarian:

The Libertarians and Greens have other ideas about Unity 2020's ambitions. 

"They're absolute f---ing morons," Nicholas Sarwark, the Libertarian Party chair from 2014 to 2020, said. "They don't have any plan for ballot access other than pretending it's not a thing."

Sarwark said Unity 2020's plan is to "transcend laws" by using a kind of magical thinking that he likened to Marianne Williamson's big-on-love and short-on-policy campaign.

"Who's your ticket? Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard? And the runners-up were William McRaven and Andrew Yang. It's like the start of 'Street Fighter': Randomize your fighter and let's see how it goes," Sarwark added.

That was pretty damn funny for someone who admires Ayn Rand.

But I think it's extremely unlikely that they ever meant Unity 2020 to be on any ballots. The likely point of the whole thing is to help Trump by claiming to their idiot social media followers that Joe Biden, a vastly superior human being to Trump (as virtually all human beings are) is somehow on the same incomprehensibly psychopathic level as Trump, thus dampening their enthusiasm and likeliness of voting for Biden.

The IDW in general, and certain members in particular are soulless, corrupt, lying, sleazy grifting rat-fuckers. They do absolutely nothing in good faith and they have absolutely no qualms about it.

Rightwing Watch exposes the garbage Post-Millennial

From a recent article in Right Wing Watch

“They operate like a crime syndicate. They don’t operate like a normal paper where you can trace the money, you can trace the editorialization, where you can trace the ethics, where you can actually understand who is involved in the outlet at any given time and what their purpose is,” ​the former writer said​, wishing to remain anonymous given the publication’s record of attack stories. “It doesn’t work like that. And in terms of opponents, they absolutely would just rather take somebody out than admit that they did something wrong.”

As Pinkerite noted in March 2019, the Post Millennial was already absolute garbage. Only an Andy Ngo could make it even worse:

“Once Andy Ngo started, then it became much more editorial and much more like he was the one who set the tone and you had to write to his tone,” ​she said, speaking to RWW via Skype. “He would tell you to write a story on something, then you would write it, and he would go in and edit it to be crazy and extreme.”