Krugman nails it

I just wish Krugman would find a different platform besides Substack for his "Krugman Wonks Out" blog - he makes excellent observations about Marc Andreessen - but Andreessen funds Substack:

Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires.

To the extent that there’s a valid reason for accumulating a very large fortune, I’d say that it involves freedom, the ability to live your life more or less however you want. Indeed, one definition of true wealth is having “fuck you money” — enough money to walk away from unpleasant situations or distasteful individuals without suffering a big decline in your living standards. And some very wealthy men — most obviously Mark Cuban, but I’d at least tentatively include Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — do seem to exhibit the kind of independence wealth gives you if you choose to exercise it.

The likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, however, surely have that kind of money, yet they’re prostrating themselves before Trump. They aren’t stupid; they have to know what kind of person Trump is and understand — whether or not they admit it to themselves — the humiliating nature of their behavior. So why do they do it?

The answer, I believe, is that many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”

So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration. Read Ross Douthat’s interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the tech bro explains why he has turned hard right. Andreessen says that it’s not about the money, and I believe him. What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.

I had to laugh at this part of the interview:

Andreessen: Of course, that’s true. You could say over the last 200 years, the left, over time, has won most of the fights or even all the fights. 

It's thanks to the left winning that we no longer have slavery. Thanks to the left we don't have children  working in factories. Thanks to the left, Black people can vote, women can vote. Thanks to the left, you can't discriminate against Jews. Thanks to the left there's a separation between church and state.  Thanks to the left you can't arrest gay people for being gay. Etc. Etc. Etc.

I once argued with socialists about their belief that nobody should be allowed to be a billionaire, that there should be a government cap on personal wealth. But thanks to these fascists with souls made of black holes, I am all in favor of limiting the damage they can do to the rest of us by taxing billionaires into extinction.

No disrespect to Krugman, but the movie "Chinatown" (yes I know it was directed by a child rapist) asked and answered the question of what motivates the obscenely wealthy, over 50 years ago:

Jake Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?

Noah Cross: (like Polanski, a child rapist): Oh my yes.

Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?

Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!

UPDATE: Wonkette had an equally critical, if more spicy response to Andreessen:

Andreessen gave interviews this week to both Bari Weissand Ross Douthat about his expectations for governance in the Age of Broligarchs, his thoughts on government funding and waste, all the ways in which non-billionaires have been very mean and unfair to the geniuses of Silicon Valley like Marc Andreessen, how elite schools such as Harvard turn kids into full-blown communists demanding the implementation of all sorts of Stalinist dogma like diversity in the workplace, what he imagines average, everyday taxpayers really think and want, the awesome and wide-ranging genius of Elon Musk, and whatever other topics are rattling around in that entitled and quite oblong head of his. 

 

To put it yet another way, if by the end of an interview even such a cloistered and obtuse mediocrity like Ross Douthat has become incredulous at your absence of anything resembling empathy towards voters or understanding of all the ways they rely on a functioning federal government in their day-to-day lives, well, you really need to step back and re-evaluate all of your assumptions.

Rachel Maddow: a public servant announcement

Rachel Maddow is doing excellent work in exploring the utter depths of corruption and incompetence already evident in the coming Trump dictatorship. Her latest "public servant announcement," as she calls them, is about the odious Pam Bondi, Trump's replacement pick for the only slightly more odious Matt Gaetz. 

As the New Yorker noted:

Since the election, (Trump) has proposed so many advisers of low character and dubious qualification that he has overwhelmed the circuitry of the confirmation process and the public sphere. It’s almost as if the early proposition of Matt Gaetz to head the Justice Department were a way to divert attention from the unalloyed awfulness of so many others: Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Mehmet Oz, and Kristi Noem among them. The dessert for this feast of misbegotten nominations was served when Trump appointed Kimberly Guilfoyle, the longtime fiancée of his eldest son, Don, Jr., as the new Ambassador to Greece—a move that accommodates the son’s fresher affections for a Palm Beach socialite.

The next four years - or however long it takes - will be a shitshow of epic proportions and we can thank all the morons who voted for Trump.

EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK updated

 Also at Academia.edu

• The Nazi Party and Wickliffe Draper were allies
• Draper founded the Pioneer Fund
• The Pioneer Fund funded Mankind Quarterly and the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences
• The Institute for the Study of Educational Differences was renamed Institute of Mental Chronometry. (Both organizations were designed to promote the beliefs of Arthur Jensen who was a founding member of The Institute for the Study of Educational Differences)
• The Institute of Mental Chronometry gives money to the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) (officers of Institute of Mental Chronometry are involved in ISIR) - Emil Kirkegaard has participated in six ISIR conferences, the most recent in 2024, after a brief absence caused by a controversy over Kirkegaard's "sloppy scientific work (and) ...an obnoxious social media presence." 
• The Pioneer Fund's money has been redistributed to the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF)
• Emil Kirkegaard owns the HDF which publishes Mankind Quarterly
• Andrew Conru has funded the HDF as well as Richard Hanania
• Steven Pinker is a supporter and admirer of Richard Hanania, an attendee and awardee of ISIR conferences and an enthusiastic supporter of and writer for Quillette. He's also been a vocal fan of Bo Winegard
• Winegard was an editor at Quillette and is now an executive editor of Aporia which is funded by HDF 
• It has been alleged that Peter Thiel has funded Quillette. According to the Hope article "2019, (Thiel) flew Emil Kirkegaard out for a one-hour meeting to discuss his work."
• Peter Thiel along with Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk have funded Donald Trump
• Aporia and The Jolly Heretic are platformed by Substack which has been funded by Andreessen/Horowitz
• Marc Andreessen has a paid subscription to "The Jolly Heretic" which is funded by HDF
• Musk, who has been dubbed Trump's "co-president" by the American media, supports the German neo-Nazi party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) 
• One of HDF's senior figures is Erik Ahrens, a social media advisor in Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Emil Kirkegaard has allegedly been given shelter at Das Landhaus Adlon, owned by AfD ally Mathilda Huss

Some of the information in this document is from the Hope Not Hate report "Race Science, Inc.".

Jesse Singal: Kiwi Farms needs a more broad-based psychopathy

Jude Doyle is one of several trans people
Herzgal disparages in the podcast episode.
-----------------------------------------------------

Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, reactionary grifters to the core, snipe at their transgender enemies from behind their paywalled podcast "Blocked and Reported" - hosted on fascist Marc Andreessen-funded Substack - in an episode called Premium: Liz Fong-Jones And Kiwi Farms Keep Fighting (The Parable Of Mailfrawd). 

If you think that episode title sounds like an effort at both-sidesing the vicious psychopathic website Kiwi Farms versus one of their targets, you would be right.

I couldn't access the podcast via the website Archive Today, but since I knew that Singal has a sizable fanbase at Kiwi Farms, I figured I could find access there and sure enough, one of the kiwi farmers even had a link to a transcript of the show, which I have now archived via Archive Today.

The transcript has not been corrected for auto-transcription errors. For instance the name Eliza Rae Shupe is consistently misspelled "Shoop." But I'm going to assume the transcript is roughly correct in content, if less so in spelling.

Fairly early on in the podcast Singal demonstrates the technique of both-sidesing Kiwi Farms vs. its critics. My highlight.

Jesse: Anyway, we've discussed before that we think in certain cases there's like a little bit of a moral panic about Kiwi Farms. On the other hand, they do dox people. They do like fixate on these targets and talk about them for sometimes thousands of pages. So it's a little bit disingenuous to host a messaging board – Where in the most extreme cases, everyone's like, this person should kill themselves. This person should kill themselves...

So Kiwi Farms does all these terrible psychopathic things, and yet Singal suggests that concerns about Kiwi Farms are nothing more "in certain cases" than a bullshit moral panic.

A really weird aspect of this podcast episode is the revelation that, in spite of being aware of Kiwi Farms for years, Singal and Herzog apparently only now realize that it has a far-right tilt. 

Jesse: So people sometimes say that Kiwi Farms only fixates on sort of left of center targets. And some other people say they like particularly fixate on trans targets. I think there's something to that. Now, there are some right wing people they get in beefs with. I will say, if you're going to fixate this much on Internet targets, there's definitely more worthy ones than the ones they pick. I think part of their ethos in some cases is like, oh, you want to be famous on the Internet? Here you go. And it can be very unpleasant. 

0:23:12 

 

Katie: Yeah. Okay, well, like, I just searched. I went to the site. I put it into my browser. I did all of the letters. 

Jesse: Katie Herzog, confirmed Kiwi Farms user. 

Katie: I searched for Chaya Rychik. She is the exact sort of person I would expect to have a thread on Kiwi Farms. Nothing. 

0:23:45 

 

Jesse: Well, I think Kiwi Farms probably agrees with her about, like, wokeness and blue-haired elementary school teachers. That doesn't surprise me. 

Katie: But that's my point. Like...
Katie: Can we not get a Kiwi Farms that is a little broader? Oh, wait, actually. Okay, so there's Libs of TikTok Derangement Syndrome.  

 

Jesse: That's the opposite. That's like a thread in favor of her.

(Pinkerite: yes there is a Libs of TikTok Derangement Syndrome thread at Kiwi Farms in which most of the commenters white-wash the actual harm that Libs of TikTok does. Singal was licking Elon Musk's boots not long ago. Musk is an enthusiastic supporter of Libs of TikTok.)

Katie: But that's what I want. I want a more egalitarian, a more democratic. 

Jesse: Why can't we get a liberal Joe Rogan? That's what you're saying. 

0:24:22 

 

Katie: Why can't we get... Trade it in a lab under DNC headquarters. I don't want to have to go to Rational Wiki to find out. 

Jesse: Oh, God. Rational Wiki makes Kiwi Farms look like... I don't know what. But they would never dock. 

Katie: Anyway, so I just wish they could be a little broader in scope. That's all I'm asking for, farmers. Come on. 

Jesse: Right. 

So Herzgal has no problem with the psychopathy of Kiwi Farms, they just wish the psychopathy was a little more broad-based. 

A Singal fan agrees

And somebody - subscribers or plutocratic funders or both - are paying for this podcast. What a fucking world. 

Later on in the transcript, Singal hah hah lampshades the fact that his life's work is pure shit:

0:42:31 

Katie: Okay, so what I'm curious about is, so Liz Fong Jones said that this person was making, that she's responding to a public accusation. So it just seems bizarre that Kiwi Farms, who are genuinely good detectives, they are very good at digging shit up, has never been able to find the accuser.

Jesse: So because I'm not looking...

Jesse: at all... I could devote the next three years of my life to looking at everything they've said about Liz Fong Jones on Kiwi Farms, which I am, thanks to a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

It is funny that Singal claimed I'm tenacious and his good buddy Razib Khan claimed I was obsessed with him, and meanwhile Singal spends his time digging up Kiwi Farms dirt on Liz Fong-Jones.

As with the equally repellent Nina Paley, Singal defends the real-world consequences of Kiwi Farms psychopathy on the grounds of "free speech." 

Jesse: I think you can understand from Liz Fong Jones' perspective why she'd want to pursue action against Kiwi Farms. And she's doing so totally within the laws of Australia. But you can also understand how chilling this is from a free speech and sort of basic internet discourse perspective.

Trans author Evan Urquhart had a good response to that argument:

Kiwi Farms’ whole reason for being has been to suppress the freedom of those they disagree with. Their users didn’t merely express themselves in hateful ways, but took action, often criminal action, to silence others. That’s why these online hooligans should never be allowed to wrap themselves in the free speech mantle. Free speech can thrive as long as Kiwi Farms can’t.

I think that Singal and Paley and other anti-trans grifters make money off of transphobia but want to maintain plausible deniability when the results of their grifting contributes to harm to actual human beings - for legal reasons if for no other.

To understand how insanely un-self-aware both Singal and Kiwi farmers are, Singal recounts, without comment, psychopathic Kiwi farmer ghouls unironically moaning about anybody stooping so low - and during Christmas. 

Katie: But there could also be, I mean, it's possible he got, he quit who fucking knows.

1:10:13

Jesse: Yeah. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is the guy, which I think he is, and that he was fired.

Jesse: News of this was posted to the front page of Kiwi Farms. A lot of Kiwi farmers were outraged that Liz Fong Jones would stoop this low, especially on Christmas and during Christmas.   

Someone on Bluesky created a custom feature that allows users to see if someone is a follower of Jesse Singal on Bluesky. 

All you have to do is go to this profile and subscribe. Then if someone is a follower of Singal a label will appear on their posts. You can also just subscribe to the Jesse Singal Followers block list. Probably a good idea since it's likely that a certain percentage of Singal's followers are Kiwi farmers.

Garbage takes itself out ~ Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins resign

buh-bye
-----------------

Reactionaries Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins have resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

The Friendly Atheist, unfortunately on the fascism-loving Marc Andreesen-funded Substack writes:

...biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).

Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.

None of this was shocking to those of us who have watched him go from a defender of science to an amplifier of right-wing propaganda.

P. Z. Myers writes:

Now, both Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker have announced their resignation from the honorary board at the FFRF. Good. They were a terrible influence, and their departure strengthens the FFRF as a defender of reason.

Of course the rightwing media is playing their sad violins for these poor "censored" celebrity intellectuals.

Sarah Haider, a longtime ally of race pseudoscience-promoter Razib Khan basically admits on her Substack that she finds trans rights so horrifying, she's willing to reconsider religion as a bulwark against those rights:

It is because of this I now seriously ponder what I could not have imagined myself considering just a few years ago: the intellectual value of faith.

But also, the ascent of Trump is the ascent of Christian nationalism and I believe Haider is an opportunistic grifter who knows which way the wind is blowing. She revealed her game plan in a series of predictions back in July:

• Meanwhile the Left, which has understood itself as the champions of the “marginalized”, will increasingly resort to relying on chosen identities as its legitimizing force, with transgenderism leading the way.  

• God will be everywhere and nowhere. The atheists who hate Christianity will go to the Left, the atheists on the Right will go to church. 

Jonathan Turley, a reactionary Fox News contributor and apologist for Steven Pinker, claims that Coyne was censored. 

Coyne has his own blog and nobody who spends a half-second Googling his name is unaware of Coyne's opposition to trans rights. 

And Coyne's anti-trans op-ed is available for anybody to read. So what Turley means by "censorship" is actually that the FFRF changed its mind about endorsing Coyne's opinion.

I mean, Quillette, the racist ("hereditarian") publication beloved by Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins, never publishes my opinions. Am I being censored by Quillette?

Coyne's also part of the "free speech" gang of grifters and anti-vaxxers and racists who met for the Standford "Academic Freedom" Conference. The highlights of that conference were Amy Wax bemoaning the push-back she received from her blatantly racist public statements and Peter Thiel's babbling, Bible-quoting keynote speech. 

It's curious that Coyne, such a devoted atheist, had no public objections to Thiel's religion-based argument about armageddon vs. antichrist.

But Coyne isn't content to merely question the reality of trans-identity, as the Friendly Atheist noted. The actual agenda of Coyne's op-ed is revealed by the claims he found on a virulently anti-trans website:

Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Coyne's message was received loud and clear by trans people and allies. Coyne wasn't only suggesting that trans people are delusional, he portrayed them as sexual predators.

So naturally it's the job of the right-wing media network to pretend that all Coyne said was that sex is binary.

Historian David Blight responds to being attacked by Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald in Quillette

This is one of those instances when my interests collide. 

I have been enjoying historian David Blight's work while doing research for my almost-complete play GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN.

Primarily through Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass, but also through his Yale lecture series about the Civil War and Reconstruction. And let's not forget his appearances on C-SPAN.

So although I've written about Blight on a few occasions on this blog, including Mac Donald's attack on Blight, I happened to be listening, yesterday, to one of Blight's more recent Yale Lecture series "Legacies of Reconstruction and the Origins of Jim Crow Society" for my play research rather than for content for Pinkerite. 

But lo and behold, right smack in the middle of the Class 24, Legacies of Reconstruction video -  available for free on YouTube, thank you Yale - Blight responds to the Mac Donald attack and it is a thing of beauty. 

Blight is in the middle of discussing Yale's Civil War Memorial (Blight wrote about it for The Atlantic in February 2024) which Blight calls "a Yankee apology for Reconstruction" when he mentions the Mac Donald attack. Transcript below.

It’s Russell’s and the War Memorial committee's and Yale's apology for Reconstruction. Yeah. You know, we over we took over the South. We colonized it. We imposed black suffrage on you. Oh my God. Yeah. You reacted violently here and there, but we understand. It's OK. Come back to Yale. 

 

It's a Yankee apology for Reconstruction. And the next time you walk through this, think of it that way if you can. And I apologize for getting animated about this. 

 

Not really. 

 

But I just got viciously attacked in an online essay about my New York Times essay. And I would otherwise not respond except the woman who wrote it for a very right-wing – I didn’t know about it until people started saying “have you read this have you read this?” I said no. It's a site called Quillette. OK, I'm sure some of these students must know it, it's its roots are in Australia, it turns out, very libertarian, very, very right wing stuff. But she wrote an essay far longer than my New York Times piece, attacking me and Yale. And all the elitism of our universities. And on and on and on and on she went. She especially went after how I treated this reconciliation story in the Yale and Slavery book. She said “these elite liberals have become so terrible they don't believe in reconciliation.” 

 

That is such a misreading of the book I wrote called - she mentioned my book Race and Reunion but clearly never read it. Or even if she did, it didn't impress her. 

 

The Jim Crow system in the South evolves in a culture forgetting what the Civil War was really about. A purposeful forgetting of the essential results and consequences of the liberation of four million people. The American reunion of North and South is built on a new edifice of the destruction of black rights. Political, civil and eventually of even black lives. 

 

Alright, that's enough of an editorial. Now you're all going to go try to - they have a paywall though for this Quillette thing, so… I got to read it initially. Now there’s a paywall. I was going to quote her today but it couldn't open - I was not gonna pay for it. I mean, come on. 

 

Uh. I don't know, sometimes it's good to get attacked viciously like that. It means somebody read it.

If Blight wants to read the Quillette article without the paywall, and I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to pay for Quillette, I have it archived for free right here.

Later in this lecture, Blight mentions race science (38:47) but doesn't make an explicit connection between that and Quillette.

I’m just sorry that Blight's days of being blissfully unaware of the existence of Quillette are over. 

Elon Musk doubles-down on his neo-Nazi support

In case anybody had any doubts about how extremely racist and fascist the American shadow president is, Elon Musk's latest editorial in support of "Alternative für Deutschland" (AfD)  should make it crystal clear.

As the excellent report from Hope not Hate noted, there is a connection between the extremely racist Emil Kirkegaard and the AfD. One of the "senior figures" of Kirkegaard's racism umbrella organization Human Diversity Foundation, Erik Ahrens (German original), is the social media advisor of the AfD.

So it's extremely bizarre that Musk claims to be opposed to racism.

But what's really happening here is that Musk has decided to redefine racism as prejudice only against those eligible for an H1-B visa, which is how technology corporations recruit non-Americans to work in American companies.

There is currently a growing rift in Trump-world between the hardcore MAGAs who oppose all immigration, and Musk, who only opposes immigration from those he figures he can't profit from. 

Surprise, surprise: Tesla Emerges Among Top Employers Of H-1B Visa Holders.

Trump agrees with Musk. Is this really what the dummies who voted for Trump wanted?

Racist ("hereditarian") and oligarch boot-licker Claire Lehmann is obviously team Musk (source.)

Here she portrays Musk as Santa's helper via his Starlink.

LICK THAT BOOT Jesse Singal!

As seen via Bluesky.

The continuing non-celebrity career of Razib Khan

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan enjoy the bootlicking together after 

Singal posted a photo of grifter Bari Weiss and her grifter wife Nellie Bowles.

Weiss herself has to lick the boot, which is why she gives interviews to Peter Thiel and lately, fascist Marc Andreessen. It's very likely that both Thiel and Andreessen fund The Free Press, considering that Andreessen already funds Nazi-friendly Substack and Thiel has spent his entire career since college funding right-wing media and has been accused of funding Quillette. Thiel even went so far as to have a meeting with international man of douchebaggery Emil Kirkegaard, as reported in the essential-reading "Race Science Inc." by the organization Hope not Hate.

The Free Press is so devoted to racism it employs and expresses admiration for the white supremacist Douglas Murray.

Khan and Singal have been allies for years and recently Singal appeared on Khan's podcast.

I assume Khan is team-licking with Singal on Bluesky in an attempt to get a gig with the Free Press, which is basically the American Quillette. To be fair, the Free Press is a good fit for Khan, who has made a career of promoting far-right extremism and race pseudoscience, which has been quite lucrative for him.

Holocaust denier Ron Unz paid for Khan's education, per the excellent 2017 Undark article Race, Science, and the Continuing Education of Razib Khan:

Around 2000, (Khan) joined a private email discussion group about human biodiversity organized by Sailer. (More mainstream academics, including Steven Pinker, were also in the group).

Not long after that, Khan helped a geneticist friend start a blog about science. They called it Gene Expression — GNXP, for short. Its writers discussed technical topics, as well as issues with a more political edge, like gender and racial differences.

A few years later, Khan went on the payroll of Ron Unz, a libertarian who ran for governor of California in 1994. Unz, who made a fortune in software development, offered Khan something that Unz describes as “a sort of fellowship or junior fellowship” to further his scientific career. Both Khan and Unz are vague about the reasons for the fellowship, but the gift was contingent on Khan leaving his job in software to focus on a scientific career. It was a big part of why he got on a graduate school track and ended up at UC Davis.

The article is from 2017 and since then, Khan has continued to be a promoter of race pseudoscience, working with Quillette and the Emil Kirkegaard-owned Aporia Magazine. I wrote an overview of Khan's career in 2022.

I haven't been talking about Khan much in the past year but when he teamed up with Jesse Singal to attack me last week he got my attention.

I have to laugh about Singal's calling me an internet microcelebrity. Singal and Razib Khan are allied with the much more famous Steven Pinker, but although Pinker was called a "celebrity intellectual" by the NYTimes, even he is barely known outside of the very online. 

I had lunch with a writer friend not long ago and I told her about this Pinkerite blog. I explained why I selected the name Pinkerite and her response was "who is Steven Pinker?" I went through a list of the names of other IDW-related people I've written about here, and the only name she recognized was Bari Weiss.

Although more often than not when I've mentioned the name Bari Weiss, most people hear Barry White, the music legend who died over twenty years ago.

One of the reasons this blog is so obscure is that except for Thiel, Musk and Trump, virtually all the people I write about on Pinkerite are not well known by the general public nor even by smart people who pay attention to politics and current events. 

So by microcelebrity I assume Singal means that he and his IDW friends have Googled their names and found this blog. And since someone, anyone, is writing about them, they feel like celebrities - which makes me therefore a microcelebrity.

Among Razib Khan's smears on Bluesky is the claim that I'm "scaring even woke journalists."

Which "woke journalists" could Khan possibly mean? Matt Yglesias? Yglesias is another name known among pundit-types and the very online, but almost nobody else. Although an acquaintance mentioned to me that he was a counselor at a camp Yglesias attended as a child.

Razib Khan is not well known by the general public, but that's worked out for him since it means that he gets jobs and support from the clueless now and then. In 2013 even Ta-Nehisi Coates promoted Khan's career.

But then people Google Khan. Like when the NYTimes canned him, or when people changed their mind about signing Khan's petition in defense of racist E. O. Wilson. 

And sometimes when people Google his name they find this blog, which is why Khan is so mad and making unsupported claims about me. 

But I'm not even a microcelebrity. I'm just an American citizen, keeping tabs on people taking money from fascist plutocrats to promote race pseudoscience and other rightwing bullshit.

Elon Musk supports the German neo-Nazi party AfD

Pinkerite first wrote about Alternative für Deutschland ("Alternative for Germany") known as AfD a year ago in connection with racist kook Emil Kirkegaard. And now it seems the American government is being run by a supporter of AfD, Elon Musk.

According to the Financial Times:

Elon Musk has waded into Germany’s election campaign by backing the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, marking the latest intervention by the US billionaire entrepreneur into politics around the world. Musk, a close adviser to Donald Trump, on Friday retweeted a video by a German rightwing activist, adding: “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader, responded: “Yes! You are perfectly right.” The AfD, classified as a suspected extremist organisation by Germany’s domestic intelligence, is poised for big electoral gains in elections scheduled on February 23. The vote, triggered by the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition last month, comes as Europe’s biggest economy comes under heavy strain.

Alternative for Germany is pure neo-Nazi. 

According to the epic article Race Science, Inc. by Hope not Hate that I talked about back in October, Emil Kirkegaard has a connection to AfD via his Human Diversity Foundation (which publishes the Aporia Substack):

The third senior figure of HDF (Human Diversity Foundation) is Erik Ahrens, a social media advisor in Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party. He is an advocate of white nationalism, and appeared at the AfD’s Potsdam conference in November 2023, at which party leaders discussed deporting German citizens of foreign descent.

The German media recently wrote about Ahrens (translated via Google translate into English):

He is one of the brains behind the AfD's TikTok success: Erik Ahrens trains the far-right party's cadres in how to use social media. And: He made the leading candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah (47), known in the internet world. Ahrens was also behind his video "Real men are right-wing", which has been viewed millions of times.

Is this what the morons who voted for Trump really wanted? Musk of course is now running the United States.

In any case I had to update my Emil Kirkegaard's Race Pseudoscience and Nazi Network diagram, adding fascist oligarch and current co-president of the United States, Elon Musk.

Why did a Kiwi farmer offer tech support to Jesse Singal?

Jesse Singal wonders if his Kiwi Farms tech support is any good
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kiwi Farms is a website known for targeting people, encouraging doxxing and swatting, and encouraging people to commit suicide. Several articles have been written about their tactics.

Mother Jones had this to say about Kiwi Farms:

Most websites aren’t known for having a “kill count.” Kiwi Farms is. Its victims reportedly include Julie Terryberry, who in 2016 took her life after being targeted by users of the site. Two years later, after years of harassment from Kiwi Farms trolls, Chloe Sagal lit herself on fire in a public park. In June 2021, an American video game developer based in Japan, named David Ginder, took their life amid a campaign of Kiwi Farms abuse.

Kiwi Farms is a forum similar in design to 4chan or 8chan, where anonymous posters gather. But instead of just spreading noxious discourse, Kiwi Farms users turn to the site to plan and coordinate. They work to make the lives of their targets a living hell. Their tactics include doxxing, SWATing, defaming, encouraging self-harm, and stalking, online and sometimes off.

The Australian magazine Crikey wrote:

The nearly decade-old US forum is notorious for hosting hate content — including the Christchurch mass killer’s footage and other terrorist manifestos — and coordinating harassment, stalking and revealing private information about people (known as “doxxing”).

Kiwi Farms members have relentlessly bullied people who’ve expressed suicidal ideation, often picking on marginalised groups. Multiple suicides have been linked to the forum.

The thing that seems to upset Singal the most about Kiwi Farms is reporting that emphasizes its harassment of people over other issues:

The reporting on Kiwifarms continues to be abysmal. I have no doubt the site harassed Fong-Jones, but to leave out the fact that Trans Lifeline's old leadership IN FACT EMBEZZLED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FROM THE ORGANIZATION is inexcusable.[81]

So recently Jesse Singal posted on Bluesky : 

"A kiwi farmer reached out to me claiming to have figured out the tech problems I'm having. Does this makes sense to those who are techier than me? I indeed get an error when I click on the user name so no idea how to block."

Bluesky users noticed. 

This is the archived Kiwi Farm page that contains the post Singal refers to. It's on a thread titled: Bluesky - "Decentralized" Twitter Alternative. Leftist Tranny Hugbox. "Answer" to Elon Musk's "Fascist" Takeover of 𝕏 (Formerly Twitter). 

Apparently Singal's tech problem was that there was a Bluesky account able to rig their account name to prevent anyone from blocking them - and Singal wanted to block them. 

It should be noted that Singal had no problem blocking Pinkerite's Bluesky account.

Singal's skeet seems to imply that he has a comfortable enough relationship with Kiwi Farms that his response to being contacted is not "why is someone from a dangerously psychopathic website contacting me?" but rather: "is their technical advice any good?"

Certainly Kiwi Farms has a generally positive view of Singal, and the site features a long-running discussion thread titled (the following link goes to an archive, not Kiwi Farms itself): Megathread Jesse Singal Derangement Syndrome - jsingal69 vs TroonWorld)

"Troon" is a favorite Kiwi Farms slur for transgender people.

It's true there are some negative comments about Singal himself in the megathread but what do you expect from a website devoted to psychopathy? These are people who pride themselves in having no empathy. They especially hate transgendered people but they're quick with racial slurs and anti-Semitism too. One post criticizes Singal for looking Jewish.

Kiwi Farms is currently being sued by Liz Fong-Jones, who has shared a slide presentation about Kiwi Farms called Reverse engineering hate.

Fong-Jones posted this on her Linked-In:

For the better part of a week, Bluesky has been engulfed in a crisis over uneven enforcement of its terms of service. Anti-trans pundit Jesse Singal joined the platform, was automatically banned, unbanned, then labelled with "intolerance" to limit his reach, then finally manually unlabelled. He has remained up on the platform since last Friday, and has been using his presence on the platform to post private health information, direct harassment mobs at vulnerable people, and otherwise serve as a lightning rod for "colonizing Bluesky with 'normal people'" drawn from his Twitter following.

As Bluesky crosses 25 million accounts, it is faced with the ire of its longest standing users who supported the platform in its earliest years. A public petition launched today demanding that Bluesky not grant a special exemption to people who are "famous" or "journalists" that allows them to break the Terms of Service and drive marginalised people off the platform. In only 8 hours, the petition has 13,000 signatures. Thousands of users have separately pledged to not subscribe to the service's forthcoming premium product until confidence in moderation is restored.

And in a follow-up comment writes:

Personally, I do not blame Aaron Rodericks here; the buck stops with Jay Graber, her executive team, and the board. It is her right to make a business decision to choose to keep Singal on the platform. That choice will have far reaching consequences for whether the platform is truly a change from Twitter for the better, or merely a repetition of the same problems with moderation and safety Twitter faced.

And then:

Strangely enough, Platform T&S saw no problems with immediately yeeting Libs of Tiktok and Kiwi Farms / Joshua Moon off the platform. The only reason I can think of that Singal has an exemption is because he wears the cloak of journalism while stabbing with transphobic harassment.

Nina Paley included Jesse Singal as one of
her anti-trans good guys in her "Gender Wars"
cards along with Matt Walsh and Kiwi Farms.
--------------------------------------------------------

Like Steven Pinker condemning racism, Singal tries to "maintain a facade of being outwardly supporting of trans rights."

 
And yet in the case of Pinker and Singal, they persistently ally with extremists. Pinker with Steve Sailer and Richard Hanania, Singal with Nina Paley (a big fan of Kiwi Farms) and... Richard Hanania. But Pinker never uses the N word and Singal never uses the word "Troon" so the ill-informed may believe that Pinker and Singal are just fine, just asking questions in good faith about their area of interest.

When Steven Pinker was criticized for his positive comments about the alt-right, Singal defended him. 

It really is remarkable, the overlap between people who promote race pseudoscience and the people who promote hostility towards the personal lives of trans people. 

I knew of Alice Dreger for her support of the racist E. O. Wilson and her connection to Quillette, but I only recently became aware of something called "the Dregerian Narrative." Dreger is an influential anti-trans activist.

It's like they're all part of an organized group, all using the same talking points.

I think that journalist Tom Scocca has provided the best analysis of the Jesse Singal narrative:

In absolute numbers, there are many, many more people who regret having gotten abortions than who regret a gender transition. But like detransitioners, they are a tiny fraction of the relevant total. Presented with a study showing that the percentage of patients who regret getting abortions appears to be in the low single digits, Reuters did not send its investigative team to find the exceptions, but simply went with the headline “Overwhelming majority of U.S. women don’t regret abortion: study.”

What makes trans care different? The ordinary liberal reader may be squeamish about this or that aspect of abortion, but they are fundamentally committed to the idea that abortion patients and their doctors are the ones best equipped to figure out what to do with a pregnancy. It is not the job of some outside party or institution—a controlling parent or spouse, a church, a Republican legislative majority, a major national newspaper—to step in and second-guess what they do with their bodies. 

For trans care, this liberal theory of autonomy and decision-making is cast aside. The theoretical Times reader is ready to consume 15,000 words about the risks, controversies, and downsides of contemporary gender treatment because, at bottom, they are assumed to be dismayed by it all. An abortion patient is really pregnant, but trans youth—children who “say they’re transgender,” as the Atlantic put it back in 2018—maybe aren’t really trans, or wouldn’t be, if they had more time and better information. 

The finer points of this belief are usually laid out only in bits and pieces. Jesse Singal, in a newsletter post defending the Times story about the perils of undisclosed social transition at school, was more direct than the Times itself dared to be: 

A lot of kids appear to suddenly (or seemingly suddenly) come out as trans, and anecdotally, at least, it seems like it happens more often in the case of kids who are on the autism spectrum and/or have other mental health problems and/or are dealing with some sort of jarring event, whether a pandemic or a divorce or something else.

That is, the gender dysphoria that leads young people to seek gender treatment is only a side phenomenon of the fact that they are emotionally disturbed, and possibly mentally disabled. In their vulnerability, they’ve been caught up in a wave of sudden public approval for gender nonconformity and pushed to identify themselves as trans. Singal wrote: 

…you’ll see that mere discomfort with the way you are “supposed” to act or dress as a boy or girl, and a desire to act or dress differently, means you’re trans (if you want to be), even if you don’t have gender dysphoria. Sure enough, a lot of people, particularly young ones, seem to come out as trans much more to make a statement about their desire to transgress gender boundaries than because they are suffering serious anguish at having a (fe)male body or being seen by others as (fe)male.

The recent increase in the number of young people identifying as trans, by this account, is not mainly because some of the brutal societal barriers against being visibly trans have been lifted, but because fashion and social contagion are capturing more and more adolescent tomboy girls or homosexual boys, lumping them in with the smaller population of genuine trans kids who truly need transition to treat their dysphoria. And then, the story goes, a combination of overeager clinicians and bullying activists—hostile to the very idea of skepticism or doubt—works to steer the not-really-trans kids onto the path toward hormones and surgery, away from their natural bodies and true identities, as fast as possible. 

Singal has also been accused of unprofessionalism, per Protean Magazine:

Singal’s habit of consistently and viciously attacking his critics poisons the well; it deflects any chance of real criticism, since it allows him to claim that any given critic simply personally dislikes him. He has, of course, helped ensure that this is the case by treating them poorly. This bad behavior extends beyond minor Twitter slap fights—it’s also a means of warping the conversation, punishing and dismissing dissenting voices before they can even speak. Leveling threats and directing abuse at sources and experts in this way goes beyond mere unprofessionalism—for a journalist, it’s genuinely unethical.

Perhaps this is why so many trans people and their allies detest Jesse Singal. 

And Singal for his part does not seem at all concerned about his reputation. After all, he is still a mainstream journalist, and journalists like Benjamin Ryan of the NYTimes, NBCNews, Washington Post, and the Guardian are his devoted defenders. Plus Singal pumps out right-wing propaganda for Reason Magazine. 

And with Trump ascendent, anti-trans hatred is ascendant. It looks like Jesse Singal is ready to take his place as a courtier of the kakistocracy, partying with the Bari Weiss gang of grifters on election night.

So that is probably why, even though he was in the middle of a controversy over whether or not he should be allowed to stay on Bluesky due to antagonizing trans people, Jesse Singal decided to reveal that he had a comfortable relationship with people at Kiwi Farms.

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan team up against the darkly fascinating Pinkerite

I mostly posted this image because
I just discovered WWDITS
and it's my new favorite thing 
------------------------------------------

Now, as you might guess if you've followed this Pinkerite blog, inaccuracies and exaggerations are to be
expected from these two IDW grifters, and their Bluesky skeets are no exception.

I didn't see these skeets on Bluesky myself because both Jesse Singal and Razib Khan have blocked my Pinkerite account there. But one of my followers on Bluesky gave me a heads up (thank you, you) and I was able to confirm on Clearsky. 

These cowards would never attack me except from a safe space.

I suppose they are interested in me now because I recently noted that racists Claire Lehmann and Khan rushed to defend Jesse Singal who has the most-blocked account on Bluesky at 64,312 and counting.
 

(Update December 21: 77,011)

I do want to thank Singal for the inadvertent compliments. "Darkly fascinating internet micro celebrity" - go me. Alas he makes me sound far more glamorous than I am. But I had no idea the IDW gang considered me even a micro-level celebrity.

And as for "tenacious" - I wish. I like to think of Pinkerite as an aid to journalists, but I'm afraid I only do a half-assed job.

Few journalists make a crusade of an issue the way Jesse Singal does with trans healthcare, turning it into a controversy that was used by Republicans to help get Trump elected. He's even writing a book about trans healthcare as revealed by his Bluesky profile.

But when most journalists select a topic, they do some research, write an article or book, then move on. 

I like to think that Pinkerite gives them some useful background on various IDW grifters, since I write about even their less-outrageous activities and statements and I keep track of IDW alliances, as when Claire Lehmann and Razib Khan came to Singal's defense. Or Colin Wright admitting what an important influence the oafish James Lindsay was on his grifting career. Or Steve Sailer claiming he's been a big influence on Steven Pinker. Or Steven Pinker selecting a garbage article by Sailer to include in the long-forgotten volume, The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2004.

And now Singal and Khan teaming up to attack me.

But as you can see in the archives at the bottom of this blog, there are some years when I don't even manage one hundred posts on Pinkerite. I've never posted more than 209 posts in a year. Not even one post per day on average. So basically I write about the IDW gang only now and then. 

It's Jesse Singal who is truly tenacious.

As far as Razib Khan, well of course he's full of shit. But I am impressed he restrained himself from calling me "retarded." In the recent past that is his go-to word for anybody he disagrees with. 

That's the kind of activity that makes you a celebrity intellectual of the American right wing, as James "your mom" Lindsay demonstrated.

Now as far as "stalking" - you can't stalk someone merely by writing about their public statements. Stalking is an obvious libel here. 

As far as "obsessed" - sure I've written about Razib Khan now and then over the years, but only because he's spent almost two decades promoting race pseudoscience.

So you might call Razib Khan tenacious, too.

And there's an example of the Pinkerite mission - although in this case at my personal blog, before I started Pinkerite: thanks to me writing about Khan, Jamelle Bouie found my post about Khan's racist public commentary and referenced it while protesting the New York Times intention to hire Khan. (Wow almost ten years ago now.)

And it's thanks to my blogging about the IDW gang of grifters - before there was an official IDW - that I know that Singal and Khan have been allies for years. 

Both Singal and Khan have been devoted to their projects for years - Khan to race pseudoscience and Singal questioning trans self-determination.

Why does my tenacity - no greater than their own - in criticizing those who promote race pseudoscience and anti-trans campaigns seem to baffle them? What exactly am I doing that makes them call me crazy and wild-eyed and darkly fascinating?

It's probably the money. 

Khan and Singal get paid to promote their "obsessions" and I do not. 

I mean, yeah, I have Google ads here, but I rarely make more than like a buck per month. I make far more on my other website and I spend no more hours working on that one than I do on Pinkerite. I don't even ask for donations like the somewhat comparable, albeit far more successful blog, We Hunted the Mammoth.

I think that Singal and Khan would not devote their lives to hateful right-wing political campaigns except for the money, which is why they are grifters. 

And they cannot comprehend someone who would oppose right-wing political campaigns on principle. After all, where's the profit in a white, cis-gendered individual opposing race pseudoscience and transphobia? 

Could this be an example of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good?

I just love this.