Evil psychopath Peter Thiel on the Majority Report

I recorded Thiel and his psycho rant two years ago at the CPAC for racists, also known as the Stanford Academic Freedom conference.

America's techno-fascist problem

All the disgusting fascists who have been cozy with the IDW and race pseudoscience are supporting Trump:

• Elon Musk 

• Peter Thiel 

• Marc Andreessen

Anybody still on Twitter (Musk) or Substack (Andreessen) is supporting Trump's efforts to destroy American democracy.

Period.

Legal Eagle breaks down the Supreme Court's atrocity

 

The racist rodeo - European-style - the 2024 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research

The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) typically alternates between holding its annual conferences in North America and Europe. This is a European year and so the conference is in Zürich.

The line-up appears to have fewer obvious racists this year, although it does have Richard Haier, who is a devotee of 20th century racist Arthur Jensen - ISIR is founded on Jensenism. 

Haier has been spending his time lately hobnobbing with blatant racists like Charles Murray, Bo Winegard (and the gang at Aporia) and Stefan Molyneux, while promoting the idea that Black Americans can have their innate mental genetic defects cured through genetic manipulation.

One half of the respectability power couple of ISIR, Camille Benbow is also listed as a conference participant. To get an idea of the racist world that Benbow and her husband David Lubinski inhabit, consider Charles Murray's introduction for one of his more recently-published race-screeds, Human Diversity (my emphases):

Jensen made this pronouncement in his magnum opus, The g Factor, published in 1998. The list of eminent scholars who have shared that view began with Cyril Burt and Lewis Terman in the early part of the twentieth century and continued through the rest of the century and into the twenty-first century with figures such as Raymond Cattell, Nathan Brody, Hans Eysenck, John Loehlin, David Geary, Diane Halpern, Thomas Bouchard, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow. I should add that Richard Herrnstein and I took the same position in The Bell Curve.

Murray dedicates the book to Supreme Court corrupter, and Bari Weiss's "sugar daddy" Harlan Crow. I'm guessing Crow is one of the monstrously evil plutocrats funding Murray's racist screeds now.

Murray has, you guessed it, also appeared at ISIR conferences. But he isn't listed (so far) for this year's conference. But let's see who is:

Elsbeth Stern is the host and she seems at first glance far more reasonable than the typical ISIR conference attendee, actually admitting to the missing heritability problem in a paper published by Nature :

The search for the genes responsible for the expression of cognitive capabilities has not yet had much success, despite the money and effort invested in human genome projects.

However, the paper shows she's a big believer in the Pioneer Fund-underwritten twins studies and her second citation is of scientifically worthless evolutionary psychology. So she is fundamentally a proponent of sociobiology - which makes her a perfect fit for the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

Brook Macnamara is an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Case Western Reserve, and is interested in "individual differences" a term that usually means "group differences" which is a sneaky way of referring to race pseudoscience. Or as Emil Kirkegaard says: "group differences are just individual differences, really." Kirkegaard has also presented at ISIR meetings, until he embarrassed them. 

Matt McGue has a "collegiate affiliation" in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, and says he is a behavioral geneticist - which is the latest term for proponents of sociobiology.

Wendy Johnson is part of the twin studies sociobiology gang, publishing with Bouchard, McGue and Ian Deary, past president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.

Sophie von Strum is cited several times in "Human Diversity," by Charles Murray. She is Professor of Psychology in Education and Director of the Hungry Mind Lab at the Department of Education at the University of York and she says she wants to discuss Genomic prediction of educational outcomes - one of the favorite topics of the dread Kathryn Paige Harden, who has also appeared at ISIR conferences.

Stephen Ceci is a member of the League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters as well as a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell.

Wendy M. Williams is another member of the League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters as well as a professor of psychology at Cornell.

Franzis Preckel, and Klaus Oberauer seem to be garden-variety researchers, notable (so far as I can tell, yet) by their comfort with associating their names with an organization full of racists.

Once again, the Jensen-founded Institute of Mental Chronometry is paying some bills:

All graduate students and postdocs with an accepted oral or poster presentation for ISIR automatically qualify for $1,500 in travel support (for traveling from outside of Europe) or $1,000 of travel support (for those traveling from within Europe) from the Institute of Mental Chronometry.

That organization is rolling in the dough-re-mi, last year it gave half a million to two race-pseudoscience promoters Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee.

SCOTUS helps Trump take one more step towards dictatorship

Our disgusting, right-wing plutocrat-corrupted Supreme Court has aided and abetted Trump in getting one step closer to a dictatorship.

So how does that connect to this blog, other than it's run by an American? Because Harlan Crow, one of the corrupters of the Supreme Court is also the sugar daddy of Bari Weiss, the queen of the Intellectual Dark Web.

As dissenting Justice Sotomayor wrote:

"Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency," Sotomayor wrote. "It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for 'bold and unhesitating action' by the President, ante, at 3, 13, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more."

"Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent," Sotomayor added.

She added in her opinion, “The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power.”

But let's not give ALL the credit to Harlan Crow - there's also Leonard Leo, ANOTHER friend of Bari Weiss:

Long averse to media attention, Leo recently taped a podcast interview with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of surveillance company Palantir and the University of Austin, a conservative alternative college he started with journalist Bari Weiss. The discussion was first highlighted by the watchdog group Accountable.US.

Calling it now: worst decision since Dred Scott. 

Historian David Blight appears to agree.

Steven Pinker must be so proud ~ Steve Sailer & Tucker Carlson & the Sailer lawsuit

Weird that at first glance Sailer looks 
like Joe Biden who is over a decade
older than Sailer.
-----------------------------------------------------

I'm not saying that Steve Sailer owes his entire career to Steven Pinker, after all there's no record of Pinker giving Sailer a nice wad of cash like Ron Unz did, but it sure didn't hurt when Pinker chose to include a garbage piece of work by Sailer in the 2004 edition of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" and it didn't hurt that Pinker used Sailer's data in his own writing, or as Malcolm Gladwell said:

"(Pinker) had three (scientific data) sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people."

That was in 2009. Pinker did not stop allying himself with Sailer until after 2012, when he included a blurb from Sailer for Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature."

Pinker throws a hissy fit when a journalist asks him about his Sailer connection - which rarely happens, mainly because Pinker is a sacred cow of the media, constantly promoted as a "liberal" no matter how often he publicly aligns with libertarians, Republicans and the extreme racist right.

The media, the stupid, lazy media, is merely taking its cue from Pinker, who likes to have things both ways.

But apparently Sailer harbors no ill-will towards Pinker, no doubt since they are likely both still in agreement on issues of race and since Pinker has never expressed regret about promoting Sailer's hideously racist career. 

Now Sailer is promoting racism and Trump on the show of Tucker "too extreme for Fox News" Carlson.

Meanwhile, miserable low-life Steve Sailer is being sued for "Assault Libel & Slander" as a result of his unconscionable refusal to quit defaming the target of the redacted hit piece published in the sleazy City Journal.

Like Alex Jones, these other right-wing ghouls lack a conscience and will try to beat up on people who are not public figures because they think they're vulnerable. But as Alex Jones found out and as Sailer is finding out, their targets are not as vulnerable as the ghouls hoped. The rule of law still means something in the United States - at least until the Trump fascist gang - of which Sailer and Carlson are very much a part - destroys it.

The rule of law still means something in the UK too and Emil Kirkegaard owes Oliver Smith £982 and the judge ruled that contempt proceedings against Kirkegaard may proceed.

And speaking of horrible rightwing ghouls, it looks like milord and milady of the White Supremacist Castle are in financial and legal trouble, per the Southern Poverty Law Center:

VDARE is embroiled in multiple legal proceedings in state and federal courts in New York. These cases include a federal lawsuit that VDARE filed against the AG’s office in December 2022; a special proceeding that the AG’s office initiated against VDARE in New York state court in December 2022 for failing to abide by the subpoena; and multiple appeals.
In a March 29 post on the VDARE website, Peter Brimelow estimated that the proceedings have cost his group “up to $1 million” over the course of three years.

Apparently the ghouls were living in the castle:

The Brimelows have not denied residing on castle grounds, with Lydia Brimelow referring to the complex as her “home” in a March 15 interview.
Additionally, neither Brimelow has denied purchasing the property with funds given to the VDARE Foundation.

A GRIFTER IS BORN - Uri Berliner joins the Bari Weiss racist right-wing grift "The Free Press"!

After two months of waiting for this annoucement, it's finally here:

I predicted it two months ago, but to be fair, it was 100% predictable.

As I wrote on this blog:

I recently predicted in a comment on Threads that NPR's former editor Uri Berliner will soon reappear as either an employee of Weiss; running a right-wing plutocrat-funded Substack; or as a member of a right-wing think tank.

The real question is why did NPR hire such an idiot as Berliner in the first place.

I have no doubt that Berliner's attacks on NPR were coordinated well in advance with Weiss and friends, including Weiss' sugar daddy and Supreme Court corrupter supreme Harlan Crow. Or as the Daily Beast said, Berliner "passes the audition."

I think the whole thing is a project of the Republican Party and its pussygrabbing, psychotic, treasonous felon candidate Trump, who is calling for the end of funding for NPR.

From her beginnings as the Queen Bee of the Intellectual Dark Web, Bari Weiss now finds herself as an important player in the rightwing campaign to end American democracy. 

Pinker promotes race pseudoscience via Youtube podcast - uses the term "heritable" incorrectly

While I was focused on Bari Weiss for the past couple of months, Steven Pinker was busy launching his own YouTube podcast.

I discovered this when I was monitoring the Twitter/X feed of professional racist Steve Sailer and Sailer reposted a link to Pinker's YouTube channel.

Although Pinker refuses to acknowledge the existence of Sailer, even when asked about him directly by the media (an extremely rare occurrence but it did happen three years ago) Sailer has long maintained he is an important source of Pinker's sociobiology beliefs.

Unlike Pinker's Twitter/X account, which prevents most people from commenting, Pinker's YouTube channel does, so far, allow comments. And so I took the opportunity, at least until I'm censored, to point out that Pinker uses the term "heritability" incorrectly in his emission entitled Nature vs. Nature: What's More Impactful. Pinker says, flat-out:

The first law is that all behavioral traits are partly heritable. What does that mean? It means that some of the variation within a culture between one person and another what makes Jason different from Sam what makes Emily different from Jessica comes from differences in their genes.

Per the indispensable paper "The heritability fallacy" by David S. Moore and David Shenk, published in 2016: 

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

Pinker should know better than to use the term heritability that way, but I think he doesn't care, because, I am convinced, Pinker lacks all sense of shame. One of the reasons why Steven Pinker is the world's most annoying man.

In addition to misusing the term "heritability," notice how Pinker slips in "within a culture" right before "one person and another." I don't think this is a slip of the tongue. I think Pinker uses it deliberately here, because Pinker is a weasel.

That word "culture" is very important because of the claim - first widely disseminated by Patrick Moynihan, promoted by Pinker in his book "Better Angels..." and more recently promoted by Andrew Sullivan in conversation with Jon Stewart - that Black people in the United States have not thrived since the days of slavery due to their own faulty "culture."

And here Pinker explicitly connects "culture" to genetics. 

Pinker is primarily a libertarian political operative, most recently aligning with the far right to attack Harvard. And his "scientific" claims are in service to his politics. Pinker has long pushed the idea, albeit subtly, that the only explanation for Black American failure to thrive is genetics. 

Because, like Steve Sailer, Pinker believes in race pseudoscience.

Happy Juneteenth 2024!

 

Racist Substack Aporia whines about Rational Wiki

A who's who of professional racists in two tweets.
______________________________________________

Aporia, the nest of extremist rightwing racists, harbored at techno-fascist Marc Andreessen-funded Substack has lately been whining about Rational Wiki. 

The whining was even more unintentionally funny and ironic because it occurred in an unsigned editorial:

...the mostly pseudonymous team running the RatWiki organization, the organization that owns and runs the website. It works on the standard Wikipedia format, where they let anyone edit, at least in theory. This community-sourced material status gives them a kind of legal liability cop-out for the material they host, in the same way that YouTube isn't responsible for the comments people post.

Meanwhile, the Substack toadies who work for Andreessen claim they can't be responsible for the racism spewed by Aporia and other hate-accounts on Substack.

How Kirkegaard spends his 
time on the shit-hole site Twitter/X
You can see why those serious scholars 
at Aporia would want to align
themselves with him.

It seems that those very serious scholars at Aporia are in league, big time, with that freak Emil Kirkegaard, and have taken his personal grievances on as one of their causes, along with the usual causes of racism and Neo-Nazism. 

They decided to financially support Kirkegaard: This short film is possible thanks to our paid Substack supporters.

The "film" in question, which Aporia is promoting on Twitter/X under the banner "ANTIFA WATCH," is four minutes of Kirkegaard walking along a beach whining about how true facts about him are known thanks to Rational Wiki. 

Somehow Kirkegaard connects Rational Wiki to the guy he owes money to, even though that guy is no longer affiliated with Rational Wiki. And Kirkegaard knows this because it said so in the pro-Kirkegaard article published pseudonymously a year ago by the ghouls at City Journal /Manhattan Institute which was later retracted when the target of the article (really, a smear campaign) - the same guy Kirkegaard owes money to - sued. 

Kirkegaard is very much devoted to avoiding paying his court-ordered debt, so much so he was apparently being sheltered by German Neo-Nazis - the very worst kind of Neo-Nazis - at Das Landhaus Adlon. Lately it turns out that Kirkegaard is doing business in Wyoming.

So on behalf of Emil Kirkegaard's personal grievances, those geniuses at Aporia are falsely promoting Rational Wiki as some kind of "Antifa" organization, which makes me suspect that some of the ghouls at Aporia are working for the Trump campaign - promotion of Antifa as some powerful organized operation was one of the tactics of the Trump campaign in 2020, aided by Andy Ngo, who would likely know at least one Aporia ghoul, Bo Winegard, since both worked for Quillette around the same time. Last August, Ngo lost his own lawsuit against "Antifa."

It's absurd that Kirkegaard believes the only way anybody would form a bad opinion of him is through Rational Wiki. A couple of years ago he was in the news when he embarrassed the respectable racists at the International Society for Intelligence Research when Abdel Abdellaoui very publicly refused to attend its 2022 racist rodeo if Kirkegaard was going to speak there - as Kirkegaard had done other years. Speaking of the racist rodeo, I will be writing about ISIR's upcoming 2024 conference soon.

And Stewart Lee, much better known than Kirkegaard or the guy Kirkegaard owes money to, referred to Kirkegaard in the British press as "a weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil."

And by raging against Rational Wiki, Kirkegaard and his gang at Aporia are only helping to raise its ranking in Google results. Rational Wiki already has a response to the Kirkegaard video.

As you can see in the screen image posted above, professional racist Steve Sailer - who was once heavily promoted by Steven Pinker - jumped on the Aporia tweet to join in the whining about Rational Wiki. It's no wonder Sailer is bitter, the Rational Wiki profile of Steve Sailer includes one of the most perfect observations about Sailer I have ever seen:

Think of him as a dead cat under the floorboards of the internet: worthless, repulsive and raising an unholy stench. But, sadly, also very difficult to get rid of.

The same could be said for Kirkegaard, Winegard and all the grifters, goons and ghouls who administer, edit, write for, financially support and platform Aporia.

From the Majority Report: Dave Rubin And Russell Brand Have An Idiot Contest

Dave Rubin was named in the infamous Bari Weiss article as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web - and even had his photo taken in the dark:

“I’ve been at this for 25 years now, having done all the MSM shows, including Oprah, Charlie Rose, ‘The Colbert Report,’ Larry King — you name it,” Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, told me. “The last couple of years I’ve shifted to doing shows hosted by Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris and others. The I.D.W. is as powerful a media as any I’ve encountered.”

Mr. Shermer, a middle-aged science writer, now gets recognized on the street. On a recent bike ride in Santa Barbara, Calif., he passed a work crew and “the flag man stopped me and says: ‘Hey, you’re that skeptic guy, Shermer! I saw you on Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan!’” When he can’t watch the shows on YouTube, he listens to them as podcasts on the job. On breaks, he told Mr. Shermer, he takes notes.

“I’ve had to update Quillette’s servers three times now because it’s caved under the weight of the traffic,” Ms. Lehmann said about the publication most associated with this movement.

Even so, I have rarely mentioned Rubin on this blog.

But I had to share this Majority Report episode - just the title alone is perfect but the debate about exactly HOW Rubin lied is hysterical.

Peter Thiel is back to supporting Trump of course, along with stochastic terrorist Elon Musk

 Robert Reich in the Guardian:

Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.

The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.

Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns.

We have a serious techno-fascist stochastic terrorist man-baby billionaire problem.

Jerry Seinfeld is apparently a member of the Bari Weiss right-wing racist club

I was never a fan of the TV show "Seinfeld" and so didn't care much that Jerry Seinfeld apparently became a cranky old right-wing billionaire. 

 But then he started hanging out with that right-wing racist grifter Bari Weiss. I found out via The Majority Report.

I think it's a sign that Seinfeld knows, deep down, that he's not funny (if he ever was) and so the only way he can stay relevant (instead of spending his time enjoying all his money) is to kiss up to the far right.

I was very impressed to see that the actual talent behind Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, appears to despise Bari Weiss.

Why is Danish neo-Nazi scofflaw Emil Kirkegaard doing business in Wyoming?

The Wyoming-based Cowboy State Daily recently reported:

White Supremacist Who Wants Legal Child Porn Doing Business Through Wyoming LLC

And who else could that be but Emil Kirkegaard?

Leo Wolfson writes:

A globally recognized Danish white supremacist is doing business in Wyoming, or at least through the Cowboy State as a registered LLC here. 

Emil Kirkegaard has been accused by many of using scientific racism as a base for his open-access research journal website where he’s published numerous articles supporting a basis for biological differences between races, ethnicities and immigrant groups on measures such as crime and IQ.

It seems that Wyoming (which voted for convicted felon Donald Trump 70% in 2020) welcomes this kind of business:

Wyoming has some of the most private business filing laws in the country and the cheapest rates to file, which allows people to easily cloak their identities when filing with the state.

These laws have drawn significant scrutiny in recent years as some nefarious actors have been found doing business in the state.

Earlier this spring, a Fremont County investigation revealed an influx of out-of-state businesses filing to addresses in that county, often unbeknownst to the actual property owners.

 

In another instance, there were 551 different businesses registered to a single address.

Secretary of State Chuck Gray announced earlier this week the dissolvement of three businesses connected by the FBI to North Korean actors.

Gray said his office has proposed several interim topics to the Wyoming Legislature to take further administrative action against entities on the basis of their being owned or controlled by foreign adversaries.

The people of New York have spoken

And also the people of the New Yorker: "A Man of Conviction"

 

Judd Legum vs. the Bari-verse

Like virtually everybody in the media, Judd Legum (in his Popular Info column entitled "The Real Cancel Culture") gives Bari Weiss too much respect, treating her as a good-faith journalist who just happens to end up on the same side of every issue as far-right extremist Republican political operative Christopher Rufo and far-right media like The Free Beacon:

NPR didn't follow the script. Rufo and The Free Press were both involved in the successful effort to oust various Ivy League presidents. Those efforts included allegations that they were captive to the far-left, insufficiently concerned about anti-semitism, and engaged in various "scandals" exposed by Rufo and others. When Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard's president based mostly on the allegations published in another right-wing outlet, The Free Beacon, Weiss said she was "green with envy." 

But instead of capitulating to The Free Press and Rufo's pressure campaign, NPR defended its CEO and its journalism and moved on. 

That's when Rufo escalated his attacks on Maher.

I think there's reason to believe that the entire "NPR is too woke" brouhaha is a coordinated attack, dreamed up - or "workshopped" - and deployed by Bari Weiss and her long-time IDW allies like the extreme loser Peter Boghossian. I think the NPR attack plan is a more-successfully funded version of the far-right media campaign attempt described in the New Yorker exposé of the right-wing grift organization FAIR: 

Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

Boghossian and Weiss have been allies since at least 2018.

I have a Google alert set for "Uri Berliner" so I'm aware that even though his charges against NPR are no longer headline news in most of the media, it's still a big story in the right-wing media network. And the underlying goal is, and has always been, ever since it was likely "workshopped" by Peter Boghossian or some similar far-right grifting ghoul, to defund public radio.

And again, I don't believe that there are as many paying subscribers as claimed for Weiss's The Free Press (which is staffed almost entirely by far-rightwingers and kooks) nor as many for far-right Substacks as claimed, because it would be far too easy to fake paying subscribers through the subscription infrastructures of the Free Press and Substack, so they could launder the money possibly coming in from far-right plutocrat monsters like Harlan "sugar daddy" Crow, Charles Koch, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. 

All to make it look like their far-right views are more popular than they actually are.

And since they could do it, I firmly believe they would do it.

There should be audits of all media outlets funded by far-right plutocrats.

Another bashing in the Bari-verse

And the roll continues.

Last week the Washington Post bashed the recently released book, "Morning After the Revolution," by Nellie Bowles, the oafish right-wing grifter wife of equally oafish right-wing grifter Bari Weiss.

Now here comes the New Yorker: Nellie Bowles's Failed Provocations by Molly Fischer.

My absolute favorite description of Bowles's work in the piece: "incuriousity."

The book just reflects, unexamined, an experience—hers—of being caught in the online slipstream. “The transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless,” she writes. “The movement simply pivoted: The conversation about racism was now about transphobia. Done! Go!” Maybe this was how it felt scrolling through Instagram at the time; on the page, it reads as incuriosity, even credulity. Surely a book premised on a united and overpowering new movement ought to offer some account of how the people, the institutions, and the ideas it encompasses came into concert. Lacking that, the main thing that B.L.M., pediatric gender clinics, and San Francisco nimbys appear to have in common is that they began to vex Bowles around the same time.

But I am disappointed in the credulity of Molly Fischer - she seems to believe that just because Bowles likes to compare herself to Joan Didion, Bowles is also a Serious Writer, albeit not a very good one.

Nellie Bowles is working for Bari Weiss (like Weiss's sister Suzy) whose media property "The Free Press" is simply a method of promoting right-wing beliefs, likely funded by right-wing ghouls like Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow.

The New Yorker revealed the Weiss-Crow connection, less than a year ago:

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Bowles is a right-wing political operative, plain and simple, which is why, apart from her lack of talent as a writer, her book doesn't wonder about the people targeted as the enemy. This passage from Fischer's piece says it all:

It is difficult, though, to see Bowles’s subjects as more than caricatures when her descriptions of them are so generic. She writes that Seattle’s sixtysomething mayor has “hair perfectly blown out into the helmet that’s popular for successful women of that age.” Protesters in their teens and early twenties, meanwhile, possess “that coiled squirrely energy men have then.” At such moments, Bowles is not identifying and describing types; she is gesturing toward them, relying on readers to supply a portrait they already have in mind.

Well of course Bowles is "relying on readers to supply a portrait they already have in mind." That's how political propaganda works. Why would Bowles spend her time thinking about and describing individual human beings? That's not what her audience or her funders want.

And it should never be forgotten how extreme Bowles is - she promoted the psychopathic Libs of TikTok a couple of years ago:

Another week and another funny investigative report from Libs of TikTok, this time about a Portland lesbian bar, Doc Marie’s, that closed a week after opening...

Bowles links to the Libs of TikTok Substack and to "our friends" the grifting goons Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, who also link to Libs of TikTok. 

Libs of TikTok and its creator Chaya Raichik are infamous for engaging in stochastic terrorism. And they are still at it: Waukesha middle school receives bomb threats after Libs of TikTok post; Planet Fitness outlets receive bomb threats after far right derides gym policy; Northwest ISD teacher — subject of Libs of TikTok posts — targeted by hoax bomb threat.

Imagine being a committed supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016, as Bowles apparently was, to, in a mere six years, publicly expressing your admiration for the humor of an extremist right-wing, gay-bashing soulless monster like Chaya Raichik. 

That's the corrupting power of far-right plutocrat money in action.

Quillette author gently criticizes Bari Weiss in the Daily Beast

Bari Weiss has been part of the IDW
since the beginning. Quillette founder
Claire Lehmann celebrates Weiss partying
with long-time Koch-funded grifters
---------------------------------------------------

Well I am on a roll with Bari Weiss lately.

I was glad to see Weiss receiving some criticism in the Daily Beast in an article entitled Is Bari Weiss Embarrassed by the Intellectual Dark Web? 

But I thought there were some glaring omissions in the article - no mention of what was a pretty big bombshell only a year ago - Weiss's sugar baby status as fund recipient of Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow. 

And although the Bari Weiss article about the "renegades" of the Intellectual Dark Web mentions Quillette as the "publication most associated with this (IDW) movement" the Daily Beast article does not mention Quillette once.

Then I realized the name of the author was familiar - ah yes the same Matt Johnson who has written for Quillette - and surprise surprise, Johnson's connection to Quillette is not mentioned in his Daily Beast bio, leading to this question: 

Is Matt Johnson embarrassed by Quillette?

Johnson has written fifteen articles for Quillette so far, the most recent in March of this year. Including a softball  interview with Steven Pinker - that's the only kind of interview anybody associated with Quillette would conduct. 

Johnson gives the impression that Weiss was at one time an outside (albeit sympathetic) observer of the IDW - but she's always been a member of the gang, which is why she is now so tight with far-right racist plutocrats associated with the IDW, including Peter Thiel. Weiss could be seen partying with IDW types a month after her renegades article ran.

Johnson has written for the equally right-wing garbage magazine Areo. And he adores misogynist Islamaphobe Christopher Hitchens. What an ass. 

Really it's kind of a miracle that Johnson has written anything against Weiss no matter how mild - but maybe this is an indication that the Quillette branch of the IDW is mad at Weiss for stealing their thunder - and maybe some plutocrat funding - by creating "The Free Press," the Bari Weiss version of Quillette.

The Washington Post slams Bari Weiss's grifter wife

 Nellie Bowles, wife of Bari Weiss, is like Bari a talentless right-wing political hack, superbly detailed by a review by Becca Rothfield in the Washington Post:

Then, she fell in love with former Times opinion editor and writer Bari Weiss, to whom she is now married. Bowles grandiosely characterizes Weiss as a “known liberal dissident,” as if she were a renegade in a Soviet prison — not a canny businesswoman who left the Times vocally but voluntarily in 2020 so as to earn a purported $800,000 from an aggrieved newsletter the following year.

In the gulag that is life after the New York Times, the pair founded the Free Press, an outlet that designates itself as a stronghold of “fierce independence” and that specializes in sneering at the alleged excesses of progressivism. (“Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella,” reads a representative headline about a student protest that has since been disbanded by swarms of police in full riot gear — not the sort of characters usually in attendance at a music festival.) With Weiss’s help, Bowles suggests, she abandoned her youthful follies and entered true adulthood.

Hers is a familiar narrative, and one for which there is an eager audience. Publications like the Free Press, which boasts 77,000 paid subscribers, often publish confessionals in which newly minted centrists detail their conversions. Books abound with such stories, too. In a recent screed about the pitfalls of the sexual revolution, self-proclaimed “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington explains that she pivoted rightward after a bout of hedonistic philandering in her 20s; the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari, in a 2021 memoir, admits that he arrived at college convinced of the wisdom of liberalism, only to be disillusioned as he came of age.

For the record, I don't believe the Free Press has 77K paid subscribers. I think it has 77K paid accounts some of which are underwritten by Bari Weiss's right-wing racist sugar daddies. Much like Substack. And until I see an audit of the accounts of the Free Press (or Substack) that proves otherwise, I will maintain that position.

Nellie Bowles revealed her true, hideous colors when she praised the psychopathic stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok. A piece of smug right-wing hackery is no more than I would expect from that truly awful human being.

And where would a friend of the Intellectual Dark Web be without raging self-pity in spite of having an incredibly lucrative but also incredibly easy plutocrat-funded grift?

What mass movement — massive by design and definition — has no ridiculous constituents? Certainly not the movement of brave “free thinkers” who liken the harsh feedback they receive online to public humiliations in Maoist China, as Bowles does at length.

Hack grifter ghouls, funded to make the world a more hateful place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a toxic brew.