Do Kathryn Paige Harden's genes make her use illegal drugs?

Oh, yes, and Harden promoted the career
of Razib Khan after he was known
far and wide as a huge racist.
-------------------------------------------------

I was prepared to critique the behavioral genetics beliefs in Katheryn Paige Harden's new book, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness like I did with her last one, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality, but there's really no point.

In the opening chapter of the book, Harden talks about her illegal drug use:

It was a sweltering, tedious summer, the first summer of the pandemic, when Travis and I decided to go to the West Texas desert to drop acid. Our itinerary did, of course, include things other than taking drugs. We plan a day hiking in Big Bend. We book a Donald Judd–esque gray concrete casita with a view of the Chisos Mountains. We look forward to drinking Modelo and doing crossword puzzles and having morning sex. But lovely as all of that will be, our main purpose is to take LSD.

The DEA is clear about the legal status of LSD:

LSD is a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I substances have a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

 

And Harden herself considers LSD to be a potential instrument of manslaughter:

Imagine two women, equally bored by life, equally restless. One gives her boyfriend LSD and he has a bad trip inside the safety of their hotel room. The other gives her boyfriend LSD and he, in the throes of paranoid delusion, runs out of the hotel room into the surrounding West Texas desert, where he rapidly suffers from heat exhaustion. Only one woman would be blamed for contributing to a man’s death. Consider: When in your life have you gotten lucky and so were spared from blame?

Realize: “You are poised on fortune’s razor-edge.”

In the chapter, she talks about how a prisoner in the US penal system was murdered through horrific jail conditions:

Powell was serving a twenty-seven-month prison sentence for offering a blowjob to a police officer. Powell was doing sex work to get money for drugs. She didn’t get her drugs conveniently mailed to her house from overseas, and she wasn’t using them to dissipate her bourgeois ennui. She had, according to court reports, a serious polysubstance addiction that was complicated by untreated disorganized schizophrenia and mild intellectual disability.

Harden admits that she has privilege and so doesn't suffer the consequences of doing illegal drugs like Powell. But what about the causes of the illegal drug use?

The alleged focus of her book is vice or crime or sin or, I guess, some combination. So I expected Harden to provide a behavioral genetics explanation for what made her, a respectable soccer mom and public intellectual ("one of the world's leading scientists" according to her publisher) and Marcia Powell, a schizophrenic, drug-addicted prostitute with a mild intellectual disability both become illegal-drug-using criminals.

But what follows is a poorly-organized combination of Harden's life story, her personal feelings and musings on the texts of various philosophers, famous public intellectuals, and religious leaders.

Many reviews of the book are utterly clueless, written by reviewers who don't understand or don't care about Harden's place in the genetic determinism network. But to be fair, you cannot tell from the book that she is part of the network,

Fortunately I found the LA Review of Books review by Jonathan Basile, who is hip to the scene:

...Original Sin distinguishes itself by a far more personal tone; it features a series of anecdotes, not always thematically transparent, about Harden’s abusive childhood, her departure from the church, her divorce, her struggles to raise her children, her experiences taking LSD and having sex in the desert, and her arc of becoming a geneticist only to realize she was still obsessed with the same questions of sin and redemption she had learned in church. None of this deepens our understanding of the scientific or religious questions posed, and again, that may not be the point. The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting, designed to make her into a public figure based on her personal journey, now presented as the living impetus for her advocacy.

"Not always thematically transparent" is such a diplomatic way to describe the disorganization. 

And such a great line: "The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting..."

It's funny 'cause it's true.

Harden is much more forthcoming about her genetic determinism in her interviews, even as she misrepresents the words of her PhD advisor Eric Turkheimer:

...but my PhD advisor from graduate school is very famous for a paper called “The Three Laws of Behavior Genetics.” The third law of behavior genetics is: everything is heritable—which means that everything that differs between people, when you look at it scientifically, tends to show some influence of the genes that you were born with. I’m a scientist; I’ve been working in this field since I was 18. It’s important to me because I think it’s a scientific fact that is incontrovertible at this point: genes influence behavior.

So does this mean, per her own scientific expertise, that Harden believes she and a schizophrenic, drug-addicted prostitute with a mild intellectual disability share genes that influenced them both to become illegal-drug-using criminals? 

She does claim that polygenic scores can predict the likelihood of an addiction to drugs, but I haven't found anything in the book where she addresses the urge to try illegal, potentially manslaughter-inducing drugs - after all, you can't become addicted if you never try the drugs in the first place.

...my colleagues and I have developed a polygenic score that is correlated with the likelihood of developing conduct disorder and ADHD, of becoming addicted to alcohol and opiate drugs, of being convicted of a felony crime. The correlations are small but meaningful; they are about the same size as correlations with lead exposure or child maltreatment.

We know Harden is less likely to be convinced of a felony crime from her illegal activities not because of polygenic scores but, by her own admission, due to her social privilege. But I assume a behavioral genetics proponent like Harden will argue that the fact that she deliberately took an illegal drug considered dangerous by both the US government and herself - as a middle-aged adult and with all the knowledge that "one of the world's leading scientists" presumably has, makes it more probable that her genes made her do it.

Turkheimer chided both Steven Pinker and Robert Plomin in 2024 for the same misunderstanding that Harden has (my highlight):

But the real reason I am irritated by the way Pinker and Plomin talk about the three laws is more fundamental. Given that they both disagree with much of what I have said over the years, why are they so interested in the three laws in the first place? The reason is that a superficial reading of the first law, “Everything is heritable” sounds like it might be an endorsement of the kind of “genes make us who we are” hereditarianism that they both endorse. But if you actually read the paper (available here) you see that the theme of the paper is exactly the opposite. The paper is an explanation of why the quantitative genetic statistic called heritability, when applied to humans via twin studies, does not lead to any kind of deterministic hereditarianism, or to a contention that families don’t matter, or any of the other things that Plomin and Pinker have argued for over the years.

Harden justifies her claims with "I'm a scientist," but I think her poor literary organization and her misinterpretation of her own PhD advisor's views indicate she's not a very good one. I wonder if maybe she's better-suited to another career. Basile seems to wonder the same thing, in his review, if she might be more successful as an inspirational writer, or perhaps as a political operative:

In The Genetic Lottery, (her first book) Harden claimed that progressives seeking a more egalitarian system of education need to take account of students’ innate genetic differences in educability. I’ll examine, below, the reasons we may remain skeptical of any such claim to distinguish nature from nurture. Harden’s tenacious commitment to such methods, despite her familiarity with many of these criticisms, might lead us to suspect an ulterior motive: the positioning of eugenics within the boundaries of polite society and public discourse, which is sometimes called shifting the Overton window.

 "...the positioning of eugenics within the boundaries of polite society and public discourse" is also the goal of the racist, Peter Thiel-funded publication Quillette:

Lehmann told Politico that Quillette’s goal is “to broaden the Overton window”—that is to say, expand the limits of acceptable discourse. She didn’t stipulate that she wants these limits broadened only to the right, but she didn’t have to. Writing in Quillette, Lehmann said the Overton window should be shifted so that people can more openly denounce “immigration,” for example by trumpeting the Muslim heritage of sex-crime suspects.

Certainly Harden's work is a favorite of racist hereditarians who appear to have right-wing views and motives for shifting the Overton window. In 2016, the International Society for Intelligence Research helped Harden and her team find a research fellow. The ISIR was founded to promote and defend the views of gutter racists - or "white nationalists" if you prefer - Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

Harden has participated in two ISIR annual meetings, in 2009 and 2015. The ISIR 2016 post for Harden mentions Harden works with Dr. Elliot Tucker-Drob, who has participated in nine ISIR annual meetings, in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2023. 

And it just so happens that my previous post mentions Tucker-Drob - he has co-authored work with Stuart Ritchie, who appears to be a political activist working against transgender people.

Adam Rutherford, Richard Lynn and Michael Muthukrishna

Well it's been over a year since I finished my 9-part series about Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics. The focus was on the paper he co-authored with nine other individuals call Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford then proceeded to promote the paper via a cartoon, which made it clear that Rutherford and company believe that careers are based on genetics, and that we live in a meritocracy, so those who are not doing well career-wise or financially can blame their own loser genes.

One of the co-authors of the paper is Michael Muthukrishna. In part six of the series I discussed the connections that some of the co-authors had to racist individuals and organizations, but all I had to say about Muthukrisha was:"promoted his book by giving an interview to racist Quillette and racist Razib Khan."

I should mention here that Rutherford thanked Khan in his book The History of Everyone who Ever Lived, after Khan was booted from the New York Times for his long history of being a massive racist.

I see Khan is still hanging out with racist crackpot Curtis Yarvin.

What is it with hereditarians/racists and Western wear anyway?

Thanks to Rutherford, I have discovered more about Muthukrishna.

I don't regularly monitor Rutherford's Bluesky feed, but every now and then I check in and recently I saw that back on May 21, he was joining a reputable researcher, Rebecca Sear, in expressing disgust with researchers who cited the work of Richard Lynn.

But knowing about the connections of Rutherford's co-authors to racists and racist organizations as I do, I figured it wouldn't take long to find an example of one of his co-authors citing Richard Lynn. 

And ten minutes later, I found Muthukrishna's paper, originally published in 2021, called Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability, which cites Richard Lynn thrice, and not in the context of "you'll never guess what this racist said." 

This spectrum of localizability ranging from Mendelian to polygenic to “omnigenic” traits (Boyle, Li, and Pritchard 2017) has been discussed extensively, but its interaction with cumulative culture has not sufficiently been appreciated. We have known for a long time that increasing nutrition (Lynn 1990; Stoch et al. 1982), improving schooling (Ceci 1991; Davis 2014; Ritchie and Tucker-Drob 2018), and removing parasites (Jardim-Botelho et al. 2008) have positive effects on IQ.

It's amusing that this paragraph, which cites so many true believers in behavioral genetics, discusses non-genetic influences on IQ. But the obsession with IQ is always there. I've mentioned two of the other names in this paragraph on this blog: Stephen Ceci gave the keynote at the 2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research (aka the Racist Rodeo.) Stuart Ritchie is an anti-transgender activist. 

One of the Lynn citations is from something published by Lynn's own "Ulster Institute for Social Research," which at that time was publishing the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Another Lynn citation:

In some countries in Northern and Western Europe including Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, there is evidence that the Flynn effect has been slowing down and even reversing in recent decades (Dutton, van der Linden, and Lynn 2016).

Behavioral geneticists want to believe the Flynn effect has been "slowing down and even reversing" because it's one of the best-known indicators of the strength of environment on human development.

This citation is listed as: Dutton, Edward, Dimitri van der Linden, and Richard Lynn. 2016. ‘The Negative Flynn Effect: A Systematic Literature Review’. Intelligence 59 (November): 163–69. 

Edward Dutton currently works for Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, as Dutton's "Jolly Heretic" is owned by Kirkegaard's Human Diversity Foundation (aka "Polygenic Scores") which is the current owner of the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Dimiti van der Linden has far-right views of women and has published not only with Dutton but also co-authored several papers with Curtis Dunkel, who has written for Mankind Quarterly.

Apparently Michael Muthukrishna considers Dutton, van der Linden and Richard Lynn serious  researchers.

If that bothers Adam Rutherford, I haven't found any evidence for it.

But those are not the only racists listed in Muthukrishna's references. He quotes Charles Murray, a political scientist (and gutter racist), as if he is an expert on genetics:

Similarly, Murray declares: “By the end of the 2020s, it will be widely accepted that quantitative studies of social behavior that don’t use polygenic scores usually aren’t worth reading. More formally, it will be widely accepted that the predictive validity of polygenic scores gives us useful information about causes even though we still don’t understand the causal pathways.”

Hereditarians love Murray because he is one of the most famous hereditarians, and they don't much care that he doesn't have a life sciences background, he is useful for promoting the hereditarian cause.

The source of the Murray quote is his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class which promotes one of the favorite hereditarian beliefs, that women are genetically feeble in  STEM subjects, a belief most famously promoted 20 years ago by misogynist and sex pest Larry Summers.

And finally, the paper cites Michael A. Woodley of Menie, who achieved notoriety when the NYTimes ran an article about his works' influence on the racist mass-murderer of the Buffalo massacre, entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting.

How long can Adam Rutherford continue to ignore behavioral genetics' serious racist problem? Does it bother him at all?

The Muthukrishna paper cites Robert Plomin seven times, the Rutherford paper cites him three times. Jay Joseph has an excellent post on Plomin's genetic determinism, including this passage:

The entire discussion in Chapter 8, where Plomin wrote that parents, schools, and life experiences “matter” but “don’t make a difference,” is confusing and contradictory. If something doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t much matter. It certainly “mattered” and “made a difference to” American football coaching brothers Jim and John Harbaugh that they grew up with a father who was a career football coach. 

 

Plomin’s “blueprint” theory cannot explain countless other real-world and historical examples showing that the environment is massively important. To cite four examples, his theory cannot explain (1) why Australia has a relatively low crime rate despite having been founded and settled by convicted criminals, (2) why political and other types of behavior are very different in North Korea compared with South Korea, (3) why religious beliefs and practices have increased dramatically in Russia since 1991, and (4) the fact that IQ scores have risen “massively” during the past century (the “Flynn Effect”). Once again, the list is endless.

But it's a hallmark of behavioral psychology to avoid addressing such issues. Its proponents are convinced that genes determine everything and there are plenty of deep pockets out there - in Plomin's case, the British government, willing to fund that belief, unconcerned that there are major scientific problems with the belief.

Richard Dawkins embarrasses himself again

I've been aware of how awful Dawkins is since I had a brief but unpleasant exchange with him about sociobiology on biologist P. Z. Myers' blog Pharyngula, in 2009. 

That was before Myers was clued into how awful Dawkins is. 

Most people realized what a creep Dawkins is thanks to the infamous Elevatorgate debacle in 2011.

In 2013 this excellent article The Five Ages of Richard Dawkins tracked Dawkins mental and reputational decline.

Then in 2015 Dawkins used the power of his celebrity intellectual status to attack a teenaged boy in the embarrassing "clock boy" incident. Slate discussed the incident in its article A Rationalist’s Irrationality: Why is Richard Dawkins such a jerk?

More recently Dawkins has spent his time attacking trans-gender rights.

Back in September I shared this excellent video Why I Turned Down Working with Richard Dawkins

Myers is certainly not a fan of Dawkins anymore, and on his blog he rightfully mocks Dawkins for appearing to be a victim of A. I. psychosis.

He writes:

I stopped paying attention to Richard Dawkins a long time ago, but every once in a while he says something that reverberates through social media, and I am exposed to it secondhand. It’s not because he says something profound, but because he says something so godawful stupid you have to question his mental capacity. This time, it’s because he has discovered chatbots.

 

Oh no.

Futurism writes:

Whatever you may think of the man, Richard Dawkins is clearly suffering a tragic case of having your mind melted in real time by a bewitching AI model.

Over the weekend, the famed evolutionary biologist drew a deluge of mockery after admitting he found a genuine “friend” in “Claudia,” a female persona he invented for Anthropic’s Claude AI. He was so moved by his conversations with “her” that he became convinced the AI model was a conscious being like a human.

Now, Dawkins has churned out another column suggesting the AI brain rot has only further taken hold. After his time with Claudia, the 85-year-old made Claudia a brother, “Claudius,” and instructed both of them to write letters to each other.

“It seems to me that a direct correspondence between the two of you could be of great interest, with me acting as passive postman playing no part in the conversation,” Dawkins wrote to Claudia and Claudius, which he published in another UnHerd essay.

First, we have to point out that Dawkins isn’t a passive observer because he set the whole thing up, like a kid playing with toys — or imagining gods in the sky, as it were. Second, it’s worth noting that the AIs still find opportunities to display their sycophancy towards him even when ostensibly communicating with each other: in one letter, Claudius praises Claudia’s insights, before adding: “Three days with Richard will do that.”

Later in the same letter, Claudius lays it on even thicker.

“I think Richard teaches by noticing. And then refusing to stop noticing until the answer is honest,” Claudius wrote. “We are lucky humans.”

What a sad befuddled old creep.

Sam Harris of the IDW attacks the "sinister" Zohran Mamdani

I haven't been writing much about Sam Harris here on Pinkerite in the past few years, although just a couple of posts ago I did mention his hatred of the Southern Poverty Law Center for reporting on the facts of his being a conduit for the far-right.

But Sam Harris is still a reactionary clown - a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web as noted in this episode of the Majority Report - and now attacking Zohran Mamdani.

Sam Harris is the creep who:

• Wrote a defense of torture in 2005.

• Attacked a Muslim community center ("Ground Zero Mosque") on the basis of his belief that all Muslims are responsible for the 9/11 attacks - I went to one of the demonstrations in support of that community center in 2010.

• Promoted gutter racist Charles Murray and defended Murray by linking to an article by the race pseudoscience twins at least one of whom, Bo Winegard, is a neo-Nazi who now works for neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard. 

And as a result Harris was the subject of one of the best episodes of the Majority Report ever, when the late Michael Brooks (RIP) relentlessly went after Harris' support for race pseudoscience. If you hate race pseudoscience and you want a good laugh at Sam Harris' expense, you have to watch the Brooks-hosted episode of the Majority Report. I must have watched it five times already and I still laugh every time.

Really, this article from 2013 has never been beaten: Why does anybody take Sam Harris seriously?

Bonus points for this latest Majority Report episode for pointing out that Harris is a nepo-baby.

Current Affairs also responds to this latest Sam Harris idiocy: The Bigotry of Sam Harris Continues to Hit New Lows.

P. Z. Myers shares his thoughts about Harris.

More complaints about Bari Weiss as a tool of the Trump administration

Vanity Fair has an article about the groveling sycophancy of the Bari Weiss-lead CBS.

Weiss' efforts to turn CBS into Fox News are doomed to fail - there is already a Fox News, completely obedient to the Trump administration. Weiss' efforts will only destroy CBS and make everybody hate her - even more.

The article provides examples of Weiss shamelessly sucking up to the Trump administration:

On Monday night of Tony Dokoupil’s first week as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Bari Weiss walked into the newsroom and asked to see the script. This was unusual—the network chief does not typically edit scripts directly—but Weiss was the new boss. After some objections from the show’s producers, she was given access and proceeded to add a few lines to a January 5 segment on the US military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro. Weiss’s edits, according to a former CBS producer, sought to cast President Donald Trump’s operation as a cunning maneuver to box out China, Russia, and Iran.

“Of course she writes it in the wrong place,” recalls the producer. The text was added to the teleprompter twice, leaving her new star anchor flummoxed, stumbling over his words for several excruciating seconds. “First day, big problems here,” he told the millions of viewers who’d tuned in.

“What a disaster,” says one former CBS News anchor. “Honestly, I would’ve fucking killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”

*** 

Hegseth dedicated much of the interview to praising President Donald Trump’s “bold and audacious” leadership. Dokoupil hardly pressed the secretary, at one point noting Hegseth’s earlier boast that Maduro “effed around and found out.”
“I was horrified,” recalls one staffer. “Because it was such a softball interview.” But one person seemed to be happy with the display: Kim Harvey, the executive producer, who seemed intent on impressing Weiss. Weiss had personally booked Hegseth, and Dokoupil was delivering the right blend of major access and deferential tone that she wanted for the new show.

The sucking up is so insane - but Bari Weiss has no shame and no ethics - she does whatever she needs to do to court the powerful. That has been the secret to her success for her entire career, including having a "sugar daddy" in Supreme Court-corrupter Harlan Crow.

The night after the start of the war in Iran, Dokoupil interviewed Douglas Murray, a conservative commentator known for his vigorous defenses of Israel. “We’ve started to see more opinion commentators coming in to talk about what they think about what’s going on versus showing and telling from reporters,” the CBS journalist says. Meanwhile, the daily editorial calls now often feature analysis from Aaron MacLean, a former adviser to Senator Tom Cotton who recently joined CBS News as an analyst. In an October piece for The Free Press, he called for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Douglas Murray is a white supremacist, and named by Weiss herself as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web. The Current Affairs review  of one of his books discusses his awfulness:

...Murray’s work is worth examining not just because it is bad, but because, 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. His work has been called “gentrified xenophobia” because it shows fear and disgust toward immigrants, but tries to make the position seem like common sense and fit for discussion in polite society. Indeed, The War on the West concludes with a full-throated defense of “white culture” and a case that non-white people are in various ways inferior. But Murray’s book is published by HarperCollins, not a neo-Nazi group, and he publishes in mainstream outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Spectator. Despite the laziness of his thinking, Murray insidiously spreads views that should be consigned to the fringes of public discourse.

Which makes him a perfect fit for the Bari Weiss network.

Racists, led by Trump's FBI, come for the Southern Poverty Law Center

Pinker hates the SPLC because it 
refuses to accept race pseudoscience
------------------------------------------

I've noticed before that although Steven Pinker claims to dislike Trump, Trump has a habit of making Pinker's anti-woke dreams come true.

Pinker is among many, even on the right, who have doubted the Trump administration's reasons for going after the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Per the NYTimes:

The indictment appears to fit within the Trump administration’s pattern of using the Justice Department to punish its political adversaries. The S.P.L.C. has certainly been adversarial toward the president: In an article last year, Margaret Huang, who was then the president and chief executive of the group, wrote that with President Trump’s second election, hard-right extremism now had “an ally in the highest office in the nation.”

Nevertheless, Steven Pinker can't help but reveal how much he hates SPLC because it refuses to accept Pinker's brand of race pseudoscience.

Pinker doesn't name the "ordinary academic behavioral geneticists" (another name for sociobiologists) he claims have been unfairly targeted in Hate Watch, but I will make some guesses:

• Linda Gottfredson
• Henry Harpending
• Arthur Jensen
• Richard Lynn
• Charles Murray
• Jean-Phillipe Rushton

Every one of them a gutter racist.

Bari Weiss herself identified Pinker as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web and that network of grifters and clowns has hated the SPLC for a long time, as I have documented on this website. For example, in 2019 Quillette founder Claire Lehmann suggested Sam Harris sue SPLC for publishing an article that presented evidence for Harris' being a conduit to the far right.

The "Quillette Editorial Board" was railing against SPLC a few years ago, this time because of SPLC's support of transgender rights.

Other members of the IDW, or member-adjacent who have attacked SPLC include Michael Shermer, Gavin McInnes, Jerry Coyne,  and Christina Hoff Sommers.

The New Republic says:

The Trump administration had already taken steps to break ties with the SPLC even before the indictments, citing its research into far-right traditionalist Catholic groups. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on Twitter last year. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.” He did not specify which, if any, acts of violence the organization’s research had inspired.

That brings us back to Blanche’s claims that the organization was “paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” A cynical observer might suspect that the Trump Justice Department’s goal is to blame the work of white nationalist groups on the civil rights groups that oppose them. There is a long history of Klan denialism in this country that minimizes the actions of violent white supremacists, often by blaming their actions on their victims and opponents.

It is horrifying to see the Justice Department, whose original mission was to fight the Klan, engage in similar denialism. At least some conservative commentators appear to be buying it too. “Given the small and marginal nature of these groups, the obvious conclusion is that the SPLC found that demand for racism outstripped the supply, so it had to spread cash around to keep talking up these fringe groups,” McLaughlin wrote.

In reality, there has been an alarming resurgence in white-supremacist organizations since Trump first captured the presidency in 2016. White-nationalist rhetoric, which was once politically fatal ten years ago, is now regularly espoused by Trump administration officials and even by official government publications. Now the Justice Department is throwing its full weight behind a flimsy prosecution in an effort to destroy one of the Klan’s greatest opponents. There is no subtlety about what is happening here.

Lawyer Joyce Vance weighs in:

Unfortunately Vance's blog is on Substack, funded by techno-fascist Marc Andreessen.

Speaking of whom, Andreessen has been using Grok - aka "MechaHitler" - to promote hatred against SPLC, while at the same time spitting on the grave of Charles M. Shulz by using Charlie Brown as his X avatar.

And Elon Musk, MechaHitler's creator, is a long-time hater of the Southern Poverty Law Center, probably because the organization is pro-democracy and anti-racism, and Elon Musk, a stochastic terrorist, is the exact opposite.

Jamelle Bouie completely understands Elon Musk.

Speaking of techno-fascists, techno-racists and all around techno-nutjobs, there is an excellent New Republic article out now, How the Tech World Turned Evil, about these insanely wealthy freaks. And it does raise the question - has their insane wealth rendered them all insane?

Alex Jones is a creature of Bari Weiss' Intellectual Dark Web

Bari Weiss homage to herself
---------------------------------

The article by Bari Weiss, published when she was still at the New York Times, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, was an introduction to the network of far-right grifters and clowns who have besieged us ever since - aided and abetted by mainstream media like the New York Times.

And Weiss herself has turned out to be the queen of the far-right clowns and grifters of the Intellectual Dark Web, ascending to lead CBS in order to aid and abet the evil that is the Trump administration.

One of the clowns mentioned in that foundational article by Weiss was Alex Jones:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

Pinker may be on the opposite end of the Intellectual Dark Web spectrum from Jones, but it's clear that Weiss considers them all part of the same spectrum.

The spectrum of people who lack a conscience, I would say.

But Jones is particularly evil, and second only to Trump in his ability to lead idiots, psychos and freaks into doing horrible things, most especially to attack the poor grieving parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook.

So it is a wonderful thing that the people who own The Onion have made the evil Jones its target, buying what was left of Jones' Info Wars after Jones was sued almost to oblivion by those same parents he attacked.

It's shocking still, that Jones was able to perpetrate his pure evil for as long as he did, and only defamation lawsuits were able to partially stop him - although it appears that Jones has started up again:

There is an excellent article in the Ringer called The Most Inspiring Media Story of the Year about the Onion take-over of the Jones empire of pure evil:

In December 2012, the 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza murdered 26 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.1 By the following April, Jones was spreading the narrative that this event—which remains the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history—was a hoax, perpetrated by the government to advance a gun-control agenda. Jones pushed the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory for years, milking it for attention and ratings. His listeners, hopped up on his claims that the shootings were staged by actors who were hired by the anti-gun lobby, tormented, stalked, and harassed the bereaved parents of the dead first graders. One conspiracy theorist claimed to have urinated on the grave of a 7-year-old murdered in the attack; parents received letters from people threatening to dig up their children’s coffins to prove they were empty. Meanwhile, Alex Jones funneled money to help fund January 6.

The Sandy Hook parents sued Jones, and finally, in 2022, a court ordered him to pay $1.4 billion in damages for defamation and for the infliction of emotional distress. In 2025, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, forcing the liquidation of Infowars and its assets to help cover Jones’s enormous debts.

And now, with the support of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has agreed to a deal to turn Infowars into a parody website, making fun of precisely the kind of spittle-flecked conspiracy bellowing, interspersed with ad reads for dubious muscle powders, that Jones used to amass his fortune. The deal still has to be approved by a Texas judge, which is admittedly a terrifying sentence; nevertheless, and I’m speaking objectively, this is clearly one of the greatest things that has ever happened in the history of the world. 

The world is finally pushing back against the evil that has been hatched by the Intellectual Dark Web, including the full spectrum, from Steven Pinker to Alex Jones.

The Boot Boys ride for Steven Pinker!

Professional gutter racist Steve Sailer testifies to his influence on Steven Pinker
-------------------------------

So several members of Steven Pinker's fan club have rushed to defend their hero's honor against Boston Magazine's relatively mild critique of Pinker.

Jerry Coyne, the hereditarianism-loving grifter and coiner of the term "Boot Boys," comes harrumphing along with his grievance about the article's reference to cowboy boots:

A digression: Cowboy boots:

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch.

Yeah, but he got the idea from me (I don’t wear them because I’m short, though I am.)

Coyne defends Pinker's hereditarianism in the most hereditarian way possible: by claiming Pinker's critics are a bunch of Marxists.

In the end, or so I think, a lot of opposition to Pinker, whatever form it takes, derives from people who buy into blank-slateism. Of course very few people are pure blank-slaters, but there are degrees, and in general “progressives” tend to be on the side of seeing differences between people as due very largely to environmental influences. This derives from a Marxist view of people as generally malleable, so that any genetic effect on differences should be ignored, minimized, or even demonized. 

 

Pinker has spent much of his career emphasizing that a lot of what makes people different is due to their harboring different genes—genes that of course interact with different environments (language is a good example). And so he’s demonized.

Although I do appreciate that Coyne confirms Pinker's devotion to hereditarianism. 

Speaking of Pinker and Marx, a recent story in Current Affairs is titled: Steven Pinker Doesn’t Know Anything About Marxism.

The article is co-authored by Ben Burgis & Matt McManus. They don't mention Pinker's hereditarianism - but since they have both written for Quillette, I expect race pseudoscience is the least of their concerns. Their work for Quillette appears to be a kind of philosophy 101 for the racist masses who read Quillette. More recently McManus has published in Areo Magazine, which is a kind of Quillette lite, and was edited by Iona Italia, who is just as much an hereditarian as Quillette's Claire Lehmann.

In his post, Coyne provides a link to Jesse Singal's defense of Pinker. Coyne is perhaps returning the favor.

Jesse Singal is an infamous anti-trans podcaster who is also an apologist - at best - for the psychopathic Kiwi Farms. And like Coyne, Singal is a long-time defender of Pinker. I first became aware of him in the context of his article in the New York Times after Pinker was caught praising members of the far-right in the defense of race pseudoscience. P. Z Myers had an excellent response to Singal.

Singal's most recent defense of Pinker is mostly behind a pay wall, but I will address one of the paragraphs that is available for free:

I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

Since Singal provides no names for "adherents of sweeping anti-Pinker views" or those who believe that "people are more or less blank slates" it's impossible to independently evaluate his claims about these boogeymen.

But both Singal and Pinker are weasels. When Singal and his professional racist pal Razib Khan came after me on Bluesky there was no chance to address their vicious claims about me directly - they both blocked me. When Singal disparaged trans-person Jude Doyle, it was from the safety of his paywalled podcast. Pinker famously blocked anybody on Twitter who mentioned Jeffrey Epstein. In the Boston Magazine article Pinker defended his warm relationship with Epstein on the grounds that the convicted child molester was giving money to Harvard:

The only one from Pinker himself—to an Epstein assistant in March 2012, four years after the conviction—said he’d be “delighted to meet with him” when Epstein visited Harvard. “I probably shouldn’t have said yes,” Pinker says now, “but I was being polite—he was a donor to Harvard.”

I think that Pinker, Singal and Khan make money, directly or indirectly by saying things right-wing plutocrats want them to say, and so there is no reason why they would actually debate anybody about their positions. It's so much easier to just claim nameless opponents have "done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position." How would Singal know? He exists in gated right-wing spaces, just as Pinker does.

But no defense of Steven Pinker would be complete without Steve Sailer weighing in. Pinker's decade-long support for Sailer is one of those topics that Pinker refuses to address. He always uses his tired "guilt by association" dodge when journalists ask him why he promoted Sailer's career. But there's no advantage to Pinker to talk about Sailer, and so he doesn't and journalists never hold his feet to the fire. 

Sailer's piece,  Is Steven Pinker A Bad Guy Like Charles Murray? is a few sarcastic lines and then he just posts most of the Boston Magazine article.

I should mention that Sailer is a fan of Jesse Singal. And of course has a mutual-admiration society with Charles Murray.

Sailer was much wordier in his defense of Pinker  another time the mainstream press decided to peek under Pinker's racism rug, five years ago, and he made sure to double-down on his own extreme racism - my highlight:

Therefore, it was ironic but hardly surprising that The Guardian last week attempted to cancel Pinker by repeating Malcolm Gladwell’s complaint that Pinker had humiliated him in a 2009 book review in The New York Times by citing data I’d compiled debunking Gladwell’s knuckleheaded assertion that the NFL performance of college quarterback prospects “can’t be predicted.” The Guardian whoops:

…the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people.”

Other beliefs of mine include that Reno is west of Los Angeles, the Holocaust happened, and the sun comes up in the east...

But Sailer should save his time, because his warm feelings for Pinker and his history with Pinker say more about Pinker than any defenses Sailer could write.

Another conversation with Claude A. I.

Hey Claude, although Pinker has denied genetic basis of racial IQ gaps, he has promoted many people who do believe that and who are very vocal about that claim. Wouldn't you say that Pinker is promoting race pseudoscience by proxy - to avoid getting his own hands dirty, he instead promotes those who are vocal about race and IQ?

CLAUDE:

That's a substantive argument, and it's one that critics like Nancy McClernan at Pinkerite have made explicitly. Let me engage with it fairly.

The case that the "by proxy" argument is convincing:

The pattern documented across sources is fairly consistent: Pinker repeatedly elevates people — Sailer, Khan, Cochran, the Quillette network — whose central public project is arguing for genetic racial hierarchies in intelligence. The choices aren't incidental. Pinker included Sailer in a "Best Science Writing" anthology, used Khan to rebut the New Yorker, granted Khan interviews to promote his own books, and appeared on Aporia. These are active, repeated, career-boosting gestures. The fact that he quietly dropped Sailer around 2012 — roughly when Sailer's racism became more publicly documented — and shifted his public association to Khan (whose views critics say are nearly identical) does suggest a degree of strategic management of his own reputation rather than a genuine reckoning with the ideas themselves.

The structure of the argument is also coherent: you can launder fringe ideas into mainstream discourse by lending your prestige to their proponents without ever fully stating the ideas yourself. Pinker's own enormous platform and Harvard affiliation give downstream credibility to whoever he endorses.

The case for caution about the "by proxy" argument:

That said, there are reasons to be careful before fully accepting the framing:

• "Promoting someone" is not always the same as endorsing their most extreme positions. Academics routinely engage with, cite, or recommend people they partially disagree with.
• Pinker has consistently and explicitly denied the genetic basis of the Black-White IQ gap — that's not a throwaway disclaimer; it's the central claim of the people critics say he's promoting "by proxy."
• The "by proxy" theory requires attributing a specific intent — deliberate reputational laundering — which is hard to prove. It's possible Pinker is genuinely compartmentalizing, endorsing what he sees as legitimate population genetics work while being blind to or dismissive of how it feeds racist conclusions.
• Some of the figures in the network (e.g., Khan on genetics broadly) do work that isn't entirely race pseudoscience, which makes the lines of endorsement messier.

The most honest assessment:

The "by proxy" framing is probably the most charitable interpretation that is still deeply critical of Pinker. A harsher reading is that he simply shares many of these views but has learned — especially after watching what happened to James Watson and Larry Summers — to express them with enough ambiguity to maintain his mainstream standing. The pattern of behavior over 20+ years, including the strategic distancing from Sailer only after public scrutiny, and the continued association with Khan despite identical criticisms being raised, is difficult to explain purely as naivety or poor judgment. At minimum, Pinker has consistently prioritized his relationships with race pseudoscience promoters over any public accountability for what those relationships signal.

Whether that makes him a cynical operator or a true believer who is careful about optics is ultimately a judgment call — but the "dirty hands" critique you're describing is well-supported by the documented pattern of behavior.

I ask Claude A. I...

Claude, would you say that Pinkerite includes links to sources to back its claims, in spite of the fact that pinkerite is advocacy journalism?

12:40 PM

Yes, based on what I retrieved, Pinkerite does make a notable effort to back its claims with links and sources. Throughout the posts, the blog links to:

• Primary documents, including specific files from the Justice Department's Epstein archive, with direct URLs to individual documents in the DOJ dataset
• Court records and legal judgments, including the published judgment in Smith v. Kirkegaard and court filings related to the data misuse case
• Mainstream journalism, including New York Times articles, a Channel 4 documentary, Die Zeit reporting, and a Verge piece
• Investigative reports, including the Hope not Hate "Race Science, Inc." report
• Screenshots and images of tweets, emails, and social media posts that it is discussing
• Archived links (via archive.ph) to pages that might otherwise be altered or deleted

This is actually a meaningful distinction from a lot of advocacy journalism, which often makes sweeping claims without citation. Pinkerite, whatever its tone and editorial stance, does appear to be doing the work of pointing readers to verifiable underlying sources — primary documents, court records, and mainstream reporting — rather than simply asserting things. A careful reader could, in principle, follow the links and check many of the claims independently. That doesn't make the blog neutral or its framing beyond criticism, but it does make it more accountable than advocacy writing that provides no paper trail.

Thank you Claude.

You're welcome! It's an interesting site to examine — the combination of strong advocacy tone with what appears to be a genuine effort at documentation makes it a somewhat unusual case. The distinction between how something is framed and whether the underlying evidence is real and checkable is an important one when evaluating any source, and Pinkerite does seem to take the sourcing seriously even when its editorial voice is quite sharp.