The meeting of the race pseudoscience brain trust is called to order

 

You cannot have a race pseudoscience brain trust meeting without Greco-Roman statuary to signify "The West." 

FAIR grifter update - even further right than ever - can it be possible???

Nothing gives Warren more credibility than the fact
that misogynist rightwing tax-evading
plutocrat Elon Musk hates her.

The FAIR board of advisors is leaning so far right now, it's a wonder it hasn't fallen over entirely.

Back in July I did a tally of the board and its political leanings. Very far right.

So who's out now and who is in?

Well the only one who appears to be gone is Christopher Rufo. I guess his main assignment of trying to prevent discussions of race in American classrooms under the umbrella of CRT is taking up all his time.

But Rufo is verrrrry far right. A Trump supporter, a Koch employee, and is or was "a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank known for its opposition to the theory of evolution and advocacy for intelligent design to be taught in public schools."

Will the FAIR gang be able to not only make up for Rufo's extremism, but add enough members of right-wing alignment to allow the FAIR board of advisors to tilt even further starboard?

You can count on the FAIR gang. 

The newly added members are Jonathan Kay, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Tim Urban and John R. Wood, Jr.

Jonathan Kay of course is the right-wing editor of the race pseudoscience rag Quillette. So Quillette connection. Check.

Batya Ungar-Sargon: "Newsweek opinion editor: Fauci represents 'extremely arrogant and highly politicized elite." Wrote an anti-woke book. Complete rightwing establishment media asshole. Check.

Tim Urban worships Elon Musk. Elon Musk was seen on Twitter recently, combining plutocrat disdain for paying taxes with misogyny. So economically conservative. Check.

John R. Wood, Jr. - Republican who loves Trump. Check.

Watch him at CPAC asking God to bless Trump. It will make your skin crawl.

So these four, while individually not as horrible as Christopher Rufo, are each pretty horrible in their own special way and that more than makes up for the loss of Rufo.

Help fight racist, perjuring scofflaw Emil Kirkegaard

Emil Kirkegaard, described by comedian Stewart Lee as a "weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil" is also a perjurer who was ordered by the court to pay the legal costs of a person he sued, Oliver Smith. 

Of course Kirkegaard is refusing to pay. 

Smith has set up a gofundme to help defray the costs of going after Kirkegaard in his native Denmark.

In May 2020 I won a frivolous libel suit filed by a vexatious litigant named Emil O. W. Kirkegaard in the High Court of England and Wales. My comments he sued me for were not ruled to be defamatory under statute law (they did not cause him "serious harm") and my legal defence of honest opinion was successful. Kirkegaard subsequently lost the assessment of costs that dragged on until September 2021. In October 2021 he missed the deadline and refused to pay my legal costs of 35,971.67 (which includes two separate costs orders + interest) and is in contempt of court. I am now taking him to court in his own country (Denmark) to enforce the court orders and judgment. I am raising money to cover the enforcement costs.

More information can be found on the following webpage: https://oliveratlantis.com/emil-kirkegaard/

I have donated and I recommend you do too. 

Race pseudoscience is a many-headed hydra and opposing one race pseudoscience-monger like Kirkegaard is opposition to all. Quillette author and extreme racist Noah Carl has published in Kirkegaard's OpenPsych. Carl likes to team up with Quillette employee and racist Bo Winegard to defend race pseudoscience. 

Charles Murray is a supporter of Kirkegaard. In this tweet we see him supporting a "human biodiversity" fundaraiser for Kirkegaard - and another for racist Bo Winegard.

I will admit to having one thing in common with Emil Kirkegaard though - we both believe Steven Pinker is a "racial hereditarian."

Anna Krylov embarrasses herself in print again

When we last discussed Anna Krylov, professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California, here at Pinkerite, it was to criticize her essay "The Peril of Politicizing Science" in which I demonstrated that Krylov was a hypocrite who believes that if she promotes a manifestly political position it is not really politics.

Then there is her logical incoherence - scoffing along with Steven Pinker at the idea that words have power, while simultaneously claiming a grave existential threat over changing the words in the names of science prizes and terms and even in an advertisement for soap. 

Finally there is her moral incoherence. She clearly thinks that "canceling" is bad - she even equated it with being burnt at the stake. And yet she appears to decry the removal of the name of a murderous Soviet dictator from towns and other public edifices as "canceled."

Well Krylov has published a new piece on the same old topic, this time in the horrendous Quillette, proving I was correct when I said, at the end of my previous critique of Krylov: "she truly is a member of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex."

She co-wrote the Quillette article with someone named Jay Tanzman. Tanzman is identified merely as "a freelance statistician." There is a Jay Tanzman mentioned in a few academic journals where the name is connected to "Tanzman Statistical Consulting, Los Angeles, California, United States of America" but a search for "Tanzman Statistical Consulting" shows no results for that company name.

Krylov reiterates her moral - or perhaps mental - incoherence in this new article (my highlight):

My own home town of Yuzovka, I noted, was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), then renamed Stalino after Trotsky was purged, then Donetsk when Stalin was posthumously canceled by Khrushchev. Survey the stream of recent renamings of awards, buildings, and even laws of physics, and modern parallels aren’t hard to find. The intrusion of newspeak into science and education is truly Orwellian.

So her hometown started out as Yuzovka - which was named after a Welsh businessman named John Hughes. (Don't ask me how they got Yuzovka out of Hughes.) Then the town was renamed after Trotsky, then renamed after Stalin. Once again we see her say that Stalin was 'canceled.' Is that supposed to be a bad thing? She appears to be making a point in complete opposition to her belief that cancel culture is the great Satan.

Nowadays the town is called Donetsk - named after a river. I think we should all thank "cancel culture" for that.

I had to laugh at this section of her Quillette article:

I expected to be viciously mobbed, and possibly cancelled, like others before me. Yet the result surprised me. Although some did try to cancel me, I received a flood of encouraging emails from others who share my concern with the process by which radical political doctrines are being injected into STEM pedagogy, and by which objective science is being subjugated to regressive moralization and censorship. The high ratio of positive-to-negative comments (even on Twitter!) gave me hope that the silent liberal majority within STEM may (eventually) prevail over the forces of illiberalism.

Now of course she provides no evidence that anybody tried to "cancel" her. And we don't know what she means by the word "cancel" - in her lexicon it could mean anything from having your name removed from something to being burnt at the stake.

But clearly she drank the crazy Quillette Kool-aid before publishing the first piece.

The link on the word "others" in the cited paragraph is to a piece by reactionary academic Lee Jussim, whose entire career appears to involve repeating "stereotypes are real" over and over again. In the piece she links to, Jussim moans about, among other "cancellations," racist Bo Winegard failing to have his contract renewed at a college. Winegard holds such extreme views that he advocates for national ethnic quotas which sounds straight out of the Nazi playbook.

In her Quillette piece Krylov warns us, all evidence to the contrary, that there is a nefarious mob out there. How nefarious?

Their efforts are directed, often single-mindedly, at enforcing contortions of language and ideology within their own rarified institutions, forming task forces to rename equations, invent microaggressions, police language, rename moths and ants, and repackage soap. And they are completely vicious in the use of mob tactics to intimidate or cancel those who dare object to their extreme strictures. Again, the parallels with the USSR of my youth are rather obvious.

That's right - renaming things and repackaging soap are the equivalent, in Anna Krylov's mind, of the USSR. This position would be rational if the worst thing the Soviet Union ever did was rename things.

I think this might be the last time I write about Krylov. I am beginning to feel more pity for her than anything else, in her public displays of irrationality and fear-mongering. Writing an incoherent mess for a racist rag like Quillette is a complete embarrassment, especially for someone who had a reputable STEM career. 

When her career ends, I expect she'll claim she was cancelled, but I doubt the reason will have anything to do with her politics.

This excellent Quillette logo

I first saw this image on Twitter a few months ago, but recently I decided to find out who created it.

Incorporating literal calipers into the Quillette logo is perfection. Quillette is the leading promoter of race pseudoscience (outside of the proudly racist American Renaissance, which likes to repost Quillette articles) which is based on 18th century racial beliefs. Quillette even ran a pro-phrenology article.

I've had this tweet up for 24 hours now, and although it's gotten a fair amount of attention, nobody has come forward. 

Recently a right-winger on Twitter claimed the Intellectual Dark Web is not right-wing. I set them straight though. It seems unlikely that a group of people associated with the publication Quillette would be anything but right-wing.

Quillette founder Claire Lehmann once threatened an op-ed writer with a defamation lawsuit for saying that Quillette is "a conservative website which has been happy to publish authors known for promoting theories of white supremacy."

In spite of that being the writer's opinion, it is also, on examination, an accurate description of Quillette.

Steven Pinker and Quillette have a mutual admiration society. For obvious reasons. 

I had to laugh at this recent tweet from Pinker about Claire Lehmann:

The reason this is such a big deal, for Lehmann to diverge from the right on this one issue, is because the vast majority of Quillette supporters are right-wingers.

Pinker: the left is "out to lunch" to attribute crime to poverty and racism

During a mercifully brief interview with Graham Lawton of New Scientist, Steven Pinker, the world's most annoying man, compared the belief that crime is caused by poverty and racism to climate change denial.

...scientists are often surprised that there is so much denial... and it is sometimes attributed to scientific uh ignorance or scientific illiteracy... as it turns out itself a uh less than rational belief because it's not based on empirical studies of why people deny climate change... and what those studies show is that the deniers are actually no more ignorant of science than the believers, in fact a lot of people who endorse the scientific consensus are really uh out to lunch when it comes to the science of climate change, they think it has something to do with the ozone hole and toxic waste dumps plastic straws in the ocean. 

What does predict people's belief in climate change is just their politics the farther you are to the right the more denial there is.

Now that's a case in which the scientifically respectable conclusion is aligned with the left but there are also cases that go the other way, where it's the the uh the left that's out of touch with the scientific facts. 

The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism...

But since the media almost always treats Pinker's utterances as unquestionable pearls of scientific wisdom, Lawton did not ask Pinker what he thinks is the true cause of crime.

I looked around for other instances of Pinker discussing crime, and found a Pinker interview from May with his fellow Quillette author Coleman Hughes. While Hughes is a Black American, he is also an apologist for race pseudoscience and a Koch employee, via the Koch-funded City Journal, and I wondered if Pinker was going to go all-in on a race pseudoscience explanation for crime.

Instead what I found was Pinker said something different about racism and crime:

HUGHES

...But I want to ask now a deep and basic question relating to human nature and a kind of fundamental disagreement on what human nature is and how that relates to violence. And and the question, which is deceptively simple, is: "What is the cause of crime? What causes people to commit crime? Does the question make sense? If so, why or why not?" And just how do you view that--because and the context is, most people I talk to about this issue take it for granted that crime is, you know, we know the causes of crime--poverty, inequality, systemic bias, hopelessness, despair. And I have no doubt that that is true in some cases, but I - I - I've been persuaded by by by many arguments that sort of hold that human nature can can kind of just tend towards this to begin with. 

So, where do you stand on that? And how do you, how do you think of that? 

PINKER

Yeah, there are ah, there different kinds of crime and there are different people who commit them out of different motives. Generally, it's certainly true that a lot of crime occurs in poor neighborhoods. And poor people are more likely to commit violent crime. It's not true, necessarily true of violence in general, especially through history when it used to be the aristocrats that had their armed retinues and would engage in contests of honor and revenge, dueling men men of honor as in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet when two aristocratic families have a a street fight. 

So it's, that's not a given, but it tends to be true now. In general it's--although there are many causes of crime--they're not all racism and inequality, the ah especially not when it comes to changes over time.

So apparently Pinker does think that racism and poverty are causes of crime, just not the only ones. 

It would appear that in May 2021, Steven Pinker did not believe "leftists" were incorrect to the point of climate-change-denial-incorrectness. But in December 2021 he did.

Did Steven Pinker change his mind between the May and December? Or is this yet one more example of weak and strong pinkerism? 

Did Pinker change his response based on his audience, the way Pinker's buddy Razib Khan did on the issue of "white supremacy"?

Pinker's interview with Hughes demonstrates Pinker's utter obtuseness - it must be based on his own political leanings - when it comes to data:

PINKER 

...The great American crime decline, which began in 1992, which saw rates of violent crime plunge to half their levels in you know, in New York it plunged 75 percent. This was during a period of rising inequality. And even though there've been there was a slight deep systemic decrease in racism--not enough to have brought crime rates down that quickly, 50 percent in eight years...

We saw in "Better Angels" that Pinker attributed Black American high crime rates to low Black marriage rates. In spite of the data showing the opposite - marriage rates fell along with crime rates.

Pinker doesn't say what metric he is using to determine "inequality" here. But we do have one useful metric, which involves looking at data, so maybe that explains why Pinker missed it: 

American unemployment began to fall after 1992.

And Black unemployment rates, while historically higher than white unemployment, also fell at the same time.

Seriously, what is wrong with Steven Pinker? Is he incapable of the tiniest effort to find data?

I'm not the first to be baffled by Steven Pinker. Way back nineteen years now, Louis Menand wrote the perfect Pinker review and said:

...Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue...

The paragraph captures the "having it both ways" phenomenon seen repeatedly in Pinker's public opinions.

In the Hughes interview, right after Pinker claimed, without evidence, that inequality rose after 1992, he said this:

And even though there've been there was a slight deep systemic decrease in racism--not enough to have brought crime rates down that quickly, 50 percent in eight years--a lot of crime is opportunistic. People, there's a strong correlation between people who commit crime and lack of self-control.

Now "self-control" is a favorite subject of the biosocial criminologists, and they believe Black people possess less of it. As the reliably blunt rightwing biosocial criminologist John Paul Wright wrote:

While self-control is an important executive function, so, too, is intelligence. Indeed, there is no other individual variable as studied as intelligence. While hotly debated, thousands of studies of millions of individual intelligence scores indicate that IQ follows traditional racial categories (Rushton & Jenson, 2005). Asians have an average IQ of 106, Caucasians 100, and Blacks 85 (Lynn, 2006; Sarich & Miele, 2004)…

...Self-control and IQ covary, so that individuals with low self-control are also more likely to have low IQ. These deficits are potent enough to predict many of the negative life-course factors that afflicted individuals will experience. Longitudinal analyses of cohorts of individuals demonstrate that these individuals will face multiple problems across their life- course and that their self-limiting choices will show a high degree of continuity. Most will fail at their education and will then encounter problems in employment… They likely will live a fluid existence, relocating from place to place but often within the same economic stratum (Wright & decker, 1997). Finally their relationships will frequently be marred by conflict, unfaithfulness and unreliability. This pattern holds for anyone with deficits in executive control functions, black, white or Asian, but due to the distribution of low IQ and low self- control found in black populations, it is more often reflected in the lives of blacks.

And

Those passages were published in "Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research" edited by Anthony Walsh and Kevin Beaver.

I was aware that Steven Pinker promoted Brian Boutwell, a biosocial criminologist, but I wasn't aware how connected Pinker was to biosocial criminology until recently. I will be discussing that soon.

Has Peter Thiel funded Quillette?

Byline Times has an interesting article on Trump-supporter Peter Thiel's international right-wing connections, entitled PETER THIEL’S Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge University REVEALED.

The article revealed a fascinating tidbit that I hadn't known: Claire Lehmann sits on the advisory board of Toby Young's "Free Speech Union." 

But the biggest bombshell was the article's mention of a recently-published book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin, which claims that Thiel secretly funded Quillette.

Lehmann denies it:

Quillette founder Claire Lehmann has completely and unequivocally denied recent claims published in a new biography of the billionaire, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, by Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chafkin that “Thiel was secretly funding” Quillette around 2016.

Lehmann told Byline Times that Chafkin’s account is “wrong on multiple levels” and based on the claims of “a notorious internet troll and fraudster”. Peter Thiel’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

However, the social connections of key Quillette contributors to the “Thiel network” around Cambridge University points to an alignment of interests and ideology illuminating the extent to which several Quillette writers and editors operate within Peter Thiel’s sphere of influence. 

But I'd believe almost anybody before I'd believe Claire Lehmann, up to and including a "notorious internet troll and fraudster."

I don't like The Baffler, but they get credit for mentioning the issue when the Chafkin book was first published, in September:

Bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker is only the tip of the iceberg: one source told Chafkin that Thiel had secretly funded Quillette (Claire Lehmann, the publication’s founder, has said that Thiel’s start-up manual Zero to One, coauthored with Blake Masters, inspired her to create the magazine); he also funds a journal that questions the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change.

I'm kicking myself for missing this Thiel-Quillette claim for three months.

I've been wondering about Quillette's funding sources for years now. It was already obvious there was some connection between Thiel and the Intellectual Dark Web because crackpot Eric Weinstein works for Thiel, but I never found any information proving a direct funding connection.

Peter Thiel funding Quillette does seem inevitable and it would especially make sense because Quillette has been such a big supporter of right-wing grifter and Trump-aligned ratfucker Andy Ngo.

The problem with "heritability"

I've been thinking about this for several months now, about what to do with this word, "heritability."

The problem is that it is often used in reference to genetics, but it can either mean "something caused by genetics" or "something not caused by genetics."

For example:

Today, researchers rely on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to find the genetic variants that are relevant to a specific trait. In GWAS the genomes of individuals are analyzed to see if particular genetic variants are correlated with variation in traits of interest. GWAS results have identified hundreds of variants underlying phenotypic variation in humans, mice, fruit flies, rice, maize, and many other taxa. Yet, despite the large number of alleles that have been identified using this technique, the amount of phenotypic variation they explain is just a fraction of what twin and pedigree studies predict is heritable. For example, twin studies have shown that approximately 80% of variation in human height can be explained by genetic factors (Silventoinen et al., 2012). However, the results of the best powered GWAS only explain around 20% of such variation (Wood et al., 2014). This gap is known as the ‘missing heritability problem’.

The "missing heritability problem" is pretty clearly a problem with predictions about genetics - far less evidence has been found, than was anticipated, for specific genes influencing specific human traits.

And yet, for example, educational attainment is also said to be an "heritable" trait :

SNP heritability increased with socioeconomic deprivation for fluid intelligence, educational attainment, and years of education. Polygenic scores were also found to interact with socioeconomic deprivation, where the effects of the scores increased with increasing deprivation for all traits.

"Years of education" is a social phenomenon, not a genetic one. But it is still called "hereditable."

To give one extreme example: in American chattel slavery, not only were slaves rarely taught to read, they were often actively prevented from learning to read. So illiteracy could be said to be highly "heritable" in American slaves - the children of slaves were about as likely to be illiterate as their parents. But obviously this has nothing to do with a genetic ability to learn how to read.

The way heritable is used, it sounds like it describes an action - as if "heritable" educational attainment is the act of passing down educational attainment from one generation to the next. 

Instead "heritable" is the observation that nothing has changed from one generation to the next. "Heritable" is nothing more than a statistical description of stasis.

Apparently Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt (a Koch money beneficiary via Heterodox Academy) both believe the term "heritability" means "genetic."

But hereditarians would want to believe "heritability" means "genetic" because their answer to everything is "genes."

I have long joked that the "nature assumption" is so strong among promoters of sociobiology that this is how they do their studies:

Step one: observe a human behavior

Step two: declare the cause "genetics"

Step three: write a paper declaring the victory of nature over nurture

The term "nature assumption" is a nod to that darling of biosocial criminology,  Judith Rich Harris, who wrote "The Nuture Assumption" and who, I recently discovered, was hugely influenced by Steven Pinker, which I will discuss in a future post.

Recently hereditarians were taking yet another premature victory lap for nature over nurture, this time based on claims by "behavioral geneticist" Kathryn Paige Harden. Those claims were immediately assumed to be a victory for race pseudoscience by people like Quillette author Nathan Cofnas:

The fecklessness of sociobiologists was what annoyed Tom Scocca so much in his response to the New Yorker article about Harden written by Gideon Lewis-Kraus:

Here's how Lewis-Kraus described Harden's own account of the tool she uses to address the most loaded social questions of our time:

GWAS simply provides a picture of how genes are correlated with success, or mental health, or criminality, for particular populations in a particular society at a particular time.....GWAS results are not "portable"; a study conducted on white Britons tells you little about people in Estonia or Nigeria.

That is, the genome makes people unequal, but it does so by an unclear mechanism, the effects of which are contingent on a person's social position in a particular time and place. Yet the reader was supposed to share Harden's regret or bafflement that Darity, a scholar of the material processes of racial inequality, would be hostile to her work.

In other words, Harden absolutely does not have evidence for the claim that correlations between some social conditions and some GWAS results are caused by genes, but nevertheless she goes ahead and makes that claim.

And not only makes the claim - she compares those who have doubts about her claim with bank robbers. But being a drama queen seems to be a pretty common trait, over the years, among promoters of sociobiology and its many sub-categories: evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, race science, etc. Is "drama queen" an heritable trait for sociobiologists?

Colbert on Dave Chappelle

Really good response by Steven Colbert to Dave Chappelle's jokes about transpeople.

Bonus points for the reference to My Dinner with Andre

Timothy B. Lee of Full Stack Economics and the career of Razib Khan

Who cares that Razib Khan stated publicly that
Black Americans are an existential threat?
Certainly not Timothy B. Lee of Full Stack Economics

I've noted here several people associated with establishment media who have recently promoted the
career of Razib Khan. Every time I've reached out to any of them to ask why they are promoting him, in spite of his infamous racist views, they refuse to respond.

So I'm not expecting a response from Timothy B. Lee of Full Stack Economics.

The hall of shame so far includes (in addition of course to Steven Pinker):

• Noah Smith,
• Lindsay Beyerstein
• Julia Ioffe
• Nathaniel Popper

The issue as always remains: either they didn't know about Khan's racemongering career; don't care that he's a racemonger and hope he can benefit their career; or agree with him, but don't want to admit it. 

They clearly don't want to hear that Khan recently reviewed Charles Murray's latest book, in race pseudoscience-promoting Quillette, and agreed wholeheartedly with Murray:

...I had the pleasure and honor of becoming (Charles Murray's) friend. And rather like Murray, I am now the sort of public figure that certain types of people feel they have to publicly denounce in order to establish their own group bona fides.

Given this personal history, you might reasonably ask why I agreed to write about Murray’s latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. The answer is simply that I am one of the few people willing to write about it. The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race—Murray has described it as a cri de coeur. But the difficulty of finding someone willing to admit to even reading one of Murray’s books, let alone someone willing to review it, may doom the project before anyone turns the first page. After all, most of those willing to listen to Murray are already familiar with the data he presents here, and those who are unaware of the uncomfortable facts he wants us to confront would never admit to touching one of his books for fear of peer condemnation. 

But why read a book on this topic when you can discover these facts within a few minutes? Tables on SAT scores by race are available in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, which pointed out in 2005 that “whites were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the verbal SAT.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, has an entry entitled “Race and Crime in the United States,” which plainly states that a bit over 50 percent of victims and offenders in homicides are African American. The same website tells us that African Americans are about 13 percent of America’s population. Would you also be surprised to face the reality that the perpetrators of homicides are overwhelmingly young and male as well? These dots are there for anyone to connect if they like.

And yet very few choose to do so. Indeed, the failure—refusal, even—to connect the dots has become a vaunted feature, not a bug, of 2021’s regnant culture. Acknowledging unambiguous patterns of this kind will often result in the rebuke that some beliefs are divine mysteries, to be accepted on faith rather than analyzed more deeply. Which is precisely why Murray wants to inject these taboo realities into the intellectual bloodstream of our society. Despite being a brisk read, Murray’s short book lays out all the inferences and conclusions that remain lacunae in our public discourse. Without these facts on the table, the contemporary American debate has had to rely upon the ether of social science and nebulous theoretical explanations of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” 

Khan is stating that Black crime has nothing to do with systemic racism and white supremacy but rather, since social circumstances don't count, the problem with Black Americans is their own genetic inferiority.

It is for this reason that Khan is so hostile to American history - so much so he believes the only way to truly understand our present situation is to "remove all the history." 

Khan, writing for the Koch-funded City Journal in March of this year:

To realize these possibilities, Americans need to look up from their own concerns and shed the dead weight of their history. 

Although in that same article, written before his July 2021 denial of the existence of white supremacy in Quillette, Khan wrote:

American history is riven with white supremacy, but more than half of children born today in America are not white.

So which is it? White supremacy or "white supremacy"? Apparently in addition to being a racemonger and a bad writer Khan also utterly lacks integrity and changes his position depending on his audience. This reminds me of Khan's first mainstream champion, Steven Pinker.

Is this what we're going to do now? Mainstream people with repugnant, pseudoscientific and racist beliefs? And beliefs that are not in the distant past - but clearly expressed just a few months ago.

Perjurer & racist Emil O W Kirkegaard comes for me

Recently I got a heads-up from someone on Twitter that Emil O W Kirkegaard was lying about me - on the same issue that Razib Khan lied about me - some anonymous rando Twitter account. I caught Razib Khan promoting that lie a couple of weeks ago.

Kirkegaard appears to have a team of anonymous Twitter randos who attack on his behalf. In the image above a rando named "Trevor Sutcliffe" provides his crackpot theory on how I was involved in the anonymous Twitter account. Then Kirkegaard encourages him to write up his "findings" which Kirkegaard can then share. 

It was no surprise that Kirkegaard calls me a "catlady" - misogyny usually goes along with racism.

Emil Kirkegaard is such a big liar, he even committed perjury, as documented by Oliver Smith in his court case with Kirkegaarrd:

Emil Kirkegaard committed perjury

Kirkegaard is not only in contempt of court for breaching costs order(s) but lying to the High Court were he lives (he committed perjury by falsely claiming he lives at a different address and seems to have given a dubious description of his employment). I raised this with my solicitor, only to learn Kirkegaard’s own solicitor dropped him; not a surprise, given his bad conduct and dishonesty. In the last few months of litigation – Kirkegaard was pro se and he refused to respond to any emails (sent by my solicitor and the court). Kirkegaard’s alma mater also criticised him for making untrue claims about himself, so he has a history of lying (even his colleagues have described him “extremely dishonest”).

The Southern Poverty Law Center mentions Kirkegaard:

Emil Kirkegaard, who edits frequently under the username Deleet, is a research fellow at Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social research and the co-founder of the online pseudojournal OpenPsych.

Meanwhile, Encyclopedia Dramatica accuses Kirkegaard of defending pedophilia.

Pinkerite's 3rd anniversary

It's November 17, Pinkerite's third anniversary, and quite a few things have happened since the second anniversary, in the world of Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Science.

And coincidentally tomorrow, November 18 is the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the great Satan of the Intellectual Dark Web. Pinkerite has referenced the SPLC on many occasions. Consider donating to this worthy organization. Pinkerite donates automatically each month out of gratitude for all the information SPLC provides about racists and racemongers.

If the IDW hates SPLC, they must be doing something right!

Some noteworthy items from the past year:

• For Pinkerite, the biggest deal of the past year is that for the first time since Malcolm Gladwell criticized Pinker in 2009, someone in the establishment media asked Pinker about his connection to racist Steve Sailer

• Quillette author and infamous grifter Andy Ngo's ratfucking campaign, to demonize the amorphous, anonymous Antifa was so successful that when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6 to stop election certification and destroy American democracy, Trump attempted to blame it on Antifa.

• My suspicion that Proud Boys were engaging in ratfucking by disgusing themselves as Antifa turned out to be true. 

• And Andy Ngo was caught posing as a BLM supporter

• At that point, many in the group became suspicious of a fellow protester, who was wearing tinted oversized ski goggles, a mask that obscured his face, black clothing and a Black Lives Matter flag worn as a cloak. Protesters said the man was attending the demonstration alone and did not respond to questions.

• Ngo went after an opponent who has negatively impacted Ngo's Post Millennial advertising.

• Charles Murray blew up the traditional pretense, used by race pseudoscience promoters, that race pseudoscience cannot be used to harm individual Black people.

• Andrew Sullivan disavowed Charles Murray - sort of.

• Grifter James Lindsay sent his online followers after me because I criticized his hypocrisy, resulting in a huge and lucrative spike in traffic for this site

• I was attacked by grifter Peter Boghossian for criticizing Pinker, which Boghossian apparently believes is inappropriate because Pinker is far more becited than me.
• And then out of the blue, traditional gender roles entrepreneur Evan Marc Katz, who I last criticized way back in 2017 on my personal blog, jumped on board the Boghossian thread to attack me.

• Quillette managing editor Colin Wright called me insane, twice - because that's what men do to women who disagree with them

• Juneteenth finally became a national holiday

• Quillette founder Claire Lehmann became an international laughing stock

• Steven Pinker was a laughing stock thanks to the NYTimes review of his latest book

• The University of Austin - associated by some with the Intellectual Dark Web was announced. Steven Pinker was initially part of the project but then quickly dropped out.

• Sociobiologist Kathryn Paige Harden published a book that racemongers proceeded to use to claim victory for race pseudoscience. The New Yorker ran a profile of Harden related to the book's publication. I am still waiting for a direct response to the racemongers from Harden's fans Eric Turkheimer and Adam Rutherford.

• FAIR - the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism was founded, basically to carry on the Christopher Rufo-lead Republican campaign against discussing racism in classrooms, which they are cynically calling CRT. No surprise its board of advisors is full of Trump supporters, Koch employees and race science promoters. But you're wondering, "is Steven Pinker a member of that board of advisors?" 
• Of course he is.

Top posts for year 3:

• James Lindsay and Your Mom - 5.95K

• Meet FAIR - the organization full of Trump supporters, Koch employees and race science promoters - 1.05 K

• The Brian Ferguson Interview - 971

• I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and the "biological reality of race" - 534

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 472

• The Left, the hereditarian Right and the New Yorker - 454

• Yes, Kevin Drum, Quillette is defending phrenology - 418

• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 1: Race essentialism - 409

• American Renaissance still loves Claire Lehmann's Quillette - 350

• You and Your Racist Friend - 325

Racist or racemonger?

Pinker believes "race"
classifications are biological,
not "social constructions."

Although both racists and racemongers share a (scientifically invalid) belief in biological "races," there are some differences between a racemonger and a racist. 

I classify all promoters of race pseudoscience as racemongers. That includes many Quillette authors including Steve Pinker and members of the Intellectual Dark Web like Sam Harris.

They either claim outright that there is something different and inferior or superior about one or more "biological" races, or, in cases like Pinker, they support the careers of those who do, while making race pseudoscience-friendly statements.

Steve Sailer, Quillette author Bo Winegard and Charles Murray are also racemongers. Sailer and Murray have built their careers on racemongering. Bo Winegard seems headed in that direction. 

But Winegard, Murray and Sailer are also racists. 

Racemongers generally defend their race beliefs on the grounds that those beliefs are based on science. 

Now the fact that their "science" is garbage, based on various combinations of careless categorizations, badly-done studies (some funded by hardcore racists) and 18th century beliefs doesn't matter. They cling to the claim that theirs is a science-based opinion.

But every now and then they slip up.

In his defense of The Bell Curve, for the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray wrote:

I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites. Here are three crucial points to keep in mind as we go along:

The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.

That was in 2005. More recently, Murray contradicted that statement in a tweet, suggesting that it is appropriate - "economically rational" - to judge an individual's potential based on the individual's race.

Charles Murray is a racist, and probably has been ever since he was a cross-burning teenager. 

Now in Bo Winegard's case, after years of promoting "human biodiversity," the mask slipped in his support for a Third Reich-style attitude towards racial demographics. Although he prefers the term "ethnoculturally conservative" and honesty about "group differences."

Steve Sailer has been revealing himself as a racist for decades. One of the more recent, blatant examples is when he implied that the exonerated "Central Park Five" accused of a crime that occurred in 1989, were guilty by comparing them to a non-white teenager accused of murder in Central Park in 2019. The two assaults occurred 30 years apart. Sailer's "logic" is classic racism: all those people are the same. If one of them commits murder it proves that they are all murderers.

But since Charles Murray is also a racist, the racism of Steve Sailer bothers him not at all.

Murray is such a racist now that even Andrew Sullivan backed away from him, in the recent 60 Minutes interview, although Sullivan was promoting Murray as recently as May 2021.

 As Variety's Daniel D'Addario notes, Sullivan was treated deferentially on the issue. And I would add, almost as deferentially as Steven Pinker is treated by the establishment media (with rare exceptions.)

Sullivan’s musings, by contrast, lack a clear reason to be broadcast at this particular moment and deserve to be placed within context — something Pelley seems fundamentally uninterested in doing.

To wit: Pelley comes close to asking a tough question about Sullivan’s tin ear (at best) on race, noting the incident when, as then-editor of The New Republic, Sullivan published an excerpt of a book asserting genetic deficits in IQ among Black people. Pelley notes, though, that Sullivan published rebuttals, “but he’s criticized for airing the debate at all.”

Well, yes: Lending the institutional voice of a prestigious publication to a racist crackpot theory and then letting others write in to contest it is worthy of criticism. With an interviewer like Pelley, though, Sullivan barely needs defenders: Sullivan’s eventual admission that the “harm outweighs the good” of the “Bell Curve” publication “doesn’t mean he’s giving up on debate,” Pelley tells us. He then recites Sullivan’s claims that newsrooms “pander to the left and right and are intimidated by political correctness.”

I think it's likely that Sullivan is a racist. I haven't seen anything as clear-cut as in the cases of Winegard, Murray and Sailer, but until this 60 Minutes interview he has been a dedicated racemonger.

I've been debating with myself for awhile whether or not Razib Khan is a racist rather than just a racemonger. He's certainly built his career on racemongering, and lately I've been leaning towards putting him in the racist category, since he agreed with racist Charles Murray that we need to "connect the dots" about Black Americans or "face disaster." It's apparent that Khan wants to promote the notion that Black Americans as a group are a serious threat and something needs to be done about that - unless you know, you're OK with disaster. 

That's about as racist as you can get.

Michael Shermer and Equalitarianism and the Citizens' Councils

Last time I wrote about Quillette author Michael Shermer it was to note his agreement with Quillette author Nathan Cofnas on the issue of "genetic diversity." 

Lately I've found that Michael Shermer is in agreement with racist Bo Winegard on the issue of the term "equalitarian." Both believe it would be a good term to use against those who oppose and criticize race pseudoscience and racism - the ideological enemies of Shermer and Winegard.

Shermer cites Thomas Sowell, a rightwing economist. From a Washington Post review of a book by Sowell:

Sowell’s central message is that the reason some people are poor — in any country, at any period in history — is not discrimination or exploitation or malicious actions on the part of the rich. Rather, people are poor because they don’t or won’t produce. For him, the only mystery is why.

Michael Shermer and his friends are ready to supply the answer to the mystery, via pseudoscience: they believe poor people have genes that make them poor. 

This belief isn't new of course, racist Charles Murray has made a career out of that belief since at least The Bell Curve. 

The term equalitarian is not new either. It was a favorite term of segregationist Carlton Putnam as noted by Neil R. McMillen in The Citizen’s Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction:

Setting forth his ethnological assumption in an influential and widely circulated book, Race and Reason (1961), Putnam asserted that one need not have advanced scientific training to dispute theories of racial equalitarianism: “Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo… can compare this settlement with London or Paris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence…” That so few informed Americans saw things so clearly was compelling proof to Putnam that the nation had been victimized by a “pseudo-scientific hoax” popularized by such early exponents of racial equipotentiality as Franz Boas and several subsequent generations of like-minded anthropologists more devoted to “the demo-goddess of Equalitarianism” than to “the Goddess of Truth.”

Putnam's pro-segregation pamphlet "High Court's Arrogance is Viewed by Northerner" was published by the Educational Fund of the Citizens' Councils of Greenwood, Mississippi.

If you do a search for "equalitarian" you can see how popular the term is with racists:

• The Equalitarian Dogma by HE Garrett · 1961 · 

• The equalitarian dogma revisited by JP Rushton · 1994  

• (PDF) Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias by Bo Winegard, Cory Clark, Connor Hasty, Roy Baumeister - Oct 30, 2020 

• "Equalitarianism" and Progressive Bias - Quillette by Bo Winegard 2018

Garrett was a segregationist and briefly a director of The Pioneer Fund. J. P. Rushton was an infamous racist and racemonger.

Rushton's "The equalitarian dogma, revisited," is a defense of Garrett's "The Equalitarian Dogma."

Rushton is listed as a reference in "Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias" by Winegard, Clark, Hasty and Baumeister.

I don't believe any of these authors are ignorant of the use of "equalitarianism" by segregationists, racists and racemongers. I think that, more likely, this attempt to revive the term "equalitarian" by Shermer, Winegard, Clark, Hasty and Baumeister is a knowing homage to 20th century racists, and perhaps a dogwhistle to other promoters of race pseudoscience.

Cory Clark is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and co-author with Bo Winegard of this retracted paper; Connor Hasty is a professor at Florida State University; and Roy Baumeister was associated with Winegard at Florida State University and is now Emeritus professor at the University of Queensland.

Putnam's Wikipedia entry includes these passages from his book "Race and Reason: A Yankee View": 

In the next 500,000,000,000 years I would be quite prepared to concede the possibility the Negro may, through normal processes of mutation and natural selection within his own race, eventually overtake and even surpass the white race. [...] When the Negro has bred out his limitations over hundreds, or thousands, of years, it will be time enough to consider absorbing him in any such massive doses as would be involved in the South today.[6]: 53 

The mulatto who was bent on making the nation mulatto was the real danger. His alliance with the white equalitarian often combined men who had nothing in common save a belief that they had a grudge against society. They regarded every Southerner who sensed the genetic truth as a bigot [...]. Here were the men who needed to be reminded of the debt the Negro owed to white civilization.[6]: 117 

Contemporary racemongers must be so jealous of Putnam, who could get away with such blatant public racism and still have a career in business, serving as chief executive officer of Delta Airlines after he published his racist swill.

Winegard's career seems to be wholly supported by the racist wingnut welfare system via Quillette, but Shermer still has Skeptic magazine. I can only assume Skeptic is supported by racists and idiots who either don't know Shermer is a racist, or don't care.

Fun fact: Ruby Bridges, whose quest for desegregated education was supported by the "equalitarians" so hated by Shermer, Putnam, Garrett, Rushton, Clark, Hasty, Baumeister and Winegard, is 67 years old. The same age as Steven Pinker (within 10 days) and Michael Shermer (same birthday) and one year younger than Roy Baumeister.

When the IDW comes after you

 

Lehmann claimed, without evidence,
that Ngo was the victim of a chemical attack.
There was no chemical attack.

Quillette was identified by Bari Weiss, in her NYTimes article as "the publication most associated with (the IDW)."

In spite of claims that can be found online that Andy Ngo was fired by Quillette, he is in fact still listed as a "contributing writer" at Quillette.

As Buzzfeed News wrote:

He’s whittled his themes down to a brutally efficient, social media- and Fox News–friendly trio: Hate crimes are hoaxes, anti-fascists are the real fascists, and liberals are naive about Islam, which is violent. And he now edits part time for Quillette, the so-called heterodox publication that has staked out a position as a home for centrist journalists and academics disgruntled about left-wing activism and woke culture. It gives him an easy way to defeat charges that he’s a right-wing activist.

Ngo also had connections to the Trump administration, and Ngo's relentless attempts to demonize the rag-tag group of unorganized anonymous leftists, Antifa, was so popular with the Trump administration that at one point during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Trump claimed the attackers were Antifa.

So I was very interested to see an article in The Intercept, A Right-Wing Brawler Asked a Court to Protect Him From an Antifascist’s Tweets. 

It seems that rightwing extremists went after an activist who had volunteered to investigate far-right groups:

LODER FIRST BECAME alarmed while working as a consultant for tech companies that wanted to keep their sites clear of hate speech and messages that promote violence; they realized that social media platforms were not doing enough to keep extremists “from fundraising and recruiting and spreading their hateful messages.” Paying attention to what was on those platforms during Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, and in the lead-up to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Loder said, felt like “pointing at an oncoming freight train, and then just watching it happen.” 

So, working on weekends, Loder started to tackle the problem as a volunteer, watching hours of footage from right-wing social media feeds and trying to identify groups that might be using political rallies as “grass to hide in, to recruit and carry out violent acts.” 

Loder has tried to prod social networks into taking action against users who threaten violence. In 2019, Loder set up searches to collect death threats directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar, after then-President Donald Trump tweeted a video that distorted her comments on the 9/11 attacks alongside images of the World Trade Center in flames. Loder then urged other users to mass-report those tweets to press Twitter to enforce its rules and remove them.

The article reports on Andy Ngo's connection: 

In July, Loder helped identify  far-right activist Aaron Simmons as the masked attacker who clubbed an independent filmmaker in the head during an anti-trans protest in Los Angeles. (That attack had been wrongly blamed on antifascists after video of the assault was tweeted with a misleading caption by Andy Ngo, a far-right commentator.) Simmons was subsequently arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon for the attack on the filmmaker (Simmons had menaced Loder outside the Torrence courthouse in September)...

Ngo was identified as a "free speech grifter" in 2018 along with a named member of the IDW, Christina Hoff Sommers. But of course free speech only goes one way with grifters:

In the meantime, Loder has also repulsed two recent legal complaints from lawyers working for Andy Ngo. The first was a copyright complaint over a photograph Loder tweeted of Ngo posing in front of fascist graffiti in Poland. The second was a cease-and-desist letter concerning Loder’s role in a Twitter campaign to shame companies into pulling their ads from the Canadian website Ngo writes for, The Post Millennial.

Loder scoffs at Ngo’s complaint that putting pressure on the site’s advertisers is a form of censorship. “I’m not censoring you,” Loder said they would tell Ngo. “But I am showing advertisers what your site looks like and what’s on there, and they’re dropping you.”

Thanks to Quillette and other rightwing media, Ngo was classified as a "journalist" for a time, but soon news outlets discovered that Ngo was very much a partisan:

Nowhere was this demonstrated more quickly than in the case of the meteoric rise and equally rapid fall of Andy Ngo, the provocateur and social media personality who garnered nationwide sympathy last June, when he tweeted that he was attacked by antifascist protesters at a Proud Boys rally. Last week, the local newspaper the Portland Mercury reported that a left-wing activist going undercover as a member of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group known for promoting and engaging in violent clashes with leftist activists, had given the publication an 18-minute video that included footage of Ngo with a group of Patriot Prayer members as the members discuss an upcoming brawl, including weaponry to be used in altercations with antifa. Ngo, who describes himself as a journalist, did not record the conversation, and does not appear to have his camera or notebook out. For part of the footage, he is seen on his phone.

It should be mentioned here that both Ngo and Proud Boys have shown up at public demonstrations disguised as Antifa and BLM supporters.

Luckily for Loder, California has a robust anti-SLAPP law:

Unfortunately for Kiefer, that is not how the law works. Thomas Burke, a lawyer who wrote a book on California’s anti-SLAPP statute, told me that it doesn’t matter at all if Loder is defined as an activist or a journalist. The law is designed to protect anyone whose free speech in a public forum or on a matter of public interest is threatened by a meritless lawsuit or injunction.... 

...As Burke explained, the original aim was to stop wealthy corporations from suing environmentalists or residents of an area who protested a company’s use of land but could not afford the legal fees to defend themselves from a libel suit. A later amendment added language saying that the statute “shall be construed broadly.” Since then, courts have ruled that anti-SLAPP protections apply to people who are providing information to the public, whether they are activists or journalists.

My work is different from Loder's: he focuses on the rightwing extremists themselves. I am less likely to be the target of violent threats, since I focus on the mainstream right-wingers who sometimes aid and abet extremists, and "celebrity intellectuals" like Steven Pinker, who, while he may not support Andy Ngo directly, seems to have no problem supporting Quillette, which helped legitimize Ngo's grift. Pinker even has a couple of bylines in Quillette.

Quillette also published Razib Khan's review of Charles Murray's latest book in which Khan agreed with Murray we need to "connect the dots" about Black Americans or "face disaster." That information is public, but few people outside the Quillette audience are aware of it. It's possible Khan considers my publicizing his menacing views of Black Americans as some kind of threat to his career.

I'm grateful New York State also has a robust anti-SLAPP law.