Well it looks like the usual IDW gang has started a new grift.
From the Bari Weiss substack:
But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.
I mean that quite literally.
As I write this, I am sitting in my new office (boxes still waiting to be unpacked) in balmy Austin, Texas, where I moved three months ago from my previous post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis.
I am not alone.Our project began with a small gathering of those concerned about the state of higher education—Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and I—and we have since been joined by many others, including the brave professors mentioned above, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot and Peter Boghossian.
We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen.
We are also joined by journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.
So basically, if you support race pseudoscience, are on the Koch payroll or are a grifter, you are welcome to teach at The University of Austin.
Of course Pinker is part of this. You can't escape Pinker.
And you can't have an Intellectual Dark Web scam without a connection to Peter Thiel:
At present, UATX is fiscally sponsored by Cicero Research, which is an exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Joe Lonsdale is listed as an officer of Cicero Research. Lonsdale is a longtime associate of Peter Thiel:
Lonsdale, after all, spent much of his early career in Thiel’s footsteps. He served as an editor of the Stanford Review, the provocative conservative student publication that Thiel co-founded, years earlier; interned at Thiel’s PayPal before it became a Mafia; and eventually became a right-hand man to Thiel, himself. Lonsdale would become one of the first employees at Thiel’s first investment shop, Clarium Capital, and then in 2004, helped him found Palantir, the data-mining, terrorist-hunting software company that made them both fabulously wealthy. That kickstarted a meteoric career—interrupted by a too-tangled-to-quickly-explain personal scandal—in which Lonsdale struck out on his own, founding the wealth management platform Addepar and a venture capital firm, 8VC.
Although race pseudoscience supporters are already listed as part of the Austin University team: Pinker, Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Haidt, it is inevitable that even more extreme, more obviously racist people will be brought in to teach "Forbidden Courses" on race pseudoscience.
Noah Carl and racist Bo Winegard are ready.
