I rarely hear directly from the people associated with the Intellectual Dark Web and race science, whom I criticize on this blog. Mostly I get an indication of their opinion of me indirectly, as when grifter and former non-tenure track professor Peter Boghossian expressed his indignation that I, with almost no citations to my name dare criticize Steven Pinker, who has many citations.
Boghossian's belief that Steven Pinker should not be criticized by his inferiors is likely a common attitude, and one of the reasons why Steven Pinker is a sacred cow of the media establishment, with rare exceptions.
But there are some direct encounters, as when Quillette's managing editor Colin Wright demonstrates the IDW's fabled love of civility by suggesting I'm insane for my criticism - or even a question - and then doubles down on that insult.
I don't believe he believes anything - let alone everything - I do literally exudes psychopathy. But I imagine he finds my behavior inexplicable: from his perspective, all he is doing is making money by giving racist plutocrats what they want: "scientific" claims that the failure of some Black Americans to thrive is not the result of a long legacy of anti-Black brutality and legal and extra-legal discrimination, plus current systemic racism, but rather, their own damn inferior genes. And I dare to criticize him for it.
Quillette, acknowledged by Bari Weiss as a mouthpiece of the Intellectual Dark Web, hired Razib Khan to write a review of Charles Murray's latest book in which he makes it screamingly clear what the Intellectual Dark Web thinks of Black Americans:
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 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.”
That Quillette pays Khan to write this, and that people with establishment media credentials are not bothered by this but rather have friendly relationships with Khan tells you all you need to know about what an incredibly anti-Black, racist country we still live in.
Imagine, instead, if Murray had written, and Khan had agreed, that we needed to face the reality about Jews or face disaster. Would feckless media dullards finally wake up to the menacing implication there?
But it's probably better for me if the people I criticize dismiss me as crazy. If they took me seriously, they might attempt some form of retaliation.
And it's possible this happened the other day, when I signed onto Twitter and found a Twitter troll accusing me of being responsible for some rando Twitter account. I followed the trail from there and soon found other Twitter trolls attacking me, often in crudely personal ways.
It was a complete mystery for a half-hour or so as I reported the various personal attacks to Twitter.
Then I saw who was apparently responsible for the falsehood. The day before, Razib Khan, who has over 43,000 Twitter followers, suggested that I controlled the rando Twitter account.