Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - the tight-knit circle of Koch employees, Thiel flunkies and race pseudoscience promoters

Last week I did a quick survey of some of the speakers who will be in the upcoming Peter Thiel-led CPAC for racists, otherwise known as the Stanford Academic Freedom conference. 

The conference so dedicated to Academic Freedom that the keynote speaker will be Peter Thiel, who is not involved in academia except, I assume, to donate to it in order to garner influence for his right-wing democracy-hating political agenda.

So for the first round I looked at mostly people I recognized as promoters of race pseudoscience, and/or are on the plutocrat payroll, and I had written about many of them on this blog.

This survey of the remaining speakers, like the first survey, demonstrates what a shameless lie the "College Fix" promoted in its claim that the conference is a bipartisan endeavor. It is overwhelmingly slanted to the right.

Well let's have a look at the others:

Luana Maroja is a sociobiologist and a Koch-funded promoter of Koch's favorite claim, that there's not enough free speech for right-wingers on American campuses. Which probably explains why Breitbart loved her enough to spread what Reza Aslan said was a lie about a panel he did with Jamelle Bouie. Naturally Jerry Coyne and professional racist Steve Sailer are fans of hers.

Mimi St. Johns has a very close tie to Peter Thiel - she is currently the editor-in-chief of the far-right newspaper the Stanford Review, which Thiel founded in 1987. Thiel is still very involved with the Review: "While Thiel also makes financial contributions, he has hosted staff reunions at his home, and meets with the editors quarterly as a way to stay current with campus activities in general."

Dorian Abbot is an author for racist Quillette, funded by Thiel and also wrote an op-ed in Newsweek comparing affirmative action to Nazi Germany. His co-author was Iván Marinovic, one of the three Stanford Graduate School of Business Faculty Organizers. 

Fun fact - two of the speakers, Anna Krylov and Richard Lowery are also members of the conference Organizing Committee. The CPAC for racists is an extremely tight-knit group.

John Hasnas is a far-right winger on the Koch payroll via CATO and a contributor at the far-right Federalist Society.

I haven't found direct connections between  Peter Arcidiacono and race pseudoscience and/or right-wing plutocrats, although he seems to be popular with those types of people, probably because they feel his work can be used to oppose affirmative action. 

Solveig Gold is Joshua Katz's wife and predictably a right-winger. The New York Times ran a Better Homes and Gardens style profile about her last summer. 

Joseph H. Manson is a fan of some of the biggest crackpots and racists from the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette including Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Jonathan Katz (another speaker at the conference) and racist extremist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.

John Schendal Rose is an instructor at Duke University with a Master of Theological Studies. He was scheduled to teach a gender-segregated seminar in June 2020, The Moral Life and the Classical Tradition Seminar, "a week-long program for rising high school juniors and seniors as well as rising college freshmen interested in the ancient philosophical tradition and its influence in the Christian moral life." I hope he gets a chance to witness for Christ to Jerry Coyne, a militant atheist.

Speaker John H. Cochrane one of the three Faculty Organizers of the conference, is a Hoover man, like speaker Niall Ferguson and a member of the Koch network via CATO. He's written for National Review about his loathing of government funded healthcare, like a good right-wing libertarian would.

John M. Ellis works for right-wing plutocrats via the Sarah Scaife Foundation-funded National Association of Scholars, whining about political correctness ruining higher education. Rand-roids love him.

Erik Kaufmann is a Koch man via the Manhattan Institute.

Steven Koonin can be seen giving an interview to Ayn Rand fanatics in order to promote climate change denial.

Bjorn Lomborg is another climate change denier.

Jay Bhattacharya is identified as "a scholar connected to right-wing dark money" at Exposed by CMD and the article also mentions Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration which "recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

John Ioannidis is another Covid genius who "tried to convince President Donald Trump that locking down the country would be the real danger."

Richard Shweder is a right-winger who likes to whine about "identity politics" for the Koch-connected DonorsTrust-funded Heterodox Academy.

Hollis Robbins can be seen on Linked In promoting Koch man Tyler Cowen (also a speaker at the CPAC for racists) and she gave him an interview in 2019 here. She says something interesting in that interview:

"I don’t understand why founders don’t have more operas about them, why we don’t see operas and movies about Steve Jobs, about Peter Thiel, about Jeff Bezos. There’s the David Fincher film of the founding of Facebook, but that’s pretty much it. The founders, entrepreneurs today are titans."

So you can see why Thiel would like her. And she sounds pretty clueless since there have been several movies and documentaries about Steve Jobs. As far as Thiel, well, she may be interested to know that I have written a play which features a Thiel-like character (called Toby Peel) and it will receive its first public reading in a couple of weeks. But I don't think Thiel would like it. 

So what this looks like to me is that the Koch people have been cultivating Robbins, best known for working with Henry Louis Gates, for a few years, and her appearance at this conference is part of sealing the deal. But that's just my best guess.

Scott W. Atlas is a long-time Republican and Trump advisor best-known for spreading Covid-19 misinformation.

Michael W. McConnell is a Bush nominee, a Hoover Institute man and a contributor to the Federalist Society online site.

Eugene Volokh is a conservative/libertarian Koch man via Reason Magazine.

Frances Widdowson is an author at racist Quillette, who also happens to hate Black Lives Matter.

So there you have it. The whole political spectrum from libertarian to Republican to conservative to right-wing to Trump supporter to race pseudoscience supporter to full-on racist. 

And the keynote speaker is a democracy-hating, Trump-funding, racism-funding sociopath.

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - an update

The Peter Thiel-lead conference featuring many speakers who are racists and supporters of race pseudoscience is officially called the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference.

The College Fix, an organization funded by many right-wing plutocrats like Charles Koch, is claiming the conference will unite "big name conservatives and liberals," using this as evidence:

The event does include many thinkers who identify as either Democrat, traditionally liberal, or centrist, including New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Greg Lukianoff. The two co-authored “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

Another panelist is Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Chicago, who maintains the popular blog Why Evolution Is True.

“Be aware that some speakers have been extensively canceled or demonized, but I refused to be tarred by going to the same meeting with them, so please refrain from that,” Coyne wrote on his blog last week.

We know that Charles Koch loves fake bi-partisanship. But in fact the conference is not so bi-partisan, according to Inside Higher Education:

Conference organizers told FIRE that they’d invited numerous progressives to participate, Perrino also said, but over time “more conservatives said yes, and very few of the big-name progressives said yes. The political polarization and tribalism is dispiriting.”

Abbot said that organizers invited several dozen progressives who’d previously expressed a “negative view” of academic freedom, who ultimately declined.

Marinovic said that "we invited many academics who have argued for some kind of restrictions on academic speech to present and debate their views, and all of them declined."

David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford and professor of comparative literature, who’s publicly opposed the conference, said he wasn’t asked to participate, but that a few of his colleagues had been asked and “objected to the lopsidedness of the program. The organizers placed them on panels where it was clear they were there only as tokens.”

Livestreaming the conference doesn’t change much at all, Palumbo-Liu added.

“This in no way solves the problem of the inability of those not present being able to substantially question or interact with speakers. That is, it does not reflect a change of thinking whatsoever, nor does it cover up the original intent of the conference.”

An organization like College Fix, which exists to promote the views of right-wing plutocrats isn't going to mention that Jonathan Haidt is a long-time promoter of race pseudoscience, including most recently defending a highly speculative paper about intelligence written by a pair of right-wing racists. 

Greg Lukianoff is on the right-wing plutocrat payroll via Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (formerly "Education"), founded by Ayn Rand-lovers Charles Kors and Thor Halvorssen, and libertarian Harvey Silverglate who writes for the Thiel-funded racist rag Quillette. 

FIRE is funded by the usual right-wing extremists - just like The College Fix.

Jerry Coyne is a reactionary misogynist who loves Steven Pinker and supports race pseudoscience. He's been a little defensive lately, about his upcoming participation in CPAC for racists:

I predict that the mainstream media and many on social media will deem the entire conference a conclave of bigots, racists, and transphobes because a few people on the schedule have been called those names. Indeed, Steve Pinker himself has been the object of criticism, and has been called a racist; and I (deemed “someone with a solid reputation who speaks his mind and is honest in his arguments”) have also been called a transphobe and a racist. Hardly anybody is immune!

But as my recent piece on CPAC for racists demonstrates, most of the speakers are either racists, supporters of race pseudoscience, or take money from one right-wing racist plutocrat or another, or often more than one.

And it's likely that I will find similar issues with the speakers I haven't yet reviewed, which I will have to do soon.

There are few people on the American political scene at the moment who are worse than Peter Thiel, starting with his support for evil monster Donald Trump who tried to destroy American democracy and still might succeed. 

Steven Pinker appears to dislike Trump. But for some reason that doesn't stop him from participating in a Thiel festival sponsored by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, to which Thiel must certainly donate. And Thiel has funded Quillette, which Steven Pinker loves.

A man's love for race pseudoscience will lead him to accepting some very strange, but very wealthy bedfellows.

The fact that Peter Thiel, an opponent of democracy in general and American democracy in particular is headlining this event tells you everything you need to know about the deliberate right-wing partisanship built right into the "Stanford Academic Freedom Conference." 

LOL ~ seen on Twitter (before Elon Musk ruins it) ~ "Heterodox Thinker" Halloween costume

 The only thing missing is the cowboy boots.

Derrr I think I'll use a famous misogynist quote...

"Derrr... I think I'll use a famous misogynist quote in order to make a point about training cats."





Is there anybody in the science world more obnoxious, with the exception of Steven Pinker, than Jerry "I swoon for Steven Pinker's boots" Coyne?

Jerry Coyne is a good buddy of the biggest fans of race pseudoscience: Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, who are in turn influenced by Jean-Phillippe Rushton. Pinker was a promoter of the careers of both Steve Sailer and Razib Khan twenty years ago when both were singing the praises of Rushton. 

Then I discovered that Coyne claimed to never have heard of Rushton.

Pretty amazing right? There's no way Coyne could be a bigger ignoramus than that, right?

GUESS AGAIN!

Coyne was chortling today about his inclusion in CPAC for racists:

Now, according to the announcement below (click to read), you can livestream it, seeing all the talks (and a panel with PCC[E]) in real time. (They’ll also be archived on YouTube.) Big fun, and the Woke are sharpening their knives and fangs. The site below reprises the schedule and speakers. Be there or be square!

Now Peter Thiel will be the keynote speaker because of course he will, he's likely not only funding this racist roundup, he's likely also paying most of the speakers on a regular basis via one funding vehicle or another, including of course Quillette.

Peter Thiel is famous for his hostility towards democracy and for his funding of Donald Trump and MAGA politicians like J. D. Vance. Most people over the age of 15 who have political opinions have heard of Peter Thiel. 

Well Jerry Coyne is well over 15 and spouts his reactionary political opinions on his blog daily, but as of October 21, 2022 Jerry Coyne claimed to never have heard of Peter Thiel!

Which gives you an idea of how ignorance-based Jerry Coyne's reactionary views are. Absolutely flabbergasting.

But now that he knows that this sociopathic enemy of democracy is running the show do you think Coyne will change his mind about participating? 

But why would he, all his friends will be there, whining about how whenever they start floating their reactionary and/or race pseudoscience views they are criticized.

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists

Peter Thiel was credibly accused of funding right-wing, race pseudoscience-loving Quillette in a book about him, published last year.

Well there's no doubt now that Peter Thiel is a leading promoter of race pseudoscience. This November there will be an "invitation-only" (i. e. safe space) "Academic Freedom Conference" probably funded directly or indirectly by Thiel, at Thiel's alma mater, Stanford University. Thiel will be the keynote speaker.

It is a far-right-leaning and motley collection of some of the biggest supporters of sociobiological racism, not to mention a blatant public racist, Amy Wax.

Considering the speakers line-up and Thiel's status as a Republican donor, this is going to be the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for racists. 

Apparently there was a version in the UK last year: PETER THIEL’S Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge University REVEALED:

The parallels between Peter Thiel’s campaigning in the US and UK are revealing: Thiel’s chief of staff was involved in building up the UK ‘free speech’ network exactly while Thiel himself was ingratiating himself with the Trump administration and its white nationalist supporters.

This appears to suggest that the network’s ‘free speech’ agenda may be little more than a cover for deeper, partisan, anti-liberal political concerns. It is also consistent with Thiel’s broader interests in the US. While the context behind the Thiel connection to the Cambridge network is shrouded in mystery, the US equivalent is not.

Thiel has invested millions of dollars in support of Senate candidates campaigning on a free speech ticket. J D Vance, who reportedly received $10 million from Thiel to support his campaign, recently told a conference of the National Conservative movement that “professors are the enemy”, citing Richard Nixon. Vance has also promoted the racist Great Replacement theory which baselessly posits that white populations are being ‘replaced’ by people of colour due to immigration and integration. Another colleague of Thiel, Blake Masters, is running for the Senate in Arizona with, it is claimed, another $10 million from Thiel. His campaign is premised on the discredited conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 elections.

With Peter Thiel’s surrogates extending their influence in the UK through the fulcrum of Cambridge University, it seems that an alarming agenda is being smuggled in under cover of defending ‘free speech’.

Thiel has a long history of aligning with white supremacists.

My guess is that the general theme of Stanford's Thiel-a-thon will be the academic freedom to be a racist through taking money from Peter Thiel and Charles Koch.

This is not a comprehensive list of all the speakers, just the ones I am already at least somewhat familiar with:

Jonathan Haidt - long-time promoter of race pseudoscience,  including supporting the crackpot NHAI hypothesis, who doesn't understand what the term "heritability" means although he's sure those dastardly leftists are denying it. Like many promoters of race pseudoscience, Haidt likes to make predictions for the Triumph of Racist Claims:

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

Anna Krylov - who first offered a master class in how to invent panic about "cancellation" based on a badly curated collection of anecdotes including from Soviet Russia and the Catholic Church in the 17th century, combined with hysteria over renaming science prizes and existential anguish over the wording in advertisements. She then found her true home - right-wing racist Thiel-funded Quillette - where she admitted she was not cancelled for writing her seriously bullshit article about cancellation.

Jerry Coyne is not only Steven Pinker's #1 fanboy (you can witness him kvelling over Pinker's cowboy boots here if you have a strong stomach) he's an anti-Muslim bigot & misogynist and a huge fan of racists - like E. O. Wilson - and race pseudoscience.

Fun fact: I just discovered today that two of Coyne's anonymous cowardly followers attacked me on his blog, the first informing him of this blog's existence. Of course Coyne knows about this blog - it's critical of Coyne's bigotry and support for race pseudoscience, which is why Coyne won't let me write in the comments section of his blog posts (for example to defend myself) and why he blocks me on Twitter. Like all race pseudoscience promoters, Coyne prefers to remain inside the racist echo-chamber safe space and avoid all contrary opinions while, without any self-awareness or shame, accusing others of cowardice.

The post in question is Coyne's support for racist Emily Willoughby - like Steven Pinker, it seems that Coyne has never met a racist he didn't like. Naturally Coyne doesn't mention, while weeping over the "demonization" of the poor lil "behaviour geneticist," that she is currently on the board of the International Society for Intelligence Research, known for the many hard-core racists associated with it. Although to be fair, even racists have some standards and uninvited "weird paedophilia apologist" Emil O. W. Kirkegaard from this year's racist roundup.

And as if Coyne's odious "science" views aren't bad enough, he has a repulsive cranky-old-man persona on his blog, whining about new-fangled expressions of the kids these days like "tone-deaf" and "gig-workers."

Richard Lowery (not to be confused with right-wing Richard Lowry) can be found speaking to race pseudoscience-promoter Steve Hsu here promoting the GOP's favorite culture war talking points about "critical race theory."

Lee Jussim, Rutgers University psychologist and author at racist Quillette is a long-time hater of Pinkerite. I still can't figure out what the point of Jussim's career is besides being a supporter of race pseudoscience and muttering over and over "stereotypes are real."

Niall Ferguson is living proof that being a major creep will not get you kicked out of the right-wing plutocrat-supported wingnut welfare system. Ferguson is on the Hoover payroll and likes to spend his time plotting to destroy left-leaning college students. He's also married to IDW named member Ayaan Hirsi Ali and a fan of Trump's ratfucker Andy Ngo.

Tyler Cowen is a dedicated Koch-man. But just because he takes money from Koch doesn't mean he can't also take money from Peter Thiel.

Gad Saad is a right-wing clown who does oafish "satire" like this:

“Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing,” he muses on the topic of one of his recent online broadcasts. “By that logic I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate — to stop breathing.”

In case you needed more evidence right-wingers can't do humor.

Douglas Murray, a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, is a white supremacist. In the Current Affairs review of Murray's recent book "The War on the West:"

...there’s something refreshing about the way that Murray cuts away a lot of the bullshit and leans into an understanding of “the West” that just means white people. While different parts of the book occasionally run in the other direction, especially when Murray wants to mute critics of European imperialism by highlighting how many colonial subjects benefited by having their native cultures and practices transformed by European contact, he often can’t seem to help himself when it comes to giving into xenophobia and transparent ethno-chauvinism...

Greg Lukianoff is on the Koch payroll via the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But again, there's no law against double-dipping from two right-wing plutocrats.

Nadine Strossen is another Koch employee, via CATO, and a defender of race pseudoscience.

Ilya Shapiro is also a Koch stooge via CATO and associated, of course, with the far-right Federalist Society.

Joshua Katz, a Quillette cause and known for inappropriate conduct with students at Princeton.

Elizabeth Weiss was probably invited to speak at Racist CPAC as much for her being the third wife of disgraced sociobiology racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton as for her treatment of Native American remains. She's written for racist Quillette - of course. 

Because of her connection to Rushton, she is arguably the spiritual leader of this collection of white supremacists, racists and Trump-lovers. Here she tells sociobiology racist Michael Shermer that Rushton wasn't really a racist. Although he argued that Black people are a separate type of human and spoke at an American Renaissance conference explaining why Black people are a separate type of human.

And of course, Steven Pinker the leading mainstream "celebrity intellectual" defender of race pseudoscience. His long-time support for race pseudoscience was persistently ignored by the mainstream press until last year.

This blog is full of examples of Pinker supporting and promoting racists like Steve Sailer, going so far as to include a piece of dreck written by Sailer in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" of 2004. He continues to promote racist Razib Khan and racist rag Quillette. 

If he had not been invited to Racist CPAC I would have been very surprised.

I discuss the rest of the speakers here.

 PINKERITE: FIGHTING RACISM & RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE

I heart Jeffrey Wright

The responses to Tulsi Gabbard dropping out of the Democratic Party were pretty funny. Basically the responses were:

• Good riddance
• You were never a Democrat in the first place
• Say hi to Putin when you get to Russia, you ASSet.

But I liked Jeffrey Wright's response best, since it hit some great points PLUS referenced Koch and Thiel.

Jeffrey Wright is not the household name he should be, but you might have seen him in the excellent HBO show Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches, or in Angels in America. He's one of the GOATs.

The racist manifesto: Black people are not part of American heritage and history

 

Pedro L. Gonzalez is an embarrassment to any organization except Chronicles, the right-wing extremist magazine that employs him and also employs infamous racist Taki Theodoracopulos of Taki's Mag.

Here we see Gonzalez making an even bigger name for himself in racist circles by claiming that a Black American flautist playing James Madison's crystal flute is "about humiliating white people, about desecrating American history and heritage."

Gonzalez reminds us that no matter how far back Black American roots go in the history of America, he - like all filthy stinking disgusting racists - will never consider Black Americans part of American history and heritage.

Also note-worthy, his bonkers suggestion that "white people" have been "conquered." Unless by "conquered" he means "no longer permitted to own slaves."

And considering that Gonzalez is a fan of the Confederacy, that is mostly likely what he does mean.

Sweet Jesus, Pedro L. Gonzalez is a cross-burning level flaming racist.