Well after almost four years of this Pinkerite blog, you'd think I would have learned to never take members of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex at their word.
When Jerry Coyne claimed on his blog ("Why Evolution is True") on October 21 that he'd never heard of Peter Thiel, the Trump-funding, Quillette-funding anti-democracy sociopathic keynote speaker for the CPAC for racists (aka the Stanford Academic Freedom conference) I should have immediately run a search on his blog, instead of just accepting his claim.
So it finally occurred to me to run the search, and of course Peter Thiel is mentioned several times on Coyne's blog prior to October 21 of this year.
The most recent instance of Peter Thiel showing up on Coyne's blog was just two months before he claimed he never heard of him. Coyne is quoting a right-winger on Bari Weiss's Substack:
Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance managed to win his primary in Ohio with just 32 percent of the vote but rarely goes a week without some sort of gaffe, such as suggesting that women should stay in violent marriages. He now finds himself mired in a surprisingly tight general election against undistinguished Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, whose main strategy is calling Vance, who’s worked for billionaire Peter Thiel, a plutocratic carpetbagger and repeating the word China over and over again to Rust Belt audiences. Then there’s another Thiel-backed political virgin, Arizona’s Blake Masters, who just this week flipped his position on abortion from being “100% pro-life” and supporting a federal personhood law to suggesting he’s only against late-term and partial-birth abortion. These aren’t even rookie mistakes.I get that sometimes Coyne has other people write his blog posts. But does he ever bother to read them? Is he not capable of retaining information from them? I mean a billionaire is a pretty unusual type of person. You'd think that would be memorable enough.
So in May of this year, Coyne again mentions Thiel, in his post Elon Musk's list of must-read books.
Now Coyne doesn't say why anybody should care what an asshole like Elon Musk reads. Musk had already threatened to buy Twitter a month before this post (Coyne was in favor of it) but Coyne only mentions that Musk is famous in the must-read books post.
But clearly Coyne felt it was important to share. But somehow he doesn't remember that one of the books Musk loves was written by sociopath democracy-hating, racist CPAC keynote speaker Peter Thiel:
3.) Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Master. It’s about how to build a business; I haven’t read it.
But back in 2016, so before Coyne was as far down the road of senescence as he is now, he published an entire post about Peter Thiel's efforts to use his wealth to punish anybody who criticizes him, because you know, he loves free speech so much: Open thread: Press freedom, free speech, Gawker and public humiliation.
Now it was written by someone name Grania Spingles but still, doesn't Coyne read and remember what gets published on his own platform?
