Razib Khan still promoting racist neo-Nazi ghoul Richard Hanania

Because of course he is. 

If Khan's biggest booster, Steven Pinker, isn't ashamed to be associated with the neo-Nazi racist ghoul; and Khan's buddy Matthew Yglesias isn't bothered by Hanania's racism and extremism; you know Razib Khan's not bothered by Hanania's racism and extremism and neo-Nazism.

I think what all this means is that right-wing racist billionaires have increased their funding of ghouls like Hanania so much that courtiers like Pinker, Yglesias and Khan no longer worry about being "cancelled" because not only do they have the option of wingnut welfare - see Carole Hooven and Thomas Chatterton Williams - but their plutocrat patrons have decided to go full steam ahead in the project of mainstreaming race pseudoscience and racism.

And to nobody's surprise, Charles Murray is also promoting the neo-Nazi racist ghoul - but Murray has been promoting exactly that kind of ghoul - Steve Sailer, Emil Kirkegaard, etc. for years. 

Murray doesn't just promote Hanania, he grovels before him. Holy crap is that revolting.

Jerry Coyne was lately seen promoting Hanania too. Of course.

Meet Nina Paley, culture wars grifter and Kiwi Farms fan

I assumed Alex Byrne was a garden-variety culture wars grifter, writing for racist rag Quillette. I figured he was hoping to advance his career by maybe scoring some wingnut welfare, like Carole Hooven, or maybe getting a Fox News interview, also like Carole Hooven.

But I discovered Byrne has a very interesting collaborator: Nina Paley who did illustrations for Byrne's forthcoming book which is apparently loved by Steven Pinker and Christina Hoff Sommers.

Paley is notable enough to have her own Wikipedia page, although I never heard of her until today.

Paley has created a "Gender Wars" deck of cards. The red cards are the "gender-critical" good guys and the black cards are people she lumps together as "transactivists," including a mass murderer. 

Now I don't have a high opinion of culture war grifters to begin with, but even I was stunned to see that Paley included Kiwi Farms as one of the good guys in her deck of cards.

Kiwi Farms is evil to the point of being psychopathic:

Founded by Joshua Moon, a former 8chan administrator, Kiwi Farms evolved into a popular platform for creating harassment campaigns. Its users often fixated on transgender people, relentlessly stalking and doxing them. At least three of its victims died by suicide.

In the image Paley created, the cow represents "lolcows" - the people selected by Kiwi Farms for torture. Paley apparently thinks this is cute and funny.

Paley did a podcast with Joshua Moon. She and her podcast co-host Corinna Cohn provide a dishonest description of Kiwi Farms:

In 1993 John Gilmore famously said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” To learn why that’s no longer true, listen to Josh Moon enumerate “the amount of things that have broken that people in the industry assumed could never break,” as activists with personal vendettas and political agendas relentlessly employ every possible strategy to silence his small but notorious gossip site Kiwi Farms. From Cloudflare to Hurricane Electric, ISPs, data centers, and payment processors, literally anything up and down the Border Gateway Protocol has been targeted to shut down the ‘Farms. With ISIS, the KKK, Stormfront, neo-nazis, and child porn all continuing to enjoy online services, who expected “the gossip site that makes fun of troons” to be the straw to break the Internet’s backbone? And why have the individuals and organizations who once stood against censorship lost their own?

Here's what is actually meant by "makes fun of the troons":

Mother Jones:

Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized—people who are transgender, neurodivergent, disabled, financially struggling—with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns. Despite its penchant for destroying lives, Kiwi Farms has been mostly overlooked by the media for much of the site’s existence. That is partly because of who it attacks, but also because reporters are wary of becoming targets themselves. The users call their victims “lolcows” because their pain can be milked for laughs. The group made its purpose clear on its Twitter page before it was taken down: “Gossip and exploitation of mentally handicapped for amusement purposes.” 

 

Kiwi Farms users deploy slightly different tactics for various victims, but the rough beats are the same. First, the group assembles extensive dossiers. Then they use the information (some true, some contorted, some fabricated) to torment their targets. 

 

When Sagal posted about her suicidal thoughts, Kiwi Farms users sent private messages urging her to kill herself, a friend said. When posters learned that Terryberry, an 18-year-old with learning disabilities, used the internet to make friends, they worked to get her social media accounts shut down while mocking her mental health struggles. They relentlessly tormented Ginder for being nonbinary. One thread went on for more than a dozen pages. 

Lacking a sense of empathy is said to be an indicator of psychopathy. 

I'm wondering if Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven like Kiwi Farms as much as Nina Paley apparently does. (YES - see below)

And you'll never guess - Paley is also an author at Quillette. Also interviewed by Paley: Razib Khan, Alice Dreger, Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven.

And as you've probably guessed, Joshua Moon is also a huge racist.

UPDATE: Paley conveniently posted fans of her cards on Twitter, and it turns out Carole Hooven is a big fan, promoting them on Twitter.

Stay classy, you poor cancelled martyr!

Also a fan, another Koch employee (besides Hooven) Pamela Paresky. Hooven cited her when she promoted the crackpot sociobiologists' social affinity theory. Apparently Paresky thinks these cards are hysterical! I knew Paresky was a wingnut ass, but I didn't guess what a hate-filled ghoul she is.

Paresky wants to "protect kids" - but presumably NOT the ones selected to be lolcows by Kiwi Farms.

And crackpot Jordan "enforced monogamy" Peterson is a fan.

Imagine hating trans people so much that you condone the glorification of psychopathically evil Kiwi Farms.

Carole Hooven accepts that sweet sweet wingnut welfare

Back in March, I predicted that Carole Hooven would get her very own Quillette byline, thanks to her willingness to promote neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, plus her connection to Steven Pinker.

But I should have aimed a little higher. 

Charles Murray, advocate of ethnicity-based job discrimination, reports that Hooven is now, like him, on the easiest of all possible career trajectories: wingnut welfare via the American Enterprise Institute.

Adam H. Johnson tweeted about the ease and profitability of a wingnut welfare career at AEI in 2020, using Murray's career as an example. 

And you know Hooven is presenting herself - the way all hereditarian stooges do when they get pushback - as a martyr.

Of course Jerry Coyne, when he isn't posting pictures of victims of the Holocaust,  portrays Carole Hooven as a victim - the real question is who does Coyne think had it worse, Hooven or Anne Frank.

UPDATE: turns out Hooven is a fan of a pack of playing cards that includes a card that glorifies the psychopathically evil Kiwi Farms. 

The terrible decline of Morrissey

I'm the right age that I should have been a huge Smiths fan in their heyday, but somehow I missed out on the humor and left-leaning (and anti-monarchist) political commentary and ineffable beauty of their greatest songs until well into my 40s and by then the Smiths were broken up and the magical synthesis that was Morrissey and Johnny Marr was no more.

But Morrissey had given signs of what was to come long before then, per The Guardian:

Yet other aspects of his character were on display even in his heyday. In 1986, Morrissey gave an interview to Melody Maker in which he claimed that a “black pop conspiracy” was keeping his band down, describing reggae as “the most racist music in the entire world” and declaring that he “detests … black modern music”.

You can get a pretty good idea of how low he has sunk by who his fans are now - the some-time employer of Steve Sailer, the viciously anti-immigration, white supremacist castle-owning VDARE is raffling tickets to see Morrissey. 

Morrissey claims he is not on the far right - but come on, the VDARE freaks would not love him this much except that he is.

Woki Wiki

Edward Dutton, a bigot who covers just about all the bigotry bases, thinks Rational Wiki is too woke - but then you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who is not to the left of that extremist. 

He even thinks Wikipedia is too woke:

Unfortunately, some people, who are otherwise highly intelligent and discerning, don’t seem to realise its true nature, possibly because it involves the word ‘Wiki,’ which should be a red-flag anyway, considering the Woke biases of Wikipedia. It is written in a deliberately mocking-style, which should, surely, sound alarm bells.

 I assume he doesn't like Wikipedia in part because editors there gave Emily Willoughby, a bigwig at the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research a bad time when she tried to post racist garbage there.

Dutton is disappointed that the stooges at City Journal took down the libelous hit piece they published by some pseudonymous rando (the smart money is on Emil Kirkegaard.) 

I guess Dutton wants to see City Journal - and its Manhattan Institute Death Star - sued.

Dutton links to an article by Steve Sailer, who is such a chickenshit coward that any time I get anywhere near his Twitter/X account with a new burner Twitter/X account, he blocks me - I don't even tweet at him - just tweeting at anybody on a thread near him makes him block me. 

I mean, why is he so afraid? What could I possibly do except tweet at him? And Twitter/X is an absolute rightwing racist cesspit now, he'd have an absolute home field advantage, with his loser racist goons there all around him, to cheer him on.

Is he still sore because I got him to embarrass Steven Pinker on Twitter, years ago?

Oh and who does Dutton go running to for comfort in the case of the libelous City Journal article? 

Why every racist hereditarian ghoul's hero - Steven Pinker. 

Dutton shared this Pinker tweet:

And speaking of the wingnut welfare Manhattan Institute, I'm working on a draft for a Rational Wiki article about the Institute’s most famous funding recipient - Charles Murray - and as I research him I find he's an even bigger asshole, personally and professionally than I ever dreamed. 

Just the part where he wants to deny welfare to single mothers to punish them for their immorality, combined with bragging about how he used Thai prostitutes while working for the Peace Corps - qualifies him as one of the world's most repulsive hypocrites. 

Although maybe this isn't about sex - maybe Murray thinks that single mothers on welfare are immoral because they are using tax-payer funded programs, and Murray would find it more moral if they escaped starvation instead through the free enterprise of prostitution.

Either way, it explains why Murray is the perfect thought leader for the grotesquely evil Manhattan Institute.

I gave up on Dutton responding to me via the academic email address he provides online, so I tried another email address someone gave to me. We'll see if Dutton responds this time - I will make a full report if he does.

Steven Pinker 🖤 Michael Shermer

Two pals who love race pseudoscience

I recently discovered Steven Pinker has an Instagram account. He's had it for years, I just didn't bother to look for it.

He doesn't post the usual reactionary offensiveness there, like he does on Elon Musk's shitshow "X," but he did reveal there that he has a warm personal relationship with Michael Shermer. 

The caption is: "MAMILs (middle-aged men in Lycra) - me and Michael Shermer in Santa Barbara"

First, since when is late 60s "middle-aged"? The image was taken in October 2021 when both were 67. 

But also never forget that Michael Shermer is a blatant racist, much more so than Pinker.  I'm not saying Pinker is not a racist, I'm saying he's much less blatant about it.

Certainly Pinker is not so disturbed by racism that it prevents him from being good buddies with Shermer, who is so racist he agrees with extreme racist and thankfully dead J Philippe Rushton and his bogus claims about Black people.

When E. O. Wilson's promotion of Rushton's career was in the news, not long after Wilson died, Shermer tweeted: "I thought (Rushton) was (a racist) too until I looked at the evidence. You should try that some day instead of motivated reasoning"

Rushton is well-known for the very poor quality of his work in addition to his racism. So it's Michael Shermer who is guilty of "motivated reasoning" and he's projecting here: Michael Shermer wants to believe that Rushton was correct that Black people are virtually a different species from white people, and intellectually inferior and genetically inclined to crime.

And E. O. Wilson encouraged Rushton and helped him with his career.

E. O. Wilson is to blame for the pseudo-science of evolutionary psychology

Although Pinker is often identified as an
"evolutionary psychologist" his view on race 
is the opposite of the Tooby/Cosmides-branded
evolutionary psychology which says
"there is no such thing as race"

In my opinion, PZ Myers' video "The Problems with Evolutionary Psychology" is the gold standard of evo-psycho critiques. First Myers explains evolutionary theory basics, briefly but effectively, and then explains how evolutionary psychology deviates from evolutionary biology.

But Myers has another good video Heather & Bret: Warmed over evolutionary psychology which includes a thorough look at the crackpottery of everybody's favorite free speech grifters this side of Jordan Peterson. (And they love Game Theory!)

Myers recommends a 2013 book that examines the follies of evolutionary psychology, "Paleofantasy : what evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live" by Marlene Zuk, which you can read for free here.

I knew there was a connection between E. O. Wilson's sociobiology and Tooby/Cosmides' evolutionary psychology, but I didn't realize how much until I researched Wilson for the Rational Wiki page I created about him. 

Wilson took credit for evolutionary psychology in the afterward to the 2006 edition of his autobiography:

…the twelve years since the original publication of Naturalist have seen many changes in sociobiology, from which I have received, as its nominal founder, both anguish and satisfaction. Applied to ants and other animals, it has flourished. Applied to human social behavior it has also proliferated, but under the name “evolutionary psychology,” now an academic subject with a life of its own. Evolutionary psychology has generated some excellent research and much else that is less than distinguished. Overall it has created an industry of popular books, with substantial combined impact, and become part of the popular culture.

But as Steve Sailer tells it, evolutionary psychology succeeded as an academic subject because Tooby and Cosmides removed race from the equation. But then, Steven Pinker put race back in:

(Pinker) started out completely under the spell of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the founders of evolutionary psychology, which has succeeded on politically-correct campuses by stripping from Edward O. Wilson's discipline of sociobiology its emphasis on explaining human differences.

And of course we know how devoted Wilson was to the racial component of sociobiology thanks to his correspondence with Sailer's hero, arch-racist J. Philippe Rushton.

Jerry Coyne traveling with his "CPAC for racists" pals ~ are those THIELBUX?

In the past I have speculated that the reason Jerry Coyne is constantly posting photos from his deluxe vacations is because he's on the payroll of a far-right plutocrat.

His latest vacation pix don't argue against it.

He identifies his travel pals as Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman. 

Both have written for racist rag Quillette, and Krylov must be especially close to Peter Thiel through her work with his CPAC for racists.

I don't doubt this is part of their reward for doing what one or more rich men tell them to do, spreading race pseudoscience.

But hey, it's no doubt very easy money, if you don't have a conscience.

Speaking of Jerry Coyne, by request, I added my two cents worth to his Rational Wiki profile. Supposedly Coyne doesn't like Rational Wiki. I don't think he's going to like it any better now.

 More about Peter Thiel's funding schemes at Salon:

Then there was Compact Magazine, the hybrid "radical American journal" Ahmari co-founded last March with fellow Catholic Matthew Schmitz and Marxist populist Edwin Aponte. Its professed agenda was to wage "a two-front war on the left and the right" and promote "a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right." 

Although Compact has declined to specify who funds the magazine, a source familiar with its operations told Salon that it was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who has funded numerous other "new right" projects, from NatCon conferences to the political campaigns of J.D. Vance, Blake Masters and Josh Hawley — and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein (another top NatCon donor). Klingenstein did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn't rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine. In a statement, Ahmari said, "Compact is an independent, for-profit publication supported by our subscribers. A group of investors helped us jump-start it. We respect their privacy and decline to name them." 

Elon Musk is a stochastic terrorist who needs to be pushed out of the American government

Elon Musk is out of control. He needs to get out of our government.

Elon Musk blames ADL for lost revenue, says he's 'against anti-Semitism of any kind'
The tech mogul said Monday he was considering legal action after blaming pressure from the Anti-Defamation League for lost advertisers.

Libs of TikTok is thrilled. There is something seriously wrong with Chaya Raichik.

Wilson, you're all done!

 I finally completed my E. O. Wilson entry over at Rational Wiki. This might be my favorite part.

It's the Racist Rodeo sausage-fest yee-haw

The Substack hosted Aporia is a racist garbage site, and an employer of neo-Nazi Bo Winegard. 

It claims it's trying to "move the Overton window" which is race pseudoscience lingo for "make race pseudoscience acceptable outside of racist circles."

But thanks to a heads-up from Oliver Smith, I find that the creeps at Aporia have shared a video of some of the race-obsessed weirdos who showed up for the Racist Rodeo sausage-fest, that is the 23rd annual conference of the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

  👉RACIST RODEO SAUSAGE-FEST ROLLCALL!👈

James Lee - recent recipient of Mental Chronometry money.

Professor Greg Clark - economic historian and hereditarian idiot.

Book review of his The Son Also Rises in The Economist:

One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

Frank Worrell - I assume if he bumped into Clark they avoided discussing Clark's theory that Black people are descended from low social competence losers. No doubt Worrell is getting paid too well by the gang at ISIR to embarrass them like that.

Razib Khan, of course. What would he do with himself if it weren't for his (well-remunerated) obsession with race? Do some actual science?

Rex Jung - past president of ISIR.

William Revelle - likes to cite racists in his work including Rushton.

Edward Dutton - right-wing extremist who covers all the bigotry bases. Some goon keeps commenting on my Pinkerite talk page on Rational Wiki claiming Dutton is talking shit about me on his discord. I will report more about that claim once I can track down a valid email address for Dutton - his college email account doesn't seem to work.

Sam Thyssen - he's listed as an "entrepreneur" but I can't find anything about him online. I guess he just gives money to ISIR and they want to butter him up.

Professor Andrew Conway - thinks Andrew Sullivan is the smartest guy he's ever met, so that pretty much tells you all you need to know about him. 

Except that he likes to retweet Richard Hanania.

Gavin Tredoux - A creep who shares his love of Uber-racist Galton with racist Aporia* while collecting genetic data for a company called Traitwell DNA Testing. I wonder what he does with data from Black clients.

*Although to be fair, he loves all the race science racists.

It's just one big happy asshole sausage-fest, there at the Racist Rodeo. But where's the Steven Pinker interview?

The Institute of Mental Chronometry gives money to its gang members - and the University of Minnesota is so proud

Here I was just saying that the "Institute of Mental Chronometry" doesn't seem to do much except for provide support services to the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

I also mentioned the organization was founded for/with Arthur Jensen and was once called "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences" and received a grant of $337,500 from the Pioneer Fund.

Well if you think $337,500 was a lot of money for race pseudoscience, hold onto your hats!

The Institute of Mental Chronometry has just given over half a million dollars to two promoters of race pseudoscience. 

$530,129 to be exact.

Emily Willoughby of course is on the board of the race pseudoscience-loving International Society for Intelligence Research, 

James J. Lee is also associated with ISIR, but their website does not say how. 

Emil Kierkegaard is a big fan of Lee's brand of race pseudoscience.

I wrote an email to the University of Minnesota pointing this out to them, but I don't think they're going to be overly concerned. The University of Minnesota has also taken money from the Pioneer Fund.

I've said many times, although race pseudoscience is garbage, it is extremely lucrative.

If you were a person of color - or just a person of conscience - would you want to send your kid to a school that harbors race pseudoscience ghouls?

But wait, with all that money... does this mean we are finally going to get that state-of-the-art mental chronometry apparatus that Jensen promised us?

And the ISIR still has not posted any documents pertaining to its 2023 Racist Rodeo yet. 

Geez, with all the money they have slopping around...

Time to get Elon Musk OUT of the US government!

 It's time to rein in the plutocrat mofos!

Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker:

The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

Although I still think Peter Thiel is probably even more of a threat to American democracy because he is much sneakier than Musk.

More of the evils of Musk here on Pinkerite.

Black writers at the New York Times are not having it

Within a couple of days, two Black writers at the NYTimes have spoken out against the racist insanity of the Republican Party and conservatives in general in the United States.

Charles Blow on what that idiot DeSantis is up to:

To David Blight, the definitive biographer of Douglass, PragerU’s video is appalling and a joke, but in an interview with me, he recognized the danger that it could be compelling to a young student.

Is anyone, ultimately, served by this promoting of logical fallacy and bastardizing of history? As Blight explained it, the video “really does appeal to that version and vision of history that so many Americans still want. They want to be left feeling good at the end of the day. They don’t want to be threatened. They want to sleep at night. They want to know that the greatest of Black leaders really were on their side.”

Using Douglass in any way to soften slavery is a desecration. And, that is DeSantis’s educational legacy in the state.

Jamelle Bouie on the plutocrat support for Richard Hanania.

A whole coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires have lent their time and attention to Hanania, as well as elevated his work. Marc Andreessen, a powerful venture capitalist, appeared on his podcast. David Sacks, a close associate of Elon Musk, wrote a glowing endorsement of Hanania’s forthcoming book. So did Peter Thiel, the billionaire supporter of right-wing causes and organizations. “D.E.I. will never d-i-e from words alone,” wrote Thiel. “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate, also praised the book as a “devastating kill shot to the intellectual foundations of identity politics in America.”

Unfortunately he left Steven Pinker and Matt Yglesias off the list.

Thiel of course is the link between the race pseudoscience gang at Quillette, since Thiel "secretly" funded it, and Ron DeSantis, who Thiel is openly backing. 

Clearly the subject of this blog, "Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Science" is unfortunately more of the moment than ever, even more than when Andy Ngo was operating as Trump's lil ratfucker.

Steve & Chuck

A reminder that these two great minds of science are a political scientist and a marketing guy. 

Meanwhile, Sailer is mad at Wikipedia about Richard Lynn.

I assume Sailer will be pleased to discover that Rational Wiki's entry on Lynn does indeed note that he is dead (RIH).

Fun fact - I joined Twitter with a burner account a month or so ago, which displayed a variation of my real name, and even though I never tweeted at Sailer, he blocked my account. Probably for the same reason that, Sailer believes, Nikole Hannah-Jones blocked him.

Chuck and Emil are still best buddies.

Steven Pinker & Steve Sailer & Human Biodiversity

Keira Havens has an excellent new post on her Medium site which discusses the alliance between Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer:

It has been fairly well reported that Pinker cites Steve Sailer, organizer of the Human Biodiversity (h-bd) group that connected Charles Murray, Henry Harpending, Rushton and others in the early ’00s. While most famously called out by Malcom Gladwell in 2009, Pinker published Sailer’s argument that Iraqis are too inbred to manage democracy in his 2004 anthology of best science writing, cited it again in a 2007 article for The New Republic, and cited a 2004 VDARE article of Sailer’s in Better Angels, one that highlighted the observations of fellow HBD member Frank Salter. In a 2009 comment, Sailer shares with confidence that, “Pinker, however, has long been moving away from 1992-style ‘era of evolutionary adaptation’ evolutionary psychology toward Gregory Cochran-style ‘continuing evolution.’” In 2016, a reader asks if Pinker reads Sailer’s blog, and Sailer uses those citations as proof that he does. 

 

The truth is, Sailer probably has a far simpler way of knowing that Pinker is reading his work. In early 1999, when Sailer’s resume was limited to Conservative movie reviewer and VDARE columnist, Steven Pinker, an endowed professor of Brain and Cognitive Scientists at MIT, was already in an email chain discussing the “special problem that Black people have with 3D-to-2D translation“ along with Geoffrey Miller, J Michael Bailey (of recent rapid onset gender dysphoria retraction fame), and J.P. Rushton of the explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund. A few months later, many of these addressees would join the Human Biodiversity (h-bd) group, with Sailer proudly adding “the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals” to his resume. By the end of the next year, when the group was sending a few hundred messages per month, Sailer went on to share a private message that hadn’t made it into the group chat: a discussion of Al Gore’s lisp from “a best selling cognitive scientist / linguist / evolutionary psychologist.”

Steve Sailer testified directly to me, in 2019 that he's been an important influence on Pinker's views:

On the rare occasions (maybe only the one occasion?) when a journalist asks Pinker about his connection to Sailer, Pinker cries "guilt by association":

Many critics allege that Pinker’s recent remarks are part of a longer history of comments and behaviour that have come dangerously close to promoting pseudoscientific or abhorrent points of view. To take a single example: the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people”. Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website.

Pinker is listed as a member of Sailer's Roster of Human Biodiversity Discussion Group Members although I have always been hesitant to cite this as more evidence of his connection to Pinker. 

It appears to me that Sailer just added anybody he wanted to his discussion group. The fact that Paul Krugman is listed on this discussion group is a sign that being a member does not mean you volunteered to be a member. However, there is an interesting data field worth noting - by the way, I created a Google Sheets version of the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group Members for sorting capabilities here.

So the column that is furthest to the right is labeled "Public Contributor" and Krugman is marked as "Not yet." Another member of the group who is labeled Not yet is Jonathan Marks who I assume is the same guy who says he coined the term "human biodiversity" and it was stolen by racists. 

On the other hand, Steven Pinker is marked "Yes." Also marked "Yes" are Charles Murray, J. P. Rushton, Peter Brimelow, Rosalind Arden, Gregory Cochran, Daniel C. Dennett, John Derbyshire, Henry Harpending, Kevin MacDonald, Helmuth Nyborg and Arthur Hu. What a collection.

I would pay big bucks to get my hands on Steven Pinker's contributions to the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group.

In the meantime, I discovered that Sailer let the domain name humanbiodiversity.org lapse, so I bought it. It displays very different content now.

What's new Pinkerite?

Khan helping his buddy brag that
he's even more popular with
wealthy racists than ever before.
------------------------------------------------

Glad you asked. 

I am now the proud owner of the domain name humanbiodiversity.org, formerly owned by Steve Sailer for use by his "Human Biodiversity Institute."

It was incredibly cheap - under ten dollars for a year. Although strangely enough, the domain name humanbiodiversity.com costs $2,888 for a year. 

My Rational Wiki entry for Razib Khan is finally out of draft mode. 

I've added the Hereditarian section to Pinker's entry.

Also on my to-do list - entries for Charles Murray (in addition to the existing The Bell Curve entry) and E. O. Wilson, whose own correspondence revealed what a big racist he was.

Jonathan Katz has a new piece about Khan's buddy Richard Hanania. 

Good stuff:

The heart of this allegation is that Mathias was trying to “simply silence a person” rather than “engage with ideas.” But this is another tell. Which of Hanania’s “ideas” was Mathias supposed to “engage” with? That Black people are a “race with an IQ of 85?” That people from Latin America “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation?” That “Jewish elites” hate fertile white women? That “the ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave?” If Hanania truly believes his ideas from that time “repugnant” and “repulsive,” then why would he think anyone should engage with them? Unless, of course, his real goal is to inject genocidal racism and antisemitism into the discourse under the cover of pseudo-intellectualism and inquiry, which happens to have been the project Richard Spencer recruited him into not so long ago.

Giving racists the seal of mainstream approval: Steven Pinker and Matthew Yglesias

The latest Richard Hanania drama is a reminder that there are mainstream public intellectuals like Matthew Yglesias and Steven Pinker who are happy to promote racists. 

Clearly racism does not bother them.

Yglesias admits he's always known Hanania is racist. He promoted him anyway, because he is a "conservative" and I guess that's enough of an excuse - after all, if they can write "some good pieces," their racism doesn't matter.

And the Fuhrer could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon - two coats!

Steven Pinker has also been promoting Hanania, but then, Pinker has been promoting racists since Steve Sailer in the early 2000s.

Apparently Pinker loves Hanania so much, that he only has one subscription on Twitter - and it's Richard Hanania.

So what is wrong with Matthew Yglesias and Steven Pinker? Why do they promote racists without a moment's bad conscience?

Is it:

• They are getting and/or desire (more) racist plutocrat funding?
• They agree with the racists but don't want to admit it directly?
• They are feckless white male mediocrities who don't give a shit about making the world a better place?
• All of the above?

UPDATE: Yglesias' pals are rallying 'round their loyal "centrist."

Apparently Hanania is too stupid to understand that of course he isn't going to be "cancelled" since his income depends on saying what racist plutocrats want him to say, while Yglesias supposedly is a mainstream centrist.

Non-racists have commentary.

The Richard Hanania saga continues ~ Peter Thiel is indisputably evil

So now that the cat's out of the bag and we all know that right-wing racist Richard Hanania was slightly even more right-wing racist in his younger days, most of the race pseudoscience ghouls are circling the wagons.

Didn't I say that Matthew Yglesias is not nearly as innocent as Henry Farrell wants to believe? 

Henry Farrell also had nice things to say about Noah Smith. I've known he is a racist-mainstreaming goon for years.

I think "just too much cognitive load for me" means "I don't want to offend the racist plutocrats who might hire me."

Predictably Claire Lehmann came to Hanania's aid in Quillette, reposting Hanania's explanation for why he was marginally more repugnant before than he is now:

Editor's note: Some may question my decision to publish Richard Hanania, especially in light of the recent revelations by the Huffington Post. I want to clarify that I am sharing his work not because I am dismissing the seriousness of far-right extremism among young men. On the contrary, I believe it is a genuine problem that demands thoughtful responses.

This is very funny considering how much Lehmann nurtured the career of neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.

I have always had absolute faith in Claire Lehmann's and Quillette's ability to support all racists.

And then there is Hanania's shameless hypocrisy - youthful stupidity was not an acceptable excuse to Hanania when it came to a former Rational Wiki contributor. Except that the former Rational Wiki contributor is no longer an extremist, but Richard Hanania is still a right-wing racist extremist.

But Hanania did lose Bari Weiss. For now at least.

However, David Klion noticed who blurbed Hanania's latest book:

The blurbs include one by Peter Thiel, demonstrating how indisputably evil he is. Apparently this is how libertarians talk now.