Substack's Chris Best will not say that racism is banned from Substack

Which of course anybody could have predicted given that, like many people associated with Substack, Best has a Thiel connection, and has appeared on the Thiel-funded Quillette podcast.

And race pseudoscience promoters are already on Substack.

Nilay Patel of Decoder interviewed Best. The entire interview is here.

I heard about this interview because folks in the Fediverse were sharing the part where Patel nails Best to the wall.

More from Mike Masnick at TechDirt.

Why I think Harvard's "Council on Academic Freedom" is owned by Steven Pinker

It starts with the fact that Pinker co-authored the founding announcement of the Council on Academic Freedom, which was printed in the Boston Globe.

Then, in the announcement: 

• The second link goes to FIRE, the organization funded by Koch and other right-wing plutocrats. According to Source Watch:

FIRE is a former member of the State Policy Network, a group of right-wing think tanks and other politically-active nonprofits.

FIRE was a sponsor of Turning Point USA's 2017 "Student Action Summit".[6][7]

Connection to Conservative Dark Money Groups, Collaboration with Hate Group Alliance for Defending Freedom

FIRE has received millions of dollars in contributions from politically-active conservative nonprofits, including over $3.4 million from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, over $3.4 million from Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust, over $1.8 million from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, over $1.3 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, over $1 million from the Searle Freedom Trust, and over $1 million from the Stand Together Trust.

• The third link goes to Heterodox Academy, an organization funded in part by DonorsTrust, the right-wing plutocrat funding vehicle of choice which also funds the racist obscenity VDARE, the owners of the White Supremacist Castle. Heterodox Academy is headed by "one of Charles Koch's 'pet professors,'" John Tomasi.

• The fourth link goes to FIRE.

• The fifth link goes to an article by Steven Pinker's buddy, pioneer of stochastic terrorism, among other awful things, the Koch-funded Quillette author Cathy Young. Naturally Young's article focuses on Pinker himself.

• The eighth link goes to FIRE.

The membership of the Council on Academic Freedom includes:

• Pinker's fellow Quillette author Jeffrey Flier, co-president

• Carol Hooven, a proponent of sociobiology whom Steven Pinker is apparently mentoring, and who praised neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard, 

• Laurence Summers, another buddy of Pinker, who also praised Winegard

• Liz Gaufberg - "heterdox humanist" fan of Heterodox Academy and Bret Weinstein.

• David Haig - supporter of Napoleon Chagnon along with Pinker

• Dan Carpenter defends Amy Wax's right to be a public racist troll while a member of an academic institution and mentions FIRE and two other members of this Council, Jeannie Suk Gersen and Janet Halley. I suspect that defending Wax will be an important issue for Harvard's Council on Academic Freedom, given Wax's prominence at Peter Thiel's CPAC for Racists, at which Pinker, and other supporters of race pseudoscience, spoke.

• Joseph Henrich - evolutionary psychologist - predictably Quillette author Rob Henderson wrote a positive review of his book for the Koch-funded City Journal.

• James Hankins - author at Quillette

• Regina E. Herzlinger - Koch employee

• Jilly Hooley - evolutionary psychologist

• Randall Kennedy - co-author at Quillette with Federalist Society contributor Harvey Silverglate

• J. Mark Ramseyer - notorious for suggesting that comfort women were not coerced

• Stephen Sachs - contributor at the Federalist Society

• Richard Zeckhauser - one-time member of the Council of Academic Advisors for the Koch-funded AEI, chair of Quillette author Jason Richwine's dissertation committee

The focus of the organization is well-illustrated by the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal's commentary on the announcement:

Conservatives are so few at American universities that the battle to restore respect for free and open debate will have to be led by what used to be known as traditional liberals. Well, maybe there’s hope. On Wednesday Harvard University said it’s forming a new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom dedicated to the free exchange of ideas as a cornerstone of “reason and rational discourse.” 

We know that Steven Pinker considers agreement with race pseudoscience an indicator of "reason and rational discourse."  

Fun fact about Harvard - it has a page on its library site about scientific racism. And meanwhile Steven Pinker is merrily promoting those who promote the same.

Not so fast, Quillette

 Quillette was seen today in that cesspool T itter, trying to whitewash its reputation, in spite of its far-right positions and its support for race pseudoscience, via ChatGPT.

So I went over to ChatGPT and had a little talk with it and by the end we agreed:

Yes indeed, ChatGPT, since Quillette does publish articles that promote race pseudoscience and since Quillette employs individuals who promote race pseudoscience, this raises questions about the publication's values and standards.

And yes, any claims or ideas that promote race pseudoscience should be challenged and debunked with evidence and reason. I will continue to do that. Thank you for your support.

As far as I can tell, the current Quillette Editorial Board is Jon Kay, Jamie Palmer, Claire Lehmann and Bo Winegard.

As I told ChatGPT, Bo Winegard is a notorious promoter of race pseudoscience and even a neo-Nazi, and I have been compiling evidence about Winegard for years.

Jon Kay has been associated with sleazy Quillette for years and is a huge hypocrite, moaning about a writer being "mobbed" then going on to participate in the exact same kind of behavior a couple of years later, as I documented here. Aided by Trump's vicious little rat-fucker Andy Ngo.

Jamie Palmer was the Quillette editor who was duped by the Archie Carter hoax. There's no such thing as shame at Quillette. Or standards. But then, Palmer apparently goes back to the earliest days of Quillette, which is maybe why he can only fail up. 

Claire Lehmann is an execrable human being, the founder of race pseudoscience-promoting Quillette and probably took money from nutty Peter Thiel to do it. She's a long-time supporter of Winegard, attacking me for daring to discuss Winegard's love of "human biodiversity" theories, and made an international name for herself as a racist idiot a couple of years ago.

Speaking of Peter Thiel, I couldn't help asking ChatGPT about the Thiel-Quillette connection.

Lehmann denied that Thiel funded Quillette. But clearly "Quillette" puts a lot of faith in ChatGPT - which is not known for its factual reliability.