The Far Right & the International Society for Intelligence Research

The Atlantic published an article by Ali Breland yesterday, The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. Thanks to Maxine Margolis for the heads-up!

I have an issue with the title though. The far right has long been obsessed with Race and IQ. The important issue, which is what the article is really about, is that the Republican Party is being infected by race pseudoscience: 

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

And it's been going on since at least Bari Weiss's infamous glorification of several hardcore race pseudoscience promoters among the "renegades" of the Intellectual Dark Web including Michael Shermer, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, Sam Harris and of course Steven Pinker.

I don't think the article really has a good handle on Steve Sailer's career though, whatever Sailer may claim:

In June, (Sailer) also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. 

I have long noted on this blog that 2012 was the last time Steven Pinker mentioned Sailer in public after a previous decade of promoting his career, so I assume that's why Sailer picked 2013 as the year he was allegedly pushed out of the spotlight. And 2023 was when stochastic terrorist Elon Musk took over Twitter and invited all the racist ghouls back on. 

But New York Magazine had an article all about Sailer in 2017, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right. So Sailer was hardly in hiding. 

The article does not mention the International Society for Intelligence Research, of course, but it does mention Stefan Molyneux, who had Linda Gottfredson, one of the most prominent members of ISIR on his show and together they ranked races with Black people on the bottom. 

The ISIR chugs along, year after year, almost completely unnoticed by the mainstream media, platforming many many proponents of race pseudoscience at its conferences. In 2023 it featured Michael Woodley of Menie, Gregory Clark, Rosalind Arden, Richard Haier, Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker. 

This year they allowed one of the most extreme racists back in to make a presentation - Emil Kirkegaard.

There's a reference to "Bronze Age Pervert" in the Atlantic article and as outrageous as he is, his message per Breland is a perfect encapsulation of the ISIR ethos from Arthur Jensen to Linda Gottfredson to Richard Haier:

Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. 

I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of the participants of the annual Racist Rodeo - AKA the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

You can see the spreadsheet here.

Below are the top ten most frequent participants in the annual conferences since the first one in 2000. 

Note that participation is determined by mention in the annual conference program either for the inclusion of their work, or as an organizer or advisor or various administrative functions like interviewing the participants. But identification as a participant doesn't necessarily mean the individual was at the conference in person.

I haven't completed the 2024 conference since they haven't released the program yet, so these numbers are based on a timespan from 2000 to 2023. There was no conference in 2020. The right column is the number of times each has participated.

Lubinski, David	20
Bates, Timothy C.	18
Benbow, Camilla P.	18
Plomin, Robert	18
Deary, Ian J.	17
Haier, Richard	17
Johnson, Wendy	17
Detterman, Douglas K	16
Gottfredson, Linda	16
Colom, Roberto	14

So let's meet these most enthusiastic ISIR racist rodeo participants.

• David Lubinski is married to Camilla Benbow, and is currently at Vanderbilt University. In addition to being the most frequent ISIR conference participant, he received a "Lifetime Achievement" award from ISIR along with Benbow in 2019. Lubinski was one of the signatories of the Linda Gottfredson paper defending the race pseudoscience view in The Bell Curve, and as of 2022 was the director of the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which accepted money from the Pioneer Fund under the name Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. In 2023 the Institute of Mental Chronometry gave a grant of half a million dollars to two ISIR associates, Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee. 

Lubinski has not published anything directly about race, that I was able to discover so far, but his dedication to the cause of race pseudoscience seems certain via his various Jensenite associations and his apparently warm relationship with people like Linda Gottfredson and Steven Pinker. When Pinker was at the 2017 conference, Lubinski interviewed him and asked him, in effect, what made him come over to his side, the race pseudoscience side:

How did someone with your background, someone who at one point in his career and I'm not putting him on the spot because Steven said this publicly, said early on, he found individual differences "uninteresting" how did someone at that stage of development become so interested in human psychological diversity that you developed expertise in individual differences and wrote a book like "Blank Slate."

"Human psychological diversity" is a term indistinguishable from Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." And clearly Lubinski is using the term "individual differences" as a synonym for "human psychological diversity." 

Lubinski published an obituary for Jensen in American Psychologist that paints Jensen as compassionate towards Black people while failing to mention Jensen's alliances with hard-core racists like American Renaissance; that he was supported by the Pioneer Fund; and that he was on the board of the neo-Nazi publication Neue Anthropologie.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.  

• Timothy C.  Bates is a member of the editorial board of Intelligence, the publication associated with the ISIR. Bates' far-right, racist political views are apparent on his X/Twitter feed, where he retweets the likes of techno-fascist Trump-funder Elon Musk, Steven Pinker, and Razib Khan. He was the president of ISIR in 2017 and 2018.

On the Facebook page for the ISIR, Bates posts a reminder of how much the ISIR gang loves the incredibly racist Charles Murray. 

 

• Camilla P. Benbow, like her husband David Lubinski, underplays her race pseudoscience beliefs, but is clearly an enthusiastic participant in the ISIR race pseudoscience project. She is also at Vanderbilt. She's coauthored with extreme Jensenite Richard Haier and with extremist David C. Geary who has published in racist Aporia and racist "hereditarian" Quillette. I think that like Pinker, Lubinski and Benbow are too careful to make blatant racist statements, but they are clearly allies with those who do. They let those allies take the heat, while they continue to benefit from the financial legacy of the Pioneer Fund and who knows how many racist plutocrat donors.

• Robert Plomin - David Gilborn explored the perniciousness of Plomin:

‘… the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table, despite all the progress blacks have made in this society … the last great battle over racism will not be fought over access to a lunch counter, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, under a microscope, on the battleground of our DNA.’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. (2008) 

Why write a paper about racism and genetics in the second decade of the Twenty-First century? Surely arguments about race, intelligence and genetics are dead and buried? A Black man has been President and, in both the US and UK, bold assertions about racial minorities’ supposed intellectual inferiority have led to public condemnation for the speaker. Part of my answer lies in the main title of the paper, which quotes Professor Robert Plomin, one of the principal figures in contemporary writing about genetics and education. 

As I explain (below), Plomin has become something of a celebrity-academic in the UK; his claims make headline news, his views are sought by policy-makers, and he features in pop-science radio shows. In one such show, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili (Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, UK) he was challenged on the topic of race. Plomin described his approach as follows:  

‘In general I’ve felt softly softly is a better way to go…’ (BBC Radio 4, 2015).[1]  

Until recently many in the field of behavioural genetics have been far less reticent about airing their views. The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is the most famous, but by no means the only, example of such work (see Eysenck, 1971; Gottfredson, 1986; Jensen, 1969; Lynn, 1991 & 2001; Rushton, 1997). This paper shows how, in recent years, a softly softly approach (that avoids explicit reference to race) has become more common. I argue that this inexplicitness should not be mistaken for an absence of racialized thinking and does not signal that the current work is free from possible racist consequences. Indeed, if anything, the new softly softly version of hereditarianism may be even more dangerous than the outspoken version of earlier periods. 

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

😱 Plomin published an article with Deary that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer. 

• Ian J. Deary - curiously, Deary is quoted for the anti-hereditarian side in the Guardian: 

No one has successfully isolated any genes “for” intelligence at all, and claims in this direction have turned to dust when subjected to peer review. As the Edinburgh University cognitive ageing specialist Prof Ian Deary put it, “It is difficult to name even one gene that is reliably associated with normal intelligence in young, healthy adults.” Intelligence doesn’t come neatly packaged and labelled on any single strand of DNA. 

So it's strange that he spends so much time with people convinced of the hereditarian hypothesis, and, let's be real, hard-core racists and neo-Nazis who show up at ISIR conferences. 

 

😱 Deary published an article with Plomin that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer.   

 

• Richard Haier - I wrote the first iteration of the new version of the Rational Wiki article (NOT the one discussed here) exploring the extreme Jensen-infused racism of Richard Haier, the most devoted member of the Jensen race cult.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

• Wendy Johnson - appears to be a Jensenite, but did not make a good case for racism when she appeared in an online interview. However, she has published with blatant racist Jan te Nijenhuis. And of course has no problem hobnobbing with all the racist extremists who show up at ISIR conferences.

• Douglas K. Detterman - according to his Wikipedia entry: "Among his achievements, Detterman founded the scientific journal Intelligence in 1977, and was editor in chief from 1977 to 2016 where it was taken over by Richard Haier. He also founded the International Society for Intelligence Research and was its president until 2011." 

The entry doesn't mention that Detterman is also vice president/director of the Jensenite, Pioneer Fund grantee organization the Institute of Mental Chronometry. It is likely that Detterman is just as racist as Gottfredson is and Jensen was, but is more careful to downplay the racism at the heart of his belief-system. 

 

👉Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.    

 

• Linda Gottfredson is hideously racist, shamelessly so - possibly the equal of Jensen and J. P. Rushton. She can be heard ranking "races" with perfect confidence on white nationalist Stefan Molyneux's program. Her career is propped up by her lack of shame and the Nazi money of the Pioneer Fund. Gottfredson introduced Charles Murray to race pseudoscience. Of course this horrific racist ghoul is a long-time and highly admired member of the ISIR klan. They gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. 

👉Author of the defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence. 

• Roberto Colom is a huge fan and defender of the race pseudoscience of political operative and life-long recipient of wingnut welfare Charles Murray. He's also chummy with Murray on Twitter/X. Likes to cite all the biggest race pseudoscience ghouls in his work. Published in ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Five of the top 10 ISIR conference participants signed Gottfredson's "Mainstream Science" claim. 

Another signer was R. Travis Osborne - pro-segregationist, director of the Pioneer Fund. His article "Racial Differences in Mental Growth and School Achievement" was included in a collection of race pseudoscience essays edited by Robert Kuttner, another segregationist. That collection was a big influence on Arthur Jensen.

The race pseudoscience obsession with school achievement has continued from the days of segregationists like Osborne through the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which was originally called "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences" through to Kathryn Paige Harden and "behavioral genetics" arguing that educational attainment is the result of genes, to Richard Haier arguing for manipulating genes to raise IQ.

Jonathan Katz on J. D. Vance and the Weinstein brothers

Jonathan Katz took a deep dive into the infamous Eric Weinstein-hosted interview of J. D. Vance and came up with some good, if predictably nauseating stuff.

He refers to Bret Weinstein as "disgraced evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein." I certainly have long thought Bret was a disgrace, since the Evergreen incident, which I am convinced was at the very least partly a deliberate scam on the part of Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. My opinion was then bolstered by Bret and Heather shilling ivermectin as a treatment for Covid. 

And then there's that obsession with Game Theory.

But I didn't know about this latest Bret Weinstein disgrace:

Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biology professor turned podcaster and ivermectin guy, repeated a series of discredited pseudo-theories about AIDS in a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Weinstein, a frequent guest, told Rogan that he found the theory that party drugs like poppers cause AIDS to be “surprisingly compelling.” (It is not.) Weinstein also told Rogan he came to these ideas by reading a recent book by anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, creating a sort of unholy turducken of misinformation passed onto an audience of millions. 

Wow, what a garbage person.

Katz goes on to give a full accounting of the Intellectual Dark Web's racist, misogynist pseudoscience context that inform's Eric Weinstein's views, and demonstrates how much Vance agrees with them.

The problem is that race-baiting, misogyny, and a general obsession with supposedly in-born hierarchies aren’t distractions from the Trump team’s message. They are the campaign’s message. Even when confronted with an issue that genuinely concerns the electorate — such as the still-high cost of living, especially for those of us raising children — they can’t resist offering rhetoric and solutions that sound like they come from the minutes of a 1920s meeting of the American Eugenics Society, if not the pronatalist movement in Fascist Italy itself. The reason is simple: They really believe this stuff.

***

The vice-presidential candidate concludes:

VANCE: Just to sort of bring this full circle to where we started, is that the economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately gonna unwind and collapse upon itself. It has to. I think it's, yeah — it’s the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market.

Yes, Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and great influencer of medieval Christian doctrine, who taught, among other things that: “the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying”; and “for the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority,” and who summarized “the female is a misbegotten male.” Those virtue politics.

In spite of Steven Pinker's public distaste for Trump, the Republican ticket is the Intellectual Dark Web ticket, holding the same pseudoscience beliefs that Pinker has been promoting via evolutionary psychology first, then by a cleaned-up version of Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." Or as David Lubinski, bigwig at the International Society for Intelligence Research calls it "human psychological diversity."

Which is why the Republican ticket, funded by anti-democracy Peter Thiel and lead by a pussy-grabbing rapist and a misogynist creep, is the most evil in American history. 

And Pinker likes to attack Trump but he has no qualms about allying himself with Republican operative Bari Weiss and her garbage rag. But that's who Pinker is, a complete and utter weasel.

Where Arthur Jensen got his "science" from - Robert E. Kuttner and his race extremist gang

From the ISIR 2012
conference program

Arthur Jensen is the guiding light along with J. Phillip Rushton of the International Society for Intelligence Research. The ISIR was very sad when they both died in 2012.

Jensen is even more important to the ISIR than Rushton, since the ISIR has been led by one of the most devoted of Jensen's disciples, Richard Haier and a closely allied organization, the Institute of Mental Chronometry was founded by Jensen.

John Jackson has an excellent study of Jensen's "science" at his blog. 

He points out that in Jensen's most famous race pseudoscience paper, How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Jensen wrote:

This is practically axiomatic, according to the geneticists with whom I have spoken…. Races are more technically viewed by geneticists as populations having different distributions of gene frequencies. These genetic differences are manifested in virtually every anatomical, physiological, and biochemical comparison one can make between representative samples of identifiable racial groups (Kuttner, 1967). (p. 80)

Jensen simply moves from a socially defined “race” like “black” to the claim that they are the same as a genetic population. He knows this because of “geneticists with whom I have spoken.” Which geneticists? He provides us with a citation with to (Kuttner, 1967). 

The citation is from an article, "Biochemical Anthropology" written by Kuttner, which was included in a book, Race and modern science. A collection of essays by biologists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists which was edited by Kuttner.

In the article Kuttner appears to think that measuring bodily fluids in a variety of groups will somehow provide a racial taxonomy:

"Race taxonomies in the past depended almost exclusively on the descriptive anatomy of skin and bone... The body contains many thousands of substances, some of which most certainly vary in quantity or type with ethnic identity. In this light it is regrettable to note how rarely until recent years tissue or blood studies were employed in anthropological research. (pages 197-198)

But Kuttner doesn't need thousands of substances because he has already determined racial classification in advance: on page 207 he refers to "three major races" identified as Caucasian, Negro and Asiatic Mongol. 

But throughout the article he makes observations of seemingly randomly-selected populations of uncertain identity and widely-diverging scope, much as with the work of Daniel G. Freedman. 

(E. O. Wilson cited Freedman's work in "On Human Nature," the book that followed "Sociobiology" and was written to defend Wilson's race pseudoscience claims.)

For example on page 211 Kuttner writes:

Further investigation revealed that American Indians of Sioux linguistic stock had elevated pepsinogen with an average of 30 percent greater than Caucasians...

So one group is "American Indians" who speak Sioux. He compares this tiny population to "Caucasians," one of the "three major races." 

He doesn't define who exactly counts as Caucasian and he sometimes uses the term "white" as a synonym. He identifies two sub-groups of Caucasians, "Europeans" and "White Americans" but there's no reason given for why he makes the distinction:

Plasma cholesterol values for Europeans and White Americans may range from 50 to 100 percent higher than for non-Caucasians inhabiting backward areas. (page 202)

So not only different "races" but "inhabiting backward areas" versus, presumably Caucasians inhabiting non-backward areas.

Kuttner does not seem to understand the concept of "controls." 

By the end of the article, he all but admits that he has proven nothing, but he's hopeful for the future:

It has not been the intention of this review to do more than sketch in the horizon. The task of introducing a dynamic new science is not difficult but to summarize it defeats the best efforts of any reviewer. It may be sufficient to say that in terms of new discoveries to come, biochemical anthropology promises to be an extremely stimulating contributor to our knowledge of human biology.

And this is the basis of Arthur Jensen's claim for "gene frequencies."

The collection of essays, "Race and modern science. A collection of essays by biologists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists", which appears to be the foundation of Jensen's racialist views, is written by racists, fascists and Nazis:

• Bertil Lundman served on the executive committee of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, an organisation that promoted eugenics and segregation, and the first publisher of Mankind Quarterly.

• Jan Czekanowski - "In the context of the racial theories of his time which have since been disproved by modern genetics,[2] Czekanowski classified Europeans into four pure races. The four pure races were the Nordic, Mediterranean (Ibero-Insular), Lapponoid and Armenoid."

• J. D. J. Hofmeyr - "Soon after its launch in 1960, Hofmeyr joined the international advisory board of the Mankind Quarterly, a pugnacious journal conceived by right­wing intellectuals as a reaction against the liberal anti­racism of postwar anthropology in the United States and Britain. Through the networks of The Mankind Quarterly, and with the support of Pretoria University, Hofmeyr became closely involved in promoting a profoundly racialised view of human genetics geared to the defence of high apartheid."

• Ilse Schwidetzky, worked with Nazis, published Racial Psychology in Mankind Quarterly.

• Luigi Gedda, far-right Italian politician and eugenicist, one of the founders of Mankind Quarterly.

• David C. Rife wrote in Mankind Quarterly in his review of Carlton Coon's The Origin of Races that the book was "a new milestone in our knowledge of the evolution of men. It should be on n the book shelves of all scientists, as well as of others who are interested in the history of mankind. It is undoubtedly being viewed with serious concern by the advocates ages of egalitarian nonsense."

• C. D. Darlington - "Asked by a reporter for The Sunday Times whether or not he was a racist for this connection to John Baker, who believed that no civilizations had ever arisen in Africa, all "negrids" had a "fetid smell" and were "less evolved,"[11] Darlington replied: "Well, I'm regarded as one by everyone except the Jews, who are racist, and who utterly agree with my views."

• Corrado Gini - "Focusing on the problem of the degeneration of the Italian race, Gini had a tremendous influence on Benito Mussolini's (1883-1945) political campaign, and shaped Italian social sciences for almost two decades. He was also a committed racist, as documented by a series of indisputable statements from the primary literature. All these findings place Gini in a linking position among early Italian eugenics, Fascism and official state racism."

• A. James Gregor - "In 1959, Gregor joined with Robert E. Kuttner to found the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), where Gregor acted as secretary. According to Gregor, the organization was founded to restore "an intellectual climate in the U.S., and throughout the Western World, which would permit a free and open discussion of racial ... problems." The organization was funded by segregationist Wickliffe Draper to oppose the civil rights movement.[4] As part of this group, Gregor was also an assistant editor of, and contributor to, Mankind Quarterly, the organization's journal."

• George A. Lundberg argued in Mankind Quarterly for the right to discriminate.

• Friedrich Keiter - Nazi anthropologist

• Frank C. J. McGurk - American racist employed by various academic establishments like Villanova University

• R. Travis Osborne - pro-segregationist, director of the Pioneer Fund and was one of 52 signatories of Mainstream Science on Intelligence, a public statement written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal as a response to what the authors viewed as the inaccurate and misleading reports made by the media regarding academic consensus on the results of intelligence research in the wake of the appearance of The Bell Curve earlier the same year.

Several of the 52 signatories, including Gottfredson, went on to become prominent members of the International Society for Intelligence Research. Mainstream Science is posted to the ISIR website and called a "classic."

When Kuttner wasn't trying and failing to demonstrate a scientific underpinning for traditional race classifications, he was succeeding at being an extreme racist.

From Kuttner's Wikipedia entry:

Kuttner opposed miscegenation and believed it was "unnatural", only found amongst zoo animals.[2] He described his own position as "scientific racism". He identified as a Nordicist and argued against racial equality.[1] Kuttner stated that Negroes were racially inferior, they had failed to build and create civilization and they lacked intelligence.[1] He testified in Congress to oppose school integration.[3] Anthropologist Robert Sussman described Kuttner as a "lifelong neo-Nazi".[2]

Kuttner collaborated on racial ideas about "biopolitics" with Eustace Mullins.[1] He wrote for Roger Pearson's Northern World, the floundering The American Mercury and was an editor of the Mankind Quarterly. He edited the essay collection Race and Modern Science in response to the 1967 document Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice issued by UNESCO. Race and Modern Science was negatively reviewed by Sherwood Washburn, who described it as a "useful source book for racists. Anthropologists need not bother with it."[4] 

From neo-Nazi to Arthur Jensen to the International Society for Intelligence Research. Of course the ISIR has many many other racist and neo-Nazi contributors, but Jensen is the most important.

ANTIFA is doing the Lord's work

Or rather, I should say, doing work that the FBI should be doing. 

It appears I was wrong when I scoffed at the idea that ANTIFA was organized. And it's a good thing they are organized, since, according to an article just published in the New Yorker, Infiltrating the Far Right, it appears ANTIFA has helped catch far-right terrorists. 

(Far-right infiltrator) told me he couldn’t believe that the organizers “were this stupid”: they’d laid out explicit plans, in writing, for instigating violence. Anarchist computer programmers eventually helped replicate the entire cache, which Unicorn Riot published online, in searchable form.

The leaks became the basis of a landmark lawsuit, Sines v. Kessler, which concluded this past July, when the court in Richmond approved a verdict awarding a group of Charlottesville residents more than nine million dollars in punitive damages and legal fees, from a roster of far-right groups and their leaders. Prosecutors used the leaks to help convict Fields of the killing—he was given a life sentence—and to win plea agreements from four members of Rundo’s Rise Above Movement, who had been charged as “serial rioters.” The suit also led to the implosion of several white-supremacist groups, including Vanguard America. (Afterward, Rousseau led hundreds of the group’s members to form Patriot Front.)

They have also demonstrated how much the military and police are infested with white supremacists:

 In addition, the leaks caused the dishonorable discharge of two U.S. marines who had participated. One of them, Lance Corporal Vasillios G. Pistolis, a member of the Atomwaffen Division, had boasted on Discord that during the rally he had “cracked 3 skulls together.” Sergeant Michael Joseph Chesny had asked in a Discord chat, “Is it legal to run over protesters blocking roadways?”

And it's clear that Patriot Front is an exceptionally evil organization:

By May, 2022, Unicorn Riot had released audio files documenting at least seventeen hours’ worth of internal Patriot Front meetings and calls, in addition to nearly a hundred thousand lines from internal chats. (Feidt and Schiano refused to talk about their source.) The chats revealed that Rousseau and other members had privately described the U.S. as a “Zionist Occupied Government.” Recordings captured members discussing the need to ban homosexuality and to make women subservient, and fantasizing about how “rape gangs” could exert control over women in their future ethnostate. In one recording, a Florida network director of Patriot Front advised members to enlist their girlfriends in racist vandalism; then the members could blackmail their girlfriends, insuring their loyalty. The director mused in another recording that Patriot Front was, in some ways, “a criminal organization.”

Patriot Front officially disavowed violence. It also prohibited members from bringing firearms to events. But the leaks revealed that some members had a keen interest in guns. Photographs showed 3-D-printed “ghost guns” inside the home of a Seattle-area member. A video captured someone in Brown’s crew firing a rifle at a stolen Black Lives Matter sign, and chats indicated that another member brought two loaded handguns to the Washington march. (At least two people linked to Patriot Front in other areas have been arrested for illegal gun possession.)

The end of the article has this fascinating account of the antifascist Appalachia Research Club versus the far-right Appalachian Archives. 

At the time, (journalist Jordan) Green was reporting on the 2119 Crew, a neo-Nazi gang linked to brick-through-the-window attacks against a synagogue and a Jewish center, in addition to vandalism targeting Muslim and Black people. (“2119” is alphanumeric code for “Blood and Soil.”) Appalachian Archives posted a head shot of Green and wrote, “The bastard above had been found out to be harassing our boys.”

One afternoon this past January, Green’s doorbell rang: a pizza that he hadn’t ordered was being delivered. The next day, Appalachian Archives posted a photograph of Green answering the door. A few weeks later, half a dozen men—many wearing skull masks, a neo-Nazi hallmark—gathered outside his house. Some gave straight-armed Roman salutes, and one carried a sign warning of a “consequence” for Green’s reporting. Appalachian Archives posted a picture of the stunt, as well as a photograph of the same contingent standing next to a marker commemorating the Greensboro massacre, where, in 1979, white supremacists shot and killed five labor organizers.

But an antifascist collective called Appalachia Research Club, which was working with Green, had obtained a photograph of the vehicle driven by the stealth photographer at the pizza delivery. Armed with the license-plate number, they were able to identify the car’s owner: Kai Liam Nix, a twenty-year-old from North Carolina. Having scoured social media and Unicorn Riot’s database of leaks, they were able to match his face and birthday with a Patriot Front member operating under the pseudonym Patrick North Carolina. It seemed likely that Nix either ran the Appalachian Archives account or was closely linked to it. With the help of Jeff Tischauser, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the researchers discovered that Nix is also an active-duty soldier in the Army, serving in the 82nd Airborne Division and stationed at Fort Liberty, in North Carolina. Tischauser told me, “These antifascist researchers may not be up to the ethical standards of professional journalists, but some of them get quality information.”

I reached Nix by phone, and he denied any involvement in the Appalachian Archives account or with Patriot Front. He told me, “That is a hate group, and you can’t be in the military and a hate group at the same time.” Nix pleaded with me not to publish the allegations, which, he said, would hinder an application he’d made to become a police detective after leaving the military, “to stop criminals.” We agreed to discuss the matter the next day, at a Starbucks near Fort Liberty. Before we hung up, I asked him for his license-plate number—the key detail linking him to Appalachian Archives—and he claimed not to remember it. The next morning, he backed out of our meeting and stopped responding to my messages. On August 16th, a few days after I called the Army, a government official told me that the previous day federal agents had arrested Nix for illicit sales of firearms and lying on a background check. (Spokespeople for the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina declined to comment.)

The online war between the far right and the far left continues. After recent marches in Nashville by Patriot Front and a neo-Nazi group, some antifascist researchers launched a campaign called Name the Bozo, which aims to publicly identify as many neo-Nazis as possible. About twenty “bozos” have been exposed so far. One member of the Appalachia Research Club told me that members of far-right groups “have a First Amendment right to be assholes and voice their opinions—but I have a First Amendment right to call them out on that, and if that results in repercussions where they lose their jobs or go to jail, that’s on them, not me.” He continued, “It doesn’t seem like the authorities are interested. I don’t know if they are just turning a blind eye, or if there is something else. But I think this is important work, and I am going to keep doing it, because I think some of these guys are legitimately dangerous.”

The article also links Patriot Front to the Buffalo mass-murderer:

Moreover, the far right’s online promotion of the great-replacement theory to countless sympathizers is accumulating an ominous death toll. In the past decade, lone gunmen inspired by far-right propaganda have killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston (2015), eleven Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh (2018), twenty-three Walmart shoppers in El Paso (2019), and ten Black residents of Buffalo (2022). Inside Patriot Front and across the far right, these mass murderers are venerated with the title of “saint”—as in “Saint Dylann Roof,” who carried out the Charleston massacre. (Roof’s name was chanted at the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, in 2017.) Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University who studies extremist violence and sometimes advises the White House and the F.B.I., told me that Patriot Front’s marches and vandalism—even if they appear merely performative—“are intended to normalize these ideas, to help mobilize other people, to make them think that there’s a groundswell, to inspire violent action. And it’s effective.”

The Buffalo mass-murderer wrote a manifesto that cites several people who have participated in conferences of the International Society for Intelligence Research.

The Intellectual Dark Web strikes again

Eric Weinstein, here to explain
the whole purpose of
"post-menopausal females."

J. D. Vance is owned by Peter Thiel, so that was plenty of evidence for me that J. D. Vance was a creature of the Intellectual Dark Web, but it turns out he had another connection.

And a reminder that the Intellectual Dark Web is not ONLY racist, although it is that of course - the Intellectual Dark Web is hideously misogynist:

In a 2020 appearance on the Portal podcast — hosted by Eric Weinstein, the Managing Director of Peter Thiel’s Thiel Capital — the then-venture capitalist expressed his weird take on elderly women and how his mother-in-law has helped raise his son — he now has three children.

“There's sort of all the classic stuff that grandparents do to grandchildren — it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents,” Vance told Weinstein.
“That's the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female, in theory,” the podcast host said, as Vance chimed in, “Yes.”

Eric Weinstein is the apparent leader of the Intellectual Dark Web, credited with coming up with the name. And you don't even have to speculate whether he is funded by Thiel - he is an official employee of Thiel.

I was just talking yesterday about Bari Weiss - the biggest cheerlead of the IDW - promoting right-wing grifter Christina Hoff Sommers as a "feminist" in spite of the fact that Sommers is a female misogynist whose career has been funded by wingnut welfare.

Sommers was one of those profiled in the Bari Weiss article, one of the special ones photographed lurking in the dark, back in 2018, along with Eric Weinstein.

Bari Weiss is a long-time fan of Eric Weinstein and other horrific right-wing ghouls including that freak James "your mom" Lindsay.

I notice that Weinstein's 55-year-old sister-in-law, Heather E. Heying, appears to be ignoring her whole purpose as a post-menopausal female. When does she have time to mind the children? Tsk tsk!

Heather and her husband Bret Weinstein are big fans of GAME THEORY.

The New York Times kisses Bari Weiss's grifting ass

Bari Weiss and her grifting pals.
But they are all making sooooo
much money as courtiers for racist,
democracy-hating billionaire fascists. 
I guess that means they "know exactly
what they are doing."
--------------------------------------------------------------

 The New York Times published an article glorifying Weiss, Bari Weiss knows exactly what she's doing.

Weiss knows what she's doing in the sense that she knows how to be the best, most grotesque courtier ever to right-wing techno-fascist billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are trying to destroy American democracy to avoid paying taxes.

It's called "being a grifter."

She's a right-wing political operative pretending to be a journalist. She's trying to do what her paymasters want her to do: move the Overton window by portraying right-wing views as centrist.

Something her good pal, racist right-winger Claire Lehmann likes to talk about. And something the NYTimes is doing its best to help her achieve.

Weiss and the NYTimes are utterly disgusting.

More of my opinions about Bari Weiss and her equally disgusting wife.

A GRIFTER IS BORN - Uri Berliner joins the Bari Weiss racist right-wing grift "The Free Press"!

Jerry Seinfeld is apparently a member of the Bari Weiss right-wing racist club

The Washington Post slams Bari Weiss's grifter wife

The Free Press - the right-wing racist Bari Weiss grift

Majority Report vs. Bari Weiss and "sugar daddy Harlan Crow"

Where it all started - when Bari Weiss promoted a gang of racists and Peter Thiel employees known as the Intellectual Dark Web: Why Pinker? Why Pinkerite? Blame Bari Weiss.

Not all corporate media loves Bari Weiss, fortunately. While googling "Bari Weiss" and "grifter" I found this fun New Republic article My Night Among Bari Weiss’s Free Speech Warriors:

By now, most of the very online are familiar with Weiss’s schtick. The intellectual dark-web doyenne presides over a lucrative media empire centered on The Free Press, technically the most popular newsletter on Substack with over 600,000 subscribers, upward of 77,000 of them paying at least $8 a month. That reach and income have allowed Weiss to run The Free Press as much more than a newsletter: It has a staff, columists, podcasts—including a sympathetic platform for J.K. Rowling—and, naturally, events. The brand forcefully represents itself as a forum for people and ideas that have passed their sell-by date in today’s more enlightened and politically sensitive times, or, as their About page puts it, “We focus on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative.” You can argue among yourselves whether Rowling has really found herself without other outlets to air her grievances—at The Free Press, this is as canonical as the whole of her Wizarding World.

And of course this classic from Gentlemen's Quarterly, 2018: The Free Speech Grifters

Two days prior, Weiss's column titled "We're All Fascists Now" highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a "self-identified" feminist and a "registered" Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers's more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza among its past fellows. 

 

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a "factual" one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn't know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she's been silent on harassment of women in tech and finance. And she's been outspoken about the due-process rights of men accused of rape on college campuses, but apparently has no interest in addressing the complexity of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.

Congratulations John Jackson

I was a little behind on listening to Rachel Maddow's latest podcast, Ultra, so it wasn't until yesterday that I realized that one of the contributors in the fourth episode was familiar to me - John Jackson, the historian who runs the blog focusing on race pseudoscience and the origins of the alt-right, Fardels Bear.

I've mentioned Jackson a few times on this blog.

Here is part of the transcript of the fourth episode, Spectacle:

Newsreel Announcer: Thirty in all charged with scheming to establish a Nazi government in the United States. 

 

Maddow: But despite their participation in that conspiracy to push Nazi propaganda through Congress and feed it to the American people, no criminal charges were ever brought against any members of Congres s for that. We just let it be and moved on.

And so a bunch of powerful forces and figures who’d been involved in America First before the war, they got to work on this brand new project after the war, coming to the defense of the now-defeated Nazis. Here’s historian John Jackson. 

 

Jackson: Henry Regnery was part of the isolationist crowd before World War II. 

 

Maddow: Henry Regnery was a prominent member of the America First Committee before the war. He was from a very rich family. His father had co-founded and funded America First. Henry Regnery, the son, helped found a right wing magazine called Human Events.

Reporter: The war crimes trial of 20 former top Nazi and German military leaders opened at Nuremberg. 

 

Maddow: Just one day after the Nuremberg trial started, the magazine railed against that prosecution as a quote, travesty of justice. Regnery then launched his own conservative publishing company, which is still around to this day. The first books he published argued that the Nazis were being treated very unfairly, that the supposed atrocities committed by the Nazi regime were really no worse than what anyone else did. 

 

Jackson: He was searching around for authors who would make that case, that equivalent sort of atrocities were committed by the allies as the axis powers. The problem was most of these people that Regnery publishes in the late 40s, early 50s were fascists, were aligned with the fascist cause, with Hitler’s cause.

As a result I was checking out Fardels Bear and I had forgotten how much good stuff Jackson has on Arthur Jensen. I will be talking about that soon.