Historian David Blight responds to being attacked by Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald in Quillette

This is one of those instances when my interests collide. 

I have been enjoying historian David Blight's work while doing research for my almost-complete play GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN.

Primarily through Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass, but also through his Yale lecture series about the Civil War and Reconstruction. And let's not forget his appearances on C-SPAN.

So although I've written about Blight on a few occasions on this blog, including Mac Donald's attack on Blight, I happened to be listening, yesterday, to one of Blight's more recent Yale Lecture series "Legacies of Reconstruction and the Origins of Jim Crow Society" for my play research rather than for content for Pinkerite. 

But lo and behold, right smack in the middle of the Class 24, Legacies of Reconstruction video -  available for free on YouTube, thank you Yale - Blight responds to the Mac Donald attack and it is a thing of beauty. 

Blight is in the middle of discussing Yale's Civil War Memorial (Blight wrote about it for The Atlantic in February 2024) which Blight calls "a Yankee apology for Reconstruction" when he mentions the Mac Donald attack. Transcript below.

It’s Russell’s and the War Memorial committee's and Yale's apology for Reconstruction. Yeah. You know, we over we took over the South. We colonized it. We imposed black suffrage on you. Oh my God. Yeah. You reacted violently here and there, but we understand. It's OK. Come back to Yale. 

 

It's a Yankee apology for Reconstruction. And the next time you walk through this, think of it that way if you can. And I apologize for getting animated about this. 

 

Not really. 

 

But I just got viciously attacked in an online essay about my New York Times essay. And I would otherwise not respond except the woman who wrote it for a very right-wing – I didn’t know about it until people started saying “have you read this have you read this?” I said no. It's a site called Quillette. OK, I'm sure some of these students must know it, it's its roots are in Australia, it turns out, very libertarian, very, very right wing stuff. But she wrote an essay far longer than my New York Times piece, attacking me and Yale. And all the elitism of our universities. And on and on and on and on she went. She especially went after how I treated this reconciliation story in the Yale and Slavery book. She said “these elite liberals have become so terrible they don't believe in reconciliation.” 

 

That is such a misreading of the book I wrote called - she mentioned my book Race and Reunion but clearly never read it. Or even if she did, it didn't impress her. 

 

The Jim Crow system in the South evolves in a culture forgetting what the Civil War was really about. A purposeful forgetting of the essential results and consequences of the liberation of four million people. The American reunion of North and South is built on a new edifice of the destruction of black rights. Political, civil and eventually of even black lives. 

 

Alright, that's enough of an editorial. Now you're all going to go try to - they have a paywall though for this Quillette thing, so… I got to read it initially. Now there’s a paywall. I was going to quote her today but it couldn't open - I was not gonna pay for it. I mean, come on. 

 

Uh. I don't know, sometimes it's good to get attacked viciously like that. It means somebody read it.

If Blight wants to read the Quillette article without the paywall, and I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to pay for Quillette, I have it archived for free right here.

Later in this lecture, Blight mentions race science (38:47) but doesn't make an explicit connection between that and Quillette.

I’m just sorry that Blight's days of being blissfully unaware of the existence of Quillette are over. 

Elon Musk doubles-down on his neo-Nazi support

In case anybody had any doubts about how extremely racist and fascist the American shadow president is, Elon Musk's latest editorial in support of "Alternative für Deutschland" (AfD)  should make it crystal clear.

As the excellent report from Hope not Hate noted, there is a connection between the extremely racist Emil Kirkegaard and the AfD. One of the "senior figures" of Kirkegaard's racism umbrella organization Human Diversity Foundation, Erik Ahrens (German original), is the social media advisor of the AfD.

So it's extremely bizarre that Musk claims to be opposed to racism.

But what's really happening here is that Musk has decided to redefine racism as prejudice only against those eligible for an H1-B visa, which is how technology corporations recruit non-Americans to work in American companies.

There is currently a growing rift in Trump-world between the hardcore MAGAs who oppose all immigration, and Musk, who only opposes immigration from those he figures he can't profit from. 

Surprise, surprise: Tesla Emerges Among Top Employers Of H-1B Visa Holders.

Trump agrees with Musk. Is this really what the dummies who voted for Trump wanted?

Racist ("hereditarian") and oligarch boot-licker Claire Lehmann is obviously team Musk (source.)

Here she portrays Musk as Santa's helper via his Starlink.

LICK THAT BOOT Jesse Singal!

As seen via Bluesky.

The continuing non-celebrity career of Razib Khan

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan enjoy the bootlicking together after 

Singal posted a photo of grifter Bari Weiss and her grifter wife Nellie Bowles.

Weiss herself has to lick the boot, which is why she gives interviews to Peter Thiel and lately, fascist Marc Andreessen. It's very likely that both Thiel and Andreessen fund The Free Press, considering that Andreessen already funds Nazi-friendly Substack and Thiel has spent his entire career since college funding right-wing media and has been accused of funding Quillette. Thiel even went so far as to have a meeting with international man of douchebaggery Emil Kirkegaard, as reported in the essential-reading "Race Science Inc." by the organization Hope not Hate.

The Free Press is so devoted to racism it employs and expresses admiration for the white supremacist Douglas Murray.

Khan and Singal have been allies for years and recently Singal appeared on Khan's podcast.

I assume Khan is team-licking with Singal on Bluesky in an attempt to get a gig with the Free Press, which is basically the American Quillette. To be fair, the Free Press is a good fit for Khan, who has made a career of promoting far-right extremism and race pseudoscience, which has been quite lucrative for him.

Holocaust denier Ron Unz paid for Khan's education, per the excellent 2017 Undark article Race, Science, and the Continuing Education of Razib Khan:

Around 2000, (Khan) joined a private email discussion group about human biodiversity organized by Sailer. (More mainstream academics, including Steven Pinker, were also in the group).

Not long after that, Khan helped a geneticist friend start a blog about science. They called it Gene Expression — GNXP, for short. Its writers discussed technical topics, as well as issues with a more political edge, like gender and racial differences.

A few years later, Khan went on the payroll of Ron Unz, a libertarian who ran for governor of California in 1994. Unz, who made a fortune in software development, offered Khan something that Unz describes as “a sort of fellowship or junior fellowship” to further his scientific career. Both Khan and Unz are vague about the reasons for the fellowship, but the gift was contingent on Khan leaving his job in software to focus on a scientific career. It was a big part of why he got on a graduate school track and ended up at UC Davis.

The article is from 2017 and since then, Khan has continued to be a promoter of race pseudoscience, working with Quillette and the Emil Kirkegaard-owned Aporia Magazine. I wrote an overview of Khan's career in 2022.

I haven't been talking about Khan much in the past year but when he teamed up with Jesse Singal to attack me last week he got my attention.

I have to laugh about Singal's calling me an internet microcelebrity. Singal and Razib Khan are allied with the much more famous Steven Pinker, but although Pinker was called a "celebrity intellectual" by the NYTimes, even he is barely known outside of the very online. 

I had lunch with a writer friend not long ago and I told her about this Pinkerite blog. I explained why I selected the name Pinkerite and her response was "who is Steven Pinker?" I went through a list of the names of other IDW-related people I've written about here, and the only name she recognized was Bari Weiss.

Although more often than not when I've mentioned the name Bari Weiss, most people hear Barry White, the music legend who died over twenty years ago.

One of the reasons this blog is so obscure is that except for Thiel, Musk and Trump, virtually all the people I write about on Pinkerite are not well known by the general public nor even by smart people who pay attention to politics and current events. 

So by microcelebrity I assume Singal means that he and his IDW friends have Googled their names and found this blog. And since someone, anyone, is writing about them, they feel like celebrities - which makes me therefore a microcelebrity.

Among Razib Khan's smears on Bluesky is the claim that I'm "scaring even woke journalists."

Which "woke journalists" could Khan possibly mean? Matt Yglesias? Yglesias is another name known among pundit-types and the very online, but almost nobody else. Although an acquaintance mentioned to me that he was a counselor at a camp Yglesias attended as a child.

Razib Khan is not well known by the general public, but that's worked out for him since it means that he gets jobs and support from the clueless now and then. In 2013 even Ta-Nehisi Coates promoted Khan's career.

But then people Google Khan. Like when the NYTimes canned him, or when people changed their mind about signing Khan's petition in defense of racist E. O. Wilson. 

And sometimes when people Google his name they find this blog, which is why Khan is so mad and making unsupported claims about me. 

But I'm not even a microcelebrity. I'm just an American citizen, keeping tabs on people taking money from fascist plutocrats to promote race pseudoscience and other rightwing bullshit.

Elon Musk supports the German neo-Nazi party AfD

Pinkerite first wrote about Alternative für Deutschland ("Alternative for Germany") known as AfD a year ago in connection with racist kook Emil Kirkegaard. And now it seems the American government is being run by a supporter of AfD, Elon Musk.

According to the Financial Times:

Elon Musk has waded into Germany’s election campaign by backing the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, marking the latest intervention by the US billionaire entrepreneur into politics around the world. Musk, a close adviser to Donald Trump, on Friday retweeted a video by a German rightwing activist, adding: “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader, responded: “Yes! You are perfectly right.” The AfD, classified as a suspected extremist organisation by Germany’s domestic intelligence, is poised for big electoral gains in elections scheduled on February 23. The vote, triggered by the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition last month, comes as Europe’s biggest economy comes under heavy strain.

Alternative for Germany is pure neo-Nazi. 

According to the epic article Race Science, Inc. by Hope not Hate that I talked about back in October, Emil Kirkegaard has a connection to AfD via his Human Diversity Foundation (which publishes the Aporia Substack):

The third senior figure of HDF (Human Diversity Foundation) is Erik Ahrens, a social media advisor in Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party. He is an advocate of white nationalism, and appeared at the AfD’s Potsdam conference in November 2023, at which party leaders discussed deporting German citizens of foreign descent.

The German media recently wrote about Ahrens (translated via Google translate into English):

He is one of the brains behind the AfD's TikTok success: Erik Ahrens trains the far-right party's cadres in how to use social media. And: He made the leading candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah (47), known in the internet world. Ahrens was also behind his video "Real men are right-wing", which has been viewed millions of times.

Is this what the morons who voted for Trump really wanted? Musk of course is now running the United States.

In any case I had to update my Emil Kirkegaard's Race Pseudoscience and Nazi Network diagram, adding fascist oligarch and current co-president of the United States, Elon Musk.

Why did a Kiwi farmer offer tech support to Jesse Singal?

Jesse Singal wonders if his Kiwi Farms tech support is any good
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kiwi Farms is a website known for targeting people, encouraging doxxing and swatting, and encouraging people to commit suicide. Several articles have been written about their tactics.

Mother Jones had this to say about Kiwi Farms:

Most websites aren’t known for having a “kill count.” Kiwi Farms is. Its victims reportedly include Julie Terryberry, who in 2016 took her life after being targeted by users of the site. Two years later, after years of harassment from Kiwi Farms trolls, Chloe Sagal lit herself on fire in a public park. In June 2021, an American video game developer based in Japan, named David Ginder, took their life amid a campaign of Kiwi Farms abuse.

Kiwi Farms is a forum similar in design to 4chan or 8chan, where anonymous posters gather. But instead of just spreading noxious discourse, Kiwi Farms users turn to the site to plan and coordinate. They work to make the lives of their targets a living hell. Their tactics include doxxing, SWATing, defaming, encouraging self-harm, and stalking, online and sometimes off.

The Australian magazine Crikey wrote:

The nearly decade-old US forum is notorious for hosting hate content — including the Christchurch mass killer’s footage and other terrorist manifestos — and coordinating harassment, stalking and revealing private information about people (known as “doxxing”).

Kiwi Farms members have relentlessly bullied people who’ve expressed suicidal ideation, often picking on marginalised groups. Multiple suicides have been linked to the forum.

The thing that seems to upset Singal the most about Kiwi Farms is reporting that emphasizes its harassment of people over other issues:

The reporting on Kiwifarms continues to be abysmal. I have no doubt the site harassed Fong-Jones, but to leave out the fact that Trans Lifeline's old leadership IN FACT EMBEZZLED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FROM THE ORGANIZATION is inexcusable.[81]

So recently Jesse Singal posted on Bluesky : 

"A kiwi farmer reached out to me claiming to have figured out the tech problems I'm having. Does this makes sense to those who are techier than me? I indeed get an error when I click on the user name so no idea how to block."

Bluesky users noticed. 

This is the archived Kiwi Farm page that contains the post Singal refers to. It's on a thread titled: Bluesky - "Decentralized" Twitter Alternative. Leftist Tranny Hugbox. "Answer" to Elon Musk's "Fascist" Takeover of 𝕏 (Formerly Twitter). 

Apparently Singal's tech problem was that there was a Bluesky account able to rig their account name to prevent anyone from blocking them - and Singal wanted to block them. 

It should be noted that Singal had no problem blocking Pinkerite's Bluesky account.

Singal's skeet seems to imply that he has a comfortable enough relationship with Kiwi Farms that his response to being contacted is not "why is someone from a dangerously psychopathic website contacting me?" but rather: "is their technical advice any good?"

Certainly Kiwi Farms has a generally positive view of Singal, and the site features a long-running discussion thread titled (the following link goes to an archive, not Kiwi Farms itself): Megathread Jesse Singal Derangement Syndrome - jsingal69 vs TroonWorld)

"Troon" is a favorite Kiwi Farms slur for transgender people.

It's true there are some negative comments about Singal himself in the megathread but what do you expect from a website devoted to psychopathy? These are people who pride themselves in having no empathy. They especially hate transgendered people but they're quick with racial slurs and anti-Semitism too. One post criticizes Singal for looking Jewish.

Kiwi Farms is currently being sued by Liz Fong-Jones, who has shared a slide presentation about Kiwi Farms called Reverse engineering hate.

Fong-Jones posted this on her Linked-In:

For the better part of a week, Bluesky has been engulfed in a crisis over uneven enforcement of its terms of service. Anti-trans pundit Jesse Singal joined the platform, was automatically banned, unbanned, then labelled with "intolerance" to limit his reach, then finally manually unlabelled. He has remained up on the platform since last Friday, and has been using his presence on the platform to post private health information, direct harassment mobs at vulnerable people, and otherwise serve as a lightning rod for "colonizing Bluesky with 'normal people'" drawn from his Twitter following.

As Bluesky crosses 25 million accounts, it is faced with the ire of its longest standing users who supported the platform in its earliest years. A public petition launched today demanding that Bluesky not grant a special exemption to people who are "famous" or "journalists" that allows them to break the Terms of Service and drive marginalised people off the platform. In only 8 hours, the petition has 13,000 signatures. Thousands of users have separately pledged to not subscribe to the service's forthcoming premium product until confidence in moderation is restored.

And in a follow-up comment writes:

Personally, I do not blame Aaron Rodericks here; the buck stops with Jay Graber, her executive team, and the board. It is her right to make a business decision to choose to keep Singal on the platform. That choice will have far reaching consequences for whether the platform is truly a change from Twitter for the better, or merely a repetition of the same problems with moderation and safety Twitter faced.

And then:

Strangely enough, Platform T&S saw no problems with immediately yeeting Libs of Tiktok and Kiwi Farms / Joshua Moon off the platform. The only reason I can think of that Singal has an exemption is because he wears the cloak of journalism while stabbing with transphobic harassment.

Nina Paley included Jesse Singal as one of
her anti-trans good guys in her "Gender Wars"
cards along with Matt Walsh and Kiwi Farms.
--------------------------------------------------------

Like Steven Pinker condemning racism, Singal tries to "maintain a facade of being outwardly supporting of trans rights."

 
And yet in the case of Pinker and Singal, they persistently ally with extremists. Pinker with Steve Sailer and Richard Hanania, Singal with Nina Paley (a big fan of Kiwi Farms) and... Richard Hanania. But Pinker never uses the N word and Singal never uses the word "Troon" so the ill-informed may believe that Pinker and Singal are just fine, just asking questions in good faith about their area of interest.

When Steven Pinker was criticized for his positive comments about the alt-right, Singal defended him. 

It really is remarkable, the overlap between people who promote race pseudoscience and the people who promote hostility towards the personal lives of trans people. 

I knew of Alice Dreger for her support of the racist E. O. Wilson and her connection to Quillette, but I only recently became aware of something called "the Dregerian Narrative." Dreger is an influential anti-trans activist.

It's like they're all part of an organized group, all using the same talking points.

I think that journalist Tom Scocca has provided the best analysis of the Jesse Singal narrative:

In absolute numbers, there are many, many more people who regret having gotten abortions than who regret a gender transition. But like detransitioners, they are a tiny fraction of the relevant total. Presented with a study showing that the percentage of patients who regret getting abortions appears to be in the low single digits, Reuters did not send its investigative team to find the exceptions, but simply went with the headline “Overwhelming majority of U.S. women don’t regret abortion: study.”

What makes trans care different? The ordinary liberal reader may be squeamish about this or that aspect of abortion, but they are fundamentally committed to the idea that abortion patients and their doctors are the ones best equipped to figure out what to do with a pregnancy. It is not the job of some outside party or institution—a controlling parent or spouse, a church, a Republican legislative majority, a major national newspaper—to step in and second-guess what they do with their bodies. 

For trans care, this liberal theory of autonomy and decision-making is cast aside. The theoretical Times reader is ready to consume 15,000 words about the risks, controversies, and downsides of contemporary gender treatment because, at bottom, they are assumed to be dismayed by it all. An abortion patient is really pregnant, but trans youth—children who “say they’re transgender,” as the Atlantic put it back in 2018—maybe aren’t really trans, or wouldn’t be, if they had more time and better information. 

The finer points of this belief are usually laid out only in bits and pieces. Jesse Singal, in a newsletter post defending the Times story about the perils of undisclosed social transition at school, was more direct than the Times itself dared to be: 

A lot of kids appear to suddenly (or seemingly suddenly) come out as trans, and anecdotally, at least, it seems like it happens more often in the case of kids who are on the autism spectrum and/or have other mental health problems and/or are dealing with some sort of jarring event, whether a pandemic or a divorce or something else.

That is, the gender dysphoria that leads young people to seek gender treatment is only a side phenomenon of the fact that they are emotionally disturbed, and possibly mentally disabled. In their vulnerability, they’ve been caught up in a wave of sudden public approval for gender nonconformity and pushed to identify themselves as trans. Singal wrote: 

…you’ll see that mere discomfort with the way you are “supposed” to act or dress as a boy or girl, and a desire to act or dress differently, means you’re trans (if you want to be), even if you don’t have gender dysphoria. Sure enough, a lot of people, particularly young ones, seem to come out as trans much more to make a statement about their desire to transgress gender boundaries than because they are suffering serious anguish at having a (fe)male body or being seen by others as (fe)male.

The recent increase in the number of young people identifying as trans, by this account, is not mainly because some of the brutal societal barriers against being visibly trans have been lifted, but because fashion and social contagion are capturing more and more adolescent tomboy girls or homosexual boys, lumping them in with the smaller population of genuine trans kids who truly need transition to treat their dysphoria. And then, the story goes, a combination of overeager clinicians and bullying activists—hostile to the very idea of skepticism or doubt—works to steer the not-really-trans kids onto the path toward hormones and surgery, away from their natural bodies and true identities, as fast as possible. 

Singal has also been accused of unprofessionalism, per Protean Magazine:

Singal’s habit of consistently and viciously attacking his critics poisons the well; it deflects any chance of real criticism, since it allows him to claim that any given critic simply personally dislikes him. He has, of course, helped ensure that this is the case by treating them poorly. This bad behavior extends beyond minor Twitter slap fights—it’s also a means of warping the conversation, punishing and dismissing dissenting voices before they can even speak. Leveling threats and directing abuse at sources and experts in this way goes beyond mere unprofessionalism—for a journalist, it’s genuinely unethical.

Perhaps this is why so many trans people and their allies detest Jesse Singal. 

And Singal for his part does not seem at all concerned about his reputation. After all, he is still a mainstream journalist, and journalists like Benjamin Ryan of the NYTimes, NBCNews, Washington Post, and the Guardian are his devoted defenders. Plus Singal pumps out right-wing propaganda for Reason Magazine. 

And with Trump ascendent, anti-trans hatred is ascendant. It looks like Jesse Singal is ready to take his place as a courtier of the kakistocracy, partying with the Bari Weiss gang of grifters on election night.

So that is probably why, even though he was in the middle of a controversy over whether or not he should be allowed to stay on Bluesky due to antagonizing trans people, Jesse Singal decided to reveal that he had a comfortable relationship with people at Kiwi Farms.

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan team up against the darkly fascinating Pinkerite

I mostly posted this image because
I just discovered WWDITS
and it's my new favorite thing 
------------------------------------------

Now, as you might guess if you've followed this Pinkerite blog, inaccuracies and exaggerations are to be
expected from these two IDW grifters, and their Bluesky skeets are no exception.

I didn't see these skeets on Bluesky myself because both Jesse Singal and Razib Khan have blocked my Pinkerite account there. But one of my followers on Bluesky gave me a heads up (thank you, you) and I was able to confirm on Clearsky. 

These cowards would never attack me except from a safe space.

I suppose they are interested in me now because I recently noted that racists Claire Lehmann and Khan rushed to defend Jesse Singal who has the most-blocked account on Bluesky at 64,312 and counting.
 

(Update December 21: 77,011)

I do want to thank Singal for the inadvertent compliments. "Darkly fascinating internet micro celebrity" - go me. Alas he makes me sound far more glamorous than I am. But I had no idea the IDW gang considered me even a micro-level celebrity.

And as for "tenacious" - I wish. I like to think of Pinkerite as an aid to journalists, but I'm afraid I only do a half-assed job.

Few journalists make a crusade of an issue the way Jesse Singal does with trans healthcare, turning it into a controversy that was used by Republicans to help get Trump elected. He's even writing a book about trans healthcare as revealed by his Bluesky profile.

But when most journalists select a topic, they do some research, write an article or book, then move on. 

I like to think that Pinkerite gives them some useful background on various IDW grifters, since I write about even their less-outrageous activities and statements and I keep track of IDW alliances, as when Claire Lehmann and Razib Khan came to Singal's defense. Or Colin Wright admitting what an important influence the oafish James Lindsay was on his grifting career. Or Steve Sailer claiming he's been a big influence on Steven Pinker. Or Steven Pinker selecting a garbage article by Sailer to include in the long-forgotten volume, The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2004.

And now Singal and Khan teaming up to attack me.

But as you can see in the archives at the bottom of this blog, there are some years when I don't even manage one hundred posts on Pinkerite. I've never posted more than 209 posts in a year. Not even one post per day on average. So basically I write about the IDW gang only now and then. 

It's Jesse Singal who is truly tenacious.

As far as Razib Khan, well of course he's full of shit. But I am impressed he restrained himself from calling me "retarded." In the recent past that is his go-to word for anybody he disagrees with. 

That's the kind of activity that makes you a celebrity intellectual of the American right wing, as James "your mom" Lindsay demonstrated.

Now as far as "stalking" - you can't stalk someone merely by writing about their public statements. Stalking is an obvious libel here. 

As far as "obsessed" - sure I've written about Razib Khan now and then over the years, but only because he's spent almost two decades promoting race pseudoscience.

So you might call Razib Khan tenacious, too.

And there's an example of the Pinkerite mission - although in this case at my personal blog, before I started Pinkerite: thanks to me writing about Khan, Jamelle Bouie found my post about Khan's racist public commentary and referenced it while protesting the New York Times intention to hire Khan. (Wow almost ten years ago now.)

And it's thanks to my blogging about the IDW gang of grifters - before there was an official IDW - that I know that Singal and Khan have been allies for years. 

Both Singal and Khan have been devoted to their projects for years - Khan to race pseudoscience and Singal questioning trans self-determination.

Why does my tenacity - no greater than their own - in criticizing those who promote race pseudoscience and anti-trans campaigns seem to baffle them? What exactly am I doing that makes them call me crazy and wild-eyed and darkly fascinating?

It's probably the money. 

Khan and Singal get paid to promote their "obsessions" and I do not. 

I mean, yeah, I have Google ads here, but I rarely make more than like a buck per month. I make far more on my other website and I spend no more hours working on that one than I do on Pinkerite. I don't even ask for donations like the somewhat comparable, albeit far more successful blog, We Hunted the Mammoth.

I think that Singal and Khan would not devote their lives to hateful right-wing political campaigns except for the money, which is why they are grifters. 

And they cannot comprehend someone who would oppose right-wing political campaigns on principle. After all, where's the profit in a white, cis-gendered individual opposing race pseudoscience and transphobia? 

Could this be an example of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good?

I just love this.

What does Manhattan Institute pay Colin Wright for?

Apparently Colin Wright's job is to post this emoticon all day on his Bluesky account. He's posted it at least a dozen times.

😘

It reminds me of Wright's buddy James Lindsay, who thought it very clever indeed to respond to people on Xitter with some variation of "your mom."

Wright, former managing editor of racist Quillette, testified on Xitter what a big influence the oafish anti-Semite Lindsay was on his own political views.

Colin Wright and James Lindsay count as intellectuals in right-wing circles. Which is why, I assume, the Manhattan Institute made Wright one of its fellows. Colin Wright is officially on wingnut welfare.

The Manhattan Institute is right-wing trash, and it publishes garbage rag City Journal. I was just talking about City Journal and its connection to Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald a week or so ago.

As readers of Pinkerite may recall, City Journal was sued last year for publishing a defamatory article against a guy who was - and still is - owed money by neo-Nazi kook Emil Kirkegaard. 

City Journal retracted the article.

It seems very likely that either Kirkegaard wrote the article himself, or it was written at his request. 

Now it must have been pushed for publication by an important Manhattan Institute donor (Kirkegaard himself?) because I don't think even the ghouls who edit City Journal are really interested in Emil Kirkegaard's personal finances. 

But City Journal does have alleged editors:

• Brian C. Anderson Editor, City Journal
• Steven Malanga Senior Fellow | Senior Editor
• Paul Beston Managing Editor
• John Hirschauer Associate Editor
• Daniel Kennelly Associate Editor
• Theodore Kupfer Associate Editor
• Jordan McGillis Economics Editor, City Journal

One of Colin Wright's biggest thrills was from his stickman cartoon, which was re-tweeted by Elon Musk. 

Wright immediately tried to monetize it.

I assume that like the oafish Lindsay, Wright thinks he's very clever. But in fact, his cartoon is simply an illustration of what life has always been like for people who are conservative by nature. 

The illustration shows Colin Wright - I assume that's who "me" is. In 2008 he was left of center. But those "woke progressives" ran farther away from the center, somehow causing the hapless Wright to slide to right of center.

Now in this example, this slide happened due to "woke" beliefs - the beliefs that Black Lives Matter and that trans lives matter. 

But I'm sure many "left of center" people throughout human history have gone on the same "political journey" as Wright as they've gotten older.

Take the issue of slavery. Those on the right were whole-heartedly in favor of slavery. But those slightly left of center believed that slaves should be set free some day, maybe when slavery died out all by itself. And once they were free they should move to Haiti.  

Meanwhile the left was saying that slaves had the right to be free, immediately, and live in the United States.

Then one day John Brown came along and tried to start a slave insurrection. Many on the left thought that it was a great idea. That was when the left stretched farther to the left, as in Wright's stick figure graphic - thanks to the hardcore abolitionists of 1859.

They were considered so radical they were even called "Radical Republicans" back in the day long before the Republican Party became the party of fascism. 

But conservatives who thought they were pretty liberal - center left - for believing that slavery should end some day thought the Radicals were crazy, and suspected them of being open to personal, even sexual relationships with Black people, a thought that horrified the "center left."

And so it goes, from one progressive cause to the next - women's suffrage, the labor movement, gay rights, etc. etc. All causes that were once considered radical.

When he was young, Colin Wright approved of things that had been radical twenty years before. But as he got older and was confronted with new progressive causes that he did not grow up with - trans rights and diversity, equity and inclusion - he decided that change should stop.

So Colin Wright's political journey is nothing new. It's the same old same old.

It's just a matter of time before Wright is telling those kids to get off his lawn, like his ideological ally Jerry Coyne.

Compare people like Colin Wright to Abraham Lincoln. Like Wright, when he was younger, Abe Lincoln was center-left - he wanted slaves to be free, and he believed that slaves would eventually be free, maybe in about a hundred years. And he was in favor of "colonization" the term for sending free Black people to Haiti or elsewhere.

When the Civil War came, probably influenced by Frederick Douglass and others, Abraham Lincoln moved towards the left until, at the very end of the war, he gave a speech in favor of Black voting rights, an extremely radical position at the time.

That's the primary reason John Wilkes Booth shot him, according to historian Michael Burlingame. 

I think it's a safe bet that Colin Wright will never die for a noble cause.

I'm reminded of this excellent comic.

Pinkerite is a member of the elite now

Plutocrat bootlicker Jesse Singal is one of the top accounts blocked by other accounts on Bluesky, along with Brianna Wu.

Here they are both at Bari Weiss's Free Press election party, along with other grifters and ghouls like Coleman Hughes, Michael Shellenberger and Nellie Bowles.

 

The reason Wu is part of the IDW/Quillette/Free Press gang of grifters and booklickers is very likely because she was offered a sweet deal to work for them and couldn't resist. After all, Bari Weiss has connections to both Peter Thiel and Harlan Crow, and other insanely fascistic billionaires who are eager to spend their money on the future, Mr. Gittes, the future!

It's a classic right-wing move to hire a member of any group the right wishes to attack, so they can say "see, even one of THEM hates liberals and the left." That's why Coleman Hughes is part of this gang of race pseudoscience promoters, and why anti-feminists Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers have careers at all. Now the gang has Brianna Wu to promote anti-trans views along with the likes of Jesse Singal.

Singal blocked my Pinkerite account, but I can still view his skeets via a Bluesky-affiliated website called Clearsky, which is also where I got the blocking statistics. I'm also blocked by Claire Lehmann and Razib Khan. But I can see their skeets on Clearsky too.

You can get an idea of how tight-knit the gang of bootlickers is by how fast Claire Lehmann and Razib Khan, both promoters of race pseudoscience beliefs - or as Lehmann prefers, "hereditarian" beliefs - jumped in to support Jesse Singal.

But also thanks to Clearsky, I've discovered I'm a member of the elite now. Razib Khan has blocked only a few Bluesky accounts: my two accounts and accounts for Jamelle Bouie and Molly Jong-Fast. And another person I wasn't familiar with, Erin Reed - but if she's blocked by Razib Khan, she must be good.

Racist Claire Lehmann and her goon squad

I wasn't paying attention to Claire Lehmann on Bluesky, because I assumed she had already blocked my Bluesky Pinkerite account since she's a snowflake and she already blocked my other account. 

But while I wasn't looking she was replying to my skeets about her and her grotesquely racist friends. People like Steve Sailer and the neo-Nazi Aporia gang. 

And her goon squad was thrilled.

Now that I've responded to her of course she will block me, so I made sure to grab some screen caps.

(Update: yes she did block me.)

Here are the racists and right-wing grifters that Claire Lehmann recommends others should follow:

Charles Murray, Bari Weiss, Eric Weinstein, Jonathan Haidt,  Jordan Lasker (aka Cremieux),  Jonah Goldberg, Nicholas Christakis, Iona Italia, Jerry Coyne, Razib Khan, Michael Shermer, Steve Sailer, Aporia and of course the racist rag she founded, Quillette.

Elon Musk has always been a promoter of race pseudoscience and now he owns America

It was inevitable that X would become a vector of race pseudoscience.

Some people like to imagine that Musk was radicalized by the existing racist content on Twitter/X. But Musk and his PayPal pal Peter Thiel have been racists for a long time - probably their entire lives considering that Musk comes from South Africa and Thiel comes from hyper-Christian German immigrants who became "fanatical Republicans" and, like Musk, grew up in South Africa during apartheid.

But they even brought their racist beliefs into the workplace, as discussed in "Contrarian" the book about Thiel by Max Chafkin. Thiel was a founder of the now-defunct Clarium Capital, and Musk was an investor (my emphasis):

Clarium employees read, played chess, and debated (sample topic: If you were going to design a country from scratch, what would it look like?) Everyone spent a lot of time talking politics, though it was important that those politics always be of the right-wing variety. An employee told me that it was common to hear talk about climate change denial and to see web browsers open to VDARE, the far-right website with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. There were liberals at Clarium, but they understood that it was best to keep those views quiet. 

VDARE, which also seems to be defunct now - hooray - is about the most racist organization this side of American Renaissance. VDARE was infamous recently for buying a castle in West Virginia.

But is VDARE really necessary for white supremacists now? 

After all, Elon Musk, stochastic terrorist, white supremacist, anti-Semite, misogynist and best buddy of fascist Trump, possessor of many US government contracts and beneficiary of billions in US government subsidies, and all around horrible human being, now owns America.

Blocked on Bluesky by the snowflakes of Quillette

So many ghouls and grifters and racists are stinking up Bluesky now. I haven't been blocked yet by Charles Murray, Aporia and Steve Sailer, but it's just a matter of time.

Meanwhile the racists who can't stand being called racists have blocked me: Iona Italia, managing editor of Quillette, Razib Khan, long time contributor to Quillette, Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette and Quillette itself.