Weasellitude on display

What's it going to take for journalists
(except the Guardian), to ask Pinker about 
his warm relations with neo-Nazis?
---------------------------------------------------

I missed this article until just the other day: How the world left Steven Pinker behind in the New Statesman. 

Pinker's predilections for having-it-both-ways and weasellitude were both on display in this interview with staff writer Finn McRedmond:

Though, for all the talk of counter-Enlightenment trends, Pinker is at pains to stress that the world isn’t backsliding into the dark ages; there has just been a light, directionally concerning, shift. “Despite the setbacks of the last 15 years, I don’t think the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever. Liberalism is on a back heel, but there are still liberals.” Who are the liberals that might be able to wrest the West back from the iconoclastic populists Pinker holds in such deep contempt? “It’s probably not Gavin Newsom, it’s probably not Pete Buttigieg,” he says matter-of-factly. And then, as I have
come to expect of him at this point, neglects to provide a positive answer. 

When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Stephen Pinker and his wife, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, filmed themselves dancing in their home. But, the respite from this man – one who represents the inverse of everything Pinker believes in – was brief. The second election of Trump in 2024 “flabbergasted” Pinker. He cites Trump’s first election, in 2016, as the moment that events seemed to spin out of coherence. Not even Pinker’s voluminous talent and erudition – nor that of his fellow liberal peers – could reckon with these cosmic forces. I found Pinker someone reluctant to give a straight answer on small questions; no matter all that data, fame and institutional support. Perhaps we should not be surprised that he doesn’t have any answer to the big ones. 

That's Pinker, tout craché. Dismissive commentary but no straight answers. But of course he outsources answers to his race pseudoscience friends and has done so for the past quarter-century.

And since this is not the Guardian, Pinker is not asked about his connection to those friends even as he becomes more obvious about his alliances, even with actual neo-Nazis. 

What is wrong with journalism? Just in terms of interest, it would have jazzed up the article considerably to ask about Pinker's long-time support for racists. 

Instead the interview seesaws back and forth between passive-aggressive complimentary and then snippy observations about Pinker. His blue eyes don't get a mention this time, but his hair does.

Pinker is described as a liberal, but the interviewer doesn't mention that in spite of Pinker's dislike of Trump, in many ways the second Trump presidency is a dream come true for Pinker and his allies - from anti-trans hostility to anti-diversity, equity and inclusion.

But posing as a liberal while promoting hideous right-wing goals is what makes Pinker so valuable to the Intellectual Dark Web project of "moving the Overton window."

I did laugh aloud at this part:

...A cynic would call him pious. Instead, what I found in the man – as we spoke in a windowless room in Fitzrovia – was someone driven to distraction by the liquid rationality coursing through his veins; trading a faith in the divine for the higher, matter-of-fact power of data; permanently agog at the sea of unreasonable maniacs around him. If you were to burst him with a pin, I suspect he might explode into a shower of Excel spreadsheets.

Meanwhile it seems that Pinker has been a big influence over Anna Krylov. She used to promote women in STEM, a position I found puzzling considering her alliance with the IDW gang from Bari Weiss to Quillette to Pinker.

It looks like they've gotten her to come around to their way of thinking. P Z.  Myers has a great response:

Krylov has a prestigious position at USC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also a crank. She wrote an atrocious article equating soap companies using inclusive language in their advertising to Soviet-style purging of history, which was much loved by the right-wing opponents of DEI. Her latest criticism is even more absurd and contrived.

Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California (USC), said she had been invited to act as a peer-reviewer — a scientist asked to provide independent scrutiny — of a study being published in the journal Nature Communications.

In an open letter to bosses at Springer Nature, she said the topic was “within my field of expertise” and that she would “normally welcome the opportunity”, but asked if she had been contacted “because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs”.

Wait, what? She’s highly qualified, she has expertise in the field, and her response to a routine request to review a paper is to ask if it’s because she has ovaries? The request says nothing about her sex, but is all about her skills, and she is reaching ridiculously hard to take offense. I would suggest that maybe her imposter syndrome has grown massive and malignant, but I think it more likely that she has found an angle that gets her a lot of attention. Either way, it’s a ridiculous complaint. 

 

And look — she gets support from Richard Dawkins!

Reposting Krylov’s letter on X, Dawkins said: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journals”, but claimed it was now among many who placed emphasis on the background of authors rather than only on “the excellence … of their science”.

Nature is still among the world’s most prestigious science journals, and he has not shown in this complaint that the excellence of their science has diminished. 

 

Unless… 

 

Maybe he thinks Anna Krylov is such a poor scientist that he’s dismayed that she was asked to review a paper? That asking Anna Krylov to review a paper is evidence that Nature is scraping the bottom of the barrel nowadays? This could be a devious insult, you know.

Sure, Krylov is a crank - and probably a grifter taking money from some organization controlled by Peter "and I know about the antichrist" Thiel -  but at least she is no longer in conflict with herself: I assume she's given up on her previous women in STEM efforts now that she's joined the far-right push to force women out of public life so they'll stay home and have lots of White babies.

The reactionary ghouls at X have recently been all a-twitter over a stupid women-are-losers piece by Helen Andrews that even annoyed some conservatives. 

But I don't know what the problem is. All these right-wing women with professional careers who think women are polluting institutions with their feminizing girl germs, like Steven Pinker's buddy Cory Clark - why don't they all go ahead and quit already and become tradwives? Who is preventing them? 

How about some quiet quitting?

Another business venture for Neo-Nazi Emi Kirkegaard - Liegent LLC

Thanks to the exposé by the UK-based organization HOPE not Hate, we know about neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's business, formerly called Human Diversity Foundation, now officially renamed Polygenic Scores LLC, likely so-called so that racists can try to promote racism via the failure that is behavioral genetics.

And now, thanks to former neo-Nazi and former Kirkegaard associate Erik Ahrens I see that Kirkegaard has another business, "Liegent." And like Polygenic Scores LLC, Liegent is registered in Wyoming.

According to Ahrens, writing on his (ugh) Substack in German (translated via Google Translate but my highlight):

I maintained contact with Kirkegaard from 2021 onwards, intensifying this contact around 2022 (we attended the ISIR conference in Vienna together, where he was subsequently disinvited). From 2023 onwards, I was involved with him and his then business partner Matthew Frost in the Human Diversity Foundation. In the summer of 2023, I founded a startup called Liegent LLC with him and his girlfriend. From January to April 2024, I lived with Kirkegaard and his girlfriend in a house in Spain. I can prove all of this with pictures, videos, chats, and much other evidence – I was closer to Emil Kirkegaard than almost anyone else. His statements like "racism is good" and the openly expressed bias of his "research" can also be confirmed by others who had contact with him during this time.

Ahrens also published a video discussing Kirkegaard on Youtube recently.

As you can see on the image above, Liegent is, predictably, devoted to promoting race pseudoscience, in this case via one of the most important texts of twenty-first century race pseudoscience, The Bell Curve. 

The Bell Curve's author, gutter racist Charles Murray, who has donated money to Kirkegaard and another neo-Nazi, Bo Winegard, is also predictably a fan of Liegent.

What I find fascinating is that apparently some of the content Liegent offers is access to books written by Jonathan Haidt, Richard Dawkins, and David Reich. 

So do Haidt, Dawkins and Reich have some kind of business arrangements with Emil Kirkegaard?

In addition to Liegent, Kirkegaard can be seen promoting a company run by some of his associates, Herasight.

I think it's extremely likely Kirkegaard is an investor in this company since its team and advisor lists include:

• Jonathan Anomaly, who has contributed to Kirkegaard's Aporia podcast; 
• Tobias Wolfram, an ally of far-right, neo-Nazi friendly (if not an actual neo-Nazi) Martin Sellner; 
• Spencer Moore seen here contributing to a comments section of Aporia;
• Timothy Bates - likely Timothy C. Bates, a one-time president of gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) an organization with a well-documented association with Emil Kirkegaard;
• Alex Strudwick Young who likes to retweet Aporia contributors/notorious racists Razib Khan and Cremieux, both far-right political operatives.

Herasight was mentioned in an article in Popular Mechanics in August:

Last week, the latest entrant into this embryonic scrum—a company called Herasight—came out of “stealth mode” with a white paper detailing how their embryonic tool can screen for the likelihood of 17 diseases (known as a polygenic score) developing within an embryo, effectively giving parents the opportunity to select the “healthiest” one of the bunch. The company also asserts that it can do this better than the current rogue’s gallery that comprises its technological competition.

Herasight’s announcement post on X (formerly Twitter) also showed a widget displaying predicted embryonic IQs—a method that isn’t explained in the accompanying white paper—which left a few experts scratching their heads.

“I'm curious about the decision to roll out the widget without making the research behind it available,” tweeted Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “The goal is to use eugenics backlash to generate a hype cycle and raise more money (while maintaining plausible deniability), yes?”

(A co-author of the paper, UCLA geneticist Alex Strudwick Young, said that details of the IQ predictor will be released in a future white paper.)

Steven Pinker: still undefeated as the world's biggest weasel

"Ferahgo the Assassin," by Steven Pinker's

hereditarian ally Emily Willoughby, an image 

made publicly available by Willoughby 

on Facebook. Willoughby borrowed the 

character's name as a pseudonym while 

writing in support of race pseudoscience. 

It's too perfect that a Pinker ally 

identifies with a humanoid weasel.

--------------------------------------------------------

Although Steven Pinker was originally dubbed the world's most annoying man by someone else, I originated calling him a weasel. But I confess that while reading some of Pinker's latest book "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..." I found the flagrance of his weasellitude so breathtaking I'm amazed I was able to write about it outside of an oxygen tent.

In the chapter "The Instinct to Cancel" Pinker argues that it were better if we not discuss race and intelligence in public.

Fear not, Pinker has not given up on race pseudoscience.

I was alerted to Pinker's position by those who have the greatest self-interest in talking about race and intelligence because they have staked their entire careers and livelihoods on the issue: the neo-Nazis at Aporia Magazine.

In an article in Aporia called 'Pinker is wrong. We should "go there"' neo-Nazi Bo Winegard says:

Few topics inspire bad arguments as reliably as race differences in intelligence. So often have I responded to them that I have plausibly been accused of obsession. But as long as the bad arguments persist, someone must respond. Consider it a public service.

But of course Winegard is not doing anything as a "public service" - this is his full-time job. He works for Emil Kirkegaard's race pseudoscience and Nazi network, so brilliantly exposed by Hope not Hate a year ago:

In recent months, however, Aporia has dropped its pretence of balance, as evidenced by the interview that eventually took place with (Jared) Taylor in May 2024. Taylor’s interlocutor was Bo Winegard, Aporia’s new executive editor, who, on the website, has called upon his readers to “​​embrace” white identity politics and believes racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate.”

That's not to say that Winegard is only doing it for the money. I'm prepared to accept that Winegard is such a dullard he truly believes in race pseudoscience, that collection of pre-20th century European folklores presented as science from Social Darwinism to eugenics to Nazism to sociobiology to evolutionary psychology to behavioral genetics. 

I'm in favor of publicly discussing race and intelligence claims so that people who are not right-wing psychologists can gasp in wonder at how stupid race pseudoscience really is.

In the next paragraph, Winegard states why Pinker is so useful to the cause of race pseudoscience:

The latest comes from Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… It deserves attention precisely because it comes from Pinker, a celebrated academic and an outspoken defender of free speech and open inquiry. This is not some indignant progressive who made a career of castigating “racist pseudoscience”, but a rational centrist who has long argued against the left’s denial of human nature.

Pinker's also been called a "celebrity intellectual" by the New York Times.

In "When Everyone Knows...," Pinker makes the case for race pseudoscience while pretending to weigh the pros and cons of discussing the issue:

The case for not going there, to be sure, has many problems. It’s almost impossible to enforce. It faces the polar bear paradox: telling people not to think about an idea forces them to think about the idea. It may be hard to draw the line around the no-go zone so that it doesn’t swallow up neighboring territories, like the study of intelligence or of continental ancestry. It forecloses the possibility of obtaining decisive evidence that racial differences are wholly environmental and eliminable, with all the social benefits that would bring.

And it may be too late. Our era is obsessed with racial differences, attributing them unquestioningly to racism, which only invites curious people to wonder whether they might be attributed to other causes, intensifying the regime that criminalizes such curiosity. As the writer Coleman Hughes has argued, there are good reasons for even the most open-minded people to want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation. But that tacit agreement should be a part of a larger commitment to color-blind policies in public and private life.

Coleman Hughes is in a tough spot - he's Black but has taken money from race pseudoscience-promoting Quillette -  so it is in his self-interest to "want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation." With Pinker's apparent approval, Hughes offers a deal on behalf of hereditarians along the lines of: "we won't mention that Blacks are genetically inferior if you promise to stop making efforts to ameliorate systemic racism via programs like DEI." 

Pinker hates DEI.

Pinker is so comfortable with race pseudoscience that this year he had a byline in Aporia, then appeared on the Aporia podcast.

For Pinker, being a true believer in race pseudoscience has only ever been a minor inconvenience in his progress as a celebrity intellectual. I've found only three times when the issue was raised by the mainstream press: 

• when fellow celebrity intellectual Malcolm Gladwell called him out in 2009 for using data from professional racist Steve Sailer; 
• when the British liberal newspaper the Guardian asked him about Sailer in 2021;
• and when the Guardian wrote about his appearance on the Aporia podcast this year. Pinker's most groveling sycophant Jerry Coyne could be seen whining that the Guardian would dare discuss that appearance.

I am convinced that Pinker's strategy, in order to promote race pseudoscience while maintaining a career as a celebrated academic/rational centrist/celebrity intellectual, is to loudly claim he is opposed to racism - he told the Guardian that racism was stupid - while at the same time promoting the careers of racists who will go there for him, from Sailer, to Razib Khan, to Linda Gottfredson to Claire Lehmann to Richard Hanania to Bo Winegard. 

In his book, Pinker mentions the ISIR meeting participant Cory Clark with approval a couple of times (including to mention she's co-authored a paper with him) but doesn't mention she has worked for Emil Kirkegaard, and when he notes another paper Clark co-authored, fails to mention Bo Winegard is one of the co-authors.

Because that's just the kind of weasel that Steven Pinker is. 

The book's reference section includes racists, hereditarians, evolutionary psychologists and right-wing reactionaries: Lee Jussim, Nathan Cofnas, Roy Baumeister, David Buss, Richard Dawkins, Alice Dreger, Jonathan Haidt, Carole Hooven, Eric Kaufmann, Greg Lukianoff, Donald Symons, Lawrence Summers, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides and Matt Yglesias.

Pinker talks about journalists muzzling themselves:

Journalists, too, despite their ironclad commitment to freedom of the press, muzzle themselves in particular circumstances. They may, for example, choose not to identify confidential sources, juvenile suspects, the victims of sexual assault, or details surrounding prominent suicides. They may decline to publish the manifestos of rampage shooters, or train a camera on sports fans running onto the field.

But he doesn't seem to appreciate how this has helped his career, how his weasellitude is enabled by most journalists being too chummy with celebrity intellectuals to dare ask anything potentially embarrassing. After all, Pinker might get huffy as he did when the Guardian dared ask:

Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website..

I know exactly how high the bar is for journalists to care about the pro-racism activities of celebrity intellectuals like Pinker. Back when the New Yorker was helping to promote behavioral genetics via a glowing profile of Kathryn Paige Harden, I had a brief exchange of emails with the profile's author Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a frequent New Yorker contributor. He said:

If you have emails between Pinker and Sailer, I will gladly review them. Otherwise, I think I'll hold my own counsel on the stories that I do... 

Now we do know about letters between E. O. Wilson and ultra-racist J. Philippe Rushton, which did seem to convince some people that Wilson was a racist. But the reason the correspondence was significant was that it provided evidence that Wilson used his celebrity intellectual powers to help advance Rushton's career.

But we don't need emails between Pinker and Sailer, there is plenty of evidence that Pinker has helped to promote the career of Sailer and many other racists as I've documented for the past seven years on this blog. And by the way, Pinker could be seen promoting Rushton too, on Boing Boing in 2009.

For journalists like Lewis-Kraus, which is almost all of them, Pinker can promote all the racists and appear on all the neo-Nazis podcasts in the world, he will always be acceptable as long as he doesn't record a precise declaration of his beliefs. The rest of us are forbidden from drawing conclusions based merely on a quarter century of Pinker's activities.

But if Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazis does not faze journalists (except the Guardian), I doubt anything will.

♫ I'm Peter Thiel and I know about the Antichrist ♫

♫ I'm Peter Thiel and I know about the Antichrist ♫

Three years ago I wondered if Peter Thiel was a babbling lunatic.

This was based on hearing his keynote speech at the Standford Academic Freedom Conference, which I called Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. 

Peter Thiel had been on my radar since it was claimed that he had funded the racist shit-rag Quillette, which Bari Weiss herself called "...the publication most associated with (the IDW) movement."

But even I was shocked by how completely bonkers Thiel sounded in his keynote speech.

Here's a small excerpt from the transcript I created, where Thiel compares environmentalism to Charles Manson:

...You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component...

It's hard to know when to begin and end the excerpt because it is not a collection of discrete, inter-related thoughts, but rather a stream-of-consciousness ramble.

And by the end of the speech he introduced the Antichrist:

...Start it seems, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous and uh and that and uh that, you know, whatever the dangers are in the future, we need to never underestimate the danger of, you know, one world, totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard hard to see what it ends. But, you know, there's always. You know, I there's always sort of the, the frame where. First Thessalonians five, chapter 3. The the political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. And and I think you know what I what I want to suggest is that and and you get it when you have sort of a homogenized one world totalitarian state and and what I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would uh do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon, thank you very much.

So three years ago, I found it disturbing that one of the richest and most politically powerful men in the world was ranting about the Antichrist and even more disturbing that nobody else seemed to care. 

I mean, not even the militant atheists connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, who also gave speeches at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, had much to say about Thiel's Christian apocalypse spiel. The worst Steven Pinker had to say was that Thiel's keynote speech was "data-light and impressionistic." 

Jerry Coyne, another IDW militant atheist at the Conference, never said anything about Thiel at the time, although thanks to Bari Weiss' The Free Press touting religion recently he - three years later! - took note of Thiel's religiosity, but utterly ignores the Antichrist babble and makes Thiel sound almost mainstream in his critique.

Thiel's nuttiness finally started to breach mainstream's consciousness when he was interviewed by someone on Thiel's side on most issues: the New York Times' Ross Douthat.

But few people outside of intellectuals and the very online know who Ross Douthat is, nor who Peter Thiel is.

Then came South Park.

Pod Save America posted an episode about the South Park episode "Twisted Christian," explaining the various cultural references like the 6-7 phenomenon and pointing out that Thiel really did hint that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.

Kudos to the South Park team - it was absolutely inspired to give Peter Thiel a song and dance routine.

Between this and John Oliver's take-down of Bari Weiss, I feel like the mainstream is finally beginning to pay attention to issues I've been shouting about for the past seven years.

NO KINGS ~ beware of Trump's ratfucking

 

It's another No Kings protest October 18 - I was at the one back in June. 

I think Trump and his fascist enablers, the Republican Party, were taken by surprise by the popularity of the June demonstration, but they are clearly ready for this one, already trying to smear millions of Americans as "anti-American."

And since they are ready, they will likely attempt some kind of dirty trick, like paying goons to dress up like "antifa" and commit violence during one or more marches, in an effort to smear patriotic Americans. 

Dirty tricks is exactly who Trump is. 

And the fascist Republican Party is happy to go along with it, if it keeps them in power.

And I have to say, those who argue that the assassination attempt against Trump was staged have been given ammunition, so to speak by the ugly Trump mug picture in Time Magazine. His ear shows not a trace of ever being clipped hard enough by an AR-15 style bullet to spray blood.

And only the most delusional of MAGAs would claim that Trump is not capable of a staged assassination attempt. There is nothing that Trump won't do to grab and keep power. NOTHING.

UPDATE - no ratfucking seen at the Times Square No Kings march - just Cartman, a plea to Kristi Noem and the classic "shit is fucked up and bullshit."

Quillette: still utterly racist, promoting racist Nathan Cofnas

Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, like Quillette
celebrates extreme racist Nathan Cofnas
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In a recent Quillette article, Abhishek Saha of Queen Mary University of London takes the opportunity, while celebrating Cambridge University siding with racist Nathan Cofnas, to argue in favor of race pseudoscience by citing gutter racists; ISIR meeting participants; employees of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard; and Scott Alexander, idiot. 

Cofnas is known for writing on his blog that “Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0 per cent.” 

Cofnas has appeared on the podcast of the neo-Nazi magazine Aporia, own by Kirkegaard.

Quillette's founder, Claire Lehmann is a gutter racist who pals around with Kirkegaard  and nurtured the career of neo-Nazi Bo Winegard - now an employee of Kirkegaard - from the time when he was but a graduate student racist. Lehmann recently got an award from the gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research, which is the beneficiary of Pioneer Fund Nazi legacy money through its sister organization Institute of Mental Chronometry as well as all its members and meeting participants whose careers have been supported by Pioneer Fund money, such as Thomas Bouchard.

Saha writes:

...Others, including cognitive psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, educational psychologist Linda Gottfredson, and social scientist Noah Carl, argue that inquiry into this question is ethically justifiable, scientifically and educationally valuable, and that suppressing it leads to misguided policies and other tangible harms.

The hereditarian hypothesis is notoriously difficult to test because of pervasive confounding factors and the non-inferability of between-group heritability from within-group heritability. But one common objection—that it must be false because “race” is socially constructed—proves unconvincing on closer examination. Social racial categories are not identical to genetic-ancestry clusters, but the overlap is often sufficient to conclude that, if average differences exist by ancestry, they will show up as average differences across socially defined races. As the psychiatrist and influential essayist Scott Alexander has argued, insisting on perfect biological precision for “race” while accepting rough categories elsewhere is an isolated demand for rigour.

Standard Quillette goon squad: Ceci and Williams both participated in the 2024 ISIR annual meeting, notable for the participation of Emil Kirkegaard.

Noah Carl works for Kirkegaard.

Linda Gottfredson is a gutter racist, long-time ISIR member and meeting participant, and beneficiary of Nazi legacy money through the Pioneer fund.

And Scott Alexander, idiot, promotes Emil Kirkegaard as a serious researcher. 

Note that promoters of race pseudoscience are almost all of them psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists. Abhishek Saha is a mathematician. Cofnas is a philosopher who specializes in being a racist.

It's as if they believe that promoting race pseudoscience will make them seem like real scientists who know what they are talking about when it comes to genetics and "race." 

They are not, and they do not, and that's why their adversaries are invariably people who do know what they are talking about like biologists P. Z. Myers, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. 

But the most interesting part of the article is when Saha illustrates how racists try to smuggle their racism into scientific respectability through behavioral genetics:

Most experts in behavioural genetics agree that genes significantly influence individual differences in intelligence, a consensus supported by large-scale meta-analyses and review papers.

The review paper Saha links to is co-authored by Ian Deary, a frequent participant in ISIR annual meetings. And the meta-analyses link goes to a paper co-authored by Peter Visscher, one of Adam Rutherford's hereditarian co-authors who also signed onto racist Razib Khan's attack against the author of an article that discussed E. O. Wilson's racism. Visscher is also an ISIR meeting participant.

People like Kathryn Paige Harden and Adam Rutherford have a lot to answer for, for their promotion of the pseudoscientific failure that is behavioral genetics.

The Republican Party is the party of neo-Nazis and white supremacists

JD Vance brushes off racist texts by adults in Republican group chat as ‘what kids do’ Vice-president downplays messages such as ‘I love Hitler’ in chat by 24 to 35-year-olds to ‘stupid jokes’

JD Vance sought to downplay the revelation that leaders of a group called the Young Republicans exchanged hundreds of racist, sexist text messages – including one in which rape was called “epic”, and another in which someone wrote “I love Hitler” – as youthful indiscretions.

Vance, speaking on a new episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, the podcast run by colleagues of the late conservative activist, suggested that the participants in the leaked chats were much younger than they in fact are. Some of the participants are barely younger than the 41-year-old vice-president.

“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives.”

Politico:

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.

“Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued.

Never forget the hypocrisy of the Trumpified Department of Justice, threatening free speech on college campuses because of "anti-Semitism." It was always a phony reason.

Trump Considers Overhaul of Refugee System That Would Favor White People

The Trump administration is considering a radical overhaul of the U.S. refugee system that would slash the program to its bare bones while giving preference to English speakers, white South Africans and Europeans who oppose migration, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

The proposals, some of which already have gone into effect, would transform a decades-old program aimed at helping the world’s most desperate people into one that conforms to Mr. Trump’s vision of immigration — which is to help mostly white people who say they are being persecuted while keeping the vast majority of other people out.

Proving that what really bothered stupid Republican voters was not the economy, it was their anger over the successful presidency of Barack Obama.

Predictably a member of Emil Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi network, Jonatan Pallesen, one of the racist ghouls who sued RationalWiki over this article about Pallesen, is defending his fellow ghouls.

Steven Pinker: still undefeated as the "World's Most Annoying Man"

Pinker's June 2025 appearance on Aporia
podcast owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard

Everything I've heard about Steven Pinker's latest book "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...” has lead me to believe it is an arid exercise in mental masturbation, coupled with Pinker settling scores against his "woke" adversaries.

The review that has most convinced me is the Washington Post's review "To Steven Pinker, human knowledge is just a game" by Becca Rothfeld.

Back in 2019, Nathan J. Robinson wrote a piece for Current Affairs entitled "The World's Most Annoying Man" about Pinker. All you need do to find it is to Google "world's most annoying man."

Both this article and the Rothfeld review agree on Pinker's incuriosity. Robinson wrote:

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is that guy. He thinks many people are very unreasonable, and makes sweeping claims about their irrationality and moral imbecility, but often doesn’t bother to listen to what they actually say. While insisting for page upon page on the necessity of rationality, he irrationally caricatures and mocks ideas he hasn’t tried to understand. Then, when the people who believe those ideas become upset, he sees this as further proof of their emotion-driven thinking, and becomes even more convinced that he is right. It is a pattern displayed by many of those who are critics of “social justice” and the political left. (For an entire book about this, see The Current Affairs Rules For Life: On Social Justice and Its Critics.) Pinker, however, takes it to an extreme: Nobody has ever tried to look more Reasonable while being so ignorant and condescending.

Rothfeld says:

Yet Pinker is so confident in his mode of inquiry, so incurious about anything that spills beyond its tidy bounds, that he tries to enfold even unwieldy and sprawling truths into his cramped formal apparatus. Facial expressions are nothing but “coordination signals”; determining whether you are laughing with a friend or laughing at an enemy is “a signaling problem”; and — you can’t make this up! — “social relationships are coordination games.”

Rothfeld and Robinson agree about the condescending part too. 

Rothfeld:

This is the kind of public intellectualism that makes the public hate intellectuals. Instead of showing what ideas have to teach us about life, Pinker holds a gun to life’s head and demands it conform to his thought experiments. And he does it with the patronizing tone of someone telling his readers what to think from on high. In one passage, prompting us to imagine increasingly higher-order levels of knowledge about knowledge, he virtually pats us on the head. “Now let’s try four layers,” he writes. After we’ve tackled four, he asks, encouragingly, “Think you can handle a fifth layer?”

So you can add "incurious" and "condescending" to the list of adjectives about Pinker that critics have agreed on, along with "likes to have it both ways" - we could shorten that to "incoherent" - and "blithe." I documented those critical responses on RationalWiki back in the time before it became the Gimp in Maynard and Zed's dungeon. 

From my perspective, the concept of "everyone knows that everyone knows" is a frustrating one, because neither Robinson nor Rothfeld know the role that Pinker has played in promoting race pseudoscience, an ethical and intellectual failure that I consider far worse than his annoying, tiresome, condescending literary personality and the books he produces. Or worse, they know Pinker's view on race pseudoscience but don't think it matters.

And far more people know that Pinker hung out with Jeffrey Epstein than about his promotion of race pseudoscience. So how does Pinker explain someone like me, who knows something that most people don't know? Why do I spend time trying to tell people things they don't know, and possibly don't want to know?

My guess: Pinker has no curiosity about something he can't explain with his simple game theory philosophy.

By the way, Pinker helps to promote neo-Nazi Kirkegaard's racist slop, and Kirkegaard returns the favor, promoting Pinker's declaration of his belief in the biological reality of "race." I've written about that Pinker video before.

Kirkegaard can be heard chatting on his Aporia podcast mentioning Pinker as one of those who appeared at the UK conference for racist ghouls.

Bee-yoo-ti-ful takedown of Bari Weiss by John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight"

Normally when I post Youtube videos here, most are from excellent but fairly obscure content creators. 

To be sure, I have posted content from "Last Week Tonight" before, but there has never been an episode so perfectly aligned with the Pinkerite mission than this week's report on Bari Weiss taking over CBS news.

What an absolute thing of beauty, especially the frequency with which Oliver mocks Weiss's egomania, starting with her self-aggrandizing characterization of quitting the NYTimes as her "Jerry Maguire moment."

And this Last Week Tonight episode may have finally made Bari Weiss notorious enough that even those to whom I have mentioned the name "Bari Weiss" in the past will no longer immediately respond "Barry White started a right-wing publication? Wait, isn't he dead?"

Right out of the gate, Oliver points out that Weiss was given control over a news organization when she herself has no experience in news - she's always been op-ed. Her rightwing garbage heap "The Free Press" is opinion-heavy - and often from right-wing extremists and racists as I discussed a year and a half ago.

Oliver mentions Weiss's idiotic retweet of the parody Twitter account @OfficialAntifa and her mischaracterization of (aka "lies about") NYTimes staff meetings.

He mentions the rightwing plutocrats who bankrolled her including techno-fascist Marc Andreessen.

I have been discussing the awfulness of Bari Weiss since I began this website so there was little new I learned from the report, although I did learn that the Free Press has been publishing shitty editorial cartoons by right-wing playwright David Mamet - who I knew was a right-wing hysteric 18 years ago.

Oliver fact-checks The Free Press.

• Its article about trans-care that turned out to be utter bullshit.

• Lies told by the Free Press about crime in Austin, Texas.

• Claims that reports of malnutrition in Gaza were fake.

Then Oliver gets into Bari Weiss's clown college for racists, known as the University of Austin, which I have discussed so many times here.

The result of this magnificent report will be that the circle of people who consider Bari Weiss a far-right sleaze-merchant and laughingstock will grow considerably.

• Salon: John Oliver slams CBS for putting Bari Weiss in charge

• Daily Beast: John Oliver Tears Into Nepobaby Billionaire Trying to Take Over HBO

• Variety: John Oliver Slams Bari Weiss’ Takeover of CBS News: She’s ‘Spent Years Putting Out Work’ That ‘Is at Best Irresponsible and at Worst Deeply Misleading’

Of course there are some who will celebrate Weiss's career as the world's most successful courtier, raking in that right-wing money by bending the knee and kissing the ass. On Bluesky, Jamelle Bouie questions the awful Sally Jenkins about her promotion of a celebration of the Weiss victory by the awful Caitlin Flanagan.

And like gutter racist Claire Lehmann (she and Bari go way back) Weiss is shitting her pants over Zohran Mamdani, as if there were not already enough reasons to vote for him.

Ben Shapiro is bad at basic lion biology

I have been really remiss about criticizing a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, Ben Shapiro, who I've only mentioned in a dozen or so posts in the past almost seven years of Pinkerite.

So I'm glad to have a chance to share this "Behind the Bastards" podcast  featuring one of the best Shapiro critics, Cody Johnson from "Some More News." Enjoy.

Bari Weiss wins the grifter olympics

TECH DIRT: Paramount Formally Hires Bari Weiss To Turn What’s Left Of CBS News Into A Soggy Right Wing Propaganda And Troll Farm

Weiss is a shameless opportunist and troll whose “expertise” (first at the New York Times then at her own Free Press newsletter) has largely involved trolling everyone left of center for engagement clicks with culture war dogshit and dangerously shoddy reporting, then crying like a full-diapered toddler when people criticize her for being generally terrible.

Weiss’ shtick is part of a much broader effort by the extraction class to frame the media’s steady lurch rightward as a necessary anti-woke corrective to mainstream media’s non-existent liberal bias. Its primary function is to punch down against the kind of academics, progressive reformers, and marginalized communities that speak truth to power. The kind of folks that white, affluent, center-right brunchlords clearly view as more dangerous to their wealth and power than violent authoritarianism.

Weiss is not really qualified to run a newsroom; she was a junior NYT editor who occasionally wrote opinion pieces in the NYT opinion section, helping the operation’s slow descent into a troll and clickbait farm that now coddles authoritarianism. Actual journalists have spent the last few weeks disgusted and embarrassed by Weiss’ fail-upward trajectory given her outlet’s past history of dangerous falsehoods.

David Klion provides some perspective on the grifter win:

As does the New Yorker:

Sometimes, the truth is viciously fought over. Trump and Weiss have certainly long been in combat mode, even if they might not always be on the same team. When Trump took on CBS earlier this year, its journalists did not back down from the stories they wanted to tell, either: one segment on “60 Minutes,” for example, quoted a source likening Trump’s intimidation of law firms to the behavior of a Mob boss, drawing another legal threat from the President; after Bill Owens, the show’s executive producer, quit, a correspondent said, bluntly, on air, that Owens felt he’d lost his independence from management amid the settlement and merger sagas. We’ll have to see what shape the fight takes from here. I don’t think that Trump has won just yet. I don’t think Weiss has, either.

Call for submissions: Black Woman Genius

I almost never have any cross-over between this website and my theater-focused website NYCPlaywrights. But today I do. 

The theme of "Black Woman Genius" is perfect for this blog, which critiques race pseudoscience, a set of beliefs which invariably hold that women are less intelligent than men (because misogyny and racism go hand in hand) and that Black people are less intelligent than everyone else, but especially White men. 

And then there's the fact that Charlie Kirk was a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, another primary focus of this blog. 

I don't expect that many of the people who read this blog are playwrights - I tend to be a bit of a unicorn compared to people I know - those interested in politics are not interested in art and the art people are not interested in politics. But I never lose hope that there are other unicorns out there.

NYCPlaywrights seeks monologues.

THE DEADLINE IS SUNDAY NOVEMBER 30, 2025 at 11:59 PM.

The theme is "Black Woman Genius."

In November 2024, NYCPlaywrights began the "Resisting Fascism" project. The winning piece was a monologue, THE 92% by Bryan-Keyth Wilson that highlighted the fact that 92% of Black American women voters did not vote for Trump - and their intelligence and wisdom are increasingly clear.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was horrific, but that does not erase the fact that  he said hateful things like this:

“If we would have said three weeks ago [...] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they're comin' out and they're saying it for us! They're comin' out and they're saying, "I'm only here because of affirmative action.

Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

Kirk dropped out of community college to become a full-time political pundit, while the Black women he attacked graduated from Harvard and  Princeton and Yale.

And so this call for submissions seeks monologues on the theme of Black Woman Genius. 

SEMI-FINALIST SCRIPTS

NYCPlaywrights will select as semi-finalists as many of the scripts that we like and which meet the submission guidelines.

The semi-finalists will be listed on this blog and an excerpt from each monologue (if permission is granted by the playwright) will be displayed in a blog post, one per day, along with any website links or other contact information the author wishes to share. 

The semi-finalist script selections will be announced Sunday, January 4, 2026. 

THE WINNING MONOLOGUE

The winning monologue will be selected from the semi-finalist monologues. The winning monologue will be recorded with an actor and an excerpt of the recording will be posted on NYCPlaywrights.org and on the NYCPlaywrights YouTube channel (if permission is granted by the playwright) along with author and actor contact information, biographies, etc.

The author of the winning monologue will receive an award of $100. 

The award-winner will be announced Sunday, January 18, 2026. Excerpts from the semi-finalist scripts will begin posting that day one monologue per day, and the winning monologue will be posted after all the semi-finalist monologues have been posted.

💡 THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 💡

Failure to follow guidelines will result in your script being rejected.

As always, there is no fee for submissions. 

• The deadline is November 30, 2025 at 11:59 PM EST.

• All rights will remain with the playwright.

• Monologues must be no more than two pages long, using standard 12-point text size and line-spacing.

• Send only one monologue script per author to genius@nycplaywrights.org.

• The monologue script must be submitted by the author of the script, no agents or others may submit. 

• The monologue script submission should be sent by email, with the script itself as a file attached to the email.

• The file format of the monologue script should be .pdf because it will retain your original script formatting.

• Make sure you have your name and your email address on the script.

• Plays can be submitted by anybody, from anywhere in the world but must be primarily in English (a few non-English phrases are acceptable, but the phrases must include English translations in production notes or stage directions.)

• A play that has had a production is acceptable.

• A play that has been published is not acceptable.

• There will be no money awarded for selected scripts except for the winning monologue.

• NYCPlaywrights' decisions are final.

• Any questions email info@nycplaywrights.org

PLEASE NOTE: when you submit your play, you should get an automatic response that says:

***

Thank you for sending your monologue to the NYCPlaywrights “BLACK WOMAN GENIUS” project.

The semi-finalist script selections will be announced Sunday, January 4, 2026.

The award-winner will be announced Sunday, January 18, 2026.

Nancy at NYCPlaywrights

***

If you don't receive the automatic response, email us at info@nycplaywrights.org to check if we received your script.

Please note:

• The monologues must be dramatic - we love facts, but the monologue must not simply be a lecture on some aspect of history or current events. A dramatic monologue should have an emotional impact and often will tell a story. We'd like to see creativity and invention.

• The call for submissions is open to any person, anywhere in the world. 

• Although the theme is Black Woman Genius, the character speaking in the monologue does not necessarily have to be a Black woman.

• Although this is a serious subject, you do not have to be grim. We welcome humor and playfulness, and we are just as interested in hopeful monologues, and anticipating a brighter future as much as we are in the injustices of the past and present.

DATE RECAP

• November 30, 2025 - submission deadline
• January 4, 2026 - semi-finalists announced
• January 18, 2026 - the winning monologue will be announced and then each day an excerpt from one of the semi-finalist monologues will be posted. 

Some genius prompts:

• Ida B. Wells, investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement.
• Aretha Franklin, voted Rolling Stone's greatest singer of all time - "a work of genius" (#2 is Whitney Houston)
• Valerie Brown, the first Black woman animated character on American television, resident genius of  the 1970s cartoon "Josie and the Pussycats"
• Alena Analeigh Wicker, in 2021, became the youngest person to intern for NASA
• Simone Biles, athletic genius
• Wanda Sykes, stand-up comedian, actor and writer
• Angela Davis, philosopher and political activist
• Dr. Ayda Mensah, character performed by Noma Dumezweni, the brilliant team leader and "favorite human" of Murderbot, from the sci-fi books and AppleTV+ series.
• Lorraine Hansberry, the young, gifted and Black playwright
• Kamala Harris, America’s first woman, Black and South Asian vice president, became the Democratic presidential candidate half-way through the 2024 campaign when Biden bowed out. She drew record-breaking crowds during her campaign and accurately predicted that Trump would use the US military against US citizens.