Happy Mamdani New Year!

This goes out to all the reactionaries and hysterics and race pseudoscience promoters like Claire Lehmann and Bari Weiss, freaking out over Mamdani.

The vocal track comes from Mamdani schooling Andrew Cuomo during a debate. It is magnificent.

Does the Genetic Literacy Project think Adam Rutherford is a "postmodernist"?

I had come across the "Genetic Literacy Project" website before and knew it was an organization of true believers of race pseudoscience, but they didn't seem interesting enough to write about.

Until I just noticed they ran an article about Adam Rutherford, published two years before my series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?" (single page version on Medium) in which they point out that in spite of his often-stated opposition to racism, Rutherford's hereditarian beliefs are quite similar to those of gutter racist Charles Murray.

This is something I noticed myself.

If you've been analyzing hereditarian/far-right media as long as I have, it doesn't take long to figure out that Genetic Literacy Project is on Team Right-wing Race Pseudoscience, simply by reading the article How to argue about ‘race’: Charles Murray and Adam Rutherford are not so far apart by Patrick Whittle which includes this passage 

Adam Rutherford, on the other hand, is an outspoken critic of both systemic racial inequality and of the sort of intellectual racism that The Bell Curve is seen to represent. As his strong social justice beliefs are clearly evident in his personal social media accounts, he is also often simplistically linked to the post-modernist concept of ‘race’ as largely a social construct.

The keyword there is "post-modernist." Actual postmodernism had its greatest popularity in 1970s-80s, and outside of perhaps obscure corners of Academia, almost nobody talks about it today except for the far-right.

For example, gutter racist Claire Lehmann, the founder of far-right and racist Quillette, the ideological twin of the Genetic Literacy Project, uses the term while being platformed by Yascha Mounck, back in May, moaning about "woke":

...but I was very familiar with postmodernism, the denigration of objective truth and empirical investigation. I thought that these philosophies were nihilistic and could only lead to a bad place.

An article in Medium by Michael Barnard discusses the strange, seemingly anachronistic use of the term as an all-purpose bogeyman by the far-right:

Postmodernism is mostly just a form of artistic criticism, but conservative intellectuals are constantly attacking it these days. Liberals are perplexed by the attacks, if they think about them at all. What the heck is going on? 

On the right side of the political spectrum (by most standards), we have statements like these: 

• “Postmodernism, in many ways — especially as it’s played out politically — is the new skin that the old Marxism now inhabits.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Obama is the first postmodern president.” — Ben Shapiro
• “These folks form the current Far Left, including those who would be described as communists, socialists, anarchists, Antifa, as well as social justice warriors (SJWs). These are all very different groups, but they all share a postmodernist ethos.” — Michael Aaron
• “Between the Carybde of pseudo-empiricism and the Scylla of postmodernism.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• “Since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we’ve seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities. It’s come to dominate all of the humanities — which are dead as far as I can tell — and a huge proportion of the social sciences.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Everything to the postmodernists is about power.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Is postmodernism inherently authoritarian?” — Zane Beal

And to be clear, "‘race’ as largely a social construct" is not a "post-modernist" concept, it is a scientific concept that race pseudoscience true believers like Whittle don't like.

The Genetic Literacy Project website does include articles by people opposed to hereditarianism and race pseudoscience, but those seem to always be reprints of articles by people unconnected to the Genetic Literacy Project. 

The most strongly pro-hereditarian articles are written by people associated with the Genetic Literacy Project. For example, Patrick Whittle is listed as a contributing columnist on its Our Team page. Whittle has written for... wait for it... QUILLETTE! Surprise surprise! 

On his own website, Whittle lists an article written for the Genetic Literacy Project in 2019 that has since disappeared from the GLP website, but can still be found via Archive.org. The article, Genetics and race: How do we have this awkward conversation? argues:

In sum, then, anyone discussing genetics and race must be conscious of the connotations and impact of words. And this is especially true when engaging in dialogue with those with a standard social science conception of ‘race’, one in which human evolved biology is seen as irrelevant to social issues — a paradigm, moreover, in which the very idea of human biological difference is treated with the utmost suspicion. Given this latter mindset — and the human tendency towards righteous indignation — it is hardly surprising that many liberal-minded people react badly when confronted with arguments about human difference that they perceive (rightly or wrongly) as morally offensive. If worthwhile or meaningful discussion of genetics and race is to proceed, therefore, it is beholden on geneticists and their ilk to take this into account — not through political timidity but through simple courtesy and common-sense.

In the process of making the case for "human biological (racial) difference," Whittle uses the evergreen hereditarian fallacy that anti-hereditarians are basically knee-jerk hysterics who only care about the morality of hereditarian claims, and never mind the scientific failure of hereditarian claims.

This argument has been used since at least when segregationist Carlton Putnam was using the term "Equalitarian" to attempt to smear Civil Rights proponents. The term has lately been adopted by racists like Bo Winegard, once an editor for Quillette, now working for neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's network. 

Hereditarians manage to shamelessly make this argument by simply pretending the scientific arguments don't exist. Winegard could be seen doing this in Quillette in 2019, and more recently Kathryn Paige Harden tried that old trick.

Now let's have a look at some of the other Genetic Literacy Project team members.

Jon Entine, executive director, has also written for Quillette and has been on the American Enterprise Institute's payroll. His Wikipedia entry mentions the controversy over the organization's connection to Monsanto: 

"US Right to Know, an advocacy group funded in large part by the Organic Consumers Association,[23][24] raised concerns after the GLP ran a series of articles in 2014 supportive of crop biotechnology after the scientists had been encouraged to do so by American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto.[25] The GLP said the authors were not paid for their articles. Entine remarked that he had total control of the editing process and that there was nothing to disclose.[25] " 

In 2020 and 2021 the GLP received US$741,183 and US$494,075 in donations, respectively.[26] 

Note 26 links to the Genetic Literacy Project's 2021 annual report which lists the Charles Koch Foundation (68.5K in 2020) and the infamous Donors Trust (25K in 2021) as donors.

According to SourceWatch:

Bloomberg and The Progressive have reported that lawyers suing Monsanto state in court documents that companies funnel money to the Genetic Literacy Project in order to "shame scientists and highlight information helpful to Monsanto and other chemical producers."[2][3]

Entine is a long-time fan of race pseudoscience. In an editorial about his book in the New York Times, "A Feckless Quest for the Basketball Gene," Jonathan Marks begins:

You know what they say about a little knowledge. Here's some: The greatest sprinters and basketball players are predominantly black. Here's some more: Nobel laureates in science are predominantly white. 

 

What do we conclude? That blacks have natural running ability and whites have natural science ability? Or perhaps that blacks have natural running ability but whites don't have natural science ability, because that would be politically incorrect?

Or perhaps that we can draw no valid conclusions about the racial distribution of abilities on the basis of data like these. That is what modern anthropology would say.

But it's not what a new book, ''Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It,'' says. It says that blacks dominate sports because of their genes and that we're afraid to talk about it on account of a cabal of high-ranking politically correct postmodern professors -- myself, I am flattered to observe, among them.

The book is a piece of good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism (those dang perfessers!) that plays to vulgar beliefs about group differences of the sort we recall from ''The Bell Curve'' six years ago. These are not however, issues that anthropologists are ''afraid to talk about''; we talk about them a lot. The author, journalist and former television producer Jon Entine, simply doesn't like what we're saying. But to approach the subject with any degree of rigor, as anthropologists have been trying to do for nearly a century, requires recognizing that it consists of several related questions.

Writing for AEI, Entine could be seen promoting that failure of race pseudoscience, the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.

Entine and Whittle are the worst, but other team members have shown their comfort with, if not outright allegiance with, race pseudoscience:

Henry I Miller, listed as Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar has written for Quillette.

Steve E. Cerier, contributing columnist has written for Quillette.

And although the Genetic Literacy Project claims innocence over any connections to the food tech industry, one of its team members,  Dr. S. Eliza Dunn (Halcomb) is listed as Co-host of GLP Facts & Fallacies Podcast and Video. According to her Linked In profile she works for both Monsanto and Bayer.

It seems pretty obvious that not only is Genetic Literacy Project devoted to, if not outright owned by the food technology industry, it is firmly devoted to promoting racist pseudoscience bullshit as part of this alleged "genetic literacy."

Far-right race pseudoscience promoter Heiner Rindermann attacks Eric Turkheimer

 

Andrew Y was an ally of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and other members of the race pseudoscience network, but has since broken away. I subscribe to Andrew's channel now, and you should too if you want to oppose international race pseudoscience and neo-Nazis.

In his most recent video, Andrew discusses psychologist Heiner Rindermann, current ally of Kirkegaard, and his attack on psychologist Eric Turkheimer. I recently discussed Turkheimer's bet with Charles Murray (which Murray is on the verge of decisively losing.)

The summary included with the Andrew Y video says:

Prof. Heiner Rindermann produced a racist book summary for Blitzwissen in 2023 and worked with me on far-right videos in 2024, knowing fully well that I was a nazi activist. He is linked to race scientist Emil Kirkegaard, whose girlfriend runs far-right business Liegent (US version of Blitzwissen) together with the current Blitzwissen owner. This is evidently a neonazi network with ties to academia, business, and AfD supporters like Mathilda Huss, who let Kirkegaard live on her Potsdam property from 2021 to 2024.

Andrew Y is a valuable source of reporting on the race pseudoscience network because of his background with them. Most recently he testified that Emil Kirkegaard is involved in the company Herasight, and also claimed that Kirkegaard talked about hiring someone to assassinate a legal adversary.

I hope Andrew Y's work is picked up on by mainstream journalists.

Rindermann had a profile on RationalWiki - here is the archived version - that was censored in the past year, apparently as part of an effort by Kirkegaard and his allies to clean up their online image by suppressing facts about their careers in racism. Possibly in order to clear the way for Herasight to be considered a mainstream and not-at-all racist organization.

So Rindermann, with the enthusiastic approval of Emil Kirkegaard, decided to post a character assassination of Turkheimer, ending by calling him "evil." All because Turkheimer has criticized the work of Rindermann and members of his race pseudoscience and neo-Nazi gang.

Rindermann calling somebody else evil reminds me of the time Kirkegaard attacked me and Kirkegaard's (at the time) legal adversary (the one Kirkegaard allegedly talked about having killed) - as a couple of nuts, while imagining himself, Emil Kirkegaard, neo-Nazi kingpin, as a solid citizen. 

These extremists live on the other side of the looking glass.

You can get a good idea of how far-right and fringe Heiner Rindermann is by looking at his profile on Google Scholar to see the people he co-authors papers with, including this one from Intelligence, formerly a hard-line race pseudoscience publication affiliated with the International Society for Intelligence Research. The paper is a who's who of far-right race pseudoscience promotors, several with direct connections to Kirkegaard: Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre, Aurelio-José Figueredo, Geoffrey F Miller, Noah Carl, Fróði Debes, Craig L Frisby, Federico R Leon, Guy Madison and Thomas R. Coyle. 

Rindermann, Madison and Coyle have all been board members of ISIR. Until recently, Coyle was president of ISIR.

Rindermann is a contributor to Kirkegaard's OpenPsych pseudo-science journal and signed onto a defense of OpenPsych along with Davide Piffer, seen here in this tweet from 2020 being incredibly racist.

And Rindermann is the author of this retracted paper - the retraction notice states:

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article. After publication, concerns were raised about the methodology and dataset used in this research. Independent post-publication peer review has confirmed fundamental flaws in the use of student assessment studies as a measure of IQ or cognitive ability, and in the prominence of individual examples taken from the author's life.

The author Heiner Rindermann disagrees with this retraction.

What a piece of work. As of today Turkheimer has not responded to Rindermann, although I would certainly understand if he never does, since the attack is basically Rindermann having a meltdown, and hardly worth taking seriously. If Turkheimer does respond I will report it here.

Steven Pinker & Jeffrey Epstein & Bari Weiss & Larry Summers & Trump

Pinker and Epstein, apparently on the "Lolita Express"

Although Pinker has claimed to be opposed to Trump, the second Trump atrocity has been in some respects very good for Pinker:

• His "woke" enemies in Academia have been fired or intimidated into silence, thanks to the Trump administration

• Legislation targeting trans people is being promoted by the Trump administration

• Pinker is a long-time ally of Bari Weiss.

•  She is now controlling CBS News, a result of Trump allies/appeasers wanting to curry favor with Trump. And before Weiss completely destroys CBS News, she's making sure to help boost the career of Pinker by putting him in one of her ill-regarded Town Halls.

And although Pinker has criticized Weiss' The Free Press, that doesn't stop him from being a contributor to that right-wing piece of crap.

Well, I've said it a million times - Pinker is a weasel. He only cares about promoting his career and promoting race pseudoscience, and if ethical consistency is an impediment to either, he will jettison ethical consistency. 

A striking aspect of Pinker's intellectual output, long noted by critics, is his habit of promoting two mutually exclusive propositions, or as critics have often called it "wanting to have things both ways."

It seems the only thing that has done any damage to his career at all is his association with Jeffrey Epstein.

Salon:

When Weiss isn’t suppressing reporting on torture, she is busy transforming CBS into a platform for the fringes of the right. Along with hosting a town hall featuring Erika Kirk, Weiss has tapped noted associates of the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including the attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz and psychologist Steven Pinker, for collaborations. This also comes as Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, was spotted this weekend dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after refusing to defend his agency’s independence in congressional testimony.

But as we see, thanks to Weiss boosting his career, even the Jeffrey Epstein connection has not significantly hindered his career.

Another long-time ally of Pinker, Larry Summers, was an extremely close friend of Epstein, asking him for advice on how best to sexually harass one of his professional colleagues.

Recently someone has shared a brief video clip of Pinker with Epstein on what appears to be the "Lolita Express" (see above.) It's funny how many images of Pinker and Epstein there are, considering Pinker claimed to try to keep his distance.

As Inside Higher Ed wrote:

Pinker’s response begins with what he calls an “annoying irony” about Epstein: that “I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him and always tried to keep my distance.”

“I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante -- he would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data.”

Still, he said, because “Epstein had insinuated himself with so many people I intersected with,” and since “I was often the most recognizable person in the room, someone would snap a picture; some of them resurfaced this past week, circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments.” He said that most joint engagements were before Epstein’s arrest, but one was after he served his sentence.

Regarding the 2007 letter, Pinker wrote that Dershowitz is a friend, “and we taught a course together at Harvard. He often asks me questions about syntax and semantics of laws, most recently the impeachment statute.” While he was representing Epstein, Dershowitz “asked me about the natural interpretation of one of the relevant laws, and I offered my opinion; this was cited in a court document.”

Pinker is friends with Trump's "confidant" Alan Dershowitz, lately seen encouraging Trump's dreams for a third term. Deshowitz was "part of the legal team that negotiated Epstein’s 2007 non-prosecution agreement in Florida and later represented him as allegations mounted in civil suits."

Pinker will be speaking to some of the wackiest crackpots of all, Randroids (aka "Objectivists") at their Summer Conference in 2026.

Back in 2013, on my personal blog, I did a deep dive into the career of Ayn Rand, with a focus on her magnum opus "Atlas Shrugged." I began with a pretty low opinion of Rand, but still, I was stunned by how bad "Atlas Shrugged' was on every level - literary, political, geographical and logical. And also by how much her "philosophy" was shaped by her mother giving away her favorite toy, a mechanical chicken, when she was five years old. 

Yes, in spite of the specter of Jeffrey Epstein, and Pinker's alleged dislike of Trump, Pinker and his allies are doing well during the second Trump administration.

Bari Weiss & CBS News suppress information about Trump torture camps

Good reactions from the Majority Report, who are long-time critics of Weiss.

   

 Meanwhile, on Bluesky, the spiked 60 Minutes report has been posted. 

Everybody hates Bari

 

Well as I was saying, CBS News, under the horrific new leadership of Bari Weiss, decided to promote a company that appears to be funded at least in part by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

And now there are the lousy ratings for her town halls.

Wonkette:

It turns out that Bari Weiss is bad at everything. Shockingly, being an uninteresting contrarian with no nose for news, zero discernible personality, and a perpetual stick up your ass about all the things in the beginning of this sentence don’t quite equip you to be the editor-in-chief of CBS News, the network that used to be home to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

Oh, and she isn’t very good on TV, which sucks, since it turns out all she really wants is to be on TV.

The hilariously lousy ratings for her “town hall” with JonBenet Scamsey or the Widow of Chucky or whatever you want to call the equally un-compelling Er*ka K*rk have apparently convinced Weiss that when you’re running a network into the ground, the only proper course of action is to keep digging. So she’s going to do more “town halls,” with equally un-compelling guests, about subjects nobody who matters cares about. They are, on the other hand, the kinds of subjects hopelessly online weirdos like Bari Weiss care about. So look forward to more ratings bonanzas!

The article includes a link to an article where CBS staffers complain about Weiss:

CBS News staffers are less than thrilled with the idea of Bari Weiss, the network’s new editor-in-chief, booking herself as the moderator for a televised town hall that will feature Charlie Kirk’s widow.
“How embarrassing,” one network staffer told The Independent. “Bari’s been Editor-in-Chief for five seconds and has revealed that all she really wants is to be on TV herself.”

Connie Chung could recently be seen ripping the right-wing owned, courtier-lead incarnation of CBS News a new one.

And it looks like Bari's university, the still-unaccredited University of Austin, dedicated to providing a safe space for right-wingers is headed south:

The school, founded in part by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and then-ex New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, promised to upend the traditional university model, which its founders believed had become unwelcoming of dissenting opinions and open inquiry. And proud to never accept government funding, UATX announced earlier this year that a massive donation from libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass would make tuition free forever.

But quietly, it appears that things in anti-woke paradise are not what they seem. According to an analysis from the Chronicle of Higher Education, many of the people who joined UATX at the beginning of the project have departed, either by choice or due to public disagreements with the school's trajectory. Among the group of nearly 20 university employees that have left UATX this year were individuals in vital roles including the president, the provost, the executive director of admissions, and operations staffers.

Lonsdale is (surprise surprise!) a huge asshole.

The article also mentions Weiss' sugar daddy Harlan Crow, who did his best to corrupt the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile Bari's reactionary ghoul gang, The Free Press is still shitting itself over Mamdani.

Bari has been failing upwards her whole life, at this point she can either only go down - or get a job with the Trump administration. 

UPDATE December 22: Everybody hates Bari EVEN MORE

Apparently Weiss spiked a story that was bad for Trump:

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

The only thing that Weiss has ever been good at is telling wealthy right-wing men what they want to hear, to get money out of them.

Even Glenn Greenwald

Very good video: "You Are Not Your Genes: The Hereditarian Fallacy"

It's by Zach B. Hancock, Ph.D in ecology and evolutionary biology and  it appropriately places Steven Pinker in the center of the hereditarian fallacy, with mentions of Charles Murray, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and Gregory Clark.

The best part is his pointing out that self-described hereditarian Gregory Clark uses the "classic" heritability (as opposed to "molecular") method invented by racist Francis Galton to make claims about social success and genes.

I will point out again that the Adam Rutherford co-authored paper cites Clark three times to make its arguments.

In case there is any doubt how extreme are the hereditarian claims being promoted by Adam Rutherford, Abdel Abdellaoui and their eight co-authors.

What is the connection between the CBS News-promoted company Herasight and Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard?

And did Kirkegaard talk about putting out a hit on his legal adversary?

The eugenics company Herasight was recently profiled by the Bari Weiss-controlled CBS News. 

This did not surprise me at all since Weiss (a right-wing grifter recently profiled by John Oliver) has long been close to people involved in race pseudoscience from at least when she promoted them as heroes in her Intellectual Dark Web piece in the New York Times. One of those featured is Michael Shermer, a good pal of Steven Pinker, who is so racist he's a big fan of infamous far-right racist charlatan J. Philippe Rushton.

So it's no surprise that CBS News decided to give Herasight thousands of dollars in free advertising.

Well today a former associate of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, (more evidence for how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) Andrew (formerly Erik) Ahrens has come forward to claim that Kirkegaard is behind Herasight:

And this company now Herasight and (Kirkegaard's) not listed there, neither is his friend Nima. But all of these other people, Jonathan Anomaly, Jeremy Li, Tobias Wolfram are listed even on the websites home page on the day that I record this, so they try to keep Emil in the background. That I know, and I can also prove this, that all of this, this whole research network there was kind of cultivated, for example, in this Vienna conference. Then later in 2023, I attended another retreat with Emil and a group of his associates. Jeremy Li was there in Italy and Como...

I've mentioned Ahrens on this blog before. The "Vienna conference" he refers to is the alleged private conference that Emil Kirkegaard hosted in a hotel in Vienna around the same time that the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) held its annual meeting in Vienna in 2022. 

Kirkegaard had been shunned by ISIR in 2022 because Abdel Abdellaoui, an ISIR participant complained about his participation in ISIR meetings. Although ISIR can't quit Kirkegaard (he and ISIR bigwig Emily Willoughby go way back) so Kirkegaard was a participant in the 2024 ISIR annual meeting.

Ahrens, who says he was at that 2022 meeting, shares details about the conference in this latest video and claims the following people, among others, attended Kirkegaard's side-conference:

• Helmut Nyborg
• Rosalind Arden
• James Thomson
• Jonathan Anomaly

Arden could be seen promoting Herasight in ultra-racist Quillette. Jonathan Anomaly has, naturally written for Quillette.

Unfortunately Ahrens does not provide solid documentation for a connection between Kirkegaard and Herasight, but the fact that Ahrens was a close associate of Kirkegaard adds credence to the claim, on top of the already very strange fact that so many of the listed Herasight team members have connections to the far-right and race pseudoscience and even, like Jonathan Anomaly, to Kirkegaard himself. 

As I said back in October:

...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.

On top of all that, Ahrens says that Kirkegaard talked about putting a hit out on his legal adversary Oliver Smith:

I know that Emil reached a settlement with this English Oliver (Smith) person who he had lost the lawsuit against and they reached an out of court agreement. No, I must say Emil told me in the past when he was drunk, this must have been in 2023. And he said this multiple times that he was going to get someone to or thinking about getting someone to kill this person. So he said that he might set up a crypto bounty on this guy's head and for 50,000 that someone would likely just get rid of him. And um. He, he told me this personally, I know that ultimately he reached an out of court agreement with him, so he didn't enact his threat. Just this is what these people talk about, right? So now that I make this video and I make all of this public, of course, there might also be talk in these circles about basically setting a bounty on my head.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if Kirkegaard said that. People who have devoted their lives to racism and far-right politics are horrible people by definition. I put nothing past them.

Instead of paying to have him killed, Kirkegaard was likely behind the smear campaign against Oliver Smith that included an article in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal attacking Smith as a former neo-Nazi (ironic isn't it?) 

Smith successfully sued City Journal into removing the article. 

That smear campaign against Smith was gleefully promoted by gutter racists Steven Pinker and Charles Murray.

I would love to have more information about any connections between Kirkegaard and Herasight or Bari Weiss and some of the people associated with Herasight.

I had to laugh though when Ahrens tried to defend Kirkegaard against a charge of antisemitism at minute 25:24 in the video, by saying:

"(Kirkegaard) told me that he likes Jews because they are smart and he thinks they are good with money."

Gutter racists Steven Pinker and Scott Siskind team up to promote neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard

So the last post I wrote was focused on Eric Turkheimer's bet over hereditarian beliefs with Charles Murray and hereditarian Murray lost. Although of course he can't admit it.

Meanwhile, Steven Pinker is promoting hereditarian ghoul Scott Alexander Siskind's website Slate Star Codex- sorry, "Astral Codex Ten", while claiming that hereditarians have won. 

Because there is no data that will convince gutter racists like Murray and Pinker that their "hereditarian hypothesis" is incorrect.

Both Pinker and Siskind like to promote hardcore racists Emil Kirkegaard and Jordan Lasker (Cremieux.) 

We've already seen that Pinker has no shame about participating in the neo-Nazi magazine/podcast Aporia.

And in the Slate Star Codex post Pinker links to from X, Siskind does his part in promoting neo-Nazi ideology pretending to be science:

Emil and Cremieux argue that we know why this study found low heritability of IQ. It’s because you can’t give 347,630 people a full-length IQ test. So they gave these people a short crappy IQ-like test with a lot of random noise. Past studies estimated the reliability of this test at 0.61 (low). It’s easy to statistically correct for this; when you do so, you find that if the test had been better, this study would have estimated the heritability of IQ at 55%. This is still on the low end, but it’s already within the hereditarians’ estimate of 50 - 80%, and there are a few other biases that might be bringing it down too (eg healthy volunteer bias).

Emil of course is neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard. On the word "argue" Siskind links to Kirkegaard's blog.

Here's how we know that Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi.

Cremieux is Jordan Lasker, who works for Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi organization, as described in the Hope not hate expose, "Race Science, Inc." And when Lasker is not spending his time promoting race pseudoscience, he's a right-wing political activist as when he utterly failed to hurt the mayoral hopes of Zohran Mamdani.

Although there's so much overlap between right-wing politics and race pseudoscience, I'm sure it's all the same to Lasker. I've written about how hopelessly infused hereditarianism - especially behavioral genetics - is with racism. And while writing that series of posts, it was clear how much overlap there is with behavioral genetics and right-wing political views, when I found Abdel Abdellaoui calling Steve Pittelli's website, which critiques behavioral genetics, "a far left hate blog."

Right-wing beliefs are a perfect complement to race pseudoscience and vice versa. There will always be be an almost-perfect overlap between members of both categories.

Siskind has been an ally of Kirkegaard for at least nine years, you can see him promoting Kirkegaard back in 2016:

3. And Emil Kirkegaard crunches some numbers that broadly support the latest discussion on here about non-shared environment.

Prior to that he was expressing his agreement with racist kooks Steve Sailer and HBD Chick.

Here is where Siskind works, when he isn't spending his time promoting race pseudoscience and neo-Nazis. 

Imagine taking psychiatric advice from a racist who promotes race pseudoscience and neo-Nazis.

UPDATE: an excellent critique of Scott Siskind, from January 2024,  which mentions his support for race pseudoscience.

Charles Murray prophesies the triumph of race pseudoscience again - and fails again

In a recent post on his Substack (ugh Substack) blog, psychologist Eric Turkheimer writes:

The third leg of the missing heritability problem is the mechanism gap. This refers to the fact that no matter what our estimate of heritability is, for human behavioral phenotypes we have essentially zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences. We can analyze variance, in Lewontin’s famous phrase, but we can’t analyze causes. All of the interesting within and between family work that Sasha (Gusev) catalogs is a step in the right direction, but the truth is there isn’t much progress toward actual mechanistic understanding. I personally doubt there ever will be (for complex human behavior), but that is another topic. The mechanism gap is crucial to my bet with Charles Murray, for example. Murray bet that by 2025 we would have IQ differences pretty much figured out, and that entails more than a reasonable estimate of a black-box heritability coefficient.

There are two especially interesting points, the first being Turkheimer's statement:

"...for human behavioral phenotypes we have essentially zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences." 

Based on what I have learned about the claims of hereditarians, especially through my series on Adam Rutherford, (now in a convenient single-page format) I agree with this, as I went to great lengths to explain in my Rutherford piece.

But I suspect Jerry Coyne respects Turkheimer, who refers to himself in the same post as an "anti-hereditarian," in a way he does not respect me. Coyne has mentioned Turkheimer a few times on his blog and always respectfully, in spite of admitting that Turkheimer is opposed to race pseudoscience. Although I think Coyne likes Turkheimer in part because of Turkheimer's support for the ghastly Emily Willoughby. Coyne is a big supporter of Willoughby, and I'm sure her being chummy with neo-Nazis bothers him no more than Steven Pinker's alliance with the neo-Nazi ghouls of Aporia bothers him. In spite of Coyne's performative anxiety over antisemitism.

Hell, I bet that if Turkheimer bought a pair of cowboy boots, Coyne would let him join the Boot Boys.

The second interesting point in the paragraph is that Turkheimer had a bet with Charles Murray with Murray supporting the claim that:

"...by 2025 we would have IQ differences pretty much figured out."

Charles Murray will never learn.

Back in the pre-Musk days of Twitter, Murray had been mocked for his frequent predictions (see image above), since the publication of the Bell Curve, that his race pseudoscience beliefs would be vindicated through science.

It's Murray's true belief in race pseudoscience that makes him such an important thought leader of hereditarianism, enough so that even Turkheimer takes him seriously enough to make bets with him, instead of endlessly mocking him for being a grotesque old delusional racist crank. 

Murray is a political scientist, not a life scientist, which is exactly why hereditarians have confidence in his views of genetics, along with professional racist Steve Sailer who holds a degree in marketing. 

Murray is as likely to stop believing in the eventual triumph of race pseudoscience as a devout Christian is likely to stop believing in the Second Coming. And these days, Murray is a devout believer of both sects.

Hereditarian Jonathan Haidt (a big fan of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence) could be seen making a similar prediction back in 2009. These
days Haidt is writing for Bari Weiss' The Free Press, because of course he would.

Meanwhile Murray can be seen on X/Twitter joining with far-right political operative (and apparent employee of Emil Kirkegaard) "Cremieux" being mad about the efforts to retract the garbage of white nationalist Richard Lynn, from whom neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard inherited the remaining Pioneer fund assets.

Murray thinks Lynn was right about everything. But data will never matter to a true prophet like Charles Murray.

Right-wing political operative "Cremieux" (Jordan Lasker) seen 
hypocritically whining about someone else having "political reasons."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the same Substack post, Turkheimer snipes at Jay Joseph:

And the truth is, there aren’t many people writing these days who are willing to adopt a strictly zero-genetic-influence position. Jay Joseph is pretty much the only one I can think of.

I doubt this is exactly Joseph's position, as indicated by his comment on a Steve Sailer tweet. As I said, Sailer, a guy with a degree in marketing, is an important figure in hereditarian science, no doubt why Steven Pinker promoted Sailer's career for a decade.

I assume Joseph will have a direct response to Turkheimer's claim eventually.

Although at least Turkheimer has gotten fed up with Sailer and his obsession with race.

Turkheimer discussed his bet with Murray in an article in the Atlantic called Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are, published in October:

Seven years ago, I took a bet from one of the most controversial figures in the scientific world. Charles Murray, the political scientist who—along with the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein—wrote The Bell Curve in 1994, wagered that one of his core ideas about genetics and intelligence would be proved true by 2025. He emailed me some time after I’d helped stoke an online furor about his insistent defense of The Bell Curve’s main points, which he’d recently reiterated on a popular podcast and which I, along with two other psychologists and intelligence researchers, had denounced in Vox. I took the bet because I was confident I would win.

Turkheimer then describes Murray's beliefs evident in "The Bell Curve," which is essentially the  hereditarian Bible:

In The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein argue that intelligence, as measured by an IQ score, is a crucial determinant of success in modern society. They also argue that a person’s intelligence is substantially determined by genetics, leading to the establishment of “cognitive elites” as intelligent people select one another for reproduction. 

Based on Adam Rutherford's paper, and its accompanying cartoon, Rutherford appears to be in complete agreement with Murray.

On Bluesky, I asked Rutherford about Turkheimer's characterization of the Bell Curve and its apparent agreement with Rutherford's paper, but I don't expect a response, since he's never been anything but dismissive or insulting towards me, but if he does respond I will report it here.

The fact that there is "zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences" does not stop hereditarians from starting businesses based on this zero knowledge. Turkheimer mentions one of them, Herasight, run by several believers in race pseudoscience:

Phenotypic parental IQ accounts for something like half the variance in offspring IQ. A properly controlled PGS accounts for 5% on a good day. (The embryo testing company Herasight has recently made big claims that they can do better, but I will wait until I see a peer-reviewed paper.) 

But promoting hereditarian claims as settled science has been around since at least when Pinker, Haidt and friends were promoting the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.

To be completely fair to Murray, there are still 31 days left for his prophesy to come true. But it's not looking good.

The Boot Boys versus Pinkerite ~ is Jerry Coyne deliberately obtuse? Is Steven Pinker really a racist?

One of the "Boot Boys" displays his 
value as an alpha male.
----------------------------------------

Almost a year ago I was called "tenacious" by infamous anti-trans grifter and Kiwi Farms apologist Jesse Singal, although I prefer the word "relentless."

But at the time I admitted that in fact I do a fairly half-assed job with this blog. Especially compared to people who make money from promoting the issues I write about - like race pseudoscience and transphobia. People like Singal and Razib Khan.

And here's another example: Jerry Coyne came after me back in June, and only now am I getting around to discovering it.

In my defense, I do have a Google alert set to "Pinkerite," but apparently Coyne's blog is not notable enough to get flagged.

The amazing part is that last month I even linked to the blog post where he mentions me, but I missed the mention. 

Here it is:

I haven’t heard the podcast, nor do I read Aporia, though I am a bit aware of Noah Carl. But what the Guardian is doing here is really smearing Pinker, trying to make him out to be a racist because of who he’s associated with. The relevant question is this, though: Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist. The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class.

Finally, I still fail to understand why so many people have it in for Pinker, and this was well before the Aporia magazine podcast.

First, Coyne has claimed to "understand why so many people have it in for Pinker." 

In his article about Pinker "The World's Most Annoying Man" Nathan J. Robinson said:

The Chronicle suggested that “by proclaiming the gospel of progress,” Pinker “has made a lot of enemies.” (It cited a cartoon printed in Current Affairs as an example of the “hate” Pinker gets.) Pinker’s friend Jerry Coyne thinks people dislike Pinker because he is famous.

Coyne took to his blog to agree with Robinson:

Well, yes, I do think that some people dislike Pinker because he is famous, for they’re always mentioning his fame and his books (and often, like P.Z. Myers, their own lack thereof).

Coyne's deliberate obtuseness, if it is deliberate, is on display when he writes:

Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist.

So unless Pinker is explicit about it, it doesn't count. The entire past quarter-century of Pinker promoting racists and participating in racist organizations like the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and publications like Quillette and now Aporia - none of that counts.

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. 

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, from Sailer, to Razib Khan, to Linda Gottfredson to Claire Lehmann to Richard Hanania to Bo Winegard, who is a neo-Nazi and works for Aporia, owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

What's perhaps even more breathtaking than Coyne's obtuseness is his shameless hypocrisy. Coyne is obsessed with antisemitism, frequently writing about it and about Holocaust victims on his blog, and has a horror of pro-Palestinian protesters.

So how is Coyne able to be so sanguine about Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his Aporia magazine, (see this post on how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) while being hyper-sensitive to anything that he believes has a hint of antisemitism?

But maybe worst of all, for someone who used to be a scientist, is Coyne's lack of intellectual curiosity. Coyne writes:

The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” 

Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class. 

But if Coyne wasn't so lazy himself he would realize that I have parsed the arguments, which he should know because he mentions Rutherford, so he is aware that I wrote a nine-part series: "What happened to Adam Rutherford" in which I discuss a paper Rutherford co-authored with nine other people and in which I critiqued behavioral genetics. I'm not a scientist, but I can certainly read what scientists and scholars have written about behavioral genetics and draw my own conclusions and then write about them.

The series is now one whole story on Medium.

Shermer's hero Rushton
------------------------------------

Although unsurprisingly, Coyne lies about what I said about Rutherford. I never called Rutherford a racist. I pointed out that he and most of the co-authors of a paper he wrote have racist connections. 

What is it about these hereditarians that makes them incapable of accurately reporting on articles about hereditarians?

I did call Shermer a racist because, among various reasons, one of Shermer's heroes is racist charlatan Jean-Philippe Rushton. E. O. Wilson's encouraging correspondence with Rushton even convinced Wilson's fan club that Wilson was a racist. Shermer and Pinker are best buddies.

I certainly wasn't happy to have to discuss Rutherford's hereditarianism, since it had been so great to have someone so charismatic and famous and explicitly anti-racist on the anti-hereditarian side. Or what I thought was the anti-hereditarian side.

It was so depressing to discover that Rutherford's paper makes its argument in part through the disgraced pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology. 

Biologist P. Z. Myers explains why it's so bad here.

I really just could have saved time and dismissed Rutherford's paper for its use of evolutionary psychology alone, but there were a lot of issues I wanted to talk about, so I spent hours and hours writing about those issues. 

But Coyne doesn't know any of this because he already made up his mind in advance that I hadn't done any work on the issues. 

I'm sure that part of Coyne's refusal to face unpleasant facts about Pinker is because Coyne has a personal relationship with Pinker. 

It's not my place to kink-shame Coyne, but I have the distinct impression that Coyne has Daddy issues with Pinker. I've noted Coyne's obsession with Pinker's cowboy boots before, but recently Coyne bought his own cowboy boots, in what looks to me like an attempt to impress Daddy. 

He likes to call himself and Pinker "the Boot Boys."

As I said, Coyne's blog is apparently not noteworthy enough for Google alerts to flag his mention of "Pinkerite." If you ask Google's AI about "Why evolution is true," it doesn't talk about Coyne's blog, only about Coyne's book by the same name.

HOWEVER, Pinkerite does get a mention by Google's AI.

Although I don't call Pinker a "public intellectual" I call him a "celebrity intellectual" because that's what the New York Times called him. But still, pretty impressive for one of the worst blogs on the internet, huh?

QUICK, ROBIN! To the Boot Mobile!
-------------------------------------------------