Just in time to help celebrate the Trump administration's war on trans people, women and non-white people.
People on Bluesky have published the table of contents and most of the contributors have been discussed on this blog.
This gang of goons is not at all embarrassed to be grouped with ultra-racist crank Amy Wax.
And of course Steve Pinker is in there.
Let's review who's who in the world of politically-motivated pseudoscience wankery:
Dorian Abbot is advisor at the Bari Weiss grift known as the University of Austin (UATX); author at the far-right City Journal; participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.John Armstrong is a right-wing reactionary who likes to retweet racist Toby Young.
Peter Boghossian - a clown associated with the University of Austin, memorably portrayed in New Inquiry last year:
"Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?”
I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.”
Boghossian attacked me for the thought-crime of being a nobody yet daring to publicly criticize celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker.
Maarten Boudry - Quillette author in league with Jerry Coyne
Alex Byrne is an anti-trans activist and married to Carole Hooven.
Nicholas Christakis supported racist Razib Khan's attack on a Scientific American author who dared to discuss - justifiably - E. O. Wilson's racism.
Roger Cohen from what I can tell is known for being married to Amy Wax.
Jerry Coyne is best known for once being a respected scientist then turning into a right-wing political operative, appearing at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists and defending white nationalist Bo Winegard. That defense is probably the piece included in this book, since Coyne co-authored it with Luana Maroja and they are listed together in the table of contents. Coyne is most recently known for writing an op-ed claiming trans women are delusional and inclined to sexual assault.
Richard Dawkins is another once-respected scientist who descended into evolutionary psychology crankery and reactionary politics, causing people to ask "what happened to Richard Dawkins?" Well known for promoting a bonkers conspiracy theory that a child was a fiendish bomb maker, in the embarrassing "Clock Boy" incident.
Janice Fiamengo was a member of the far-right misogynist "men's rights" organization the Honey Badgers
Niall Ferguson is a right-wing reactionary political operative think tank creature, who tried to pull a political op on a college student and got caught - which did not hurt his reputation on the far-right. Appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
Moti Gorin is an anti-trans activist
Carole Hooven is a fan of the viciously anti-transgender "Gender War Cards" and a promoter of garbage evolutionary psychology theories and bullshit explanations for the reactions against Lawrence Summers' "women are losers" speech given by Summers when he was president of Harvard.
Geoff Horsman considers ultra-racist Amy Wax to be a "brave truth-seeker."
Joshua T. Katz is known for student-diddling. Self-declared friend of racist ghoul Amy Wax. On the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute. Participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
Anna Krylov is a reactionary crackpot who couldn't reason her way out of a paper bag. I wrote of her logical incoherence in depth a few years ago. An organizer of Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
Luana Maroja appears to be an undistiguished academic who expressed her support for white nationalist Bo Winegard along with Jerry Coyne. Participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
Christian D. Ott - according to Buzzfeed,
"Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student."
Ott unsuccessfully sued for defamation two scientists who protested his hiring.
Bruce Pardy is a rightwing reactionary who claims '“Socialized healthcare” is medical communism."'
Steven Pinker - ugh - I've written so much about Pinker, but if I had to sum him up, I'd say he's a dissembler who claims to be opposed to racism while promoting the careers of a seemingly endless parade of hardcore racists from Steve Sailer to Richard Hanania.
Richard Redding is a right-winger associated with the Federalist Society
Arthur Rousseau appears to be related to Lauren Schwartz.
Gad Saad is a rightwing evolutionary psychology clown, Trump apologist and climate change denier. Appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
Sally Satel is on the payroll of the far-right American Enterprise Institute. Ally of Pinker, Hooven and Lee Jussim.
Lauren H. Schwartz is this anti-trans activist, who is apparently related to Arthur W. Rousseau, since she has also gone by the name Lauren Rousseau.
Alan Sokal became famous for going after the low-hanging fruit of postmodernism, then he allied with the far-right.
Alessandro Strumia is a misogynist hereditarian physicist. Like any standard sociobiologist, he basically believes that everything in contemporary society is the result of evolution - in particular, women evolving to be losers in everything from science to producing wine.
Judith Suissa is an anti-trans activist, co-author with Alice Sullivan
Alice Sullivan is an anti-trans activist, co-author with Judith Suissa
Jay Tanzman is a "freelance statistician" whose claim to fame seems to be that he's the boyfriend of Anna Krylov
Abigail Thompson - this is the first time I'm hearing about Abigail Thompson, but it looks like she's in deep with Peter Thiel's Stanford-based gang of racists and right-wing political operatives. Thompson gave a talk for the Stanford Business School "Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar." The term "classical liberal" which Thompson used in her protest against DEI statements almost always indicates a libertarian who wants to seem less conservative. The right-wing racist rag Quillette (alleged to have been funded by Peter Thiel) is a big booster of "classical liberalism." The Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar is directly connected to Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (aka "Academic Freedom conference") and the Seminar hosts run the political gamut from libertarian to right-wing racist extremist.
Speakers for the Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar include racist Cory Clark, racist Nathan Cofnas, racist Victor Hansen, "Catholic epidemiologist" Tyler VanderWeele, James Orr, another hard-core religionist, Quillette contributor Glenn Loury, Bruce Pardy, rightwing reactionary, Mia Hughes an anti-trans activist who works for University of Austin grifter and pro-nuke politician Michael Shellenberger's Environmental Progress, David Neumark a fellow at the conservative Stanford unit the Hoover Institution, Cato racist Ilya Shapiro, Charles Calomaris, a right-winger and at one time a University of Austin grifter, Jordan Lasker a eugenicist and racist (aka "hereditarian"), Roger Pielke, climate change denier, and Justin Huang, an assistant professor of marketing at Michigan State University who believes that "Trump has a public mandate to dramatically reshape the federal government."
At one Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar, run by Daniel Diermeier, you can see Amy Wax is one of the attendees.
Amy Wax is notorious for her racist statements. She gave a full-throated endorsement of race pseudoscience at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
Elizabeth Weiss was the third wife of the race pseudoscience gang's favorite "scientist" whose career was aided and abetted by E. O. Wilson, Jean-Philippe Rushton. Weiss appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
Frances Widdowson is an author at racist Quillette, who hates Black Lives Matter. She participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
And Lawrence Krauss is the third person in this collection to be accused of using his position in academia to engage in sexual acts with or harassment against his students. In his case:
BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.
Here is a photo of Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker.
