🤣 Stupid slow ICE agents fail to catch delivery guy in Chicago 🤣

It was terrible that these ICE oafs go after some poor delivery guy, but his escape is great and always makes me laugh.

Claire Lehmann: How I became a gutter racist

ISIR president Thomas R. Coyle and Claire Lehmann, 
spreading their racist propaganda at Northwestern University
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Claire Lehmann founded racist rag Quillette, which has been funded by far-right crackpot Peter Thiel, which is sufficient reason to consider her a gutter racist. 

And now the gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research has given Lehmann their best racist of the year award. To be precise, Lehmann received the Constance Holden Award for journalists. You can tell who Constance Holden was by the gutter racists who love her.

In his introduction to Lehmann's acceptance speech, officially entitled "A Heterodox Education,"  Thomas R. Coyle, soon to be ex-president of ISIR, explains how deeply allied the far-right racists of Quillette are with the far-right racists of ISIR:

Claire is receiving the award for distinguished journalism, recognizing her contributions to public discourse on intelligence research. She joins a long line of distinguished Holden awardees whose names I put on the slide. Those include Toby Young, who is currently associate editor of The Spectator, Alice Dreger, journalist and author of "Galileo's Middle Finger," Susan Pinker and Bo Winegard, who was former associate editor at Quillette, who is now executive editor, I believe, at Aporia.

Aporia is owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard. 

Lehmann herself lovingly nurtured the career of Bo Winegard from when he was but a wee baby graduate student racist. Lehmann attacked me back in 2018 for daring to point out the fact that Bo Winegard is a racist, before he became a professional Neo-Nazi, working for Emil Kirkegaard.

I should point out that Lehmann's claim is wrong - I did not "boast about getting @razibkah fired from the NYTimes" - I mentioned that some of my blog posts were picked up by journalists like Jamelle Bouie who then used the facts I provided to raise issues about Khan. 

But accuracy and honesty are not requisites to receiving a journalism award from the International Society for Intelligence Research.

Speaking of Emil Kirkegaard, "who has likened pedophilic tendencies to sexual orientation and proposed "sex with a sleeping child" as a "compromise" for pedophiles" - (shudder!) - Lehmann has friendly feelings towards that Neo-Nazi, as I documented in a couple of places on this blog.

Being an apologist for pedophilia is obviously not a problem for Claire Lehmann. In her acceptance speech she traces her journey from her days as a sweet summer child who loved Shakespeare only to be betrayed by Academia and forced to read twentieth-century literature and even ideas she may not necessarily agree with, to being rescued from despair by famous oaf Camille Paglia, headlined in the text version of Lehmann's speech in Quillette  as "Finding My Athena."

Lehmann says:

“Poststructuralism is a corpse!” Paglia declared. She described Foucault’s scholarship as weak and bloodless, imitative of Nietzsche, and lacking in rigour. But she didn’t just attack Foucault’s work, she assailed the entire academic establishment for elevating him as a guru...

Lehmann considers Paglia an antidote for Academia's love of Michael Foucault, but avoids mentioning what Paglia and Foucault had in common: a love of pederasty. 

Lehmann was born in 1985, so she discovered Paglia well after Paglia had written her 1997 Salon article entitled The Purity of Alan Ginsberg's Boy-Love. Paglia was aware of Foucault's pederasty but naturally his was the bad kind:

Allen Ginsberg was the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality. Like the expansive, sensual, democratic Whitman but unlike the twisted, dishonest, pretentious Foucault, he saw the continuity between great nature and the human body, bathed in waves of cosmic energy. Seen from this pagan perspective, Ginsberg's celebration of boy-love was pure and sinless, demonstrating the limitations of Judeo-Christian paradigms of sexuality.

Rather than the virgin-goddess Athena, I would say that Camille Paglia is more like Lehmann's Zeus, who was fond of pederasty.

Lehmann doesn't mention it, but I think another likely reason for her love of Paglia is that both have a serious case of internalized misogyny. 

But in spite of Paglia, it was too late for Lehmann - betrayed by the English department, she moved to psychology, where she discovered her true calling: race pseudoscience:

Jensen expressed something that is often taken for granted but rarely articulated—that reality exists independently of our theories about it, and that it can be studied honestly through careful scientific work. I realised then that critics like Gould and the poststructuralists were not offering up methodological refinements in their critiques with the purpose of furthering inquiry; they were mounting a challenge to the possibility of studying human nature in the first place. 

Now I'm not sure exactly what Lehmann is up to with "critics like Gould and the poststructuralists were not offering up methodological refinements in their critiques with the purpose of furthering inquiry" other than an effort to conflate Gould with poststructuralists, but if what she means is, Gould never explained in detail why he thought Jensen in particular and hereditarianism in general were wrong, well of course he did. As in Gould's New York Review of Books review of Jensen's 1980 book "Bias in Mental Testing" for one very easily obtainable example.

It can never be pointed out enough that race pseudoscience promoters are far more impressed by  psychologists, like Jensen, and political scientists, like Charles Murray and even someone with a marketing degree like Steve Sailer, than they are by a life scientist like evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

In her post on Bluesky in December 2024, Lehmann can be seen recommending racists for others to follow, including Sailer and Aporia.

Then, while studying for her degree, Lehmann found her people - evolutionary psychologists, cranks and gutter racists:

On Twitter, I met a biosocial criminologist named Brian Boutwell, a geneticist named Razib Khan, evolutionary psychologists like David Schmitt, Geoffrey Miller, and Diana Fleischman, and I spent time reading papers by psychologists like David Buss and Roy Baumeister.

Evolutionary psychology is an obvious pseudoscience, as explained so perfectly by P. Z. Myers - but then Myers is a biologist, and so his work and opinions are of no interest to the likes of Lehmann. And Khan is not a real geneticist. According to his Wikipedia page he is "a right-wing[1] Bangladeshi-American writer in population genetics and consumer genomics."  Looks to me like his real job these days is right-wing political operative who pals around with racist freak Curtis Yarvin. Lehmann could recently be heard on Khan's podcast.

Fun fact: Kirkegaard claimed Khan was a big influence on him.

Lehmann gives credit to Steven Pinker too, which is only fair, since Pinker is basically the leading mainstream evangelist for race pseudoscience:

It occurred to me that intelligence research ventured into sacrilegious territory. It undermines a vision of human nature that Steven Pinker described in his 2000 masterpiece The Blank Slate.

Lehmann whines about being called out for being a sleazy far-right political operative.

In 2019, during the peak of the “Great Awokening,” prominent figures like Nassim Taleb repeatedly described me as a “neo-Nazi” online, and the Columbia Journalism Review called me a disinformation “villain” and listed me alongside Mohammed bin Salman and Yevgeniy Prigozhin.

Is it fair to call Claire Lehmann a Neo-Nazi? After all, she only has a friendly relationship with Emil Kirkegaard and promoted the career of Neo-Nazi Bo Winegard. And she only showed up in person to receive an award from an organization that loves to platform Emil Kirkegaard. 

Just because she has no problem with allying with Neo-Nazis, how dare you describe her as a neo-Nazi.

Then in her speech, Lehmann pulls out the classic race pseudoscience lie - that critics of race pseudoscience don't care about the "science" behind her beliefs, but only its morality:

But it was obvious that attacks like these were not about specific findings or methodological disagreements. Like Gould’s attacks on Jensen, or like Katz’s attacks on sexology, the criticism rained on my young publication was moralistic in nature. Rather than focusing on what was true or false, my critics wanted to reframe the question as being one of right and wrong.

This is the "Equalitarian Dogma" bullshit that has been around since at least segregationist Henry Garrett who published an article by that name in 1961 in the neo-Nazi funded Mankind Quarterly - a publication that is now owned by Claire Lehmann's Neo-Nazi buddy Emil Kirkegaard.

Notorious gutter racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton, one of the original guiding lights of the ISIR, wrote a paper called "The Equalitarian Dogma Revisited" in 1994.

Lehmann's own mentee, Bo Winegard used the term, for the same exact purpose, in a paper he wrote with his brother Ben and David Geary, this year's ISIR annual meeting keynote speaker, called Equalitarianism and Progressive Bias. Such a perfect demonstration of the direct line between that olde-thyme Jim Crow gutter racism and today's race pseudoscience gutter racism.

The reason that race pseudoscience ghouls like Lehmann won't acknowledge the actual scientific objections to their racist beliefs is a. they're too stupid to understand real science and b. they suspect they would have their beliefs thrashed soundly, and in Lehmann's case, her racist beliefs are her meal ticket - although naturally she doesn't mention who has funded Quillette, in her speech. So why risk having an actual debate with an actual scientist when you can stay in your far-right safe space bubble and take money for an easy job like regurgitating 19th century racist "science" endlessly?

Laziness, half-truths, racist bullshit and sins of omission are what get you a journalism award from the gutter racist organization the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

Especially when you are a gutter racist like Claire Lehmann.

Youtube Shaun on "The War on Science"

The most detailed review of the now famously reviled "War on Science" book, published by a company specializing in Christian nationalism, has just been posted on a YouTube channel called Shaun.

I've written about the book a couple of times since I saw that the author list includes the usual "Intellectual Dark Web" affiliated pack of right-wing grifters, sex pests and gutter racists.

I knew it was going to be a great video when Shaun mentions Angela Collier early on. Her video on harassment in academia is a classic.

Also early on, Shaun discusses Pinker:

Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard who, as I mentioned earlier, writes a chapter in "The War on Science."  And as we've seen, he's got a few photos of him with Jeffrey Epstein floating around out there. But unlike Kraus, Pinker has since decided to distance himself from Epstein rather than defend him. "I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance," he says.

This is complicated somewhat by the fact that Steven Pinker helped Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, with Jeffrey Epstein's legal defense when he was indicted for sex crimes in 2006. To quote a BuzzFeed News article here, "an obscure document from Epstein's legal defense shows that Pinker weighed in on the precise meaning of a federal law about using the Internet to entice minors into prostitution or other illegal sex acts."

Pinker has since claimed that he didn't know Dershowitz was going to use his opinion in defense of Jeffrey Epstein and claimed that he was not paid for the letter. Quote. "It's something that Alan and I do regularly as colleagues."

He also claimed he was not aware of the charges against Jeffrey Epstein, which I find a bit difficult to believe to be honest. It was big news at the time, and you regularly work with his lawyer apparently. Also, if a lawyer asked me to provide expert opinion for a criminal offence and it pertained to a law about enticing minors into prostitution, I would probably ask for the details on that one before my name ends up in a court document defending the head of a sex trafficking ring or something. 

 

Anyway, even if we very generously take Steven Pinker at his word and assume he didn't mean to help defend Jeffrey Epstein at trial and that he never liked the guy and thought he was awful, we still have to ask what's he doing in this book with Lawrence Krauss? Because Lawrence Krauss doesn't think Epstein is awful, he thinks he's great, he loves the guy, he thinks he was absolutely brilliant. Now, maybe it's just me, but I would find it hard to maintain a positive working relationship with someone who likes and keeps defending Jeffrey Epstein. That would be a deal breaker for me in a friendship. So no, I don't believe Steven Pinker never liked Jeffrey Epstein because I think if that was the case he probably wouldn't now be working with Lawrence Krauss.

Excellent.

One of the revelations in the video for me was the recounting of the ways that Alan Sokal is a complete reactionary sleazoid, proclaiming his victory over a tiny postmodernist self-published journal, "Social Text" that actually rejected his phony paper at first and asked him to make changes.

But such things as behaving sleazily certainly won't bother the kind of people who think that the various authors included in "The War on Science" are martyrs of wokeness.

There's also a section on Elevatorgate, and later in the video in the Transphobia section, Shaun highlights Richard Dawkins being the usual shameless hypocrite and bigot that members of the Intellectual Dark Web and associates tend to be. 

He quotes Dawkins first, then calls back to Elevatorgate.

"So since males are often larger and potentially violent. Or even sexually violent. Of course, it's logical for females to perhaps feel uncomfortable encountering a male they do not know in close proximity in an enclosed space."

Unless of course that space is an elevator, in which case she's just being hysterical and she should zip it. Yes, that's right sound the contradiction alarm we got one. Richard Dawkins thinks that males, by which he means transwomen are sort of inherently threatening, and thus it makes sense for cis women to be afraid of them just minding their own business existing in a place. But Richard Dawkins also thinks that males, by which he means nice scientists like me, are harmless and they should get to actively proposition whichever woman they like, in whatever context they like, without complaint.

Perfect.

I didn't think it possible, but the sleaziest contributor to this book was not Krauss, Pinker, Dawkins, Sokal, Amy Wax or even Jerry Coyne. The sleaziest contributor was Sally Satel a shill for Purdue Pharma. The video cites the ProPublica article Inside Purdue Pharma’s Media Playbook: How It Planted the Opioid “Anti-Story”  

The Times identified Satel as “a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.” But readers weren’t told about her involvement, and the American Enterprise Institute’s, with Purdue.

Among the connections revealed by emails and documents obtained by ProPublica: Purdue donated $50,000 annually to the institute, which is commonly known as AEI, from 2003 through this year, plus contributions for special events, for a total of more than $800,000. The unnamed doctor in Satel’s article was an employee of Purdue, according to an unpublished draft of the story. The study Satel cited was funded by Purdue and written by Purdue employees and consultants. And, a month before the piece was published, Satel sent a draft to Burt Rosen, Purdue’s Washington lobbyist and vice president of federal policy and legislative affairs, asking him if it “seems imbalanced.”

On the day of publication, Jason Bertsch, AEI’s vice president of development, alerted Rosen to “Sally’s very good piece.”

“Great piece,” Rosen responded.

Of course Satel is a senior fellow for the American Enterprise Institute, the same right-wing libertarian organization of soulless ghouls who supported the career of gutter racist Charles Murray for decades. 

Satel's contribution in this pathetic joke of a book is to whine that she was "cancelled" at Yale, while avoiding the mention of her conflict of interest with AEI and how she shilled for death merchants. 

 

Lawrence Krauss shows himself to be utterly corrupt by presenting Satel as a victim of a war on science. 

But then, as Shaun notes:

As for Lawrence Krauss, I would ask him what he thinks about financial bias as a potential threat to science. Among the various so-called threats to science laid out by him and his introduction,  zero of them are corporations buying off scientists to act as spokespeople for their interests; using bribes to get around government regulations; or pushing unsafe drugs onto the market for profit. 

 

Surely those things are more of a threat to science than a bunch of culture war nonsense. Well, I would ask Lawrence Krauss all that, but of course, he took hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein, remember? So he's probably more willing than most to overlook this sort of thing. 

And then the video gets to Aporia. Shaun points out that Bo Winegard is a big influence on the various goons who contributed to this book, and then discusses Emil Kirkegaard and Human Diversity Foundation (renamed Polygenic Scores LLC) and the connection to the Pioneer Fund. 

All things that anybody who follows this blog already knows, but I'm happy when others discuss these issues, especially since Shaun has a much bigger following than Pinkerite. 

The best part of the Aporia section is when Shaun plays a clip of Bo Winegard agreeing about race "realism" with Jared Taylor.

But then I've known Bo Winegard is a gutter racist for a long time. It was the least surprising news in the world when I learned he teamed up with neo-Nazi and pedophilia apologist Emil Kirkegaard - the video discusses Kirkegaard's idea about drugging children that never fails to horrify. 

Yes, the video is four hours long, but worth every minute.

The Republican Reichstag fire is here

Back during the first Trump administration, I thought he was going to try to pull the classic Hitler Reichstag fire tactic to clamp down on American freedom.

And thanks to idiots and racists putting the rapist felon psychopath back in office, he finally has a chance to do it.

I suspected that the murder of Charlie Kirk would be Trump's Reichstag fire, and even feckless cynical careerist fool Ezra Klein mentioned the possibility, writing that the right could "turn Kirk's murder into a justification for an all-out war, a Reichstag fire for our time."

Right-wingers are not even ashamed about the fact that they are using Hitler's tactic. Per the New York Times:

Matt Forney, a right-wing journalist known for racist and misogynistic content, called Mr. Kirk’s assassination “the American Reichstag fire,” alluding to the 1933 fire at the German Parliament building that was used by the Nazi party as a pretext to suspend constitutional protections and arrest political opponents.

“It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned,” Mr. Forney wrote on X.

The Jerusalem Post:

Antisemitism flares and ‘Reichstag’ mentions soar online in wake of Charlie Kirk assassination

“Charlie Kirk was assassinated by jews,” tweeted an account called Greatest Noticer, whose username is an apparent allusion to a neo-Nazi watchword.

Antisemitism is at a record high. We're keeping our eyes on it >>

“At this point does anyone not thi[nk] Charlie Kirk was assassinated by Mossad?” tweeted Ryan Matta, a podcast host with more than 200,000 followers, referring to the Israeli spy agency.

There is no doubt the Republican Party is one hundred percent in favor of using Kirk's murder as an excuse to turn the United States into a one-party state:

Per Utah's St. George News:

Trump administration joins Republicans' campaign to police speech in reaction to Kirk's murder

Vice President JD Vance on Monday jumped onto the conservative movement demanding consequences for those who have cheered Charlie Kirk's killing, calling on the public to turn in anyone who says distasteful things about the assassination of his friend and political ally.

“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance urged listeners on the slain activist’s podcast Monday. “And hell, call their employer.”

Vance's call also included a vow to target some of the biggest funders of liberal causes as conservatives stepped up their targeting of private individuals for their comments about the killing. It marked an escalation in a campaign that some warned invoked some of the darkest chapters of American history.

The Republican Party is a force for pure evil now and must be forced to disband once Trump and his Nazis are defeated. 

And now the Republican Party has shut down Jimmy Kimmel - another Nazi move.

Has there ever been a bigger damn fool than Ezra Klein?

Ezra Klein has always gone out of his way to be kind to racists, even refusing to refer to Andrew Sullivan, supporter of gutter racist Charles Murray and shameless promoter of Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, a racist.

And now he's playing both-sides over the murder of Charlie Kirk, who was very much a racist.

In his NYTimes opinion piece, Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way, Klein warns the left and the right against using Kirk's death for political gain.

He's worried that the left will point out that Kirk was vocally in favor of a few sacrifices on the altar of NRA-level gun "freedom." 

But if you mention that unpleasant fact about Kirk, Klein will consider you to be the equivalent of the right using Kirk's murder as a "Reichstag fire for our time."

Reichstag fire refers to a fire at the Reichstag which the Nazis used as an excuse to suspend civil liberties in Germany.

And this is how the right-leaning establishment at the New York Times attempts, again and again, to equate left-wing commentary with right-wing horror.

I am opposed to murder, even of wicked men like Charlie Kirk. 

But it is a fact that he was a professional hate-monger. To say he was doing politics "the right way" is to excuse hate-mongering.

There is an excellent piece in Word in Black - 'Black America's Digital Daily' that says it all:

Charlie Kirk was no martyr for freedom. He was a provocateur whose rhetoric leaned heavily on racist falsehoods. He dismissed diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as “anti-white.” He claimed white privilege was a “myth.” He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a “huge mistake.” He even reversed his praise of Martin Luther King Jr., later calling him “awful” and a “mythological anti-racist creation.”

Kirk also promoted the so-called “Great Replacement” theory — the white nationalist idea that demographic change in America is an intentional plot to reduce White influence. “The ‘Great Replacement’ is not a theory, it’s a reality,” he declared. Those words emboldened prejudice, spread division, and threatened the dignity of millions of Americans.

Kirk’s ideology was dangerous and rooted in racism. His assassination does not erase that truth. Violence doesn’t end hate; it deepens it, handing extremists a martyr.

Author Mark Harris also had an excellent response to Klein. 

Harris forgot to mention anti-Semitism. Kirk was a big fan of the "Great Replacement" lie.

Klein's claims about Kirk are so absurd that I find it hard to believe that this is his sincere opinion. I think it's just as likely to be Klein posturing for the right-leaning New York Times establishment to show them he's their guy - he can be trusted to promote the "both sides" narrative. I think it's probably about Klein's career advancement more than anything else.

This is what Klein considers "the right way."

UPDATE

Apparently this murder was a case of right-on-right crime. 

Augusta Free Press:

Charlie Kirk murder update | The truth comes out: The shooter is a MAGA

What we know about this Tyler Robinson: good student from a good Mormon family who scored high on the ACT, then dropped out of college after a semester.

More: Tyler Robinson appears, from online postings, to have been a Groyper, a White Nationalist movement led by another far-right provocateur, Nick Fuentes, who regularly picked public fights with Kirk, urging his followers to out Kirk as a “fake conservative,” raising issue, most recently, with Kirk’s insistence that the Trump administration should release the Epstein files.

Fuentes, of course, is now distancing himself from having been engaged in a MAGA civil war with Kirk, as is another far-right nutjob, Laura Loomer, who has been busy deleting recent tweets in which she had criticized Kirk as a “charlatan” and “political opportunist” who engaged in “mental gymnastics” and “stabs Trump in the back,” and wrote that she didn’t “ever want to hear Charlie Kirk claim he is pro-Trump ever again.”

More on Tyler Robinson: the messages etched into the bullets were not, in fact, pro-trans, as the media and political ecosystem on the far right initially asserted, but rather, from a video game known for its satirical use of fascist imagery, which terminally online Groypers are known to have co-opted to be able to, in essence, hide in plain view.

Still more: the parents are registered Republicans, and the father, Matt Robinson, seen in an online photo wearing a T-shirt repping the far-right Three Percenter movement, “is a Republican for Trump,” according to the grandmother, Debbie Robinson.

PREDICTABLY - the killer was a gun-nut MAGA and apparently influenced by groypers who loved Nicholas Fuentes, but you KNEW who Bari Weiss and her confederacy of dunces were going to blame for this:

There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence. But to our minds, among the biggest culprits are the universities. In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach “inclusion,” they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance. Where they promote “diversity,” they actually enforce a uniformity of thought, denying tenure to dissenters.

Charlie Kirk was given a platform by the Utah Valley University. But Weiss and her ghouls are going to use his murder at a college campus - a murder that looks to be part of a right-wing civil war - to advocate for attacking universities and cracking down on student rights. 

Because the Free Press, and the money backing it, are monstrously evil. 

UPDATE: Ta-Nehisi Coates responded to Klein in Vanity Fair:

Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.” The only hope was Donald Trump, who had to prevail, lest Haitians “become your masters.”

 

Charlie Kirk

Kirk was a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Thanks to horrifically lax gun laws in the United States, someone was able to murder Charlie Kirk with a gun.

Was it worth it, Charlie Kirk?

Kirk is a martyr to the Republican Party's insane interpretation of the Second Amendment.

I think it's very likely the Trump administration is going to use this incident in a Reichstag fire way.

UPDATE: As of today, the shooter has not been captured, but Trump supporters are not wasting any time to use Kirk's death to call for violence against "the left" which they baselessly blame for the shooting. 

Reported in WIRED magazine: 'War Is Here': The Far-Right Responds to Charlie Kirk Shooting With Calls for Violence.

Right-wing racist ghouls pooping their pants over Mamdani

 Oh man, the Mamdani campaign is kicking ass. 

They released this take of the New York Times and its deep concern for plutocrats. I couldn't find it on YouTube, you'll have to go see it on Bluesky.

I've already mentioned that Claire "Lulu Lemon" Lehmann was shitting her pants over Mamdani, and now I see one of her race pseudoscience pals who also likes to make alliances with racist plutocrat looney tunes, Jerry Coyne, is also shitting his pants - when he isn't whining about these kids today and their befuddling slang terms like "merch" and "mood." He was doing it five years ago, whining about expressions like "tone deaf." What a tiresome old man. You kids better stay off his lawn!

About Mamdani, Coyne, attempting irony, writes:

→ Zohran Mamdani is not a real socialist: Don’t worry, silly readers. Zohran Mamdani is not a real socialist. Sure, he describes himself as a democratic socialist whose team includes so very many communists. But there’s nothing to worry about. Here’s The New York Times: “The closest Mr. Mamdani gets to socialism is in his belief in treating people more equitably.”

It’s not socialism, it’s being kind. Are you anti-kindness? It sounds like you are, the NYT reporter says, his boot on your neck. We’re just all treating people nicely, okay?

Apropos of that, various reports are coming out about Zohran Mamdani’s team, who we can expect to see in power and running New York City soon. Like, let’s take his new housing adviser, Celia “Cea” Weaver. The New York Post found these gems on her X account: “Seize private property!” And: “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.”

That’s not socialism, silly. This policy adviser is just advocating for sharing. Essentially, she wants to do a weapons buyback program. It’s just smart policy. Are you anti-sharing now too?

Coyne claims to be opposed to Trump, but in so many ways he sounds like a stupid MAGA. 

I'm sure he'd much prefer Trump-buddy Cuomo was elected mayor. After all, being a sexual predator does not bother Coyne, since at least three of the ghouls who appear in the right-wing round-up tract "War on Science"  in which Coyne proudly participated are known sex pests: Joshua T. Katz, Christian D. Ott and the book's editor Lawrence Krauss. 

Too bad for Lehmann, Coyne and their circle of jerks, MAMDANI WILL BE MAYOR.

I cordially invite Coyne to stay in Chicago and Lehmann to stay in Australia and, along with all their fellow gutter racists, to stay the fuck out of New York City.

PZ Myers has this to say while writing about "War on Science" -

(I hope Jerry is enjoying the sight of the National Guard patrolling his campus, the fucking moron.)

 

Who were the biggest racists at the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research?

Steven Pinker was not at the 2025 meeting although he's been to a few others. But he was apparently thrilled that his gutter racist chum Claire Lehmann received an award from ISIR this year. 

ISIR did not make its meeting program available on its website in 2024, unlike every other year prior, possibly because in August 2024 I created a spreadsheet to track all those who have been official participants of ISIR meetings. And without that resource, there is not much data in my database for 2024.

And I feared 2025 would be the same story since the 2025 program was not posted either.

BUT THEN! A MENSA person named Laura Endicott Thomas posted the 2025 ISIR program on the Northern New Jersey MENSA website. Thomas is a hard-core fan of race pseudoscience so I don't think she's being deliberately mean by noting the low attendance for this year's meeting. Thomas is also a Trump supporter and has a theory - a lot of Europeans did not show up because they believed the "propaganda" about Trump and his administration's utter disregard for the rule of law. 

Yeah, I had heard that MENSA people were not very impressive.

So far I've seen no evidence that neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard was at the 2025 meeting although he was clearly welcomed back by the ISIR organization in 2024. But several of his close allies and people he's funded were there.

Russell T. Warne's far-right and racist views are obvious from the list of work published by Warne on his own website. He is unashamed to admit he's published in Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi, racist Aporia Magazine and he's also published in Quillette and Mankind Quarterly. As the Hope Not Hate exposé about Kirkegaard noted:

A recent research paper, published in the respected scientific journal PLOS ONE and co-authored by Mankind Quarterly contributor Russell T. Warne, acknowledged that it had been funded by a grant from HDF. His paper looked to undermine the idea that African Americans suffer from “stereotype threat”, a psychological theory that negative stereotypes internalised by minority groups can damage their cognitive performance.

"HDF" stands for "Human Diversity Foundation" which was the name for Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi umbrella organization until he changed it to the more behavioral genetics-sounding "Polygenic Scores."

I was somewhat horrified to discover that Warne provides a link to an article in which he claims to be "a theatre critic and self-avowed 'Shakespeare fanboy.'" I certainly hope Warne tells the readers of his theater reviews that he is allied with - and funded by - a racist/neo-Nazi. Especially if he reviews "Othello." Oh wait, he has reviewed Othello, in 2011 - maybe that was before Warne became a dedicated gutter racist.

Naturally Kirkegaard is a fan of Warne's work, testifying on his blog in 2023: "Back in 2021, Russell Warne wrote a nice summary article about race differences in intelligence..."

Warne was also one of the censorship ghouls who SLAPP-sued Rational Wiki for telling the truth about his extremism.

At the ISIR meeting, Warne gave a talk on Rethinking Mental Speed: Unraveling the Mystery of Item Response Time. I assume that is related to Arthur Jensen's "Mental Chronometry" which was a big disappointment to race pseudoscience. But they keep trying anyway, I guess.

Warne's business account on Twitter, Riot IQ, promotes the work of evolutionary psychologist David Geary, which makes it it clear that Riot IQ's "science" is based on the joke pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology so exquisitely eviscerated by biologist P. Z. Myers in this video.

No doubt about it - by multiple metrics, Russell T. Warne is a gutter racist.

David Geary, the keynote speaker for the annual meeting, is a gutter racist, appearing on the Aporia podcast after the HOPE not Hate exposé made it crystal clear that Aporia was part of a neo-Nazi network owned by Emil Kirkegaard. Although to be fair, Geary's beat is more about misogyny just-so stories than about race. Still, he co-authored a paper with the race-obsessed twins, Ben and Bo Winegard - Bo Winegard is now one of Emil Kirkegaard's main toadies. So Geary is a definite gutter racist.

Geary's piece for the ISIR meeting was "The nurture of nature: Why sex differences are larger in healthy and wealthy nations" Looks like it's part of the ongoing hereditarian project to prove that girls are genetic losers in STEM subjects.

Michael A Woodley of Menie - unlike these other gutter racists, Woodley is the only one that I know of who has been declared outright a "racist" in the New York Times, in the article "A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting." That article is about Woodley's work showing up in the racist manifesto of the anti-Black mass murderer in Buffalo New York a few years ago. 

Although as I've said many times, it's really unfair to Woodley, as the work of several ISIR meeting participants showed up in the manifesto.

Woodley has co-authored papers with so many other racists, including Kirkegaard, that I wonder if he is capable of authoring a paper with someone who is not a racist.

Woodley is one of the ghouls who used a SLAPP lawsuit to censor Rational Wiki. You can tell it was pure SLAPP intimidation since the New York Times article is at least as damning as the Rational Wiki one, but as far as I know, Woodley did not try to sue the New York Times.

Thomas R. Coyle, past president of ISIR has co-authored several papers with gutter racist Heiner Rinderman who publishes in Kirkegaard's OpenPsych pseudo-journal. According to the ISIR 2025 program "...a new open-access journal, Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities, was established by Thomas Coyle and Richard Haier to reflect the growing need for an unbiased publication platform committed to free inquiry." 

I had heard about this journal, I heard it was a response by the more racist members of the ISIR network to Intelligence magazine saying it would be less welcoming in the future to race pseudoscience. I fully expect that Coyle and Haier's new journal will publish work by Emil Kirkegaard, as Intelligence has done in the past but presumably no longer will. They've already published articles by Warne, Woodley and other racists.

Coyle teamed up with other members of the league of racist villains in a paper responding to critics of race pseudoscience. You can almost smell the burning cross coming from this list of Coyle and his co-authors Michael A Woodley of Menie, Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre, Aurelio-José Figueredo, Geoffrey F Miller, Noah Carl, Fróði Debes, Craig L Frisby, Federico R Leon, Guy Madison and Heiner Rindermann.

At this annual meeting Coyle chaired sessions, introduced Lehmann's speech, and was represented by a paper called "Tilt increases at higher ability levels: support for differentiation theories."

I first heard about "tilt" when I saw Lehmann and Kirkegaard having a friendly chat about it on Twitter.

In case anybody has any doubts about Lehmann's comfort with neo-Nazis.

Coyle wrote about "tilt" for Intelligence magazine, with a somewhat more vivid title:

White-Black differences in tech tilt: Support for Spearman's law and investment theories. 

There appears to be no effort in this paper to determine exactly who counts as "Black" and who counts as "White" - which is absolutely typical of race pseudoscience. 

Douglas K. Detterman was honored at the meeting for founding ISIR. Detterman is part of the old guard of racists, along with white nationalist Arthur Jensen, who is, mercifully, dead.

Detterman was the Vice President of another organization created to promote the work of Jensen, the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, which received Nazi money via the Pioneer Fund. The institute was later renamed Institute for Mental Chronometry, which still exists, and which pays for support services for ISIR meetings and recently donated a large sum to Emily Willoughby and James Lee, board members of ISIR.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Detterman worships Jensen - and because of, not in spite of his racism. On a website created by Emil Kirkegaard to honor Jensen there is an article by Detterman explaining why Jensen was right to suggest that "group differences" in intelligence testing were genetic.

Into this cauldron of social and scientific confusion, Arthur Jensen (1969) published a paper in Harvard Educational Review entitled, “How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?” According to rumors, the paper was based on a talk given at a meeting of the American Association for Educational Research and editors of the Harvard Educational Review invited the paper and perhaps even sought to make it more controversial than the original submission. When the paper came to press, the results were explosive.

A brief synopsis of the paper is that this more than 120 page paper presented evidence bearing on the title question—is it possible to boost scholastic achievement and IQ through environmental intervention. Jensen's answer to the question was that it may not be possible to boost either IQ or academic achievement through environmental interventions because both have a substantial heritable component and are highly correlated with each other. Not more than a few pages of the paper dealt with race and intelligence but given the frequently observed mean IQ differences between groups, there was some inevitable discussion of these differences. The basic thesis of the majority of the paper was that it may not be possible to raise IQ and subsequent academic achievement through environmental interventions.

Jensen had hit every exposed nerve of the time and immediately became a lightning rod for those against the ideas he presented which seemed to be nearly everyone.

Heritable differences between groups were repugnant to psychological environmentalists, to communists, and to those who misinterpreted the fundamental concept of democracy that “all people are created equal” (instead of equal under the law). His thesis was also difficult to accept for those who believed that all differences between people could and should be accounted for by environmental differences.

As usual with hereditarians, Detterman misuses the term "heritable." And obviously Detterman agrees with Jensen's idiotic racist beliefs. The problem, in his mind, is all those communists who refuse to accept that some "groups" are clearly intellectually, genetically inferior. 

Detterman is predictably a big fan of indisputable gutter racist Charles Murray. In his glowing review of Murray's more recent piece of hereditarian garbage, "Human Diversity," he piously lectures those of us who are not afraid to point out that Charles Murray is a racist:

Do not engage in ad hominem attacks. Calling people racists or fascists or other nasty names does not resolve scientific debates. 

Like E. O. Wilson, Detterman would like to be seen as a genteel racist, and genteel racists are shocked by naughty words like fascist and racist. 

Something that Murray's defenders reliably fail to mention: Murray is not a life scientist, he's a political scientist. And as such, he's had a very successful career - thanks in large part to far-right reactionaries funding wingnut welfare -  convincing the stupid and the gullible that he speaks as a scientist about race, intelligence and genetics. It's fascinating that Detterman fully accepts Murray as an expert on scientific issues. But then, Detterman is a psychologist, which is only a slightly more scientific field than political science.

Detterman also signed gutter racist Linda Gottfredson's defense of the Bell Curve with dozens of other racists and assorted right-wing ghouls.

I'm certain that every one of them considers Charles Murray a better source of science information than Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, in part because they hate Gould's political views. Politics is everything to race pseudoscience.

Not only does Detterman adore Jensen, he attempted to mainstream the career of gutter racist Jean-Phillip Rushton. As Rushton testifies in his paper The Equalitarian Dogma Revisited: 

Fortunately, albeit after another lengthy review process, Douglas Detterman accepted the paper for Intelligence (Rushton, 1994), and invited me to write this editorial.

"Equalitarianism Dogma" is the term that race pseudoscience racists use to attack their critics, claiming that the only reason anybody opposes hereditarianism is because of politics, not because of science. The term was used by segregationist Henry Garrett in 1961 in Mankind Quarterly (now owned by Emil Kirkegaard) and more recently by Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard and associates in 2023.

Here is some of what Rushton says in the editorial published by Detterman:

Evolutionary hypotheses for why Asians average the largest brains and have the most intelligence have been provided (Rushton, 1995) . The currently accepted view of human origins, the "African Eve" theory, posits a beginning in Africa some 200,000 years ago, an exodus through the Middle East with an African/non-African split about 110,000 years ago, and a Caucasoid/Mongoloid split about 40,000 years ago. Evolutionary selection pressures are different in the hot savanna where Africans evolved than in the cold arctic where Mongoloids evolved. The further north out of Africa that populations migrated, the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering, and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children during prolonged winters . I proposed that as the original African populations evolved into Caucasoids and Mongoloids, they did so in the direction of larger brains, slower rates of maturation, and other traits differentiating the populations .

To further account for why Negroids are also, on average, more fertile, faster maturing, and more sexually active, I proposed a gene-based evolutionary theory familiar to population biologists as the r-K scale of reproductive strategy . At one end of this scale are r-strategies, which emphasize high reproductive rates, and, at the other, K-strategies, which emphasize high levels of parental investment (nurturing). The scale is generally used to compare different species, but I used it to describe the immensely smaller variations within the human species . I hypothesized that Mongoloid people are more K-selected than Caucasoids, who in turn are more K-selected than Negroids,

In the first paragraph, Rushton calls on the 19th-century "cold winters" fantasy, in the second, he uses E. O. Wilson's work on r/K strategies, to basically suggest that "Negroids" are a separate species from "Caucasoids" and "Mongoloids." We know he did that with the complete approval of Wilson.

But how DARE you call that racist! Quick, Detterman, the smelling salts!

Conclusion: If E. O. Wilson is a gutter racist for aiding and abetting Rushton, than Douglas K. Detterman is also a gutter racist.

Curtis Dunkel is part of Kirkegaard's network. Dunkel's contribution to the ISIR meeting is a paper, "A cross-trait analysis of the Dunning-Kruger effect" co-authored with Dimitri Van Der Linden, who has also co-authored a paper with racist extremists Edward Dutton and the mercifully dead Richard Lynn.

So those are the biggest racists of the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research. I'm sure there were plenty more at this meeting, in spite of its low attendance, but those are the names that jumped out at me. But the ISIR is never going to rid itself of racist extremists because without them and the beliefs they represent, ISIR would barely exist.

Bari Weiss is a fascist - and now so is CBS news

 

AV Club:

Just when you thought the Paramount corporation couldn’t heap any more indignities on the head of poor, beleaguered CBS News—which got to spend months being abused by the Trump administration for the horrible crime of editing down an interview, before having to watch its parent company sheepishly shell out millions rather than fight it out on its behalf—multiple sources are now reporting that the venerable TV news brand might end up being handed off to former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. This is per TheWrap, seemingly confirming a Puck report from earlier today suggesting that Paramount (now owned by Skydance, and under the watchful eye of its founder, David Ellison) is in talks to acquire Weiss’ media company The Free Press, potentially with an aim toward installing her at the top of CBS News.

Predictably, gutter racists like Razib Khan were celebrating.

Nathan Brand is a hard-core Republican which makes him a friend of fascism and racism, automatically.

Brand is apparently associated with Hillsdale, the far-right college that employs Ben Winegard, the twin brother (and fellow racist) of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's flunky Bo Winegard.

As Tom Scocca noted above, Weiss is supremely untalented.

But she does have one amazing talent - to be a shameless courtier to fascist plutocrats, as I have discussed on this blog for years.

Larry David detests Bari Weiss.

Exquisite take-down of Richard Dawkins

I just discovered a really good atheist YouTuber, Drew McCoy, known as Genetically Modified Skeptic.

It seems that one of Dawkins' PR guys tried to bring him into the Dawkins fold. 

McCoy refused and then did an exquisite take-down of Dawkins instead. This is how you do it. 

Hemant Mehta the Friendly Atheist makes an appearance.

Mentioned as allies of Dawkins: Jerry Coyne, Colin Wright, Edward Dutton, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.

Related Genetically Modified Skeptic videos:

• Why the Anti-Woke Right Has So Many Atheists

• Why the Right Hates Atheists but Loves Elon Musk

• The "Skeptics" Are Crashing Out Hard - about the infamous "War on Science" right-wing grievances book

Who is a gutter racist?

There are basically two kinds of racists - the genteel and the gutter.

To illustrate the difference, let's talk about the degeneration of the career of E. O. Wilson.

Wilson began as a genteel racist. In his book Sociobiology, published in 1975, Wilson did not actually discuss racial differences. He merely suggested the possibility of human mental improvement, based on the premise that hunter-gatherer societies are shaped by evolution in the same exact way that non-human societies are, although he is careful to admit that we don't know "how much mental evolution has actually occurred:" 

There is no reason to believe that during this final sprint there has been a cessation in the evolution of either mental capacity or the predilection toward special social behaviors. The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back only to the time of the Roman Empire. Two thousand generations, roughly the period since typical Homo sapiens invaded Europe, is enough time to create new species and to mold them in major ways. Although we do not know how much mental evolution has actually occurred, it would be false to assume that modern civilizations have been built entirely on capital accumulated during the long haul of the Pleistocene.

But by his next book, On Human Nature published in 1978, Wilson was making a case for the genetic passivity of Chinese and Navaho infants:

Navaho infants tested by Freedman and his coworkers were even more quiescent than the Chinese infants. When lifted erect and pulled forward they were less inclined to swing their legs in a walking motion; when put in a sitting position, their backs curved; and when placed on their stomachs, they made fewer attempts to crawl. It has been conventional to ascribe the passivity of Navaho children to the practice of cradleboarding, a device that holds the infant tightly in place on the mother's back. But Freedman suggests that the reverse may actually be true: the relative quiescence of Navaho babies, a trait that is apparent from birth onward, allows them to be carried in a confining manner. Cradleboarding represents a workable compromise between cultural invention and infant constitution.

And by a dozen years after the publication of Sociobiology, Wilson was promoting the career of gutter racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton, who would go on to become the president of the Nazi-legacy organization, the Pioneer Fund. 

As Borrello and Sepkoski wrote in the New York Review of Books shortly after Wilson died:

Rushton was arguing that “r/K selection theory” applies to different human races. This model was developed in the 1960s by Wilson and the population biologist Robert MacArthur to characterize distinct evolutionary reproductive strategies among different species of animals. It distinguishes species that produce large numbers of offspring (or those that are "r-selected") with little subsequent parental investment (for example, many insects) from those that produce few offspring (or are "K-selected") with greater parental investment (elephants, humans). Rushton’s intent was rather to demonstrate that "behavioral genetics seems to suggest that r/K relationships are heritable" among humans, and that, furthermore, different human "races" have different strategies: specifically, that Black people are r-selected, while whites are K-selected. Moreover, he carefully explained to Wilson that this model accounted for racial disparities in IQ, postulating that Black people are not selected for high intelligence because their selection strategy favors, essentially, quantity over quality.

As an author of the r/K model, one would have expected Wilson to have been outraged at Rushton’s proposal, which implied, as many nineteenth-century scientists did, that human “races” constituted different species—a view no reputable biologist, including Wilson, would have publicly defended. But Wilson immediately dashed off a letter to Rushton applauding his application of the r/K model as “one of the most original and interesting [ideas] I’ve ever encountered in psychology,” adding that the work was “courageous.” “In this country the whole issue would be clouded by personal charges of racism to the point that rational discussion would be almost impossible,” he wrote, urging Rushton to “press ahead!”

In his alliance with Rushton, E. O. Wilson became an indisputable gutter racist. 

By that measure, Steven Pinker has been a gutter racist since at least 2004, when he selected the very poor work of gutter racist Steve Sailer to include in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" annual anthology which Pinker edited that year.

And Pinker has remained a gutter racist, and these days he even makes common cause with the neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, appearing on the Kirkegaard-owned Aporia magazine podcast in June of this year. This was significant enough that establishment media, which has done its best to ignore Pinker's implicit racist views suddenly paid attention.

Basically, if you are an ally of Emil Kirkegaard, you are a gutter racist.

And so the following people are gutter racists:

• Jonathan Anomaly
• Benjamin Boyce
• Noah Carl
• Gregory Clark
• Nathan Cofnas
• Edward Dutton
• Diana Fleischmann
• Matthew Frost
• John R. G. Fuerst
• David Geary
• Richard Haier
• Richard Hanania
• Rob Henderson
• Stephen Hsu
• The International Society for Intelligence Research
• Anatoly Karlin
• Razib Khan
• Jordan Lasker
• Lipton Matthews
• Gerhard Meisenberg
• Charles Murray
• Helmuth Nyborg
• Jonatan Pallesen
• Bryan Pesta
• Davide Piffer
• Steven Pinker
• Andrew Sullivan
• Jan te Nijenhuis
• James Thompson
• Russell T. Warne
• Bo Winegard
• Michael A. Woodley of Menie
  

And of course Claire Lehmann - soon I will talk about her "how I became a gutter racist' speech for the international league of gutter racists, the ISIR. 

And her pants-pissing terror of Zohran Mamdani - the future mayor of New York City, baby!