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.
I admit I LOL'd at the part about lighting up "like a Christmas tree." WATCH AND LEARN all IDWs! (If you get that annoying...
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.
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
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.
"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] "
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]
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.
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.
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.
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:
- 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.
It seems the only thing that has done any damage to his career at all is his association with Jeffrey Epstein.
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.”
Good reactions from the Majority Report, who are long-time critics of Weiss.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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: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.
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.
"(Kirkegaard) told me that he likes Jews because they are smart and he thinks they are good with money."
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).
3. And Emil Kirkegaard crunches some numbers that broadly support the latest discussion on here about non-shared environment.