Christopher Rufo and his Clown College failure

Great episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about the idiot fascist Republican attempt to fascify a college and making it basically into a baseball scouting service.

Rufo has - of course - promoted his bullshit via Bari Weiss' "Free Press."

The Guardian made the connection between Rufo and race pseudoscience in 2024:

Activist who led ouster of Harvard president linked to ‘scientific racism’ journal

Christopher Rufo recommends a newsletter to his readers that has published several supporters of discredited genetics theory

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on his own newsletter, which according to Substack has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which has published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics.

Rufo, a close ally of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called “wokeism”, has repeatedly described his goal as “colorblind equality”, but his links to Aporia raises questions about Rufo’s proximity to extremists.

Most recently Rufo has been credited in conservative media and beyond with playing a central role in the ouster of former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who is Black.

The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions on his apparent endorsement of Aporia, and how he reconciled that with his professed “colorblindness”. He did not respond directly to any questions put to him but instead made a crude sexual insult to a Guardian reporter.

I wrote about it at the time. 

"She is murdering CBS news" - the Bari Weiss media shambles

So many stories out now about problems with Bari Weiss and CBS News.

The Ankler:

“She is murdering 60 Minutes,” Scott Pelley said to his new executive producer, Nick Bilton about Bari Weiss during a meeting on Monday that might as well have been live-streamed to our esteemed media reporter class (given the speed with which the remark was summarily spread online through what appears to be several recordings). “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

The whole spectacle of Weiss taking over CBS News is one of the most befuddling and perplexing to write about of the kerfuffles I’ve kerfuffled.

On one hand, repeated studies have shown that the group of people running big, mainstream institutional media since the 1990s is the most sanctimonious, full-of-themselves group of professionals ever assembled in human history.

Believe me, I worked at a giant media organization, and hardly an employee there didn’t think of themselves as the barrier against a new dark age. If anyone so much as suggested they might empty their wastebasket, a company-wide town hall was convened to assert the newsroom’s commitment to democracy. (That commitment rarely applied internally, however, as the mainstream media newsrooms were hierarchical, top-down workplaces to a degree that would make the military blush.) 

Après moi, le déluge was the personal motto of every employee.  

And as their work became steadily more mediocre and less relevant over the past few years, individual egos continued to swell to the size of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats.

So I get the instinct to roll your eyes at this one. Broadly, ensconced media lifers are the worst possible spokespeople for the cause of journalism and have been crying wolf so long that we are almost incapable of hearing them any longer.

But a funny thing happened. While they were busy crying wolf, the wolf showed up.

And now we’ve got to decide what we’re going to do about it. Because the problem with Hollywood is that an industry that has lost its way as deeply as this one invites the wolves in.

NYMagazine

In his termination letter to longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, the show’s brand-new executive producer, Nick Bilton, complained that Pelley had decided to “ambush” him with “a performative display of hostility” during a Monday meeting with the show’s staff. There was certainly an element of the theatrical, possibly even the premeditated, in Pelley’s confrontation with his new boss, with Pelley delivering the kinds of withering lines (“You have slender qualifications for this job”) that aggrieved employees can only dream of — all of which were instantly leaked to sympathetic reporters and spread far and wide. Pelley clearly wanted a fight.

The question then became how Bilton and the person who hired him, Bari Weiss, would respond to this massive display of disrespect. They chose not only to fire Pelley, but to blame the entire dispute on him. Bilton’s letter accused Pelley, a 30-year veteran at CBS, of having “no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.” Pelley fired back that Weiss and her team, among other offenses, “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”

NYTimes

“Despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways,” Ms. Weiss said. “We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose.”

These were Ms. Weiss’s first remarks to her staff about the decision to fire Mr. Pelley, who was informed of his dismissal on Tuesday evening. CBS News has not issued an official statement about the firing.

Mr. Pelley, in a statement on Wednesday, disputed Ms. Weiss’s account of their interaction. “There was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back,’” he said.

Mr. Pelley met on Tuesday with Ms. Weiss, Mr. Bilton and Tom Cibrowski, the CBS News president. He said that the meeting had turned hostile and that he believed the network had little interest in engaging with his concerns about the future of “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Pelley, who joined CBS in 1989, had been enraged by Ms. Weiss’s decision last week to fire the leadership team of “60 Minutes,” including its former executive producer, Tanya Simon, and two on-air correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.

At the Monday staff meeting, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley said that Ms. Weiss had been “brought in to kill” the long-running Sunday program, “and she’s been doing exactly that.” He told Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in broadcast news, that he had “slender qualifications for this job.”

Zeteo: Inside ‘Coward’ Bari Weiss’s ‘Shitshow’ at ‘60 Minutes’

Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In today’s special edition, we dive into the five-alarm fire that is the current state of ‘60 Minutes’ and CBS News after Scott Pelley was ousted for dressing down Bari Weiss’s handpicked executive producer of the show while accusing her of “murdering” the network. Strap in for a slew of exclusive details and insights about this latest Bari trainwreck…

 

Do Kathryn Paige Harden's genes make her use illegal drugs?

Oh, yes, and Harden promoted the career
of Razib Khan after he was known
far and wide as a huge racist.
-------------------------------------------------

I was prepared to critique the behavioral genetics beliefs in Katheryn Paige Harden's new book, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness like I did with her last one, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality, but there's really no point.

In the opening chapter of the book, Harden talks about her illegal drug use:

It was a sweltering, tedious summer, the first summer of the pandemic, when Travis and I decided to go to the West Texas desert to drop acid. Our itinerary did, of course, include things other than taking drugs. We plan a day hiking in Big Bend. We book a Donald Judd–esque gray concrete casita with a view of the Chisos Mountains. We look forward to drinking Modelo and doing crossword puzzles and having morning sex. But lovely as all of that will be, our main purpose is to take LSD.

The DEA is clear about the legal status of LSD:

LSD is a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I substances have a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

 

And Harden herself considers LSD to be a potential instrument of manslaughter:

Imagine two women, equally bored by life, equally restless. One gives her boyfriend LSD and he has a bad trip inside the safety of their hotel room. The other gives her boyfriend LSD and he, in the throes of paranoid delusion, runs out of the hotel room into the surrounding West Texas desert, where he rapidly suffers from heat exhaustion. Only one woman would be blamed for contributing to a man’s death. Consider: When in your life have you gotten lucky and so were spared from blame?

Realize: “You are poised on fortune’s razor-edge.”

In the chapter, she talks about how a prisoner in the US penal system was murdered through horrific jail conditions:

Powell was serving a twenty-seven-month prison sentence for offering a blowjob to a police officer. Powell was doing sex work to get money for drugs. She didn’t get her drugs conveniently mailed to her house from overseas, and she wasn’t using them to dissipate her bourgeois ennui. She had, according to court reports, a serious polysubstance addiction that was complicated by untreated disorganized schizophrenia and mild intellectual disability.

Harden admits that she has privilege and so doesn't suffer the consequences of doing illegal drugs like Powell. But what about the causes of the illegal drug use?

The alleged focus of her book is vice or crime or sin or, I guess, some combination. So I expected Harden to provide a behavioral genetics explanation for how it came to pass that Kathryn Paige Harden, respectable soccer mom and public intellectual ("one of the world's leading scientists" according to her publisher) and Marcia Powell, a schizophrenic, drug-addicted prostitute with a mild intellectual disability both became illegal-drug-using criminals.

But what follows is a poorly-organized combination of Harden's life story, her personal feelings and her musings on the texts of various philosophers, famous public intellectuals, and religious leaders.

Many reviews of the book are utterly clueless, written by reviewers who don't understand or don't care about Harden's place in the genetic determinism network. Fortunately I found the LA Review of Books review by Jonathan Basile, who is hip to the scene:

...Original Sin distinguishes itself by a far more personal tone; it features a series of anecdotes, not always thematically transparent, about Harden’s abusive childhood, her departure from the church, her divorce, her struggles to raise her children, her experiences taking LSD and having sex in the desert, and her arc of becoming a geneticist only to realize she was still obsessed with the same questions of sin and redemption she had learned in church. None of this deepens our understanding of the scientific or religious questions posed, and again, that may not be the point. The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting, designed to make her into a public figure based on her personal journey, now presented as the living impetus for her advocacy.

"Not always thematically transparent" is such a diplomatic way to describe the disorganization. 

And such a great line: "The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting..."

It's funny 'cause it's true.

Harden promotes genetic determinism in her interviews, even as she misrepresents the words of her PhD advisor Eric Turkheimer:

...but my PhD advisor from graduate school is very famous for a paper called “The Three Laws of Behavior Genetics.” The third law of behavior genetics is: everything is heritable—which means that everything that differs between people, when you look at it scientifically, tends to show some influence of the genes that you were born with. I’m a scientist; I’ve been working in this field since I was 18. It’s important to me because I think it’s a scientific fact that is incontrovertible at this point: genes influence behavior.

So does this mean, per her own scientific expertise, that Harden believes she and a schizophrenic, drug-addicted prostitute with a mild intellectual disability share genes that influenced them both to become illegal-drug-using criminals? 

She does claim that polygenic scores can predict the likelihood of an addiction to drugs, but I haven't found anything in the book where she addresses the urge to try illegal, potentially manslaughter-inducing drugs - after all, you can't become addicted if you never try the drugs in the first place.

...my colleagues and I have developed a polygenic score that is correlated with the likelihood of developing conduct disorder and ADHD, of becoming addicted to alcohol and opiate drugs, of being convicted of a felony crime. The correlations are small but meaningful; they are about the same size as correlations with lead exposure or child maltreatment.

We know Harden is less likely to be convicted of a felony crime from her illegal activities not because of polygenic scores but, by her own admission, due to her social privilege. But I assume a behavioral genetics proponent like Harden will argue that the fact that she deliberately took an illegal drug considered dangerous by both the US government and herself - as a middle-aged adult and with all the knowledge that "one of the world's leading scientists" presumably has, makes it more probable that her genes made her do it.

Turkheimer chided both Steven Pinker and Robert Plomin in 2024 for the same misunderstanding that Harden has (my highlight):

But the real reason I am irritated by the way Pinker and Plomin talk about the three laws is more fundamental. Given that they both disagree with much of what I have said over the years, why are they so interested in the three laws in the first place? The reason is that a superficial reading of the first law, “Everything is heritable” sounds like it might be an endorsement of the kind of “genes make us who we are” hereditarianism that they both endorse. But if you actually read the paper (available here) you see that the theme of the paper is exactly the opposite. The paper is an explanation of why the quantitative genetic statistic called heritability, when applied to humans via twin studies, does not lead to any kind of deterministic hereditarianism, or to a contention that families don’t matter, or any of the other things that Plomin and Pinker have argued for over the years.

Harden justifies her claims with "I'm a scientist," but I think her poor literary organization and her misinterpretation of her own PhD advisor's views indicate she's not a very good one. I wonder if maybe she's better-suited to another career. Basile seems to wonder the same thing, in his review, if she might be more successful as an inspirational writer, or perhaps as a political operative:

In The Genetic Lottery, (her first book) Harden claimed that progressives seeking a more egalitarian system of education need to take account of students’ innate genetic differences in educability. I’ll examine, below, the reasons we may remain skeptical of any such claim to distinguish nature from nurture. Harden’s tenacious commitment to such methods, despite her familiarity with many of these criticisms, might lead us to suspect an ulterior motive: the positioning of eugenics within the boundaries of polite society and public discourse, which is sometimes called shifting the Overton window.

 "...the positioning of eugenics within the boundaries of polite society and public discourse" is also the goal of the racist, Peter Thiel-funded publication Quillette:

Lehmann told Politico that Quillette’s goal is “to broaden the Overton window”—that is to say, expand the limits of acceptable discourse. She didn’t stipulate that she wants these limits broadened only to the right, but she didn’t have to. Writing in Quillette, Lehmann said the Overton window should be shifted so that people can more openly denounce “immigration,” for example by trumpeting the Muslim heritage of sex-crime suspects.

Certainly Harden's work is a favorite of racist hereditarians who appear to have right-wing views and motives for shifting the Overton window. In 2016, the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) helped Harden and her team search for a research fellow. The ISIR was founded to promote and defend the views of gutter racists - or "white nationalists" if you prefer - Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

Harden has participated in two ISIR annual meetings, in 2009 and 2015. The ISIR 2016 post for Harden mentions Harden works with Dr. Elliot Tucker-Drob, who has participated in nine ISIR annual meetings, in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2023. 

And it just so happens that my previous post mentions Tucker-Drob - he has co-authored work with Stuart Ritchie, who appears to be a political activist working against transgender people.

In spite of Harden's genetic determinism beliefs, I actually doubt she thinks she shares any drug-taking DNA with the poor murdered prostitute. 

This passage is revealing:

She didn’t get her drugs conveniently mailed to her house from overseas, and she wasn’t using them to dissipate her bourgeois ennui. 

This is the key, I think to what Harden is really on about. The issue for her isn't that she and Marcia Powell are similar for taking illegal drugs, but rather, the manner in which they obtained the drugs is what makes them so different. Harden obtained them calmly and decorously and only to relieve boredom, not as a desperate attempt to cope with an impossible life.

And that is why Basile is right to accuse her of Scientific Calvinism:

In religious terms, this is Scientific Calvinism or Evangelicalism, the insistence that we must be punished for our predestined sinfulness. In political terms, it is the fever dream of neoliberalism, a state that individualizes responsibility for the forms of life it predetermines, and spares no expense punishing those it relegates to wretchedness.

It doesn't matter that Harden also broke the law - the important thing is that she did it in a state of privilege that comes from having superior genes.

Adam Rutherford, Richard Lynn and Michael Muthukrishna

Well it's been over a year since I finished my 9-part series about Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics. The focus was on the paper he co-authored with nine other individuals call Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford then proceeded to promote the paper via a cartoon, which made it clear that Rutherford and company believe that careers are based on genetics, and that we live in a meritocracy, so those who are not doing well career-wise or financially can blame their own loser genes.

One of the co-authors of the paper is Michael Muthukrishna. In part six of the series I discussed the connections that some of the co-authors had to racist individuals and organizations, but all I had to say about Muthukrisha was:"promoted his book by giving an interview to racist Quillette and racist Razib Khan."

I should mention here that Rutherford thanked Khan in his book The History of Everyone who Ever Lived, after Khan was booted from the New York Times for his long history of being a massive racist.

I see Khan is still hanging out with racist crackpot Curtis Yarvin.

What is it with hereditarians/racists and Western wear anyway?

Thanks to Rutherford, I have discovered more about Muthukrishna.

I don't regularly monitor Rutherford's Bluesky feed, but every now and then I check in and recently I saw that back on May 21, he was joining a reputable researcher, Rebecca Sear, in expressing disgust with researchers who cited the work of Richard Lynn.

But knowing about the connections of Rutherford's co-authors to racists and racist organizations as I do, I figured it wouldn't take long to find an example of one of his co-authors citing Richard Lynn. 

And ten minutes later, I found Muthukrishna's paper, originally published in 2021, called Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability, which cites Richard Lynn thrice, and not in the context of "you'll never guess what this racist said." 

This spectrum of localizability ranging from Mendelian to polygenic to “omnigenic” traits (Boyle, Li, and Pritchard 2017) has been discussed extensively, but its interaction with cumulative culture has not sufficiently been appreciated. We have known for a long time that increasing nutrition (Lynn 1990; Stoch et al. 1982), improving schooling (Ceci 1991; Davis 2014; Ritchie and Tucker-Drob 2018), and removing parasites (Jardim-Botelho et al. 2008) have positive effects on IQ.

It's amusing that this paragraph, which cites so many true believers in behavioral genetics, discusses non-genetic influences on IQ. But the obsession with IQ is always there. I've mentioned two of the other names in this paragraph on this blog: Stephen Ceci gave the keynote at the 2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research (aka the Racist Rodeo.) Stuart Ritchie is an anti-transgender activist. 

One of the Lynn citations is from something published by Lynn's own "Ulster Institute for Social Research," which at that time was publishing the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Another Lynn citation:

In some countries in Northern and Western Europe including Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, there is evidence that the Flynn effect has been slowing down and even reversing in recent decades (Dutton, van der Linden, and Lynn 2016).

Behavioral geneticists want to believe the Flynn effect has been "slowing down and even reversing" because it's one of the best-known indicators of the strength of environment on human development.

This citation is listed as: Dutton, Edward, Dimitri van der Linden, and Richard Lynn. 2016. ‘The Negative Flynn Effect: A Systematic Literature Review’. Intelligence 59 (November): 163–69. 

Edward Dutton currently works for Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, as Dutton's "Jolly Heretic" is owned by Kirkegaard's Human Diversity Foundation (aka "Polygenic Scores") which is the current owner of the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Dimiti van der Linden has far-right views of women and has published not only with Dutton but also co-authored several papers with Curtis Dunkel, who has written for Mankind Quarterly.

Apparently Michael Muthukrishna considers Dutton, van der Linden and Richard Lynn serious  researchers.

If that bothers Adam Rutherford, I haven't found any evidence for it.

But those are not the only racists listed in Muthukrishna's references. He quotes Charles Murray, a political scientist (and gutter racist), as if he is an expert on genetics:

Similarly, Murray declares: “By the end of the 2020s, it will be widely accepted that quantitative studies of social behavior that don’t use polygenic scores usually aren’t worth reading. More formally, it will be widely accepted that the predictive validity of polygenic scores gives us useful information about causes even though we still don’t understand the causal pathways.”

Hereditarians love Murray because he is one of the most famous hereditarians, and they don't much care that he doesn't have a life sciences background, he is useful for promoting the hereditarian cause.

The source of the Murray quote is his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class which promotes one of the favorite hereditarian beliefs, that women are genetically feeble in  STEM subjects, a belief most famously promoted 20 years ago by misogynist and sex pest Larry Summers.

And finally, the paper cites Michael A. Woodley of Menie, who achieved notoriety when the NYTimes ran an article about his works' influence on the racist mass-murderer of the Buffalo massacre, entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting.

How long can Adam Rutherford continue to ignore behavioral genetics' serious racist problem? Does it bother him at all?

The Muthukrishna paper cites Robert Plomin seven times, the Rutherford paper cites him three times. Jay Joseph has an excellent post on Plomin's genetic determinism, including this passage:

The entire discussion in Chapter 8, where Plomin wrote that parents, schools, and life experiences “matter” but “don’t make a difference,” is confusing and contradictory. If something doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t much matter. It certainly “mattered” and “made a difference to” American football coaching brothers Jim and John Harbaugh that they grew up with a father who was a career football coach. 

 

Plomin’s “blueprint” theory cannot explain countless other real-world and historical examples showing that the environment is massively important. To cite four examples, his theory cannot explain (1) why Australia has a relatively low crime rate despite having been founded and settled by convicted criminals, (2) why political and other types of behavior are very different in North Korea compared with South Korea, (3) why religious beliefs and practices have increased dramatically in Russia since 1991, and (4) the fact that IQ scores have risen “massively” during the past century (the “Flynn Effect”). Once again, the list is endless.

But it's a hallmark of behavioral psychology to avoid addressing such issues. Its proponents are convinced that genes determine everything and there are plenty of deep pockets out there - in Plomin's case, the British government, willing to fund that belief, unconcerned that there are major scientific problems with the belief.