Racist Rodeo 2026 - the ISIR, the Institute for Mental Chronomatry and the Christian Education Fund

Conference poster
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The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) has posted information about its 2026 annual conference including a program.

I have updated my online spreadsheet to reflect the program participants.

There were no surprises from the conference, although there was one surprise from a related source...

There was no evidence that neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard was a participant this year, as he was in 2024 -  at least not as an official participant, but there were the usual  participants with connections to Kirkegaard, including Emily Willoughby and Michael Woodley of Menie, who was called a racist in the New York Times because his research was included in the manifesto of the Buffalo mass-murderer. But it must be noted that several ISIR meeting participants are also mentioned in that manifesto. Where are their NYTimes articles?

Also participating was Damien Morris, who is friendly with Abdel Abdellaoui. He has published in racist Quillette, and has co-authored papers with far-right political operative Tobias Wolfram, who was profiled in an article by Hope not Hate for his extremist political activities and his association with racist Jonathan Anomaly, another associate of Emil Kirkegaard.

And there was Alexandros Giannelis, an associate of Emily Willoughby who is also mentioned in the Hope not Hate profile along with Wolfram and Anomaly.

The International Society for Intelligence Research was founded on race pseudoscience, as can be seen by all the hardcore racists who participated in its first annual conference in 2000: White nationalist Arthur Jensen, race-obsessed kook and E. O. Wilson ally and penpal J. P. Rushton, Pioneer Fund grant recipient Linda Gottfriedson, Emil Kirkegaard's buddy Helmuth Nyborg and others. So it's no surprise that this year's conference was a combination of hard-core racists and right-wing political operatives and a grab-bag of moral cretins who don't mind rubbing shoulders with dedicated racists and even neo-Nazis.

What did surprise me was what I saw in the 2024 tax return of the Institute of Mental Chronometry. The Institute is a sister organization of the ISIR, originally founded by Arthur Jensen, with lots of personnel cross-over between that and the ISIR. The Institute of Mental Chronometry is thanked in this year's ISIR program, as usual, for its support of the conference.

Now obviously the Institute exists to promote Jensen's racist views, which is likely why it granted Emily Willoughby and James Lee half a million dollars a few years ago. So I don't have a high opinion of its "science," but I thought that at least the organization wanted to be seen as scientific. So imagine my surprise when I saw that in its 2024 tax return it mentions it gave "Ev Becker for Christian Education TW" a grant of $356 for "Travel & Lodging Support for Attendance at Scientific Conference Pursuant To Irs Approved Procedures."

What an odd name, "Ev Becker for Christian Education TW." The organization has its own online profile on the Cause IQ website, where it is described as "a private foundation in Brooklyn, OH, which was founded in 1989 and most recently had $36,700 in revenue and no employees. Also known as Christian Education Fund 10-0046700."

What is this all about? Emily Willoughby is publicly known as a devoted atheist, so why would she, as an ISIR board member, be OK with this? 

I mean, sure the ISIR gave a thousand bucks each to far-right extremist political operatives and racists Tobias Wolfram and Jordan Lasker (aka Cremieux) in 2023, but at least the ISIR can pretend they are science guys. But there is nothing even pseudoscience about a Christian Education Fund.

Also on Medium: Adam Rutherford & Kathryn Paige Harden & Behavioral Genetics ~ the Mini-series

 I grouped three recent posts into a single mini-series on Medium.

The Fourth of July, the American media and the plutocracy

To commemorate the Fourth of July, I enjoy watching two movies back-to-back:  first 2017's "The Post" which recounts the fight over the Washington Post's publication of the Pentagon Papers, and then 1976's  "All the President's Men" which continues the chronological story of the government versus the press in the scandal called Watergate.

It's bittersweet, since these movies are about the glory days of the Post, before the diabolical billionaire Jeff Bezos decided to destroy it. The Wikipedia page on the Post contains a pretty succinct history of the downfall:

After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the Post adopted the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" for its masthead.[163] Communications Director of the Post Shani George said they choose this slogan because it "conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year". He also stated that the slogan was not added in response to Trump's actions.[164]

In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the paper's opinion pages would endorse "personal liberties and free markets" to the exclusion of other views. According to the NPR, the announcement suggested the Post was adopting a libertarian line.[125] In October 2025, columnist Marc Thiessen stated that the paper's opinion section was now conservative.[165]

In April 2026, Nathan J. Robinson said that the paper has shifted from a centre-left economical stance to a hard-right one, opposing taxation of rich individuals, rent control, public transport, social housing and other social services. A significant number of articles in The Washington Post reportedly criticised labor unions and supported construction of new AI data centers.[166]

And on top of that, CBS is being destroyed by Bari Weiss and her diabolical billionaire sponsors. Weiss is the original inspiration for this blog. 

I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post when Bezos refused to allow the paper to endorse Kamala Harris. Again from Wikipedia:

More than 250,000 people (about ten percent of the Post's subscribers) cancelled their subscriptions, and three members of the editorial board left the board, though they remain with the Post in other positions.[180][181][182] An endorsement of Harris was subsequently published by the paper's humorist Alexandra Petri, who explained that "if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement", and that "I only know what's happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there's no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear."[183]

Condemning the Post's decision, several columnists, including Will Bunch, Jonathan Last, Dan Froomkin, Donna Ladd and Sewell Chan, described it as an example of what historian Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience.[184][185][186][187][188]

I also cancelled my account with the Bezos-owned Amazon, which I had had for a quarter century.

And then there's the New York Times. It has been apparent to many that there is a slowly creeping conservative influence there, especially when it comes to transgender rights.

This phenomenon was noted by both the journalist Tom Scocca and the satirical newspaper The Onion as I wrote about in 2023. 

The Onion published an article mocking the NYTimes' apparent anti-trans crusade: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.

Tom Scocca published a blog post THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids? - 

This is pretty obviously—and yet not obviously enough—a plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade. Month after month, story after story, the Times is pouring its attention and resources into the message that there is something seriously concerning about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care. Like the premise that the Clintons had to have been guilty of something serious, or that Saddam Hussein must have had a weapons program worth invading Iraq over, the notion that trans youth present a looming problem is demonstrated to the reader by the sheer volume of coverage. If it’s not a problem, why else would it be in the paper?

I think that the New York Times, every bit as much as the Washington Post, helped get the treasonous, rapist, orange monstrosity back into the White House.

And this latest piece from the Dissident confirms it: Exclusive: How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People notes the change in the NYTimes' editorial tone by 2022.

Over the last several years it has become readily apparent that there has been a shift in the editorial framing and focus of the New York Times when it regards issues relating to transgender people. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to issues of gender affirming care for transgender youth. The Times has contested this accusation of bias or editorial shifting of their priorities and framing, often by pointing to individual stories and claiming that the stories are rigorously fact checked and true. The issue is that any particular article can be argued about in isolation about whether or not the framing is biased against transgender people but when viewed in the aggregate the shift can become much more pronounced and difficult to defend.

While many organizations and activists before me have attempted to categorize and catalog the bias of the New York Times when it comes to transgender issues such as Assigned Media, GLAAD, Media Matters, and others, no one has fully analyzed the entire corpus of transgender coverage by the New York Times since 2014 to see exactly the nuanced changes in editorial focus and framing by the New York Times.[1]

The same paper that once gave a trans writer the page to argue for trans survival later treated that survival as an open question and let her contract lapse during the fight over how it covered her community. This shift in framing and coverage by the New York Times is measurable, and this piece measures it.

...

When the paper of record treats your existence as a debate, the framing does not stay on the page. The New York Times effectively sets the terms of what is considered respectable mainstream liberal opinion. What the Times treats as settled, the country treats as settled. What it frames as an open question shows up in courtrooms, in statehouses, in exam rooms, and in the minds of parents deciding whether to believe their own kids. I'm both a trans person and a lawyer. I have watched how the framing of these stories lands directly on people I know.

It is no wonder that Republican elected officials, Republican-appointed judges and Supreme Court justices, and far-right anti-trans hate groups have all cited the New York Times in their efforts to restrict transgender rights. The harm can be measured in the number of people forced to flee their homes and even their country as a result of these policies. As Howard Zinn once said, you cannot be neutral on a moving train. The New York Times chose to cynically change its framing and coverage around transgender issues in a bid to appeal to conservative voices. They did so knowing that the trans community was too small and politically powerless to effectively push back against the paper. And the organizations that did stand up would quickly be attacked by the Times itself through selective investigative reporting meant to silence criticism.[9]

I was amazed that odious Jesse Singal was not mentioned in the piece, but then by 2022 he had already been at it for several years, since at least 2018, helping to pave the way for anti-trans hostility, supported by racist far-right Quillette.

Fortunately there is still the Guardian - which is not American media.