Why is Neil DeGrasse Tyson promoting the career of unapologetic racist Michael Shermer?

Apparently Neil deGrasse Tyson considers Michael Shermer, a devotee of the crankiest possible brand of race pseudoscience, "someone I can claim as a friend for decades."

What is wrong with Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why is he a friend of a right-wing political activist who is not at all shy about his admiration for race pseudoscience? Although, naturally, Shermer doesn't admit to being a racist. But he doesn't have to admit it, he lets the "science" do the talking for him as when he claimed that critics of racist crackpot Jean-Philippe Rushton are the victims of "motivated reasoning."

So there's Shermer, babbling away about "post-modernism" (the far-right is obsessed with post-modernism, I wrote about that here) - on Tyson's StarTalk podcast.

Goddam, I had to watch the whole episode, in what I knew was a vain hope, that they would raise the issue of Shermer's right-wing activities and his support for the most idiotic form of race pseudoscience. Of course they did not mention any of it. It was mostly a chance for Shermer to promote his book and to pose as the voice of sweet reason. It was utterly disgusting.

I mean, Shermer also has repulsive beliefs about trans people, but I would think that Tyson would at least stand up for himself - and one of his co-hosts, Chuck Nice - against the racist idiocy of Shermer's Rushton-based beliefs.

Rushton has his own profile on the Southern Poverty Law Center website, identified as a "white nationalist." The profile, which needs to be updated, since Rushton died in 2012, includes this:

In recent years, Rushton has spoken on the alleged IQ deficiencies of minorities at conferences of the racist American Renaissance magazine and website, and he has published a number of articles in the group’s newsletter. His work is often published on racist websites, including the anti-immigrant hate site, Vdare.com. In 2002, after renting several academic mailing lists, Rushton mailed an abridged version of Race, Evolution and Behavior to 40,000 people — a mailing paid for by the Pioneer Fund, the race science outfit he now heads. Reacting to complaints from scientists who had received the mailing, the book’s original publisher, Transaction, disavowed the smaller booklet and said that the abridged version had been “purged” of any “evidentiary basis.”

And Rushton was a major participant in the International Society of Intelligence Research (ISIR) annual conferences until his timely death.

The reputation of E. O. Wilson took a big hit when, not long after he died, it was publicized in two separate articles that Wilson had a correspondence with Rushton, in which Wilson encouraged Rushton to use the r/K model, developed by Wilson to discuss different reproduction strategies of species and apply it to human "races."

Shermer promoted Rushton's ex-wife on his podcast.

Shermer's love of race pseudoscience isn't limited to his support of Rushton and his wife. Last year he was seen at a conference full of racists -  apparently neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard was there. Shermer was mentioned in a Dutch article about the conference:

Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic 2000, has fallen head over heels for racial biology. Shermer is friends with Elizabeth Weiss, the wife of the late race science quack Philip Rushton (Rushton thought men with long penises had low IQs and got his data from fictional soft porn). “Of course you think Rushton was a racist. I thought so too until I looked at the evidence.” (12). 

Elizabeth Weiss also got a chapter in Lawrence Krauss's book The War On Science. This isn't the only similarity between Krauss and Shermer, both have also been accused of misconduct. 

In fact, Shermer sued biologist P. Z. Myers for discussing accusations of sexual misconduct against Shermer.

I'm not the only person who finds Shermer repulsive.

I've written quite a few times, over the years, on this blog, about Shermer's racism and general ghoulishness. And of course, he's a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, the gang of racist and reactionary dumdums, publicized by the odious Bari Weiss in her 2018 New York Times article, which is what kicked off this website.

And if you aren't convinced that Shermer is a political operative, behold - he is now working for the Trump administration.

Santa Barbara, California, June 15, 2026—Skeptic magazine and The Skeptics Society are pleased to announce that publisher and founder Dr. Michael Shermer has been appointed to the newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council, formed at the request of the White House and in coordination with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI, and other agencies.

Possibly the low point of this whole sorry podcast episode comes at minute 38, when Shermer both-sides the murder of Renee Good, neglecting to mention his "such actions have consequences" tweet.

Shermer is also part of the MAGA McCarthyite mob coming for Fauci.

And like the standard right-wing hypocrite, while promoting the campaign against Fauci on Twitter, Shermer piously says on the StarTalk podcast: "we have to get back to trusting experts, expertise does matter, even if they occasionally get it wrong, that's fine."

Jesus. Fucking. Kee-rist. I knew Shermer had no shame, but the more I learn about him, the more degraded he appears.

Posner was fired from the Daily Beast for plagiarism.

Shermer is the bottom of the barrel. Neil deGrasse Tyson should be ashamed of himself.

I went to the podcast website contact form to ask why they decided to promote Shermer.

If they respond I will post it here, but don't hold your breath. I believe they are cowards who will refuse to discuss Shermer's racism.

The gang at StarTalk apparently believe that - unlike with Renee Good - Shermer's actions shouldn't have any consequences.

Juneteenth thoughts on the failures of the degenerate racist Trump administration

One of the best American presidents is Barack Obama, and this fact is what gave us degenerate freak Donald Trump. Because Trump and his loyal supporters are racists, and the reality of a good American president who is also Black - actually only half Black but America still operates on the one-drop rule - is what drives their white supremacist humiliation and thus their political project of revenge

Republicans are opposed to giving Americans public-funded healthcare, and so Obamacare, an impressive accomplishment considering what Obama was up against, is what they consider an example of Obama's inferiority as a president. But even Republicans can't deny that Obama killed bin Laden. The day Obama got bin Laden, I knew for sure he was going to be re-elected.

The Trump administration's degeneracy and racism were on full display this past week with the moronic White House lawn cage-match. 

I don't know if anybody connected to this administration has ever seen the film Idiocracy but those of us who have seen that 20-year old movie understand the connection, including one of the film's writers:

Comparisons have been made between the film and Trump's first presidency.[50][51][52] An article for Collider pointed out the ways in which Trump's positions echoed the political decisions of the characters in the film in areas such as science, business, entertainment, environment, healthcare, law enforcement, and politics.[53] Internet memes have spawned comparisons to Trump and characters in the film.[54][55][56]
The comparisons resurfaced when Trump became president again in 2025,[57] and became referenced again in 2026.[58]

And the rotten racist cherry on top of the cyanide-laced sundae was the moment when one of the wrestlers, on winning his wallow in the mud, yelled "Michelle Obama is a man."

This was the same week that Trump made a deal with Iran - called a capitulation by many - that was entirely to the benefit of Iran. Trump had already sealed his standing as worst US president of all time when he used his mob of morons to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But this week has sealed his future standing as one of the most hated men in American history. 

Trump is physically unwell and in the early-middle stage of dementia. And the degenerate Republican Party will deny that, publicly, as long as it possibly can. The Republican Party needs to be punished, so hard, at the polls, if we can prevent them from destroying our democracy and ending elections entirely.

Yes, I know J. D. Vance is a soulless weasel, perfectly suited to the degeneracy of this administration. But if Trump dies while in office, I will still join the rest of the world - excluding the idiocracy, who will never stop worshipping Trump - in the massive celebration. 

Racists, led by Trump's FBI, come for the Southern Poverty Law Center

Pinker hates the SPLC because it 
refuses to accept race pseudoscience
------------------------------------------

I've noticed before that although Steven Pinker claims to dislike Trump, Trump has a habit of making Pinker's anti-woke dreams come true.

Pinker is among many, even on the right, who have doubted the Trump administration's reasons for going after the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Per the NYTimes:

The indictment appears to fit within the Trump administration’s pattern of using the Justice Department to punish its political adversaries. The S.P.L.C. has certainly been adversarial toward the president: In an article last year, Margaret Huang, who was then the president and chief executive of the group, wrote that with President Trump’s second election, hard-right extremism now had “an ally in the highest office in the nation.”

Nevertheless, Steven Pinker can't help but reveal how much he hates SPLC because it refuses to accept Pinker's brand of race pseudoscience.

Pinker doesn't name the "ordinary academic behavioral geneticists" (another name for sociobiologists) he claims have been unfairly targeted in Hate Watch, but I will make some guesses:

• Linda Gottfredson
• Henry Harpending
• Arthur Jensen
• Richard Lynn
• Charles Murray
• Jean-Phillipe Rushton

Every one of them a gutter racist.

Bari Weiss herself identified Pinker as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web and that network of grifters and clowns has hated the SPLC for a long time, as I have documented on this website. For example, in 2019 Quillette founder Claire Lehmann suggested Sam Harris sue SPLC for publishing an article that presented evidence for Harris' being a conduit to the far right.

The "Quillette Editorial Board" was railing against SPLC a few years ago, this time because of SPLC's support of transgender rights.

Other members of the IDW, or member-adjacent who have attacked SPLC include Michael Shermer, Gavin McInnes, Jerry Coyne,  and Christina Hoff Sommers.

The New Republic says:

The Trump administration had already taken steps to break ties with the SPLC even before the indictments, citing its research into far-right traditionalist Catholic groups. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on Twitter last year. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.” He did not specify which, if any, acts of violence the organization’s research had inspired.

That brings us back to Blanche’s claims that the organization was “paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” A cynical observer might suspect that the Trump Justice Department’s goal is to blame the work of white nationalist groups on the civil rights groups that oppose them. There is a long history of Klan denialism in this country that minimizes the actions of violent white supremacists, often by blaming their actions on their victims and opponents.

It is horrifying to see the Justice Department, whose original mission was to fight the Klan, engage in similar denialism. At least some conservative commentators appear to be buying it too. “Given the small and marginal nature of these groups, the obvious conclusion is that the SPLC found that demand for racism outstripped the supply, so it had to spread cash around to keep talking up these fringe groups,” McLaughlin wrote.

In reality, there has been an alarming resurgence in white-supremacist organizations since Trump first captured the presidency in 2016. White-nationalist rhetoric, which was once politically fatal ten years ago, is now regularly espoused by Trump administration officials and even by official government publications. Now the Justice Department is throwing its full weight behind a flimsy prosecution in an effort to destroy one of the Klan’s greatest opponents. There is no subtlety about what is happening here.

Lawyer Joyce Vance weighs in:

Unfortunately Vance's blog is on Substack, funded by techno-fascist Marc Andreessen.

Speaking of whom, Andreessen has been using Grok - aka "MechaHitler" - to promote hatred against SPLC, while at the same time spitting on the grave of Charles M. Shulz by using Charlie Brown as his X avatar.

And Elon Musk, MechaHitler's creator, is a long-time hater of the Southern Poverty Law Center, probably because the organization is pro-democracy and anti-racism, and Elon Musk, a stochastic terrorist, is the exact opposite.

Jamelle Bouie completely understands Elon Musk.

Speaking of techno-fascists, techno-racists and all around techno-nutjobs, there is an excellent New Republic article out now, How the Tech World Turned Evil, about these insanely wealthy freaks. And it does raise the question - has their insane wealth rendered them all insane?

Matt Walsh is a stooge of the fossil fuel industry and belongs in prison

I'm very pleased to have a reason to post a video from Atun-Shei Films, owned by Andrew Rakish. He is justly renowned for his series about the Civil War, "Checkmate Lincolnites." 

 

SUPPORT HIM HERE.

And then please enjoy this video, Matt Walsh's Fascist History of Slavery DEBUNKED. 

Call for submissions: Black Woman Genius

I almost never have any cross-over between this website and my theater-focused website NYCPlaywrights. But today I do. 

The theme of "Black Woman Genius" is perfect for this blog, which critiques race pseudoscience, a set of beliefs which invariably hold that women are less intelligent than men (because misogyny and racism go hand in hand) and that Black people are less intelligent than everyone else, but especially White men. 

And then there's the fact that Charlie Kirk was a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, another primary focus of this blog. 

I don't expect that many of the people who read this blog are playwrights - I tend to be a bit of a unicorn compared to people I know - those interested in politics are not interested in art and the art people are not interested in politics. But I never lose hope that there are other unicorns out there.

NYCPlaywrights seeks monologues.

THE DEADLINE IS SUNDAY NOVEMBER 30, 2025 at 11:59 PM.

The theme is "Black Woman Genius."

In November 2024, NYCPlaywrights began the "Resisting Fascism" project. The winning piece was a monologue, THE 92% by Bryan-Keyth Wilson that highlighted the fact that 92% of Black American women voters did not vote for Trump - and their intelligence and wisdom are increasingly clear.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was horrific, but that does not erase the fact that  he said hateful things like this:

“If we would have said three weeks ago [...] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they're comin' out and they're saying it for us! They're comin' out and they're saying, "I'm only here because of affirmative action.

Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

Kirk dropped out of community college to become a full-time political pundit, while the Black women he attacked graduated from Harvard and  Princeton and Yale.

And so this call for submissions seeks monologues on the theme of Black Woman Genius. 

SEMI-FINALIST SCRIPTS

NYCPlaywrights will select as semi-finalists as many of the scripts that we like and which meet the submission guidelines.

The semi-finalists will be listed on this blog and an excerpt from each monologue (if permission is granted by the playwright) will be displayed in a blog post, one per day, along with any website links or other contact information the author wishes to share. 

The semi-finalist script selections will be announced Sunday, January 4, 2026. 

THE WINNING MONOLOGUE

The winning monologue will be selected from the semi-finalist monologues. The winning monologue will be recorded with an actor and an excerpt of the recording will be posted on NYCPlaywrights.org and on the NYCPlaywrights YouTube channel (if permission is granted by the playwright) along with author and actor contact information, biographies, etc.

The author of the winning monologue will receive an award of $100. 

The award-winner will be announced Sunday, January 18, 2026. Excerpts from the semi-finalist scripts will begin posting that day one monologue per day, and the winning monologue will be posted after all the semi-finalist monologues have been posted.

💡 THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 💡

Failure to follow guidelines will result in your script being rejected.

As always, there is no fee for submissions. 

• The deadline is November 30, 2025 at 11:59 PM EST.

• All rights will remain with the playwright.

• Monologues must be no more than two pages long, using standard 12-point text size and line-spacing.

• Send only one monologue script per author to genius@nycplaywrights.org.

• The monologue script must be submitted by the author of the script, no agents or others may submit. 

• The monologue script submission should be sent by email, with the script itself as a file attached to the email.

• The file format of the monologue script should be .pdf because it will retain your original script formatting.

• Make sure you have your name and your email address on the script.

• Plays can be submitted by anybody, from anywhere in the world but must be primarily in English (a few non-English phrases are acceptable, but the phrases must include English translations in production notes or stage directions.)

• A play that has had a production is acceptable.

• A play that has been published is not acceptable.

• There will be no money awarded for selected scripts except for the winning monologue.

• NYCPlaywrights' decisions are final.

• Any questions email info@nycplaywrights.org

PLEASE NOTE: when you submit your play, you should get an automatic response that says:

***

Thank you for sending your monologue to the NYCPlaywrights “BLACK WOMAN GENIUS” project.

The semi-finalist script selections will be announced Sunday, January 4, 2026.

The award-winner will be announced Sunday, January 18, 2026.

Nancy at NYCPlaywrights

***

If you don't receive the automatic response, email us at info@nycplaywrights.org to check if we received your script.

Please note:

• The monologues must be dramatic - we love facts, but the monologue must not simply be a lecture on some aspect of history or current events. A dramatic monologue should have an emotional impact and often will tell a story. We'd like to see creativity and invention.

• The call for submissions is open to any person, anywhere in the world. 

• Although the theme is Black Woman Genius, the character speaking in the monologue does not necessarily have to be a Black woman.

• Although this is a serious subject, you do not have to be grim. We welcome humor and playfulness, and we are just as interested in hopeful monologues, and anticipating a brighter future as much as we are in the injustices of the past and present.

DATE RECAP

• November 30, 2025 - submission deadline
• January 4, 2026 - semi-finalists announced
• January 18, 2026 - the winning monologue will be announced and then each day an excerpt from one of the semi-finalist monologues will be posted. 

Some genius prompts:

• Ida B. Wells, investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement.
• Aretha Franklin, voted Rolling Stone's greatest singer of all time - "a work of genius" (#2 is Whitney Houston)
• Valerie Brown, the first Black woman animated character on American television, resident genius of  the 1970s cartoon "Josie and the Pussycats"
• Alena Analeigh Wicker, in 2021, became the youngest person to intern for NASA
• Simone Biles, athletic genius
• Wanda Sykes, stand-up comedian, actor and writer
• Angela Davis, philosopher and political activist
• Dr. Ayda Mensah, character performed by Noma Dumezweni, the brilliant team leader and "favorite human" of Murderbot, from the sci-fi books and AppleTV+ series.
• Lorraine Hansberry, the young, gifted and Black playwright
• Kamala Harris, America’s first woman, Black and South Asian vice president, became the Democratic presidential candidate half-way through the 2024 campaign when Biden bowed out. She drew record-breaking crowds during her campaign and accurately predicted that Trump would use the US military against US citizens.

Happy Juneteenth 2025!

Happy Juneteenth!

The New York Times ran an article about it for this year and one of the commenters on the article said what a lot of us are thinking:

It’s only a matter of time before Trump turns his vindictive attentions on the Blacks, as a slumlord’s son, and cancels this holiday and MLK’s birthday too.

This will be the first year that Trump will be president while Juneteenth is a national holiday. 

It's anybody's guess how he will celebrate it - hypocritically by pretending to care about Black people while leading a Republican Party allied to Curtis "Blacks were better under slavery" Yarvin, (good friend of Razib Khan) or horribly, by attacking the holiday and/or Black people.

UPDATE -well now we know - Trump went with "horribly."

Per the NYTimes:

Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the end of slavery in the United States, has been celebrated at the White House each June 19 since it was enshrined into law four years ago. But on Thursday, it went unmarked by the president — except for a post on social media in which he said he would get rid of some “non-working holidays.”
“Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year,” Mr. Trump said in mangled syntax, not mentioning Juneteenth by name nor acknowledging that Thursday was a federal holiday. “It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

What a miserable POS. 

Neil DeGrass Tyson makes a great point about "hypothetical Black racist anthropologists"

This has crossed my mind too - I'm glad Neil Degrass Tyson is saying it. Transcript below the video.

I once pointed out to professional racist Steve Sailer that there's a good possibility that his ancestors had sex with Neanderthals. He immediately blocked me.

NOTE: on the page I link to, I use the term "Northern Superiority Hypothesis" because I did not know at the time there was already an established name for it: "Cold Winters Hypothesis." I've learned so much from doing this blog. Charles Murray could be seen promoting that "theory" because Murray, a political scientist, is a leading light of race pseudoscience.

My ancestors are just as likely to have had sex with Neanderthals as Sailer's were, but that doesn't bother me. Except the possibility of a close relationship to a marketing guy who became famous by being horrible and wrong for his entire career.

What Tyson doesn't explicitly say - in this clip at least - is that once it was apparent that white people had Neanderthal DNA, scientists started to think maybe Neanderthals were smart. 

But smart or stupid, the fact is that Neanderthals are extinct and so from an hereditarian perspective, genetic losers in the survival of the fittest contest. Which means White people (and Asians) are related to an evolutionary dead end. Another inconvenient truth for racist hereditarians to ignore or explain away.

 

TRANSCRIPT

TYSON: Suppose anthropologists were Black racists instead of White racists. What would they write? Hypothetical Black racist anthropologists:

"Chimps and other apes grow hair all over their bodies. The hairiest people you've ever seen have been white people. Distinct from their face, hands and feet. Part the hair of most chimpanzees, the way they do to each other when checking for lice and their skin color is white, not any shade of black or brown. Ever hear of a lice outbreak among black children? White children are 30 times more susceptible to lice infestation than are black children. The parasite simply likes to lay eggs in the hair of chimpanzees and White people more than on the hair of Black people."

For most of the 20th century Neanderthals were portrayed as stupid and brutish. Turns out, beginning in the 1990s, genetic research revealed that Europeans are between 1 and 3% Neanderthal, Africans 0%. This goes on. This is what we were doing as humans to each other, not recognizing authentic diversity and who and what we are.

The first Memorial Day as told by historian David Blight

The repercussions of slavery and the Civil War and the anti-Black terrorism afterwards are still with us today. But let's take a moment to remember how the freed people honored the soldiers who fought and died for their freedom.

Welcome to Black History Month - before the Musk/Trump presidency ends it

I happened on this excellent video by Forbes Magazine, of all places, from 2022 about the history of the systemic theft of Black wealth, one of those essential pieces of historical knowledge that hereditarians like Razib Khan wish to erase.

Extremist kook Heather Mac Donald attacks historian David Blight

Heather Mac Donald, promoter of the racist, neo-Nazi "great replacement theory", is so extreme that she attacked the babbling billionaire patron saint of the far-right, Peter Thiel, simply because he is gay:

Ms. Mac Donald emailed some of the same people about news reports that a boyfriend of Mr. Thiel — nominally their ally in the rising “national conservatism” movement — had committed suicide after a confrontation with Mr. Thiel’s husband at a party. Calling the episode “a scandal,” she opined that gay men “are much more prone” to extramarital affairs “on the empirical basis of testosterone unchecked by female modesty.” She added mockingly that a friend had once tried to convince her “how wonderful Thiel’s ‘husband’ was.”

Mac Donald's career is so disreputable, (although I am sure well-remunerated), that her claim to fame these days is writing for the garbage City Journal, which published a defamatory, pseudonymous article attacking a guy who is owed money by racist kook Emil Kirkegaard. City Journal removed the article after it was sued by the target of its smear campaign, and eventually settled.

That article was almost certainly written on behalf of - or even by - Kirkegaard, who is at the center of an international racist/fascist network funded by plutocrats, a network that includes the Neo-Nazi magazine Aporia.

Mac Donald is such a racist she appeared on the Aporia podcast.

So it is no surprise that Mac Donald also showed up recently in the garbage, racist Quillette, attacking Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight for his NYTimes editorial.

Pinkerite is a big fan of Blight.

Mac Donald writes:

...it is delusional to call Trump’s voters “neofascists.” They do not seek the end of democracy, they just want their voice back...

Then at the end of her screed writes:

Blight’s op-ed epitomises the cocooned state of contemporary academia. Universities should face a choice: Forgo the billions of taxpayer dollars that underwrite their bloated tuitions, politicised bureaucracies, and one-sided intellectual orthodoxies or accept strict conditions of colourblindness, admissions transparency, and political neutrality in every aspect of their operations. The Yale faculty and its counterparts throughout the country will undoubtedly feel under siege from unsophisticated “culture warriors,” but it is those who believe in preserving Western culture who now need to stand up and take the universities back. 

As Mac Donald's ally Jay Greene of the Heritage Foundation explains:

Taxpayers should not pay for building the research infrastructure at wealthy universities that already have sufficient private funds for that purpose.

It's unlikely that preventing universities from receiving research money is a top priority for most Trump voters, and even Greene admits that wealthy universities can get along without those taxpayer dollars.

So simply cutting off tax money for research will not be enough to make Yale and esteemed scholars like David Blight bow down before Heather Mac Donald's white supremacist agenda. And I'm sure Mac Donald knows that.

The only way Mac Donald's dream of total domination of American universities can be achieved would be via the Trump administration. That is how the fascist portion of Trump's voting block would "get their voice back." By suppressing universities, Nazi-style. 

And Mac Donald will certainly not shed a single tear if that happens.

Steven Pinker thinks Mac Donald is brilliant. Because of course he does.

Good piece on the racism of traffic stops

A link in case you get that stupid "Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot" message. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ygQ2wEwJw

Welcome to Black History Month 2024

We know Black history is important because the race pseudoscience network, also known as hereditarians, is dedicated to erasing it, in order to claim that the Black American inability to thrive since slavery is due entirely to their bad genes.

Linda Gottfredson, the queen of hereditarianism, admitted this is exactly what hereditarians believe:

Rushton and Jensen's (2005) hereditarian hypothesis is that Black-White differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g) are "substantially" genetic in origin.[2]

Gregory Clark, a regular at International Society of Intelligence Research conferences made it explicit per the Economist review:

 (Clark's) work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

I called it the "American hereditarian assumption" in my Rational Wiki entry on E. O. Wilson. The AHA holds that:

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,[148] segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,[149] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

I first became aware of the hereditarian desire to erase history via Razib Khan in his Unz Review column:

So I have to take issue when The New York Times posts articles with headlines such as White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier. What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population.

If we "removed all the history" we would not be aware that the reason the people with partial African ancestry did not move into the general "white" population was because of the "one-drop rule."

It's significant Khan wrote this for Unz Review. Extremist Ron Unz is an important figure in the 21st century race pseudoscience network. He has not only platformed racists like Khan and Steve Sailer, he's outright given them money to promote race pseudoscience. On top of that, he was a student of E. O. Wilson, the grandfather of contemporary race pseudoscience.

Another important influence on 21st century hereditarianism is Arthur Jensen, who claimed that because Black children, growing up during the Jim Crow era did not improve test performances due to a handful of education remediation programs, it meant that Black Americans were essentially genetically, intellectually inferior.

Richard Haier, "mainstream" scientist and one of Jensen's most devoted disciples, promotes the hereditarian belief that intelligence = money. Haier implies that the reason Black Americans have less money is because they are less intelligent.

The denial of Black history is a pillar of hereditarianism in the United States and recently the race pseudoscience network, via Christopher Rufo, has made denial of Black history an important pillar of the Trump-era Republican Party.

David Blight on Trump and the Civil War and Lost Causes ~ excellent

 

Newsflash: Trump is an idiot

From the Washington Post:

“The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” Trump said. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”

Trump went on to describe the Civil War as “vicious” and suggested that “Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.”

In interviews, historians described Trump’s statements as inaccurate and disputed the notion that a negotiation or compromise could have been reached to halt the war over slavery, which led to the deaths of an estimated 620,000 people between 1861 and 1865, with some historians suggesting the toll was much higher.

Idiot.

Abraham Lincoln is spinning in his grave

Of course Lincoln has been spinning at least since Nixon adopted the Southern Strategy, but his gyrations got another boost recently from the idiot presidential candidate Nikki Haley:

In recent polls, Ms. Haley has surged into second place in New Hampshire, edging closer to striking distance of former President Donald J. Trump. To win the Granite State contest on Jan. 23, the first primary election of 2024, she will most likely need independent voters — and possibly Democrats who registered as independents. That is how Senator John McCain of Arizona upset George W. Bush in the state’s 2000 primary.

But the Civil War gaffe may have put a crimp in that strategy.

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she said Wednesday night, “the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

The answer echoed a century’s argument from segregationists that the Civil War was fundamentally about states’ rights and economics, not about ending slavery.

Late Wednesday night, even Mr. Biden rebuked the answer: “It was about slavery,” he wrote on social media.

We should stick a cable into Lincoln's grave and take advantage of the energy source.

And speaking of the shame of the Republican Party - it happened again! HAHAHAHAH!

Maine Joins Colorado in Finding Trump Ineligible for Primary Ballot

WHOOHOO!

In a written decision, Maine’s secretary of state said that Donald J. Trump did not qualify for the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Erasing Black history part one million: THE LEHMAN TRILOGY

I saw THE LEHMAN TRILOGY when it was on Broadway but left during the second intermission, disgusted that slavery was almost completely ignored as a factor in the creation of the Lehman brothers' wealth. 

The New York Review of Books published a piece on that topic, by Sarah Churchwell, which I found recently. The article points out that not only were the Lehmans slave-owners, they were staunch Confederates:

Henry Lehman died in 1855, but when the Civil War came, the two surviving brothers were staunchly on the side of the Confederacy. Mayer Lehman was a committed Southern Democrat, friendly with the governor of Alabama, and knew Jefferson Davis socially. In October 1861, Lehman Brothers, “Merchants of Montgomery,” advertised in local papers that they had stockpiled “almost every article of necessity” during the war. Promising to “be reasonable as to prices,” they added that “owing to the hardness of the times, they are compelled to demand the cash.” Cash, appropriately, was italicized. During the war, the firm successfully ran blockades while issuing the Confederacy with free credit; the Governor of Mississippi sent a public note of thanks in 1864 to “Messrs. Lehman & Brothers,” for accepting “Confederate Treasury notes,” while “charging nothing for their trouble,” to supply the army with cotton and wool for uniforms—despite the blockade that “prevented a larger supply.” In October 1865, “Lehman & Brothers, rich Jews, and merchants,” were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson for doing so, one of the raft of pardons Johnson issued to white Southerners after the war in the name of restoring the Union, but in fact easing the cost of defeat for the embittered white South (and contributing to his eventual impeachment).

I would say it's amazing that a play that deliberately omits the importance of the protagonists' slave-trading was produced on Broadway, but as the article points out, HAMILTON...

...does the same thing in its ambivalent dynamic of denouncing slavery’s iniquities while suggesting that its own protagonists were exempt from them. Anyone who didn’t know better would finish Hamilton innocent of the fact that George Washington owned slaves, much less that Alexander Hamilton himself bought and sold them on behalf of his wife’s family. Such stories try to have it both ways: for their heroes to be representative Americans, while erasing the vicious ways in which they truly were representative. The fact that everyone was doing it is not a defense, it merely measures the scale of the crime.

HAMILTON makes a point of noting that Hamilton was an immigrant. White immigrants gaining financially from the immiseration of Black people continues into the twenty-first century, although thankfully at a lesser scale than slavery. I wrote about that in my piece on Razib Khan's career a couple of years ago:

Only in America - someone born in Bangladesh moves to this country and makes himself a lucrative career dehumanizing a group of Americans whose roots in North America and the United States go back centuries. That's nothing against Bangladesh: European immigrants have been rising in the social pecking order on the backs of Black Americans for a long time, although admittedly, not all Europeans all at once. The Irish have about the palest skin around but it took them awhile, as most of them were impoverished and fleeing famine, to become respectable enough to be truly white. As this caricature from 1876 makes clear.

Razib Khan is a pioneer in that respect, pushing the boundaries so that all you have to do to get a leg up in the American nativist hierarchy these days is to portray Black Americans as subhuman and deny the existence of systemic racism. You don't even have to have European ethnicity anymore.

Khan's family must be so proud of him.

We can see this new system in action from the very beginning of Razib Khan's appalling career. The anti-immigration, white supremacist hate organization VDARE gave immigrant, non-white Razib Khan his start on the road to race pseudoscience fame and fortune.

Razib Khan may not have made a huge fortune like the Lehman brothers, but he has made good money for very little actual work, from wealthy racists like Ron Unz, due to his willingness to portray Black Americans as genetically inferior. Like Khan, thanks to anti-Black racism the Lehman Brothers achieved "white" status, noted by Churchwell:

...the stark racial hierarchy of the South, divided into its ruthless binary of “black” and “white,” made it easier for Jewish immigrants to assimilate as “white.”

And the belief that Black people are separate from humanity, a belief which started in the days of American slavery, continues as a "scientific" claim past the age of Jim Crow and, thanks to E. O. Wilson, J. P. Rushton, Charles Murray, Steve Sailer, Razib Khan and Steven Pinker, and many others, right into the present day.

And an important tactic in the quest to prove Black Americans are separate is to erase Black American history.

Historian David Blight vs. the GOP

I didn't see this back in January when it was new, but better late than never:

Rep. Scott Perry references Frederick Douglass from the House floor. Historian David Blight is having none of it.

Original tweets on Twitter/X

Another horrific mass murder committed by a white mob revealed - Atlanta 1906

In The New York Times:

On Sept. 22, 1906, hordes numbering in the thousands converged in downtown Atlanta, according to accounts compiled by historians and researchers, including from the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. The violence started with an attack on a Black bicycle messenger, and the mobs then went after anyone with dark skin, pulling people off streetcars and stabbing them and dragging them out of businesses and into the street.

The rampage continued for four days. Then, on the final night, a group of armed white men charged into Brownsville.

In the aftermath, homes and businesses had been gutted. Many residents fled. Atlanta was rattled and shrouded in shame as word of the massacre spread.

But soon, discussions of the violence were avoided and suppressed. For decades, there was no mention of it in the Atlanta public schools curriculum. There was limited scholarship surrounding what had been labeled until recently as a race riot.

The result was a void in a city that is typically anything but ignorant of its history, wrapping itself in pride as the home base for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Yet the massacre still silently had a role in shaping Atlanta’s evolution.

The highlighted paragraph is important because so often information about race riots - unhinged white mob mass murder - has been suppressed like that.

That is one reason why people like Charles Murray and E. O. Wilson believe or have believed in the American hereditarian assumption, which is: 

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,^[148]segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,^[149] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

They don't know, or they don't want to know the many many ways the white majority has tormented and thwarted Black people. And so in their view, all Black people problems are the result of Black people having bad genes. It's such transparent bullshit.

Black writers at the New York Times are not having it

Within a couple of days, two Black writers at the NYTimes have spoken out against the racist insanity of the Republican Party and conservatives in general in the United States.

Charles Blow on what that idiot DeSantis is up to:

To David Blight, the definitive biographer of Douglass, PragerU’s video is appalling and a joke, but in an interview with me, he recognized the danger that it could be compelling to a young student.

Is anyone, ultimately, served by this promoting of logical fallacy and bastardizing of history? As Blight explained it, the video “really does appeal to that version and vision of history that so many Americans still want. They want to be left feeling good at the end of the day. They don’t want to be threatened. They want to sleep at night. They want to know that the greatest of Black leaders really were on their side.”

Using Douglass in any way to soften slavery is a desecration. And, that is DeSantis’s educational legacy in the state.

Jamelle Bouie on the plutocrat support for Richard Hanania.

A whole coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires have lent their time and attention to Hanania, as well as elevated his work. Marc Andreessen, a powerful venture capitalist, appeared on his podcast. David Sacks, a close associate of Elon Musk, wrote a glowing endorsement of Hanania’s forthcoming book. So did Peter Thiel, the billionaire supporter of right-wing causes and organizations. “D.E.I. will never d-i-e from words alone,” wrote Thiel. “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate, also praised the book as a “devastating kill shot to the intellectual foundations of identity politics in America.”

Unfortunately he left Steven Pinker and Matt Yglesias off the list.

Thiel of course is the link between the race pseudoscience gang at Quillette, since Thiel "secretly" funded it, and Ron DeSantis, who Thiel is openly backing. 

Clearly the subject of this blog, "Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Science" is unfortunately more of the moment than ever, even more than when Andy Ngo was operating as Trump's lil ratfucker.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?

David Blight and descendants (called "ancestors" by the newscaster) of Frederick Douglass on WGN News.