More complaints about Bari Weiss as a tool of the Trump administration

Vanity Fair has an article about the groveling sycophancy of the Bari Weiss-lead CBS.

Weiss' efforts to turn CBS into Fox News are doomed to fail - there is already a Fox News, completely obedient to the Trump administration. Weiss' efforts will only destroy CBS and make everybody hate her - even more.

The article provides examples of Weiss shamelessly sucking up to the Trump administration:

On Monday night of Tony Dokoupil’s first week as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Bari Weiss walked into the newsroom and asked to see the script. This was unusual—the network chief does not typically edit scripts directly—but Weiss was the new boss. After some objections from the show’s producers, she was given access and proceeded to add a few lines to a January 5 segment on the US military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro. Weiss’s edits, according to a former CBS producer, sought to cast President Donald Trump’s operation as a cunning maneuver to box out China, Russia, and Iran.

“Of course she writes it in the wrong place,” recalls the producer. The text was added to the teleprompter twice, leaving her new star anchor flummoxed, stumbling over his words for several excruciating seconds. “First day, big problems here,” he told the millions of viewers who’d tuned in.

“What a disaster,” says one former CBS News anchor. “Honestly, I would’ve fucking killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”

*** 

Hegseth dedicated much of the interview to praising President Donald Trump’s “bold and audacious” leadership. Dokoupil hardly pressed the secretary, at one point noting Hegseth’s earlier boast that Maduro “effed around and found out.”
“I was horrified,” recalls one staffer. “Because it was such a softball interview.” But one person seemed to be happy with the display: Kim Harvey, the executive producer, who seemed intent on impressing Weiss. Weiss had personally booked Hegseth, and Dokoupil was delivering the right blend of major access and deferential tone that she wanted for the new show.

The sucking up is so insane - but Bari Weiss has no shame and no ethics - she does whatever she needs to do to court the powerful. That has been the secret to her success for her entire career, including having a "sugar daddy" in Supreme Court-corrupter Harlan Crow.

The night after the start of the war in Iran, Dokoupil interviewed Douglas Murray, a conservative commentator known for his vigorous defenses of Israel. “We’ve started to see more opinion commentators coming in to talk about what they think about what’s going on versus showing and telling from reporters,” the CBS journalist says. Meanwhile, the daily editorial calls now often feature analysis from Aaron MacLean, a former adviser to Senator Tom Cotton who recently joined CBS News as an analyst. In an October piece for The Free Press, he called for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Douglas Murray is a white supremacist, and named by Weiss herself as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web. The Current Affairs review  of one of his books discusses his awfulness:

...Murray’s work is worth examining not just because it is bad, but because, as earlier critics of his work have noted, he packages white supremacist and xenophobic ideas in a way that makes them more palatable to the mainstream. His work has been called “gentrified xenophobia” because it shows fear and disgust toward immigrants, but tries to make the position seem like common sense and fit for discussion in polite society. Indeed, The War on the West concludes with a full-throated defense of “white culture” and a case that non-white people are in various ways inferior. But Murray’s book is published by HarperCollins, not a neo-Nazi group, and he publishes in mainstream outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Spectator. Despite the laziness of his thinking, Murray insidiously spreads views that should be consigned to the fringes of public discourse.

Which makes him a perfect fit for the Bari Weiss network.

Alex Jones is a creature of Bari Weiss' Intellectual Dark Web

Bari Weiss homage to herself
---------------------------------

The article by Bari Weiss, published when she was still at the New York Times, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, was an introduction to the network of far-right grifters and clowns who have besieged us ever since - aided and abetted by mainstream media like the New York Times.

And Weiss herself has turned out to be the queen of the far-right clowns and grifters of the Intellectual Dark Web, ascending to lead CBS in order to aid and abet the evil that is the Trump administration.

One of the clowns mentioned in that foundational article by Weiss was Alex Jones:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

Pinker may be on the opposite end of the Intellectual Dark Web spectrum from Jones, but it's clear that Weiss considers them all part of the same spectrum.

The spectrum of people who lack a conscience, I would say.

But Jones is particularly evil, and second only to Trump in his ability to lead idiots, psychos and freaks into doing horrible things, most especially to attack the poor grieving parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook.

So it is a wonderful thing that the people who own The Onion have made the evil Jones its target, buying what was left of Jones' Info Wars after Jones was sued almost to oblivion by those same parents he attacked.

It's shocking still, that Jones was able to perpetrate his pure evil for as long as he did, and only defamation lawsuits were able to partially stop him - although it appears that Jones has started up again:

There is an excellent article in the Ringer called The Most Inspiring Media Story of the Year about the Onion take-over of the Jones empire of pure evil:

In December 2012, the 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza murdered 26 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.1 By the following April, Jones was spreading the narrative that this event—which remains the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history—was a hoax, perpetrated by the government to advance a gun-control agenda. Jones pushed the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory for years, milking it for attention and ratings. His listeners, hopped up on his claims that the shootings were staged by actors who were hired by the anti-gun lobby, tormented, stalked, and harassed the bereaved parents of the dead first graders. One conspiracy theorist claimed to have urinated on the grave of a 7-year-old murdered in the attack; parents received letters from people threatening to dig up their children’s coffins to prove they were empty. Meanwhile, Alex Jones funneled money to help fund January 6.

The Sandy Hook parents sued Jones, and finally, in 2022, a court ordered him to pay $1.4 billion in damages for defamation and for the infliction of emotional distress. In 2025, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, forcing the liquidation of Infowars and its assets to help cover Jones’s enormous debts.

And now, with the support of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has agreed to a deal to turn Infowars into a parody website, making fun of precisely the kind of spittle-flecked conspiracy bellowing, interspersed with ad reads for dubious muscle powders, that Jones used to amass his fortune. The deal still has to be approved by a Texas judge, which is admittedly a terrifying sentence; nevertheless, and I’m speaking objectively, this is clearly one of the greatest things that has ever happened in the history of the world. 

The world is finally pushing back against the evil that has been hatched by the Intellectual Dark Web, including the full spectrum, from Steven Pinker to Alex Jones.

Is Nellie Bowles the worst writer in America?

The answer will not surprise you.

More at Defector:

It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. "If you don’t read ⁦Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence," says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. Conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan says that Bowles's columns "have the exact spirit of the 70's writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny—and also deeply in the know. "

A couple of years ago her book was being trashed by enjoyers of good literature.

I will add that Bowles is also a terrible person, cheering on the stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok versus a lesbian bar. It's what you expect for someone who is a courtier of wealthy fascists. And because she and her regime censor wife control so much media, there will always be toadies lower on the food chain to praise Bowles.

Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web, Race Science and the Jeffrey Epstein files: "Steven Pinker is also a friend."

Steven Pinker praising "bad boy" Alan Dershowitz
in the October 2013 Harvard Law School video on
Youtube titled: "Celebrating Alan Dershowitz: teacher"
--------------------------------------------------------------

If you do a search in the Justice Department's Epstein files on the name "Pinker" you will see the name is mentioned 416 times. 

In a few cases the name is not connected to Steven Pinker - his sister Susan appears a few times and at least one other person named Pinker is mentioned, but the vast majority of mentions are Steven Pinker.

The most important information about Pinker's connection to Epstein has long been known:  Pinker helped Epstein's lawyer Alan Dershowitz defend Epstein in 2007.

The phrase "had sex with Dershowitz" appears 53 times in the Epstein files, as in:

• "This makes [redacted] the second woman to allege that she had sex with Dershowitz at the behest of Epstein..."

• The second time that I had sex with Dershowitz was at Epstein's house in Palm Beach. During this encounter, Dershowitz instructed me to both perform oral sex and have sexual intercourse.

• I had sexual intercourse with Dershowitz at least six times. The first time was when I was about 16, early on in my servitude to Epstein, and it continued until I was 19.

A lot of the documents in the Epstein files are duplicates or at least the information is duplicated across many documents. And to be fair, I only did a half-assed job of searching every file in which Pinker's name appears. So I could have missed something. But still, I did find some items of interest:

On March 28, 2012 Pinker received an email from Epstein's assistant:

Hello Steven. Jeffrey Epstein will be making a trip up to Harvard on Sunday April 15th. He is wondering if you might be around and available to meet with him?

To which Pinker responded:

Unfortunately I'm out of town that day, but if Jeffrey is around on Monday the 16th, I'll be back and would be delighted to meet with him.

This was five years after 2007, when Pinker had helped Dershowitz defend Epstein, and four years after Epstein pled guilty to state charges: one count of solicitating prostitution and one count of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18.

In his response to Jeffrey Epstein's request, on June 23, 2015, to give Pinker's email address to Stephen Hawking, infamous sex pest Lawrence Krauss (his full name appears 5,209 times in the Epstein files) wrote:

Thanks. I don't normally give out email addresses, even to friends... but I guess since Jeffrey flew stephen on a plane it is ok.

An article published in the NYTimes a couple of months ago discusses Krauss's and Robert Trivers's connections to Epstein. They sound like a delightful couple of guys:

In 2018, Mr. Epstein forwarded Mr. Krauss a list of attendees for the Women in the World Summit, a convention of female leaders and activists. Mr. Krauss responded, “Let’s do a men of the world conference,” and listed men accused of misconduct: Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken and Woody Allen.

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers is also mentioned in the new tranche of emails. In 2015, he told Reuters that Mr. Epstein had given him about $40,000 for his research. And he defended Mr. Epstein, saying girls mature sooner than they used to. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.

John Brockman, the guy who edited the Epstein-funded Edge, wrote to Epstein on June 2, 2011:

Strangely, the usual billionaire crowd is not showing up for this one, so I am running hard to revision it as a serious science event, inviting more third culture intellectuals and also the global press (NYTimes, WSJ, NYorker, Economist, etc.) Ultlimately it will be a much stronger and more important event, but it's not the one advertised to you. The list status is below. (Btw, I hope you will come (Martin and Pinker would be very happy if your showed up) but will understand if you want out.

I believe Martin refers to Harvard professor Martin Nowak.

Brockman sent this email to Epstein on May 3, 2015:

I saw your boys, the Dersh, and Larry Summers, at a dinner Pinker had for Rebecca's birthday. Poor guy, he's going out for his wife, and then, the day before the event, Ilarry, his father dies. And while his whole family was in Montreal and in mourning, he persevered with smile on his face and only his close friends knew.

I talked to the Dersh - what a story! David Boies!! What's going on? Didn't talk to Summers.

Summers is a well-known good buddy of Epstein. "the Dersh" is of course Alan Dershowitz.

On February 8, 2012, Epstein wrote to Brian Boyd:

i look forward to sponsoring your dream work . 75k. we will work out the details.. Steve Pinker is also a friend. ( since you seemed to hold him in high regard )

Boyd is a University of Auckland professor  who "met disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for breakfast, and later discussed the fee that Epstein offered to pay him to write about Nabokov’s novel Lolita."

Epstein acknowledges his "colorful past" in this letter to Bill Gates on December 4, 2013:

1. I remembered I did speak to your cfo in the past , but I believe he thought at that time that my colorful past could become an issue . the time is now ripe. 2. the event in April 4-6 0 will be with Pinker, venter . sr martin rees frank wilcek, . 6 or 7 nobel prize winners. lawrence krauss. richard dawkins...

Perhaps the most pathetic figure out of all the celebrity intellectuals collected by Epstein is Stephen M. Kosslyn, who wrote to Epstein on January 3, 2013:

Dear Jeffrey:

Thank you very much for your note, which means a lot to me. You are probably not aware of this, but I consider you one of my only real friends -- you don't want anything from me, don't try to push any agendas on me, and you care about me. The feeling is mutual.

Imagine having a rapist psychopath as one of your only real friends.

Of course you knew there would be a connection between Kosslyn and Pinker, evident in an article that is included in the Epstein files:

...Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker credits Kosslyn, his former graduate adviser, with breathing new life into another venerable institution. "The Harvard University psychology department had been a backwater, coasting on its reputation, before Steve reinvigorated it in the 1990s with an aggressive program of hiring young mid-career scientists, which vaulted the department into the front ranks," says Pinker, who joined the department in 2003. Pinker also cites Kosslyn's leadership through the financial crisis as evidence that he's the right peron to turn around the Stanford center: "I'd be surprised if Steve didn't make the center financially viable and intellectually vibrant within a few years:'

What damn fools these self-impressed academics are. 

I have not spent much time on this Pinkerite blog discussing Pinker's connection to Epstein, although most people are far more interested in that than in Pinker's 25 years - at least - of promoting hereditarianism and professional racists like Steve Sailer and Razib Khan, and writing for the racist publication Quillette and appearing on the Neo-Nazi podcast Aporia (owned by Emil Kirkegaard, a pedophilia apologist.)

But it's clear that Epstein pleading guilty to raping kids did not bother him at all. I noted in the last post that Pinker's racist ally Claire Lehmann has a history of not caring about pedophilia and is a huge fan of Camille "North American Man/Boy Love Association" Paglia.

Pinker is a fan of Paglia too, mentioning her in his Blank Slate as one of the good (i. e. misogynist) "feminists."

I think that Pinker, like many in his wealthy "celebrity intellectual" cohort, believes that moral and ethical concerns don't apply to him. That's why he screams "guilt by association" whenever anybody mentions the awful people he allies with.

So why wouldn't he be delighted to meet with Epstein in 2012? 

Why wouldn't Jeffrey Epstein consider him a friend?

UPDATE: 

Great article in The Verge by Elizabeth Lopatto that mentions the connection between Epstein and his friends and the Intellectual Dark Web:

Being able to see their emails makes something very clear: The “anti-woke” movement was not a genteel intellectual inquiry, made by disinterested parties who cared deeply about free speech. It is a social circle of powerful people who feel threatened by #MeToo. Reading through the emails, it’s possible to see that Epstein himself coordinated pushback against #MeToo. Looking back, it seems obvious that sinking #MeToo also led to where we are now: a place where laws simply don’t apply if you have enough money and power. The same players are involved. 

 

Recall the great many pronouncements about the limits and dangers of #MeToo — hilariously, Bari Weiss wrote an entire article in The New York Times about “iconoclastic” members of the “intellectual dark web” who “talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right.” Included in this group was a correspondent of Epstein’s: Sam Harris, to whom Epstein suggested he use “more charm and less argument” in debates. Several of the names mentioned in the article would later join Weiss’ abortive attempt at an “independent” school, the non-accredited University of Austin. Much like the group Weiss profiles itself, the University of Austin would become a tool of the far right.

UPDATE 2

Here's something I missed - Pinker was paid $10,000 for helping to defend Epstein.

Jamelle Bouie on Bari Weiss - she was hired to be a regime censor

Bouie details what an absolute grifting right-wing fraud Bari Weiss is. 

It was obvious to me how evil Bari Weiss is when she published her Intellectual Dark Web article, and was a major reason why I started this blog.

NYTimes columnist Bouie is a long-time critic of the race pseudoscience gang, even linking to my personal blog over ten years ago when racist Razib Khan was on the verge of being hired by the New York Times. Which is most likely why Khan hates Bouie so much.

Weiss of course was an employee of the New York Times, which helped boost her grifting right-wing reactionary career, leading to the destruction of CBS news. Unfortunately the only alternative to the New York Times is the even-worse, oligarch owned and controlled Washington Post. 

That's what happens to mainstream journalism in an age of oligarchs and fascism. 

How it started:

How it's going.

 

Moral of the story: grifters gonna grift.

Oh, so that's how Peter Thiel knows so much about the antichrist.

Happy Mamdani New Year!

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.

Steven Pinker & Jeffrey Epstein & Bari Weiss & Larry Summers & Trump

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:

• His "woke" enemies in Academia have been fired or intimidated into silence, thanks to the Trump administration

• Legislation targeting trans people is being promoted by the Trump administration

• Pinker is a long-time ally of Bari Weiss.

•  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.

And although Pinker has criticized Weiss' The Free Press, that doesn't stop him from being a contributor to that right-wing piece of crap.

Well, I've said it a million times - Pinker is a weasel. He only cares about promoting his career and promoting race pseudoscience, and if ethical consistency is an impediment to either, he will jettison ethical consistency. 

A striking aspect of Pinker's intellectual output, long noted by critics, is his habit of promoting two mutually exclusive propositions, or as critics have often called it "wanting to have things both ways."

It seems the only thing that has done any damage to his career at all is his association with Jeffrey Epstein.

Salon:

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.”

Pinker is friends with Trump's "confidant" Alan Dershowitz, lately seen encouraging Trump's dreams for a third term. Deshowitz was "part of the legal team that negotiated Epstein’s 2007 non-prosecution agreement in Florida and later represented him as allegations mounted in civil suits."

Pinker will be speaking to some of the wackiest crackpots of all, Randroids (aka "Objectivists") at their Summer Conference in 2026.

Back in 2013, on my personal blog, I did a deep dive into the career of Ayn Rand, with a focus on her magnum opus "Atlas Shrugged." I began with a pretty low opinion of Rand, but still, I was stunned by how bad "Atlas Shrugged' was on every level - literary, political, geographical and logical. And also by how much her "philosophy" was shaped by her mother giving away her favorite toy, a mechanical chicken, when she was five years old. 

Yes, in spite of the specter of Jeffrey Epstein, and Pinker's alleged dislike of Trump, Pinker and his allies are doing well during the second Trump administration.

Bari Weiss & CBS News suppress information about Trump torture camps

Good reactions from the Majority Report, who are long-time critics of Weiss.

   

 Meanwhile, on Bluesky, the spiked 60 Minutes report has been posted. 

Everybody hates Bari

 

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.

Wonkette:

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.”

Connie Chung could recently be seen ripping the right-wing owned, courtier-lead incarnation of CBS News a new one.

And it looks like Bari's university, the still-unaccredited University of Austin, dedicated to providing a safe space for right-wingers is headed south:

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.

Lonsdale is (surprise surprise!) a huge asshole.

The article also mentions Weiss' sugar daddy Harlan Crow, who did his best to corrupt the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile Bari's reactionary ghoul gang, The Free Press is still shitting itself over Mamdani.

Bari has been failing upwards her whole life, at this point she can either only go down - or get a job with the Trump administration. 

UPDATE December 22: Everybody hates Bari EVEN MORE

Apparently Weiss spiked a story that was bad for Trump:

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.

Even Glenn Greenwald

What is the connection between the CBS News-promoted company Herasight and Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard?

And did Kirkegaard talk about putting out a hit on his legal adversary?

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:

• Helmut Nyborg
• Rosalind Arden
• James Thomson
• Jonathan Anomaly

Arden could be seen promoting Herasight in ultra-racist Quillette. Jonathan Anomaly has, naturally written for Quillette.

Unfortunately Ahrens does not provide solid documentation for a connection between Kirkegaard and Herasight, but the fact that Ahrens was a close associate of Kirkegaard adds credence to the claim, on top of the already very strange fact that so many of the listed Herasight team members have connections to the far-right and race pseudoscience and even, like Jonathan Anomaly, to Kirkegaard himself. 

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.

On top of all that, Ahrens says that Kirkegaard talked about putting a hit out on his legal adversary Oliver Smith:

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.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if Kirkegaard said that. People who have devoted their lives to racism and far-right politics are horrible people by definition. I put nothing past them.

Instead of paying to have him killed, Kirkegaard was likely behind the smear campaign against Oliver Smith that included an article in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal attacking Smith as a former neo-Nazi (ironic isn't it?) 

Smith successfully sued City Journal into removing the article. 

That smear campaign against Smith was gleefully promoted by gutter racists Steven Pinker and Charles Murray.

I would love to have more information about any connections between Kirkegaard and Herasight or Bari Weiss and some of the people associated with Herasight.

I had to laugh though when Ahrens tried to defend Kirkegaard against a charge of antisemitism at minute 25:24 in the video, by saying:

"(Kirkegaard) told me that he likes Jews because they are smart and he thinks they are good with money."

Charles Murray prophesies the triumph of race pseudoscience again - and fails again

In a recent post on his Substack (ugh Substack) blog, psychologist Eric Turkheimer writes:

The third leg of the missing heritability problem is the mechanism gap. This refers to the fact that no matter what our estimate of heritability is, for human behavioral phenotypes we have essentially zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences. We can analyze variance, in Lewontin’s famous phrase, but we can’t analyze causes. All of the interesting within and between family work that Sasha (Gusev) catalogs is a step in the right direction, but the truth is there isn’t much progress toward actual mechanistic understanding. I personally doubt there ever will be (for complex human behavior), but that is another topic. The mechanism gap is crucial to my bet with Charles Murray, for example. Murray bet that by 2025 we would have IQ differences pretty much figured out, and that entails more than a reasonable estimate of a black-box heritability coefficient.

There are two especially interesting points, the first being Turkheimer's statement:

"...for human behavioral phenotypes we have essentially zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences." 

Based on what I have learned about the claims of hereditarians, especially through my series on Adam Rutherford, (now in a convenient single-page format) I agree with this, as I went to great lengths to explain in my Rutherford piece.

But I suspect Jerry Coyne respects Turkheimer, who refers to himself in the same post as an "anti-hereditarian," in a way he does not respect me. Coyne has mentioned Turkheimer a few times on his blog and always respectfully, in spite of admitting that Turkheimer is opposed to race pseudoscience. Although I think Coyne likes Turkheimer in part because of Turkheimer's support for the ghastly Emily Willoughby. Coyne is a big supporter of Willoughby, and I'm sure her being chummy with neo-Nazis bothers him no more than Steven Pinker's alliance with the neo-Nazi ghouls of Aporia bothers him. In spite of Coyne's performative anxiety over antisemitism.

Hell, I bet that if Turkheimer bought a pair of cowboy boots, Coyne would let him join the Boot Boys.

The second interesting point in the paragraph is that Turkheimer had a bet with Charles Murray with Murray supporting the claim that:

"...by 2025 we would have IQ differences pretty much figured out."

Charles Murray will never learn.

Back in the pre-Musk days of Twitter, Murray had been mocked for his frequent predictions (see image above), since the publication of the Bell Curve, that his race pseudoscience beliefs would be vindicated through science.

It's Murray's true belief in race pseudoscience that makes him such an important thought leader of hereditarianism, enough so that even Turkheimer takes him seriously enough to make bets with him, instead of endlessly mocking him for being a grotesque old delusional racist crank. 

Murray is a political scientist, not a life scientist, which is exactly why hereditarians have confidence in his views of genetics, along with professional racist Steve Sailer who holds a degree in marketing. 

Murray is as likely to stop believing in the eventual triumph of race pseudoscience as a devout Christian is likely to stop believing in the Second Coming. And these days, Murray is a devout believer of both sects.

Hereditarian Jonathan Haidt (a big fan of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence) could be seen making a similar prediction back in 2009. These
days Haidt is writing for Bari Weiss' The Free Press, because of course he would.

Meanwhile Murray can be seen on X/Twitter joining with far-right political operative (and apparent employee of Emil Kirkegaard) "Cremieux" being mad about the efforts to retract the garbage of white nationalist Richard Lynn, from whom neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard inherited the remaining Pioneer fund assets.

Murray thinks Lynn was right about everything. But data will never matter to a true prophet like Charles Murray.

Right-wing political operative "Cremieux" (Jordan Lasker) seen 
hypocritically whining about someone else having "political reasons."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the same Substack post, Turkheimer snipes at Jay Joseph:

And the truth is, there aren’t many people writing these days who are willing to adopt a strictly zero-genetic-influence position. Jay Joseph is pretty much the only one I can think of.

I doubt this is exactly Joseph's position, as indicated by his comment on a Steve Sailer tweet. As I said, Sailer, a guy with a degree in marketing, is an important figure in hereditarian science, no doubt why Steven Pinker promoted Sailer's career for a decade.

I assume Joseph will have a direct response to Turkheimer's claim eventually.

Although at least Turkheimer has gotten fed up with Sailer and his obsession with race.

Turkheimer discussed his bet with Murray in an article in the Atlantic called Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are, published in October:

Seven years ago, I took a bet from one of the most controversial figures in the scientific world. Charles Murray, the political scientist who—along with the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein—wrote The Bell Curve in 1994, wagered that one of his core ideas about genetics and intelligence would be proved true by 2025. He emailed me some time after I’d helped stoke an online furor about his insistent defense of The Bell Curve’s main points, which he’d recently reiterated on a popular podcast and which I, along with two other psychologists and intelligence researchers, had denounced in Vox. I took the bet because I was confident I would win.

Turkheimer then describes Murray's beliefs evident in "The Bell Curve," which is essentially the  hereditarian Bible:

In The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein argue that intelligence, as measured by an IQ score, is a crucial determinant of success in modern society. They also argue that a person’s intelligence is substantially determined by genetics, leading to the establishment of “cognitive elites” as intelligent people select one another for reproduction. 

Based on Adam Rutherford's paper, and its accompanying cartoon, Rutherford appears to be in complete agreement with Murray.

On Bluesky, I asked Rutherford about Turkheimer's characterization of the Bell Curve and its apparent agreement with Rutherford's paper, but I don't expect a response, since he's never been anything but dismissive or insulting towards me, but if he does respond I will report it here.

The fact that there is "zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences" does not stop hereditarians from starting businesses based on this zero knowledge. Turkheimer mentions one of them, Herasight, run by several believers in race pseudoscience:

Phenotypic parental IQ accounts for something like half the variance in offspring IQ. A properly controlled PGS accounts for 5% on a good day. (The embryo testing company Herasight has recently made big claims that they can do better, but I will wait until I see a peer-reviewed paper.) 

But promoting hereditarian claims as settled science has been around since at least when Pinker, Haidt and friends were promoting the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.

To be completely fair to Murray, there are still 31 days left for his prophesy to come true. But it's not looking good.

Now we are seven ~ happy birthday Pinkerite

In the past year the biggest stories were: Jesse Singal and Razib Khan teaming up to come after me on Bluesky; Steven Pinker going full neo-Nazi, my disappointment with Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics (now as one long article on Medium); and the crazy lawsuits and secret agreements with RationalWiki thanks to people associated with Emily Willoughby and Jonathan Kane.

Last year was the exposé of Emil Kirkegaard and his racist machinations from Hope not Hate, and since then one of Kirkegaard's co-conspirators, Erik Ahrens, has come over to the good guys' side. The exposé's undercover reporter published a book about the experience.

And both Bari "Jerry Maguire moment" Weiss and Peter "I know about the antichrist" Thiel have been discussed and mocked in the mainstream media.

Other topics:

• I discovered physicist Angela Collier - yay -
• - and Zohran Mamdani and enjoyed voting for him, knowing how much billionaires and courtiers of billionaires hate him. AND HE WON! LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!
• CBS goes full fascist and fires Stephen Colbert.
• Charlier Kirk taken down by our insane gun laws.
• I got a copy of the program for the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research although they did not post it on their website. 
• The "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is still an untested and far-fetched paper authored by racists, now 20 years old.
• This blog got a shout-out in Undark.
• The Murderbot TV series, based on the book series, is also gloriously woke.
• I discussed all the people who worked for Emil Kirkegaard's publications, people who knew they were neo-Nazi publications.
• I published an updated version of EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK.

The top most-visited individual posts this year:

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - #1 for the second year in a row. And well deserved - 1.43 K views.

• That gloriously woke Murderbot - first published over two years ago, but undoubtedly benefitting this year from the Apple TV+ show - 1K

• Three more race pseudoscience ghouls SLAPP Rational Wiki - 871

• The great New Yorker article with the bad title ~ "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" - 873 - only recently posted, but hugely popular, which I did not expect.

• The Maxine Margolis interview - 732

• EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK (updated) - 675 

• The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss - 644

• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 630

• New Evidence of E. O. Wilson’s Intimacy with Scientific Racism - 619

• What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1 - 582

Weasellitude on display

What's it going to take for journalists
(except the Guardian), to ask Pinker about 
his warm relations with neo-Nazis?
---------------------------------------------------

I missed this article until just the other day: How the world left Steven Pinker behind in the New Statesman. 

Pinker's predilections for having-it-both-ways and weasellitude were both on display in this interview with staff writer Finn McRedmond:

Though, for all the talk of counter-Enlightenment trends, Pinker is at pains to stress that the world isn’t backsliding into the dark ages; there has just been a light, directionally concerning, shift. “Despite the setbacks of the last 15 years, I don’t think the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever. Liberalism is on a back heel, but there are still liberals.” Who are the liberals that might be able to wrest the West back from the iconoclastic populists Pinker holds in such deep contempt? “It’s probably not Gavin Newsom, it’s probably not Pete Buttigieg,” he says matter-of-factly. And then, as I have
come to expect of him at this point, neglects to provide a positive answer. 

When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Stephen Pinker and his wife, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, filmed themselves dancing in their home. But, the respite from this man – one who represents the inverse of everything Pinker believes in – was brief. The second election of Trump in 2024 “flabbergasted” Pinker. He cites Trump’s first election, in 2016, as the moment that events seemed to spin out of coherence. Not even Pinker’s voluminous talent and erudition – nor that of his fellow liberal peers – could reckon with these cosmic forces. I found Pinker someone reluctant to give a straight answer on small questions; no matter all that data, fame and institutional support. Perhaps we should not be surprised that he doesn’t have any answer to the big ones. 

That's Pinker, tout craché. Dismissive commentary but no straight answers. But of course he outsources answers to his race pseudoscience friends and has done so for the past quarter-century.

And since this is not the Guardian, Pinker is not asked about his connection to those friends even as he becomes more obvious about his alliances, even with actual neo-Nazis. 

What is wrong with journalism? Just in terms of interest, it would have jazzed up the article considerably to ask about Pinker's long-time support for racists. 

Instead the interview seesaws back and forth between passive-aggressive complimentary and then snippy observations about Pinker. His blue eyes don't get a mention this time, but his hair does.

Pinker is described as a liberal, but the interviewer doesn't mention that in spite of Pinker's dislike of Trump, in many ways the second Trump presidency is a dream come true for Pinker and his allies - from anti-trans hostility to anti-diversity, equity and inclusion.

But posing as a liberal while promoting hideous right-wing goals is what makes Pinker so valuable to the Intellectual Dark Web project of "moving the Overton window."

I did laugh aloud at this part:

...A cynic would call him pious. Instead, what I found in the man – as we spoke in a windowless room in Fitzrovia – was someone driven to distraction by the liquid rationality coursing through his veins; trading a faith in the divine for the higher, matter-of-fact power of data; permanently agog at the sea of unreasonable maniacs around him. If you were to burst him with a pin, I suspect he might explode into a shower of Excel spreadsheets.

Meanwhile it seems that Pinker has been a big influence over Anna Krylov. She used to promote women in STEM, a position I found puzzling considering her alliance with the IDW gang from Bari Weiss to Quillette to Pinker.

It looks like they've gotten her to come around to their way of thinking. P Z.  Myers has a great response:

Krylov has a prestigious position at USC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also a crank. She wrote an atrocious article equating soap companies using inclusive language in their advertising to Soviet-style purging of history, which was much loved by the right-wing opponents of DEI. Her latest criticism is even more absurd and contrived.

Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California (USC), said she had been invited to act as a peer-reviewer — a scientist asked to provide independent scrutiny — of a study being published in the journal Nature Communications.

In an open letter to bosses at Springer Nature, she said the topic was “within my field of expertise” and that she would “normally welcome the opportunity”, but asked if she had been contacted “because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs”.

Wait, what? She’s highly qualified, she has expertise in the field, and her response to a routine request to review a paper is to ask if it’s because she has ovaries? The request says nothing about her sex, but is all about her skills, and she is reaching ridiculously hard to take offense. I would suggest that maybe her imposter syndrome has grown massive and malignant, but I think it more likely that she has found an angle that gets her a lot of attention. Either way, it’s a ridiculous complaint. 

 

And look — she gets support from Richard Dawkins!

Reposting Krylov’s letter on X, Dawkins said: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journals”, but claimed it was now among many who placed emphasis on the background of authors rather than only on “the excellence … of their science”.

Nature is still among the world’s most prestigious science journals, and he has not shown in this complaint that the excellence of their science has diminished. 

 

Unless… 

 

Maybe he thinks Anna Krylov is such a poor scientist that he’s dismayed that she was asked to review a paper? That asking Anna Krylov to review a paper is evidence that Nature is scraping the bottom of the barrel nowadays? This could be a devious insult, you know.

Sure, Krylov is a crank - and probably a grifter taking money from some organization controlled by Peter "and I know about the antichrist" Thiel -  but at least she is no longer in conflict with herself: I assume she's given up on her previous women in STEM efforts now that she's joined the far-right push to force women out of public life so they'll stay home and have lots of White babies.

The reactionary ghouls at X have recently been all a-twitter over a stupid women-are-losers piece by Helen Andrews that even annoyed some conservatives. 

But I don't know what the problem is. All these right-wing women with professional careers who think women are polluting institutions with their feminizing girl germs, like Steven Pinker's buddy Cory Clark - why don't they all go ahead and quit already and become tradwives? Who is preventing them? 

How about some quiet quitting?