The Free Press - the right-wing racist Bari Weiss grift

Bari Weiss calling her media outlet "The Free Press" is about as accurate as Donald Trump calling his media outlet "Truth Social." But many people are stupid and willing believers of right-wing grifters and fascist traitors.

I recently predicted in a comment on Threads that NPR's former editor Uri Berliner will soon reappear as either an employee of Weiss; running a right-wing plutocrat-funded Substack; or as a member of a right-wing think tank. So far my comment has received 223 likes. People are finally beginning to recognize the right-wing grift that was practiced by Weiss herself.

Weiss threw a fit and quit the New York Times, claiming it was too liberal and Uri Berliner quit NPR for the same reason. Weiss quit not long after she had a chance to promote her good buddies as "The Intellectual Dark Web." 

In 2020 I discovered Quillette's former editor Toby Young (recently seen on the racist Substack Aporia) complaining that the big article Weiss was planning about him and other far-right racists - no doubt another excuse to complain about liberals and the left - was not going to be published since Weiss had quit.

I suspect that the NYTimes refused to run a second "Glory of the IDW & friends" article and that is one of the reasons Weiss quit. 

Weiss has done very well for herself since then - financially, if not reputationally - by making friends with a bunch of right-wing activist billionaires, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and most notoriously, that corrupter of Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court, Harlan Crow, Weiss's "Sugar Daddy." 

"The Free Press" has a soft spot for filthy, treasonous, would-be dictator Trump, as discussed in this New York Magazine article.

Berliner hasn't yet revealed his new career as a right-wing grifter, but I'm keeping a look out. I took a look at "The Free Press" writers list to see if he is there yet, but did not see him. But as you might have guessed, the list is full of right-wing ghouls, grifters and racists, many of whom have written for far-right racist Quillette:

• Francesca Block - right-winger who claims on Twitter that her working for right-wing propaganda outlet "The Free Press" means journalism is not dead. I assume she was hired on the basis of her work for the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, writing articles like "Meet the American millionaire Marxists funding anti-Israel rallies."

• Nellie Bowles - wife of Bari Weiss. She's a big fan of stochastic terrorism-promoting psychopathic LibsofTikTok. 

• Katherine Boyle is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is a leader of techno-fascism. So I should add Marc Andreessen to the list of Bari Weiss's right-wing billionaire pals.

• Margi Conklin - hyper-natalist Nazi-sympathizer Elon Musk better not find out about Conklin's refusal to have children. Conklin is managing editor of "The Free Press" and doesn't appear to have written anything for it yet. Unfortunately for Margi, her husband Christopher Yates has nice things to say about NPR - the current target of the Uri Berliner-lead attempt to defund public radio. Margi's bosses better not find out!

• Matti Friedman - appears to write exclusively about Israel, and was accused by the Associated Press of lying when Friedman claimed the AP was biased against Israel. Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him for this round of Israel-Gaza hostilities. Attacking critics of Israel is Bari Weiss's oldest and possibly favorite public cause.

• Martin Gurri - right-wing ghoul, works for the Koch-funded and -controlled think tank the Mercatus Center, author at the disgraceful, sued-for-libel City Journal and denier of systemic racism (of course.)

• Rob Henderson - right-wing racist ghoul who loves Peter Thiel oh so much, has written for Quillette. Pals around with neo-Nazi Richard Hanania.

• Coleman Hughes - a reliable source of attacks on all Black-related issues such as reparations and the 1619 Project and is a defender of race pseudoscience in Quillette. 

• Eli Lake - claims to be anti-Trump but often defends Trump and others on the far right. Promotes Quillette on Twitter.

• Walter Kirn - business partner of disgraced journalist  and infamous misogynist Matt Taibbi.

• Douglas Murray - British white supremacist, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. I've mentioned him quite a few times on this blog. Current Affairs writes: "...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." Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him. Murray has written for Quillette, of course.

• Joe Nocera - token liberal, but maybe he's becoming right-wing now for that easy post-retirement grifter income.

• Vinay Prasad - anti-vax crackpot - "In October 2021, Prasad prompted social media controversy when he published a blog post comparing the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response to the beginnings of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich."

• Olivia Reingold - the Trump-loving Republican Security Council are big fans. Reingold can be seen on Twitter promoting the "Twitter files" lies and defending hiring far-right racist piece of shit political hack Ben Shapiro a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Reingold claimed hiring Shapiro would "legitimize" Politico. To understand what a far-right ghoul Reingold is, it helps to learn more about Shapiro at the always excellent Some More News. 

• Peter Savodnik has written for racist Quillette, taking up the standard right-wing racist political line that systemic racism must not really exist because "we certainly can’t experience systemic racism, not in the way that “experience” is understood by philosophers or, for that matter, judges." I have no doubt that Savodnik is, like Quillette and its founding editor Claire Lehmann, an "hereditarian."

• Abigail Shrier - right-wing ultra-ghoulish trans-phobic political operative. So perfect for the Bari Weiss grift. Quillette author, naturally.

• Rupa Subramanya - right-wing Canadian idiot, big fan of Julian Assange and Elon Musk, "slave to (her) cat." Hates Justin Trudeau, of course.

• Suzy Weiss - sister of Bari Weiss, so unsurprisingly a right-wing grifter, enjoying that sweet nepotism.

• Oliver Wiseman - defender of that weasel Steven Pinker for the far-right Libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education. That says it all.

• Leighton Woodhouse - right-wing ally of far-right nuclear power shill and climate change denier Michael Shellenberger

• Emily Yoffe - odious right-wing grifter who has written for the equally odious "Persuasion" and  prefers to blame drunken women for rape.

So there you have it - all the far-right favorites: racism, neo-Nazism, Trumpism, transphobia, anti-vax crackpottery, misogyny, climate change-denialism, stochastic terrorism and worship of far-right activist billionaire sugar daddies. 

What a toxic brew.

Some More News: O Their Prophetic Souls

 Well I decided to take a break from posting videos from The Majority Report and instead post another video from Some More News. I love these guys and you should too and you should give them money every month like I do. YouTube shows like this are like the Daily Show in the early 2000s.

Topics for this episode include The Twitter Files; Elon Musk; Repealing Roe V. Wade; the Metaverse failure; the Fake Shoplifting Crisis - Candace Owen gets a shout-out for her Nazi shit; Havana Syndrome is not a thing; Grifters - includes Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin; and Tucker Carlson.

SOME MORE NEWS vs. the IDW

I've mentioned "Some More News" recently, but I want to praise this almost-perfect video from them, explaining the Intellectual Dark Web's attempts to deny the importance of history and the existence of systemic racism. 

Like Steven Pinker, who as I pointed out the other day, does not believe that poverty or racism has any influence on crime - or the Black crime rates that Pinker said, back in 2018, were being hidden by the media.

Unfortunately the video doesn't mention Pinker - it would be full-on perfect if it did - which is a reason why Pinker is so much more insidious than the rest. 

Nobody else associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, as far as I am aware, was invited to the United Nations to express opinions. Steven Pinker was. 

And yet he holds the same beliefs as Sam Harris and others associated with the IDW and race pseudoscience. He's careful not to directly state those beliefs, especially since the brouhaha in 2018, but it's easy enough to infer his beliefs by who he supports and his statement that:

The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism... 

I really wish I had been aware of Some More News long ago, I would have loved to post this video when it was first released two years ago. When the argument against the race beliefs of the IDW is stated so clearly you really have to wonder - is the IDW simply evil - or are they basically too stupid to grasp the complexity of socio-cultural-historical interactions, but have been socially promoted waaaay above their intellectual abilities.

We know how they have been promoted - racist plutocrats like Charles Koch and Peter Thiel have been funding them. Pinker was funded by Koch in 2018 when he made those controversial statements.

The best part of this video might be the analogy at minute 56:25, showing a Mario Cart race with Mario representing white people and Luigi representing Black people. It's so good but basic, even a sociobiologist might be able to understand it.

The "cockroach" strikes back at the shamelessness of Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer and friends

When members of the IDW aren't patting themselves
on the back for their civility, they are insulting people.

Phil Torres made some very well-justified criticisms of the work of Steven Pinker, noting Pinker misrepresented the work of others, and as a result, Pinker and his buddies Jerry Coyne and Michael Shermer insulted him for it and then claimed misrepresentation was no big deal.

This all went down back in January. I wrote at the time:

Even though I've recognized for many years that Steven Pinker is a weasel, I was astounded. "so what?" I was going to write my own response but found this piece by Olle Häggström via Phil Torres' Twitter feed. I admit I was relieved to find it. Pinker's dismissal of Torres' valid point was so shameless I wondered if I misunderstood somehow.
But no, Pinker really is that brazen.

And now Torres has a piece in Salon telling the story himself: Steven Pinker, Sam Harris and the epidemic of annoying white male intellectuals

Torres writes:

Shermer’s (cockroach) tweet is notable for a couple of reasons. First, not only does it contain a personal attack, but the personal attack is overtly uncivil. That’s a bit humorous given that Shermer, as well as Pinker, are famous for accusing progressives, especially those who care about women and people of color, of “incivility.” For example, in May of this year, Pinker tweeted:

Are you concerned about the growing illiberalism, incivility, intellectual conformity, and repression of debate in today's universities? Join us at the meeting of the society set up to encourage viewpoint diversity and constructive debate on campuses. I’ll be giving the keynote.

But Pinker did nothing to call out Shermer for his patently crude, puerile behavior, which has also included calling people he disagrees with (seriously) “namby-pamby bedwetters” and (seriously) “losers.”

But of course Steven Pinker is a hypocrite, supporting the careers of actual right-wing operatives (and race science promoters) Steve Sailer and Razib Khan while claiming that Stephen Jay Gould's scientific opinions about sociobiology and evolutionary psychology should be discounted because Gould held left-wing opinions.

Meanwhile Shermer published an article recently in his Skeptic magazine Shedding Light on the Intellectual Dark Web which of course Steven Pinker promoted in a tweet.

It should be no surprise to anybody who has tracked the carelessness of the IDW, Shermer gets things wrong. He states:

The Guardian sardonically pronounced (in its headline) the IDW to be the “supposed thinking wing of the alt-right,” featuring a photograph of Alex Jones, mentioned by absolutely no one as being part of the IDW.4

Yet Shermer makes clear in the same article, before this passage that he is aware of the importance of Bari Weiss's naming of IDW individuals in her article:

In the May 8, 2018 issue of The New York Times the editor and writer Bari Weiss introduced the world to the “Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” which she described as “an alliance of heretics” who are “making an end run around the mainstream conversation.”1 These heretics, she noted, are “iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities” who were “purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought.” In response, their sweep around what Weiss described as “legacy media” included podcasting, blogs, social media, YouTube channels, and public speaking. 

Included in this initial cohort were the mathematician Eric Weinstein (who coined the IDW label), the podcaster Joe Rogan, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the talk show host Dave Rubin, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, the psychologist Jordan Peterson, the conservative commentators and authors Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray, the anti-extremist activist Maajid Nawaz, the feminist activists and authors Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers, the magazine publisher Claire Lehmann, the neuroscientist and sex researcher Debra Soh, and I (Michael Shermer). As the conversation continued past Weiss’ New York Times feature, other intellectuals were added to the assemblage, including Steven Pinker...

The Weiss article does mention all those names that Shermer does, and which I bolded. But the article also explicitly mentions Pinker, in spite of Shermer's incorrect claim that Pinker was added to the IDW after the Weiss article. Weiss also mentions Charlie Kirk, Abby Martin, Candace Owens, Charles Murray and Kanye West.

Now is Shermer just careless or did he deliberately leave Pinker out because Pinker is counted as IDW in the exact same passage as Alex Jones? (My bold emphases):

“There are a few people in this network who have gone without saying anything critical about Trump, a person who has assaulted truth more than anyone in human history,” Mr. (Sam) Harris said. “If you care about the truth, that is quite strange.” 

Emphasis is one problem. Associating with genuinely bad people is another.
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).

It is crystal clear that Weiss is including Molyneux, Yiannopoulos, Cernovich, Jones and Steven Pinker under the umbrella of "Intellectual Dark Web." She may be using Pinker as the respectable exemplar in contrast to the motley crew - but she is indisputably including all of them as members of the IDW.

Shermer co-authored the piece with Anondah Saide and Kevin McCaffree. Maybe each thought one of the other two was going to handle the fact checking.

As if that isn't bad enough, the Shermer article counts vicious, toxic, professional misogynist Christina Hoff Sommers as a "feminist activist."

Christina Hoff Sommers, a member of those champions of civility the IDW,
and a "feminist activist" per Shermer, joins with professional misogynist
and NAMBLA fan Camille Paglia to insult and dehumanize Lena Dunham

Even worse the article fails to mention that what ties this allegedly "diverse" group together is their agreement with hereditarianism, specifically evolutionary psychology and race science.

It's just like Phil "the cockroach" Torres writes in his latest Salon piece:

...the entire IDW movement is annoying. It’s really, really annoying — its champions misrepresent positions without their (mostly white male) audience knowing, and then proceed to “embarrass” the opposition. They embrace unsupported claims when it suits their narrative. They facilely dismiss good critiques as “hit jobs” and level ad hominem attacks to undercut criticism. And they refuse — they will always refuse, it’s what overconfident white men do — to admit making mistakes when they’re obviously wrong. I am annoyed, like Robinson, mostly because I expected so much better from the most popular “intellectuals” of our time.

Charles Koch is still alive

I first got the news that David Koch died via the Twitter account of Jane Mayer, author of many New Yorker articles about the Kochs.

But as the NYTimes obituary makes clear, the most pernicious of the Koch brothers is Charles.

And of course the Kochs have heirs.

“David is more of a philanthropist in the classic sense of the word,” Mr. Schulman, the Koch biographer, said in a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR in 2014. “He funds medical research, science; he funds the arts. Charles’ lifelong mission has been to change the political culture and mainstream libertarian ideas.”

So the various members of the IDW who have taken Koch money including Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Charles Murray, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ben Shapiro and Steven Pinker don't have to worry.

Mayer recently reviewed a book which makes it clear that should humanity survive the effects of climate change, the Kochs, and especially Charles, will be known as people who did the most harm, personally, to the planet Earth.

From Mayer's review:

Because the Kochs opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump, in 2016, many have assumed that they are antagonistic to the Trump Administration. To the contrary, Leonard writes, with the help of allies such as Vice-President Mike Pence, “the politics that the Kochs stoked in 2010 became the policies that Trump enacted in 2017.” Whether announcing his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, placing shills from the oil and coal industries at the head of federal energy and environmental departments, or slashing taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy, Trump has delivered for the Kochs. “Kochland” quotes Charles Koch telling his allied political donors, in 2018, “We’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the previous fifty.”

Rebecca Watson v the IDW

Watson v Candace Owens

Watson criticizes Ben Shapiro

In her most recent video Watson talks about a sexual harassment and career study and reveals that eight years after the horrific, Richard Dawkins-created "Elevatorgate" she is still getting attacked by men.

Elevatorgate was a sort of precursor to Gamergate, another misogyny-fueled attack mob phenomenon, which was celebrated by Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers.

Recently I mentioned that Bret Weinstein was telling his Twitter followers that Rebecca Lewis, author of Alternative Influence Broadcasting the Reactionary Right was just trying to get power by claiming that she was getting threats on Twitter.

Like it's so unbelievable that a woman would actually get threats on social media.

One of the problems with the response to Dawkins over his part in Elevatorgate, the reason he got so little pressure to take responsibility for what he had wrought, was that it took a long time for people to believe it was really Richard Dawkins who wrote the "Dear Muslima" letter.

It used to be so hard to believe that science celebrity men could be assholes, but now we know better - they can be and they often are.

Steven Pinker: The World's Most Annoying Man

I generally like the work of Nathan J. Robinson, the author of the article in Current Affairs, The World's Most Annoying Man, although I was disappointed I didn't learn anything new about Pinker. I already knew he is full of himself, is fairly empathy-deficient, is a phony liberal and yes, supremely annoying.

The fact that I have devoted a blog to critiquing Pinker, albeit focusing on his support for race science, might account for my already knowing much of what Robinson reports.

However, Robinson does get credit for making me laugh out loud at the end of this passage:

Now, for me, it is trivializing, even downright insouciant, to talk about the depth of anguish and despair that millions of people endure daily in this country as a “modicum of anxiety.” And it is dismissing the urgency of the problem to say it might just be a price we have to pay. 40,000 people, measured in the official American mass death unit, is over 13 annual 9/11s. It does not matter if this was worse long ago. It doesn’t follow that it’s not a “crisis,” merely that the crisis is a recurring one and we have never done what we ought to do in order to try to fix it. It is trivially true that “not every problem” is a “crisis.” But surely, if you do not see 40,000 people taking their lives each year as urgent, you are the most insouciant of insouciant assholes.

Robinson wrote pieces about Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro too. I'd love it if Robinson wrote a piece about each member of the IDW.

Sam Seder v IDW

Sam Seder's channel is really good at keeping tabs on the more outrageous and media-centric members of the Intellectual Dark Web:

• Mike Cernovich
• Alex Jones
• Charlie Kirk
• Candace Owens
• Jordan Peterson
• Joe Rogan
• Ben Shapiro
• Milo Yiannopoulos

and of course Dave Rubin who has a feud going on with Seder.

Ben Shapiro demonstrates the utter clownishness at the heart of the IDW

Daily Beast: Ben Shapiro Storms Out of BBC Interview: ‘I’m Popular and No One’s Ever Heard of You’

Mass-murderer Bissonnette's favorite IDWs

As Sam Seder discusses recently, the Montreal mosque mass-murderer Alexandre Bissonnette was a huge fan of several members of the Intellectual Dark web: Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux and Ben Shapiro.

The IDW fault-line - religion

The Washington Post review of Ben Shapiro's new book The Right Side of History says Shapiro of course goes after the Great Satan of the Intellectual Dark Web - unruly college students:

He credits certain thinkers who get the Athens-Jerusalem balance right and help further Western greatness, among them, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Edmund Burke and, implicitly, himself. And he indicts those who got it wrong for contributing to history’s failures, the French Revolution and Nazism — and to the campus left, whose opposition to Shapiro’s views has helped propel his fame.

Enlightenment revivalists such as Pinker and Harris, both of whom reject a religious moral framework in favor of a reasoned one, are wasting precious time they could be investing in the two-pillared program for a return to meaning, Shapiro contends.

As long as they focus on college students and Islam and race science they'll be fine but the atheist wing of the IDW is extremely devoted to their anti-religion positions.

Good article: "The 'Intellectual Dark Web' is Nothing New"

I wasn't aware of the LA Review of Books article entitled The "Intellectual Dark Web" is Nothing New by Jacob Hamburger until recently. I'm sorry it took so long to find it, it has a lot of good stuff.

Favorite bits:

...What exactly are the ideas that have made people like Weinstein, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Christina Hoff Sommers into what a recent New York Times profile described as intellectual “renegades”? According to the Times writer Bari Weiss, most emphasize the biological differences between men and women, a feeling that free speech is “under siege,” and a fear that “identity politics” is a threat to the United States’s social fabric. 

A listener of Harris’s podcast might add to the list a vociferous defense of the validity of genetic explanations for IQ differences between racial groups, a follower of Peterson’s videos might insist on the nefarious influence of “postmodern neo-Marxism” on college campuses, and a fan of Ben Shapiro might contribute a skepticism toward the reality of “transgenderism..."

Right on the money. These two paragraphs list several of Quillette's political positions: pro-race science, pro-evolutionary psychology, anti-trans, anti-left.

Though opposed to political “tribalism,” as one writer put it in the online magazine Quillette — the closest thing there is to a party organ of the dark web — the movement does tend to think of liberals, progressives, and leftists as its primary adversaries. But not only do these thinkers oppose themself to “the left,” broadly speaking, they recycle the neoconservative indictment of “postmodernism” in order to explain why this left has been taken in by political correctness.

Check check - the pretense that Quillette is centrist while it is obsessed with attacking the left-of-center.

I was surprised though, that Hamburger doesn't seem to be aware that in addition to Decter and Himmelfarb, Sommers herself is associated with the AEI.

...Despite some of the novelty attributed to the dark web intellectuals, perhaps the signs of their belonging to the right have always been there. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show and Harris’s podcast, for example, have featured a number of mainstays of the old PC debates, including D’Souza and Charles Murray. And though Christina Hoff Sommers may appear to break with neoconservative opponents of the women’s movement such as Midge Decter and Gertrude Himmelfarb by calling her video blog “The Factual Feminist,” one should not fail to notice that the channel is hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank where both elder women were once affiliates.

He's absolutely right that the Intellectual Dark Web is just a variation on traditional conservatism. And Sommers is old enough to have been part of that tradition, long before Claire Lehmann rolled onto the public stage. I think the only thing that is different between the older and the newer conservatives is that conservatives were once very anti-gay, as Mother Jones remembers in its article Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome? This new iteration of the Right has accepted gay rights.

Unlike every other article on the IDW I've found in mainstream sources, Hamburger recognizes the political potential of the IDW:

...this intellectual right in waiting has amassed an incredibly large audience through its various social media platforms. Much of this audience is composed of young men for whom these entertaining take-downs of political correctness is their first exposure to “intellectual” discussions of politics and culture. When this dark web finally does come out of the shadows, it may prove a formidable weapon for the next iteration of the conservative movement.

And he didn't even mention the Koch connections or the fact that Claire Lehmann was working for Ezra Levant right up until the connections between Rebel Media and the Charlottesville atrocity became well-known.

And there is little doubt that many of these young - and I suspect mostly white - men being cultivated by the IDW are happy to learn via race science and evolutionary psychology that white men are naturally more intelligent (among other virtues) than people who are not white and not men.

The IDW are all fans of each other

This is a screen cap of a tweet that is apparently generated automatically by Twitter.

Scott Adams was not named as a member of the IDW by Bari Weiss, but he's the creator of Dilbert who became a misogynist Trump supporter - so he would fit in very nicely.

Peterson, Cernovich and Shapiro all are IDW.

Pinkerite is available on Twitter now.

I've created a Twitter list that has most members of the IDW. Cernovich is missing because he's already blocked me and Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos are missing because they were kicked off Twitter.

Quillette and racist white identity politics

Good piece by Alex Leo in The Daily Beast focusing on the IDW gang: Quillette, Ben Shapiro, and the Myth of Conservative ‘Facts’

It gets into just how bad Quillette articles really are. 

Quillette, a site that fancies itself intellectually contrarian but mostly publishes right-wing talking points couched in grievance politics, recently published a piece by Richard Hanania, a research fellow at Columbia University, called “It Isn’t Your Imagination: Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals"... 

“...I began my analysis by compiling a list of every prominent individual or political party known to have been banned from Twitter since its founding,” Hanania writes. One would expect this to be quite an undertaking since Twitter has suspended thousands of users in its decade of existence, but when you opened the supporting evidence, it was merely a list of 22 cherry-picked names. 

And if I were a conservative, I would be offended by those he claimed to own that label. David Duke is a Klansman. George Zimmerman a killer. Tila Tequila is a reality show “star” who dresses in Nazi cosplay. Other people on the list like Baked Alaska, Richard Spencer, and James Allsup are prominent members of the alt-right, also known as neo-Nazis. The tacit admission that modern conservatism is inextricably linked to racist white identity politics should not go unnoticed.

Done. I noticed it.

And Jerry Coyne even gets a shout-out:

So why would Quillette, a site atheist Jerry Coyne instructed his readers to “think of it as Slate, but more serious, more intellectual, and without any Regressive Leftism,” publish such a fact-free, embarrassing piece? Why would Claire Lehmann, a woman who embraces the label of “intellectual dark web,” get behind it?

That's a good question. Maybe it's because they are political operatives rather than people who care about data science? Because they are incapable of seeing the logical disconnect, just as I speculated was a possible for reason for Steven Pinker's obtuseness?

Leo appears to think that the Yale study of conservatives holds the key:

In 2017, Yale professors did a study and found they could turn conservatives into liberals by allaying fears for their safety. By giving them a thought exercise of imagining they were completely safe and protected from threats, Republicans became significantly more liberal when asked about their stances on social issues. Now we see why Shapiro and his ilk are so invested in fear mongering about the radical left with intellectual dishonesty.

I referenced the same or similar study on Twitter while doing battle with Claire Lehmann's flying monkeys sent to falsely accuse the Canadian academic of creating a blacklist. You want to come up with something reasonable-sounding for why right-wingers do what they do. Concluding "because they are evil and they like to be evil" just feels so medieval.

Jerry Coyne on the SPLC

Christina Hoff Sommers gloating about SPLC

Steven Pinker fanboy Jerry Coyne wonders whether the Southern Poverty Law Center is going to die.

The SPLC has not been shy about criticizing members of the IDW - Coyne mentions two of them in his piece, Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, married to rightwing political operative and sometime economist Niall Ferguson.

SPLC has also made unflattering mentions of other IDWers including Sam Harris, Christina Hoff Sommers, Stefan Molyneux, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson,  Milo Yiannopoulos - in fact it looks like Steven Pinker might be the only IDW who isn't mentioned in a negative way by the SPLC.

So of course the IDW bitterly hates this venerable organization devoted to fighting racism and sexism.

Coyne cites a recent New Yorker article about SPLC which details its organizational dysfunctions.

Having worked for a variety of organizations over my career, from huge corporations to tiny start-ups to non-profits to government agencies to food co-ops, it doesn't sound all that remarkably bad. It's an organization run by fallible human beings. An organization that is currently cleaning house, which is exactly what it should do.

Coyne writes:

Author Bob Moser worked for a while at the SPLC, and observed some of its dysfunctional culture before leaving. In fact, the racism and sexism was a standing joke at the operation

Then he quotes from the New Yorker piece.

It's hypocritical that he should be so concerned about racism and sexism at the Southern Poverty Law Center when Quillette, which he has praised and which Pinker has written for, is devoted to racism and sexism - carefully couched as science, of course. Utterly crappy science, but the right-wingers who look to Quillette as a shining beacon for their beliefs aren't too picky about the science - it's good enough for them that someone is comforting them: oh no, you and James Damore and Bo Winegard aren't racists and sexists! You're just pro-science!

Quillette's author line-up has long been a sausage party, and looking at every byline currently listed on Quillette today, it still is. I count 31 names of which 6 are women, one of them is Quillette's founder.

Don't hold your breath waiting for Jerry Coyne to complain about that.

1. Mallen Baker
2. Jaspreet Sigh Boparai
3. Tomas Borgardus
4. Spencer Case
5. Jonathan Church
6. Lauren Cooley
7. Libby Emmons
8. Jeffrey S Flier
9. Daniel Friedman
10. Raphael Tsavkko Garcia
11. Blake J. Harris
12. Cameron Hendy
13. Coleman Hughes
14. David G. Hughes
15. Max Hyams
16. Jonathan Kay
17. Claire Lehmann
18. Matt McManus
19. Kathrine Jenson Moore
20. Paulina Neuding 
21. Clay Routledge
22. Steve Salerno
23. Gideo Scopes
24. Zachary Snowdon Smith
25. Debra Soh
26. Bradford Tuckfield
27. Graham Verdon
28. Russel T. Warne
29. Mark S Weiner
30. Bo Winegard
31. Jacob Willer

A major problem with SPLC, it appears to me, is that it's been run for too long by aging white men with 20th-century mindsets. Much like the New Atheists where Sam Harris, at age 51 is the spring chicken.

Meanwhile Donald Trump is aligning with the IDW. There's even an article in the New Yorker about it and Quillette is celebrating it but for some reason it has avoided Coyne's notice.

The Quillette - IDW - Rebel Media mob gang up on an academic

Anybody who has made any effort to learn about Claire Lehmann's career knows her connection to far-right extremist Rebel Media, run by eccentric Justin Trudeau-obsessed Ezra Levant. Her idiotic feminist-hating videos for Rebel Media are legendary in anti-IDW circles.

Now it's not like Claire Lehmann has ever disavowed her connection to Rebel Media. She stopped making videos for them but there's every reason to believe she still shares the far-right views that Levant promotes.

The UK organization Faith Matters has written a report on Rebel Media...

entitled ‘Rebel Media – a platform promoting division, white nationalism and fear mongering‘ highlights the following: 

Ezra Levant has made a career out of using inflammatory language to gain audiences. He is the founder of Rebel Media and he has previously accused Gypsies of being “rapists, drug-dealers, thugs and murderers”. 

Former contributors on the payroll of Rebel Media have included Tommy Robinson, Lauren Southern, Katie Hopkins and Paul Joseph Watson. They are notorious for their anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and anti-migrant views as well as promoting views of a clash of cultures between the West and the East. 

Central to Rebel Media’s message is the platforming of far right ideology, many would identify as ‘counter-Jihadi’ and with slants that seek to portray a world view of ‘them and us’ – with Muslims in Europe being viewed as ‘them’.

When a Canadian academic tweeted this about Quillette recently, the Quillette gang led by editor Jonathan Kay had a complete meltdown.

And I mean a lot of the gang.

Free speech grifter Andy Ngo.

Naturally contemptible Michael "Steven Pinker squashed a cockroach" Shermer and even more grotesque Ben Shapiro were right there with them.

And along comes Ezra Levant. If you want to truly understand who Claire Lehmann, Michael Shermer, Jon Kay, Barbara Kay, Ben Shapiro, Andy Ngo and Steven Pinker are, just look at Ezra Levant. They are a pack of right-wing hate-mongers, almost certainly funded by the Koch brothers and/or other plutocrats, trying to pass themselves off as the voices of reason.

Of course I couldn't get Jon Kay to respond when I asked him outright about Koch brothers funding.

I'm going to see if I can talk Jane Mayer, famous for her New Yorker articles about the Koch brothers, into investigating possible financial connections between the Koch brothers, other plutocrats and the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette.

It appears that there has already been a connection established between the Kochs and Rebel Media.

Rebel Media’s links to foreign cash and anti-Muslim think tanks exposed:PressProgress is first to report Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant received grant money from the Middle East Forum, a US think tank that promotes anti-Muslim views and is bankrolled by a wealthy right-wing donor network linked to prominent Republican donors like the Koch brothers. Days later, Vice News follows-up and reports the David Horowitz Freedom Centre, an “anti-Muslim” think tank based in New York allied with Steve Bannon and other key figures behind the Trump presidency, is subsidizing the salaries of a number of Rebel Media’s correspondents

And I mentioned the other day that Spiked Magazine received Koch money.

It would be very odd if these ideological twins of Quillette received Koch money and Quillette was left out. Especially since Lehmann made a podcast with the Koch-funded Mercatus Center.

I think it's just a matter of time before someone documents a Koch brothers-Quillette connection.