Brigitte Macron has sued the hateful Candace Owens!

Back in March I asked:

When will Brigitte Macron sue the hateful Candace Owens?

And finally SHE DID IT!  🥳

Macrons Sue Candace Owens, Right-Wing Podcaster, Claiming Defamation

Ms. Owens and The Daily Wire, a conservative media company, severed ties that month over her antisemitic rhetoric, and she repeated the claim about Ms. Macron on her independent podcast and other platforms. 

 

Ms. Owens “disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim,” the filing says, and “rather than engage with President and Mrs. Macron’s attempts to set the record straight, Owens mocked them and used them as additional fodder for her frenzied fan base.” 

 

“Because Ms. Owens systematically reaffirmed these falsehoods in response to each of our attorneys’ repeated requests for a retraction, we ultimately concluded that referring the matter to a court of law was the only remaining avenue for remedy,” the Macrons said in a statement from their lawyer. 

 

The suit also names Ms. Owens’s media company and the company that runs her website, which are both registered in Delaware.

What a stupid horrible person Candace Owens is.

No wonder Owens was praised as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web by Bari Weiss back in 2018. The entire Intellectual Dark Web is simply a pack of garbage people, from Owens, to Weiss to Eric Weinstein to Steven Pinker.

When will Brigitte Macron sue the hateful Candace Owens?

Claire Lehmann scores a stopped-clock point
----------------------------------------------------------

I normally wouldn't bother with Candace Owens, except that she was named as one of the people in the Intellectual Dark Web by Bari Weiss. 

In spite of her connection to the IDW, I've hardly written about Owens, only 13 times before this, and lately it didn't seem worthwhile at all since members of the Intellectual Dark Web have turned on her, including the racist queen of Quillette herself, Claire Lehmann. 

If Claire Lehmann is against you, are you even in the Intellectual Dark Web any more?

But this is getting ridiculous. Media Matters for American ran an article about Owens' sick obsession with claiming that Brigitte Macron is trans.

On January 31, podcaster Candace Owens launched a new “investigative series” based on the debunked conspiracy theory that the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron, is secretly a transgender woman. Videos about the series, titled “Becoming Brigitte,” have been circulating on TikTok, garnering millions of views on both English-language and French-language content. 

Right-wing personalities and social media users have spread these types of baseless allegations, often called “transvestigations,” for years, frequently targeting powerful women including Taylor Swift and Michelle Obama. And this is not the first time Brigitte Macron has faced the conspiracy theory. Last year, a French court found two women guilty of slander for spreading these same claims. 

Owens has been pushing the conspiracy theory about the French first lady for nearly a year. 

As of the time of writing, she has streamed eight episodes of her “transvestigation” series on YouTube — producing over six hours of conspiracy theory content centered around the Macrons. During the series, Owens questioned whether Brigitte Macron is transgender and also whether she is French President Emmanuel Macron’s biological father. 

I became interested in the Macrons when I started taking French classes and I'm 99% sure this brief clip from an American public television show "French In Action" shows Brigitte Macron and her first husband - this is the episode, at minute 12:00. I've had this up on my personal website for years. 

Brigitte Macron has already won a case on this issue. It's TIME TO SUE CANDACE OWENS!

My theory: Owens is jealous of Brigitte Macron. 

And also, Candace Owens is insane.

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.

I 💗 Some More News

I recently discovered Some More News, hosted by Cody Johnston and it's taken me too long to do it - these guys have discussed many of the members of the Intellectual Dark Web and its most powerful funders and supporters:

Peter Thiel And His Dorky Little Goons

A Brief Look at Jordan Peterson

The Talented Mr. Musk Part 1: Free Speech

The Talented Mr. Musk, Part 2: The Elon Files

Elon Musk is Not Your Friend

Musk's War on Journalism, Unions, and Safety & MORE (This is from 4 years ago!)

Elon Musk "Versus" Twitter

Perhaps Ben Shapiro Shouldn't Be Taken Seriously By Anyone About Anything

Candace Owens, Congress, and How They Helped Each Other Lie

What and Why is "Cancel Culture"? - mentions Andy Ngo, Bill Maher and Bari Weiss

Cancel Culture Isn't a Thing, You Snowflakes

The GOP Sure Hates Queer People - mentions Libs of TikTok

Why is Critical Race Theory?

And How To Pretend Systemic Racism Doesn't Exist 

So I became a Patreon supporter of their project.

Candace Owens, Trumpian Coronavirus Denier

IDW member Candace Owens features prominently in a NYTimes article today about the right-wing approach to the Coronavirus pandemic: denialism and then when that is no longer tenable, blame the left:
Alarm, Denial, Blame: The Pro-Trump Media’s Coronavirus Distortion.

On March 10, the day that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned every American to adopt an “all hands on deck” mind-set, Ms. Owens scoffed at what she called “the mass global mental breakdown” as financial markets plunged. “People think it’s novel that 80 year olds are dying at a high rate from a flu,” she wrote, adding that when future generations study the world’s coronavirus response, “This tweet will age well.” 

Ms. Owens is the kind of influential conservative — she has a huge online audience as well as sway with the White House and top cable news and radio producers — who has been central to spreading doubt about the seriousness of the virus to Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters. 

In an interview, Ms. Owens said she did not believe that her tweets were irresponsible. “Do I think it’s irresponsible to say the economic impact will be the legacy?” she said. “It’s not about being responsible. It’s about being honest.”

Trump and his team of monsters from hell cannot lose access to the White House soon enough for sane people in the world.

Speaking of Trump and his team, the current pandemic must have put a real crimp in Trump's plans to ratfuck the Democrats.

Way back a million years ago, in August, I posted an article called Trump is the ratfucker.

And just a month later, Trump's biggest ratfucking scheme (so far. that we know of.) was revealed when his quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine hit the news on September 25. Trump Pressed Ukraine’s President to Investigate Democrats as ‘a Favor.'

Now I don't doubt that Trump is planning more ratfucking attempts. That's who Trump is. You can't expect Trump to do anything without cheating. He's cheated his way through life - when he wasn't just handed advantages - and he's not about to stop cheating now.

I still think Trump and his malicious elves Andy Ngo and Ngo's lawyer, Republican committeewoman Harmeet K. Dhillon are likely to try a ratfucking attempt a la the Nazi's Reichstag fire - frame the Democrats for the actions of one rando.

And I think they are likely to do it via antifa. But they can't very well use antifa performance art in the middle of a stay-at-home pandemic.

But once social distancing is over, expect to see more signs of Trumpian ratfucking. All the polls now indicate Biden will beat Trump and Trump is not about to stand by and let that happen without using every possible dirty trick that he and his monstrously evil supporters can dream up.

Our country depends on stopping Trump.

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.”

The Intellectual Dark Web and Gamergate

Several members of the Intellectual Dark Web are mentioned in two of the four articles published today in the New York Times on the fifth anniversary of Gamergate. I highlighted the IDW members.

Charlie Warzel writes:

...Gamergate attracted the attention of then-men’s rights bloggers like Mike Cernovich and Roosh V, right-wing political correctness monitors like Christina Hoff Sommers and middling journalists like Milo Yiannopoulos, then a writer for Breitbart.

And a little later...

Today, five years later, the elements of Gamergate are frighteningly familiar: hundreds of thousands of hashtag-swarming tweets; armies of fake Twitter accounts; hoaxes and disinformation percolating in murky chat rooms and message boards before spreading to a confused mainstream media; advertiser boycotts; crowdfunding campaigns; racist, sexist and misogynist memes; YouTube shock jocks; D-list celebrities hand-wringing about political correctness on Twitter; Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon and Breitbart; Candace Owens.

Later...

Far-right personalities swarmed Mr. (James) Damore — his first “exclusive” interview was with Stefan Molyneux, a far-right Canadian YouTuber who calls himself a philosopher and lectures about race and I.Q. and men's rights issues. 

Sarah Jeong's Gamergate piece mentions Charles Murray:

This August is an anniversary for me as well. Last year, I landed in hot water for a number of tweets I’d posted years before about white people, especially white men. They were irreverent jokes — some responses to people harassing me, others outright snark. Some were parodies of race science like Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve.” 

And like Warzel's piece, she mentions Cernovich:

There were posts with details about her former neighborhood. Texts with pictures of where she lived alongside pictures of guns. A tweet from the yet-relatively-unknown Mike Cernovich — now a figurehead of the alt-right — about how he had hired a private investigator to look into her.

None of the articles mention that Sommers and Yiannopoulos worked together to promote Gamergate, along with another recipient of Koch money (like Sommers) Cathy Young who has written pieces for Quillette.

I tend to think of Young and Sommers as part of a female misogynist triad along with Quillette founder Claire Lehmann.

Sommers, Young and Yiannopoulos appeared together in a panel on Gamergate.

Cathy Young was so enthusiastic about Gamergate that she celebrated the two year anniversary of the "Zoe Post" which Eron Gjoni used to attack his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn by doing an interview with Gjoni for the now defunct Heat Street but which I found via the Wayback Machine and have posted here.

In Arc Digital Young wrote:

 This is not to rehash GamerGate but to say that I still think Milo was basically on the right side of it. (I also think he did it far more harm than good.)

She called Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic and an actual victim of the Gamergate mob a "professional victim" to her pal, the Pinkerite Jesse Singal.

Less than a year ago she was still siding with Eron Gjoni and accusing Zoe Quinn of unethical behavior.

To date I haven't found evidence that either Young or Sommers have any regrets about their role as Gamergate cheerleaders. Although Sommers had a predictable response to Warzel's piece:

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.

Heather Heying: "we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom"

Michael Shermer demonstrating
IDW "civility" by calling a critic
of Steven Pinker a cockroach while
suggesting the critic's motive was
nothing but being desperate for attention

I recently discussed the mystery of why Bari Weiss decided for herself to group people like Stefan Molyneux in with Steven Pinker and other presumably more respectable individuals in her article Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.

I did not solve the mystery.

But while reading the article more thoroughly than I ever have before, several things jumped out at me.

One is a Big Lie of the IDW, which Weiss promotes in her piece:

...they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness...

If Pinkerite has demonstrated anything, it's that nobody in the IDW is especially civil. And in fact Weiss demonstrated it herself when she wrote:

“I’ve figured out how to monetize social justice warriors,” Mr. Peterson said in January on Joe Rogan’s podcast. On his Twitter feed, he called the writer Pankaj Mishra, who’d written an essay in The New York Review of Books attacking him, a “sanctimonious prick” and said he’d happily slap him.

So why does Weiss repeat the IDWs self-congratulatory marketing copy?

And who exactly is writing the copy?

My bet is on Eric Weinstein. He's often mentioned as merely the coiner of the term "Intellectual Dark Web" but Weiss's article makes it clear that it's about more than just the nomenclature:

...when Ms. Owens and Charlie Kirk, the executive director of Turning Point USA, met last week with Mr. West at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, just outside of the frame — in fact, avoiding the photographers — was Mr. Weinstein. He attended both that meeting and a one-on-one the next day for several hours at the mogul’s request. Mr. Weinstein, who can’t name two of Mr. West’s songs, said he found the Kardashian spouse “kind and surprisingly humble despite his unpredictable public provocations.” He has also tweeted that he’s interested to see what Ms. Owens says next.

And then there is this quote from Weinstein:

“I’m really only interested in building this intellectual movement,” Eric Weinstein said. “The I.D.W. has bigger goals than anyone’s buzz or celebrity.”

Weinstein has goals for the IDW.

And then there is Heather Heying, Eric's sister-in-law. I've argued several times with fans of the IDW on Twitter, pointing out that there is another side to the Evergreen story than the one promoted by the IDW and Fox News narrative. As Bari Weiss puts it:

A year ago, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were respected tenured professors at Evergreen State College, where their Occupy Wall Street-sympathetic politics were well in tune with the school’s progressive ethos. Today they have left their jobs, lost many of their friends and endangered their reputations.

But then Weiss includes Weinstein and Heying in her discussion of IDW profitability:

That hunger has translated into a booming and, in many cases, profitable market. Episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which have featured many members of the I.D.W., can draw nearly as big an audience as Rachel Maddow. A recent episode featuring Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying talking about gender, hotness, beauty and #MeToo was viewed on YouTube over a million times, even though the conversation lasted for nearly three hours.

Bret Weinstein in particular seems to have parlayed his increased fame into a series of high profile public forums, including one for the Koch-sponsored Spiked Magazine/Learn Liberty.

As Weiss writes:

The exile of Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying from Evergreen State brought them to the attention of a national audience that might have come for the controversy but has stayed for their fascinating insights about subjects including evolution and gender.

Spoiler alert: their "fascinating insights" on gender are garden-variety evolutionary psychology and in Heying's case scolding young women to wear more clothes lest they be guilty of "toxic femininity."

All in all, it sounds like they've used the Evergreen controversy to level up. And Heying seems to agree. Weiss quotes her:

“Our friends still at Evergreen tell us that the protesters think they destroyed us,” Ms. Heying said. “But the truth is we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom.”

The IDW rightwing plutocrat support report - UPDATE

UPDATE - adding Candace Owens - so that is now five IDWs getting direct Koch funding.


Charlie Kirk, is the founder of Turning Point USA.

TPUSA’s upcoming Student Action Summit in December has additional sponsors including the Reason Foundation, the Koch-connected Generation Opportunity Institute and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (International Business Times)

Candace Owens

Communications director for Turning Point USA (Source: Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web)

Charles Murray - AEI scholar.

David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."
Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. (Sourcewatch)

David Rubin - political commentator whose work is supported by Learn Liberty

Learn Liberty is a project of the Institute for Human Studies. Members of the IHS Board of Directors includes Charles Koch and Koch-related organization employees. 

Christina Hoff Sommers - AEI scholar

Meet the ‘Feminists’ Doing the Koch Brothers’ Dirty Work

More IDW-rightwing plutocrat connections as they are discovered...

Steven & Bari & Stefan & Eric

A little over a year ago Bari Weiss published "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" subtitled "An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?"

Weiss wrote:

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).

Eric Weinstein, his brother Bret and his sister-in-law Heather Heying all appeared in the silly photoshoot for the article, and were interviewed by Weiss, so there was certainly a high level of cooperation on the article from them. But Eric, who has been given credit for the name "intellectual dark web" does not consider Molyneux to be a member of the gang, in spite of Weiss's including him in "the group". As we can see in this tweet exchange from September 2018.

Later the same day Weinstein claimed he never met Molyneux and that he barely knew his ideas.

In January of this year, Weinstein still says he does not know Molyneux.

It seems that Bari Weiss did not speak to Molyneux for the article. 

As we can see by his reaction.

Weiss has never been on Molyneux's show, although several other people she included in the IDW have, including Michael Shermer, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson and Candace Owens. Meanwhile Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan both had Molyneux on their shows. Weiss appeared on Rogan's show.

Weiss opened her Intellectual Dark Web article like this:

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.” 

I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.

Before I continue, there are skeptics who doubt Sam Harris is an actual neuroscientist and that Dave Rubin has ever been a comedian.

Also "fundamental biological differences between men and women" is not nearly the extent of what they believe, and the description doesn't mention race, which is at least as important to IDWers as gender.

This is Weiss's group definition in the article:

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

Then Weiss links to this web site as the "closest thing to a phone book for the I. D. W." which includes many people not mentioned explicitly by Weiss, including Carl Benjamin, AKA Sargon of Akaad, described in his Wiki:

British political commentator, politician, anti-feminist, polemicist and YouTuber with the online pseudonym Sargon of Akkad. He was a UK Independence Party (UKIP) candidate for the European Parliament's South West England constituency in the 2019 election, although he failed to win his election. Benjamin grew to prominence through the Gamergate controversy. Since Gamergate, he has covered topics such as identity politics, the alt-right, Brexit and political correctness.

However, the site does not include Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones nor Stefan Molyneux. Weiss writes:

But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

By the end of the article, there is still no explanation for why Bari Weiss grouped Molyneux in with the IDW. She writes:

I get the appeal of the I.D.W. I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don’t, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.

But I think that what Pinkerite has been demonstrating, blog post by blog post, is that in fact there really are few differences in point of view, especially about race and gender, between those Weiss considers respectable, like Steven Pinker, and "the cranks, grifters and bigots."

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.

Jerry Coyne and the "generally left-wing" articles in Quillette

Jerry Coyne is not named as a member of the IDW by Bari Weiss, but is nevertheless what I like to think of as a second string member of the IDW.

So I was really surprised to see Coyne criticizing an article in Quillette. The IDW tend to watch each others backs, even the possibly least-popular IDW, Candace Owens.

Coyne: The worst article ever to appear in Quillette...

The author, John Staddon, is identified as “James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Duke University”. His answer to the title question, by the way, is “yes”.
This may in fact be the worst piece that Quillette has ever published...

However, Coyne begins the article like this:

In general I like the articles in Quillette: they’re generally left-wing but also critical of the Left’s excesses—a theme that has led some misguided ideologues to call the site “alt-right.”

How is it possible that anyone could claim that Quillette articles are "generally left-wing"? Is this part of the standard right-wing through-the-looking glass, like the way they claim that professional misogynists Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers are feminists? I thought Mari Uyehara, in her immortal article for GQ, The Free Speech Grifters, perfectly captured this right-wing mind-fuckery:

Weiss's column titled "We're All Fascists Now" highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a "self-identified" feminist and a "registered" Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers's more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza among its past fellows.

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a "factual" one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn't know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she's been silent on harassment of women in techand finance. And she's been outspoken about the due-process rights of men accused of rape on college campuses, but apparently has no interest in addressing the complexity of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.

In fact, I think Quillette articles have begun leaning further right lately. I haven't done a systematic analysis of all Quillette articles, which I suppose I will be obliged to do someday *siiiigh*. So far I've only done occasional spot checks of its bylines - spoiler alert, Quillette authorship skews very heavily male, in spite of the fact, as Quillette's fans will endlessly tell you, it was founded by Claire Lehmann, actual woman.

Quillette has, since the beginning, reflected many of the values of Lehmann's former boss, rightwing extremist Rebel Media's Ezra Levant, in that it is anti-trans, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist, anti-left, anti-socialist, pro evolutionary psychology and pro race science. Although at least Quillette hasn't replicated Levant's obsession with Justin Trudeau, probably because Lehmann is Australian, not Canadian.

Fun side-note - in spite of the fact that Claire Lehmann's boss was Levant, Jonathan Kay's boss is now Claire Lehmann but there has been some antagonism between Kay and Levant, per the National Post:

Levant has long focused enormous attention on the Trudeau family. He called Pierre Trudeau a “slut” and Margaret Trudeau “(not) much better,” in 2014. Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, “is everything Ezra hates,” said Jonathan Kay, who worked with Levant at the National Post.
(Levant denies any fixation with Trudeau. He also believes Kay, who ghostwrote Justin Trudeau’s memoirs, holds a grudge against him for publicizing that fact.)

Lately I've noticed additional rightwing party platforms on Quillette: anti-immigration and pro-nuclear/anti-green energy. I think this is likely the result of an increasing Koch influence, either indirectly through Quillette authors supported by the Kochs (Cathy Young, Charles Murray, Pamela Paresky, probably others - I will definitely be doing an article on the IDW-Koch connections ASAP) or directly through Koch Foundation money - but I haven't found evidence for the latter... yet.

Steven Pinker and Spiked and the Koch brothers

Steven Pinker is a right-winger in spite of his claiming otherwise, and his thinking this idiotic & transparent "parody" Twitter account Titania McGrath is hilarious pretty much closes the case.

Predictably Pinker's fan-boy Jerry Coyne also thought it was a laugh-riot.

I'm on the record as having issues with both New Atheists and "Social Justice Warriors" but as low as my opinion is of SJWs, I could see immediately that "Titania McGrath" was fake.

What's more interesting about the incident than Pinker's oafish sense of humor is that it reveals another connection between Steven Pinker and Spiked as well as a connection between Spiked and the Koch brothers.

Spiked columnist Andrew Doyle was behind the McGrath character. Pinker made his infamous alt-right comments at Spiked Magazine’s 'Unsafe Space Tour' panel discussion at Harvard University.

Doyle, who is deeply concerned about "political correctness" as shown by his Spiked output, thinks that Candace Owens, leading influencer of the New Zealand mass murderer was "smeared" by being described as a "far-right media personality." The rest of that article is a defense of members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

But while looking at the responses on Twitter to Pinker's Spiked-related tweet I found this article which says that Spiked has received support from the Koch brothers:

We found three payments over the past two years from the Charles Koch Foundation. They amount to $170,000, earmarked for “general operating support”. The payments were made to Spiked US Inc. On Spiked’s “Donate” page is a button that says “In the US? Donate here”. It takes you to the PayPal link for “Spiked US, Inc”. Spiked US, in other words, appears to be its American funding arm. Beyond a postal address is Hoboken, New Jersey, it is hard to see what presence it has in the US. It appears to have been established in 2016, the year in which the Koch donations began. 

When I asked Spiked what the money was for and whether there had been any other payments, its managing editor, Viv Regan, told me that the Charles Koch Foundation has now given Spiked US a total of $300,000, “to produce public debates in the US about free speech, as part of its charitable activities.” She claims the foundation supports projects “on both the left and the right”. The Koch Foundation has funded “a free-speech oriented programme of public debates on campus titled the Unsafe Space Tour” and four live events, the first of which is titled ‘Should we be free to hate?’. She told me “We’re very proud of our work on free speech and tolerance, and we are proud to be part of the programme.” 

But I have been unable to find any public acknowledgement of this funding. Neither on the videos of the debates, in the posters advertising them or in reports of the events in Spiked magazine is there any mention of the Charles Koch Foundation. From what I could see of the title slides in the videos, they acknowledged an organisation called the Institute for Humane Studies, but not the Foundation. Spiked has yet to reply to my questions on this matter. 

The Koch brothers are famously careful with their money. According to Jane Mayer, they exert “unusually tight personal control over their philanthropic endeavours”. David Koch told a sympathetic journalist, “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.” So what might have attracted them to this obscure organisation? 

Spiked magazine, now edited by Brendan O’Neill, appears to hate left-wing politics. It inveighs against the welfare state, against regulation, the Occupy movement, anti-capitalists, Jeremy Corbyn, George Soros, #MeToo, “black privilege” and Black Lives Matter. It does so in the name of the “ordinary people”, whom, it claims, are oppressed by the “anti-Trump and anti-Brexit cultural elites”, “feministic elites”, “green elites” and “cosmopolitan politicians”.

So to recap: Steven Pinker blamed the left and the media for radicalizing the alt-right while speaking at a panel that was part of the "Unsafe Space Tour" which was funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.

I think that when all is said and done it will turn out that virtually all members of the Intellectual Dark Web received funding, directly or indirectly, from the Koch brothers.

The priorities of the Intellectual Dark Web

Jordan Peterson, a Weiss-identified member of
the Intellectual Dark Web and a proud Islamaphobe

Jerry Coyne was not named as a member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" in Bari Weiss's article but since he's Steven Pinker's personal spokesman (although Coyne prefers "Pinker's Lapdog Bulldog") and hates Muslims and the Southern Poverty Law Center I think that qualifies him for honorary membership.

Coyne recently had plenty to say against the SPLC because its founder Morris Dees was let go by the organization.

He had almost nothing to say about the mass murder at the mosque in Christchurch.

But a search of his blog makes it apparent that Jerry Coyne has plenty to say against Islam and Muslims.

Meanwhile Candace Owens, who was named in the Weiss article apparently has a big fan in the mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant who wrote:

Beyond his white nationalistic views, he claimed to be an environmentalist and said he is a fascist who believes China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values. He said he has contempt for the wealthiest 1 percent. And he singled out American conservative commentator Candace Owens as the person who had influenced him the most, while saying "the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes."

I wonder which other members of the Intellectual Dark Web have influenced mass murderers.