Exquisite take-down of Richard Dawkins

I just discovered a really good atheist YouTuber, Drew McCoy, known as Genetically Modified Skeptic.

It seems that one of Dawkins' PR guys tried to bring him into the Dawkins fold. 

McCoy refused and then did an exquisite take-down of Dawkins instead. This is how you do it. 

Hemant Mehta the Friendly Atheist makes an appearance.

Mentioned as allies of Dawkins: Jerry Coyne, Colin Wright, Edward Dutton, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.

Related Genetically Modified Skeptic videos:

• Why the Anti-Woke Right Has So Many Atheists

• Why the Right Hates Atheists but Loves Elon Musk

• The "Skeptics" Are Crashing Out Hard - about the infamous "War on Science" right-wing grievances book

Curtis Yarvin and race pseudoscience and the Intellectual Dark Web

Khan and "close friend" Yarvin, together again
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With Steven Pinker going full neo-nazi it's hard to keep up with everything else that's going on in the world of race pseudoscience, especially because race pseudoscience is welcomed by the Trump administration. 

The New Yorker has just published an article about Curtis Yarvin. 

The end of the article describes Yarvin & friends visiting the castle of Renaud Camus, the "you will not replace us" guy - from whence Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald gets her nickname. 

And just this month, white supremacist Douglas Murray, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, who writes for Bari Weiss's "Free Press" wrote an admiring article about Camus for New Criterion,

Murray's article is titled "The crime of noticing."

As the Atlantic wrote in August 2024 in the article The Far Right is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ (my highlight):

“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows. 

 

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.” Sailer, one of the most prominent peddlers of race science in the United States, has made a career out of noticing things. (Last year, he published an anthology of his writing titled Noticing.) He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs). Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.

The end of the New Yorker article describes Yarvin meeting Camus, and Camus's response:

When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.” 

 

It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”  

 

Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine (Yarvin's wife) said, “You can’t just ask people that!”
Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France. 

 

As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?”

Yarvin is clearly an emotionally volatile, far-right extremist nut job, which explains why fascist freaks like Marc Andreeessen and Peter Thiel love him.

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.) 

Thiel is alleged to have funded racist Quillette, and Andreessen is a subscriber to the Neo-Nazi Jolly Heretic. Both have funded Trump.

And our old racist pals Razib Khan and Steve Sailer are mentioned in the article:

In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me... 

 

...Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”

Khan was recently expressing his hatred for NYTimes op-ed columnist Jamelle Bouie, again.

And Yarvin echoes Richard Haier in the article:

To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Like Richard Haier, Yarvin doesn't think environment matters at all. As Haier told Stefan Molyneux:

Not many people are talking about manipulating genes that raise IQ. This is not really a public conversation, and to the extent it is, it's usually framed in some negative context of eugenics or or racism or or or or something like that.[62]

This fully aligns with behavioral genetics. And Razib Khan is not only a friend of Curtis Yarvin, he is a friend of Abdel Abdellaoui, one of the co-authors of Adam Rutherford's recent behavioral genetics paper Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences. I wrote about the many connections between authors of the paper and racists here.

Richard Haier is no longer an editor at the journal "Intelligence," so he and some racist pals  - all associated with the International Society for Intelligence Research - started a new publication that will no doubt welcome race pseudoscience. More about that soon.

So who ELSE works for Emil Kirkegaard and HDF (aka POLYGENIC SCORES LLC), the new Pioneer Fund?

In a previous post I discussed the findings of the Hope not Hate organization about who works for Emil Kirkegaard and his neo-Nazi organization, Human Diversity Foundation - which has recently been renamed Polygenic Scores LLC.

In this post we'll talk about all the rest of those who have worked for Kirkegaard via  Aporia and The Jolly Heretic.

After going through the content of both Aporia and the Jolly Heretic, I noticed two major differences: the Jolly Heretic is more obviously racist, and right from the jump, interviewing infamous ghouls like Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor in its first year. And the second difference is that the Jolly Heretic is much more focused on one person, Edward Dutton, who loves to post images of himself on the site. I guess Dutton thinks this is some kind of selling point. At the same time, Dutton has concerns about other people's narcissism. 

When I say "work for" I don't claim to know what compensation arrangements these individuals made with Kirkegaard's organization, and whether their connection is current or in the past. But I assume all received money or other forms of compensation to associate their names with Aporia or Jolly Heretic - in many cases both. 

The 139 names listed below are those who have contributed to Aporia and Jolly Heretic before the exposé from Hope not hate that made it undeniable that the two websites are Emil Kirikegaard-controlled neo-Nazi media outlets. 

Undeniable because Aporia published an article about the exposé. As did the Jolly Heretic.

Abel Dean - apparently some rando writing for Aporia: "Abel Dean has studied the psychology of intelligence and other social sciences for over ten years. He has university degrees in completely-unrelated fields: land surveying and hydrographic science (he fully agrees that you should not simply accept his opinions)."

Adam Smeester - a right-winger, judging by his X/Twitter feed. So a good fit for Aporia.

Adrian Wooldridge - a business columnist at Bloomberg. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Aella - appears to be a "cam girl." Interviewed for Aporia podcast.

Agnes Callard - interviewed for the Aporia podcast

Aldo Rustichini - is an hereditarian, judging who he likes to write papers with: members of the International Society for Intelligence Research: Emily Willoughby, James J. Lee, Matt McGue, and William G. Iacono. Wrote a "Critical Race Theory is bad" article for Aporia. 

Alex Christoyannopoulos (Dr.) - interviewed for Aporia podcast,

Alex Kashuta -  Interviewed for Aporia.

"Alexander" - "date psychology" guy. His Aporia article is the usual evolutionary psychology bullshit. Also interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Amy Gallagher - interviewed on Jolly Heretic.

Amy Wax - infamous racist. Bari Weiss' "The Free Press" is a supporter. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Andrew Collingwood - a British podcaster wrote this article for Aporia.

Andrew Cutler - some guy with a Substack wrote this for Aporia. Interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Andrew Gold - basically a gossip columnist, obsessed with Meghan Markle. Interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Anthony Magnabosco - interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Auron Macintyre - MAGA fascist. Nutty conspiracy theorist. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Ben Winegard - Bo's twin brother. They are both the worst.

Bryan Caplan - Cato Institute. Interviewed for Aporia.

Catherine Salmon - "...is an evolutionary psychology professor..." - enough said. Was interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Charles Murray - racist who has not only appeared on the Aporia podcast along with Helmuth Nyborg, but, by his own admission donated money to Kirkegaard and Winegard, and, confirmed by Bryan Pesta's testimony, donated money to Kirkegaard's organization.

Charles Veitch - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Christopher Badcock - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Christopher Rufo - MAGA ghoul, appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Colin Wright - like Christopher Rufo, obsessed with trans people. Appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Cory J. Clark - ugh - will be participating in the next annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research. Appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Craig Willy - some guy with a Substack who is apparently a proponent of evolutionary psychology - or perhaps a eugenicist. So why not write for Aporia?

Curmudgeon’s Corner - "is the pseudonym of a writer with interests in AI and human intelligence."  More right-wing obsession over intelligence.

Curtis Dunkel, also writes for OpenPsych and Mankind Quarterly. Wrote the article "Does IQ alone explain Jewish success? for Aporia.

Curtis Yarvin - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Daniella Pentsak - MAGA extremist, interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

David Goodhart - appeared on the Aporia podcast 

David Starkey (Dr) - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Dimitri van der Linden - co-authored papers with Curtis Dunkel and Edward Dutton. Published an article for Aporia in August 2023.

Dominick Frisby - interviewed at Jolly Heretic.

Douglas Murray - white supremacist, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, interviewed for the Jolly Heretic.

Ed West - rightwing guy with a Substack appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Elizabeth Weiss - former wife of J. Philippe Rushton, published an article in Aporia related to her ongoing battle with Native Americans.

Eric Kaufmann - interviewed on Aporia podcast and on the Jolly Heretic

Eric Schwitzgebel - interviewed for the Aporia podcast

Eugene M. McCarthy - the Jolly Heretic.

Father Frank Gelly - I think it's spelled "Gelli" - in Jolly Heretic.

Garett Jones, is Associate Professor of Economics and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University, has written for City Journal. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Gary N. Marx - from the University of Melbourne wrote this for Aporia.

Gavan Tredoux adores ultra-racist Francis Galton and was interviewed about his love on the Aporia podcast.

George Francis -  has also written for OpenPsych. His article for Aporia argues that black men have the biggest penis size and Africa needs to manufacturer larger condoms.

Godfree Roberts - published in Aporia.

Graham Cunningham - the "imaginative conservative" - wrote an article for Aporia, Are We Making Progress?

Graham Linehan - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Greg Johnson - white nationalist - in Jolly Heretic.

Gregory Clark - a self-described hereditarian and Quillette author, his seriously flawed work is essential to both the Adam Rutherford paper "Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences" and to Kirkegaard's eugenics claims. Interviewed in Aporia, where he discusses the same claims cited by the Rutherford paper.

Gregory J. Feist - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Hannah Gal has also written for Quillette. Has written two articles for Aporia.

Heather Mac Donald - known to some as Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald was interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Helen Dale - interviewed for the Aporia podcast and wrote an article for Aporia. Also in Jolly Heretic.

Ichimoku Sanjin - I cannot discover anything about this person outside of his Aporia article. It says he has carried out research in evolutionary psychology. Enough said.

Ives Parr - an Arthur Jensen fan. He has written an article for Aporia titled "Hereditarian Hypotheses Aren't More Harmful."

J. Michael Bailey - anti-trans activitist, author of retracted work. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast and Jolly Heretic.

James Cussen - apparently a would-be philosopher with a Substack. The first to contribute to Aporia after Matthew Archer (Frost,) as far as I can tell.

James Thompson - ran the "London Conference on Intelligence" and has written for Mankind Quarterly. One of Thompson's articles for Aporia is titled "Why are black children 11 times more likely to be strip-searched?" In another article he argued that intelligence research is more important than combating climate change or curing cancer. Used a SLAPP lawsuit to get the article about him removed from Rational Wiki.

Jan Van Der Beek - interviewed for Aporia podcast.

Janne Miettinen - the Jolly Heretic.

Jared Taylor - infamous racist interviewed for the Jolly Heretic.

Jay Dyer - the Jolly Heretic.

Jeremy Carl - MAGA, appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Jess Gill -  interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

John Mac Ghlionn has written for the Daily Beast and for Aporia.

Jonatan Pallesen - co-authored an anti-Semitic paper with Emil Kirkegaard. Used a SLAPP suit to have the article about himself removed from Rational Wiki - seen celebrating on X/Twitter. Published an article wondering whether the Polio vaccine caused AIDS and appeared with Bo Winegard on the Aporia podcast. Also on the Jolly Heretic.

Jonathan Anomaly, a eugenicist who has written articles for Quillette and co-authored papers with Bo Winegard. For Aporia, he has co-authored an article with Diana Fleischman, Ives Parr, Stephen Hsu and Laurent Tellier defending embryo selection. Anomaly was a speaker at the far-right Natal Conference in 2023 and was exposed by Hope not Hate as the co-founder of a eugenics-biotech company PolygenX. Used a SLAPP lawsuit to get his information removed from the Rational Wiki.

Jonathan Rose (Prof) - interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Jonathan Keeperman - aka "Lomez" interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

John R. Hilles - co-authored a book with Edward Dutton and co-authored a paper with Dutton in Mankind Quarterly on the "demonic sexual fantasies" of witches. " He works with Dutton behind the scenes on his internet channel The Jolly Heretic" Known as J. O. A. Rayner-Hilles for his interview on Jolly Heretic.

John Zerzan - interviewed for Aporia podcast.

Joseph Renzulli - interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Julie Ponesse - anti-vaxxer crackpot wrote a book review for Aporia.

Katie Hopkins - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Kevin Dolan - on the Jolly Heretic.

Kurt Gray (Prof) - interviewed for Aporia podcast.

Laura Towler - AKA Laura Melia - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Leandra Ramm - interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Leo Kearse - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Leor Zmigrod - interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Lionel Shriver - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Lipton Matthews - a hereditarian and Holocaust denier, wrote "Myths about Black History." Also on The Jolly Heretic.

Macer Gifford - pseudonym - interviewed for Aporia podcast

Malcolm Collins - pro-natalist who attended the far-right Natal Conference in 2023. Wrote at least two articles - about natalism - for Aporia.

Mark Vicent - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Mark Weber - in The Jolly Heretic - Holocaust denier.

Mark Meechan - aka "Count Dankula" - interviewed on Jolly Heretic.

Mia Hughes - her entire life appears to be devoted to hating transgender people. Appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Michael Fritzell - some random stock trader, it seems. His Aporia article is about inflation.

Michael Huemer - interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Michael Rosen (Dr.) - appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Michael Rectenwald - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

N. S. Lyons - interviewed by Matthew Archer (Frost) - some random MAGA Substacker it appears. 

Nathan Cofnas - Appeared on the Aporia podcast several times.

Nicholas Agar - transhumanist, interviewed for Aporia podcast.

Nick Dixon - interviewed for the Jolly Heretic.

Nigel Biggar - has written for Quillette. Interviewed on Aporia and interviewed for the Jolly Heretic.

Parker Settecase - some guy with a Substack. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Paul Bloom - appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Paul Embery - appeared on the Aporia podcast.

Paul Moreland - appeared on the Jolly Heretic.

Peter Brimelow - infamous racist, interviewed on the Jolly Heretic.

Peter Frost - also authored articles for the The Unz Review and for OpenPsych. His Aporia article is a defense of the existence of biological races. 

Peter Saunders - a right-wing British academic. The second Aporia author after Matthew Archer (Frost).

Piers Corbyn - anti-vaxxer, interviewed on Jolly Heretic.

Phillip Schofield - at the Jolly Heretic.

Rachel Wilson - interviewed at Jolly Heretic.

Randy Thornhill - the "rape is natural" guy, interviewed for Aporia.

Razib Khan - career-long promoter of race pseudoscience, considers Abdel Abdellaoui, one of the co-authors of the Rutherford paper "Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences" his friend. Appeared on the Aporia podcast and in May 2025,  promoted the neo-Nazi media outlet Aporia on his own podcast.

Renaud Camus - conspiracy theorist, interviewed for the Jolly Heretic.

Richard Grannon - Jolly Heretic.

Richard Haier - considers Arther Jensen one of his heroes. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Richard Hanania - infamous racist, interviewed for the Aporia podcast and Jolly Heretic.

Rob Henderson - rightwing hereditarian, writes for Quillette, interviewed by Aporia.

Robert Kurzban - evolutionary psychologist - enough said. Interviewed for Aporia.

Rudyard Lynch - some guy with a Youtube channel, interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Ryan Faulk - interviewed by Jolly Heretic.

Sascha Ivanov - "behavior geneticist" wrote for Aporia.

Sam Thiessen - interviewed in the Jolly Heretic.

Sam Vaknin - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Sander Van der Linden - appears to be an evolutionary psychology. Interviewed for Aporia podcast.

Simon Evans - interviewed for Jolly Heretic.

Simon Maass - right-winger who takes extremist racist J. Phillippe Rushton seriously. So he's a perfect fit for Aporia.

Simon Laird - said this about crazed anti-Semite Candace Owens: "...I think that Candace Owens is a positive development for the media landscape and the culture in general." So of course he writes for Aporia.

Simon Webb -  Webb was interviewed by Dutton for the Aporia podcast and for the Jolly Heretic.

Simon Wright - Some random "independent researcher" pushing twins studies bullshit on Aporia.

Simone Collins - interviewed for Aporia podcast about pro-natalism.

Stephen Hsu  - big fan of Kathryn Paige Harden, appeared on white supremacist Stefan Molyneux's podcast in 2017. In July 2020, Hsu resigned as senior vice president of research and innovation at Michigan State University after hundreds of academics and Michigan State professors signed a petition requesting for his removal. Interviewed for Aporia.

Steve Sailer - career-long racist, one-time public ally of Steven Pinker. Interviewed by Bo Winegard for the Aporia podcast. And interviewed for the Jolly Heretic.

Tania Reynolds - interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Theodore Dalrymple - interviewed for the Jolly Heretic.

Tom Rowsell -  has a profile on Hope not hate, interviewed for the Jolly Heretic.

Walter Veit - interviewed for the Aporia podcast

Wilfred Reilly - far right activist. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast. Also on The Jolly Heretic.

William Costello - evolutionary psychologist - enough said. Interviewed for Aporia podcast.

Zac Kriegman, a former director of data science at Thomson Reuters who expresses his far right-wing sentiments and support for the Trump administration on X/Twitter,  retweeting people like Christopher Rufo and Charlie Kirk. Interviewed for the Aporia podcast.

Zoltan Istvan - a transhumanist who wrote this for Aporia.

In the next post, I will look at those who contributed after the cat was out of the bag about neo-Nazi Aporia and Jolly Heretic.

Bari Weiss promotes white supremacy at The Free Press

I have already noted that the garbage rag led by Bari Weiss, the Free Press, employs white supremacists like Douglas Murray - who is one of those named, by Weiss herself as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

And the racist right - very much including Bari Weiss and Steven Pinker - has been attempting to rehabilitate Richard Hanania's reputation since it came out he had spent years spewing incredibly racist garbage under the name "Richard Hoste."

No doubt because Hanania has access to so much fascist plutocrat money.

So I was not surprised to see Weiss publish an article in the Free Press by Richard Hanania.

You'll never guess Hanania's explanation for the obvious fascism of Steve Bannon and Elon Musk - they aren't REALLY fascists, they are just "trolling."

Say what you will about these men: None of them proclaims a Hitlerian worldview. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon was taking a page out of Al Sharpton’s book and denouncing Silicon Valley bosses for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics, which would make his brand of Nazism quite peculiar. Elon Musk has time and again pledged support for the Jewish people. He visited Israel in late 2023 and wore dog tags given to him by the father of an Israeli hostage in Gaza. Later, he went to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.

Except Elon Musk supports the German Neo-Nazi party AfD.

And Bannon has long been comfortable with Neo-Nazis - per the Guardian:

As the presidential election approaches, a recently designated neo-Nazi terrorist group is covertly seeding violent propaganda on to mainstream social media channels – exposing tens of thousands of unknowing followers to radicalizing messages – according to background research and a report provided to the Guardian by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

One of those channels on Telegram purports to be associated with Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, with an administrator claiming in group chats discovered by ISD to have had direct contact with the longtime Trump ally who is well-known for playing footsie with extremists and admitting to fomenting revolution.

But then this is Richard Hanania talking - not only did he have a long career as Hoste, promoting insane evil, these days he likes to hang out with his buddies, racists Razib Khan and Rob Henderson - here they are at a Free Press event. 

Both Henderson and Hanania have now written for The Free Press - I cannot believe Khan has not yet been employed there. 

Especially since Nellie Bowles, wife of Bari Weiss, loves loves Razib Khan. I assume exactly because of the race pseudoscience he loves to swill - especially when he can get it piping hot from non-scientist (well "political scientist") and career-long recipient of wingnut welfare Charles Murray, whom Khan recently had on his podcast. They...

...discuss how taboo it still is to talk about group differences in cognitive performance, and whether America will be able to face the reality of demographics and the social consequences thereof in the 21st century.

The link goes to one of Murray's more recent racist tracts.

But I do have to defend Bari Weiss a little - Jamelle Bouie can be seen on a Bluesky skeet above saying that Weiss believes in absolutely nothing - but to be fair, she does believe in something - she believes in GRIFTING.

The continuing non-celebrity career of Razib Khan

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan enjoy the bootlicking together after 

Singal posted a photo of grifter Bari Weiss and her grifter wife Nellie Bowles.

Weiss herself has to lick the boot, which is why she gives interviews to Peter Thiel and lately, fascist Marc Andreessen. It's very likely that both Thiel and Andreessen fund The Free Press, considering that Andreessen already funds Nazi-friendly Substack and Thiel has spent his entire career since college funding right-wing media and has been accused of funding Quillette. Thiel even went so far as to have a meeting with international man of douchebaggery Emil Kirkegaard, as reported in the essential-reading "Race Science Inc." by the organization Hope not Hate.

The Free Press is so devoted to racism it employs and expresses admiration for the white supremacist Douglas Murray.

Khan and Singal have been allies for years and recently Singal appeared on Khan's podcast.

I assume Khan is team-licking with Singal on Bluesky in an attempt to get a gig with the Free Press, which is basically the American Quillette. To be fair, the Free Press is a good fit for Khan, who has made a career of promoting far-right extremism and race pseudoscience, which has been quite lucrative for him.

Holocaust denier Ron Unz paid for Khan's education, per the excellent 2017 Undark article Race, Science, and the Continuing Education of Razib Khan:

Around 2000, (Khan) joined a private email discussion group about human biodiversity organized by Sailer. (More mainstream academics, including Steven Pinker, were also in the group).

Not long after that, Khan helped a geneticist friend start a blog about science. They called it Gene Expression — GNXP, for short. Its writers discussed technical topics, as well as issues with a more political edge, like gender and racial differences.

A few years later, Khan went on the payroll of Ron Unz, a libertarian who ran for governor of California in 1994. Unz, who made a fortune in software development, offered Khan something that Unz describes as “a sort of fellowship or junior fellowship” to further his scientific career. Both Khan and Unz are vague about the reasons for the fellowship, but the gift was contingent on Khan leaving his job in software to focus on a scientific career. It was a big part of why he got on a graduate school track and ended up at UC Davis.

The article is from 2017 and since then, Khan has continued to be a promoter of race pseudoscience, working with Quillette and the Emil Kirkegaard-owned Aporia Magazine. I wrote an overview of Khan's career in 2022.

I haven't been talking about Khan much in the past year but when he teamed up with Jesse Singal to attack me last week he got my attention.

I have to laugh about Singal's calling me an internet microcelebrity. Singal and Razib Khan are allied with the much more famous Steven Pinker, but although Pinker was called a "celebrity intellectual" by the NYTimes, even he is barely known outside of the very online. 

I had lunch with a writer friend not long ago and I told her about this Pinkerite blog. I explained why I selected the name Pinkerite and her response was "who is Steven Pinker?" I went through a list of the names of other IDW-related people I've written about here, and the only name she recognized was Bari Weiss.

Although more often than not when I've mentioned the name Bari Weiss, most people hear Barry White, the music legend who died over twenty years ago.

One of the reasons this blog is so obscure is that except for Thiel, Musk and Trump, virtually all the people I write about on Pinkerite are not well known by the general public nor even by smart people who pay attention to politics and current events. 

So by microcelebrity I assume Singal means that he and his IDW friends have Googled their names and found this blog. And since someone, anyone, is writing about them, they feel like celebrities - which makes me therefore a microcelebrity.

Among Razib Khan's smears on Bluesky is the claim that I'm "scaring even woke journalists."

Which "woke journalists" could Khan possibly mean? Matt Yglesias? Yglesias is another name known among pundit-types and the very online, but almost nobody else. Although an acquaintance mentioned to me that he was a counselor at a camp Yglesias attended as a child.

Razib Khan is not well known by the general public, but that's worked out for him since it means that he gets jobs and support from the clueless now and then. In 2013 even Ta-Nehisi Coates promoted Khan's career.

But then people Google Khan. Like when the NYTimes canned him, or when people changed their mind about signing Khan's petition in defense of racist E. O. Wilson. 

And sometimes when people Google his name they find this blog, which is why Khan is so mad and making unsupported claims about me. 

But I'm not even a microcelebrity. I'm just an American citizen, keeping tabs on people taking money from fascist plutocrats to promote race pseudoscience and other rightwing bullshit.

The Far Right & the International Society for Intelligence Research

The Atlantic published an article by Ali Breland yesterday, The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. Thanks to Maxine Margolis for the heads-up!

I have an issue with the title though. The far right has long been obsessed with Race and IQ. The important issue, which is what the article is really about, is that the Republican Party is being infected by race pseudoscience: 

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

And it's been going on since at least Bari Weiss's infamous glorification of several hardcore race pseudoscience promoters among the "renegades" of the Intellectual Dark Web including Michael Shermer, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, Sam Harris and of course Steven Pinker.

I don't think the article really has a good handle on Steve Sailer's career though, whatever Sailer may claim:

In June, (Sailer) also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. 

I have long noted on this blog that 2012 was the last time Steven Pinker mentioned Sailer in public after a previous decade of promoting his career, so I assume that's why Sailer picked 2013 as the year he was allegedly pushed out of the spotlight. And 2023 was when stochastic terrorist Elon Musk took over Twitter and invited all the racist ghouls back on. 

But New York Magazine had an article all about Sailer in 2017, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right. So Sailer was hardly in hiding. 

The article does not mention the International Society for Intelligence Research, of course, but it does mention Stefan Molyneux, who had Linda Gottfredson, one of the most prominent members of ISIR on his show and together they ranked races with Black people on the bottom. 

The ISIR chugs along, year after year, almost completely unnoticed by the mainstream media, platforming many many proponents of race pseudoscience at its conferences. In 2023 it featured Michael Woodley of Menie, Gregory Clark, Rosalind Arden, Richard Haier, Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker. 

This year they allowed one of the most extreme racists back in to make a presentation - Emil Kirkegaard.

There's a reference to "Bronze Age Pervert" in the Atlantic article and as outrageous as he is, his message per Breland is a perfect encapsulation of the ISIR ethos from Arthur Jensen to Linda Gottfredson to Richard Haier:

Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. 

I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of the participants of the annual Racist Rodeo - AKA the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

You can see the spreadsheet here.

Below are the top ten most frequent participants in the annual conferences since the first one in 2000. 

Note that participation is determined by mention in the annual conference program either for the inclusion of their work, or as an organizer or advisor or various administrative functions like interviewing the participants. But identification as a participant doesn't necessarily mean the individual was at the conference in person.

I haven't completed the 2024 conference since they haven't released the program yet, so these numbers are based on a timespan from 2000 to 2023. There was no conference in 2020. The right column is the number of times each has participated.

Lubinski, David	20
Bates, Timothy C.	18
Benbow, Camilla P.	18
Plomin, Robert	18
Deary, Ian J.	17
Haier, Richard	17
Johnson, Wendy	17
Detterman, Douglas K	16
Gottfredson, Linda	16
Colom, Roberto	14

So let's meet these most enthusiastic ISIR racist rodeo participants.

• David Lubinski is married to Camilla Benbow, and is currently at Vanderbilt University. In addition to being the most frequent ISIR conference participant, he received a "Lifetime Achievement" award from ISIR along with Benbow in 2019. Lubinski was one of the signatories of the Linda Gottfredson paper defending the race pseudoscience view in The Bell Curve, and as of 2022 was the director of the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which accepted money from the Pioneer Fund under the name Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. In 2023 the Institute of Mental Chronometry gave a grant of half a million dollars to two ISIR associates, Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee. 

Lubinski has not published anything directly about race, that I was able to discover so far, but his dedication to the cause of race pseudoscience seems certain via his various Jensenite associations and his apparently warm relationship with people like Linda Gottfredson and Steven Pinker. When Pinker was at the 2017 conference, Lubinski interviewed him and asked him, in effect, what made him come over to his side, the race pseudoscience side:

How did someone with your background, someone who at one point in his career and I'm not putting him on the spot because Steven said this publicly, said early on, he found individual differences "uninteresting" how did someone at that stage of development become so interested in human psychological diversity that you developed expertise in individual differences and wrote a book like "Blank Slate."

"Human psychological diversity" is a term indistinguishable from Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." And clearly Lubinski is using the term "individual differences" as a synonym for "human psychological diversity." 

Lubinski published an obituary for Jensen in American Psychologist that paints Jensen as compassionate towards Black people while failing to mention Jensen's alliances with hard-core racists like American Renaissance; that he was supported by the Pioneer Fund; and that he was on the board of the neo-Nazi publication Neue Anthropologie.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.  

• Timothy C.  Bates is a member of the editorial board of Intelligence, the publication associated with the ISIR. Bates' far-right, racist political views are apparent on his X/Twitter feed, where he retweets the likes of techno-fascist Trump-funder Elon Musk, Steven Pinker, and Razib Khan. He was the president of ISIR in 2017 and 2018.

On the Facebook page for the ISIR, Bates posts a reminder of how much the ISIR gang loves the incredibly racist Charles Murray. 

 

• Camilla P. Benbow, like her husband David Lubinski, underplays her race pseudoscience beliefs, but is clearly an enthusiastic participant in the ISIR race pseudoscience project. She is also at Vanderbilt. She's coauthored with extreme Jensenite Richard Haier and with extremist David C. Geary who has published in racist Aporia and racist "hereditarian" Quillette. I think that like Pinker, Lubinski and Benbow are too careful to make blatant racist statements, but they are clearly allies with those who do. They let those allies take the heat, while they continue to benefit from the financial legacy of the Pioneer Fund and who knows how many racist plutocrat donors.

• Robert Plomin - David Gilborn explored the perniciousness of Plomin:

‘… the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table, despite all the progress blacks have made in this society … the last great battle over racism will not be fought over access to a lunch counter, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, under a microscope, on the battleground of our DNA.’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. (2008) 

Why write a paper about racism and genetics in the second decade of the Twenty-First century? Surely arguments about race, intelligence and genetics are dead and buried? A Black man has been President and, in both the US and UK, bold assertions about racial minorities’ supposed intellectual inferiority have led to public condemnation for the speaker. Part of my answer lies in the main title of the paper, which quotes Professor Robert Plomin, one of the principal figures in contemporary writing about genetics and education. 

As I explain (below), Plomin has become something of a celebrity-academic in the UK; his claims make headline news, his views are sought by policy-makers, and he features in pop-science radio shows. In one such show, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili (Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, UK) he was challenged on the topic of race. Plomin described his approach as follows:  

‘In general I’ve felt softly softly is a better way to go…’ (BBC Radio 4, 2015).[1]  

Until recently many in the field of behavioural genetics have been far less reticent about airing their views. The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is the most famous, but by no means the only, example of such work (see Eysenck, 1971; Gottfredson, 1986; Jensen, 1969; Lynn, 1991 & 2001; Rushton, 1997). This paper shows how, in recent years, a softly softly approach (that avoids explicit reference to race) has become more common. I argue that this inexplicitness should not be mistaken for an absence of racialized thinking and does not signal that the current work is free from possible racist consequences. Indeed, if anything, the new softly softly version of hereditarianism may be even more dangerous than the outspoken version of earlier periods. 

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

😱 Plomin published an article with Deary that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer. 

• Ian J. Deary - curiously, Deary is quoted for the anti-hereditarian side in the Guardian: 

No one has successfully isolated any genes “for” intelligence at all, and claims in this direction have turned to dust when subjected to peer review. As the Edinburgh University cognitive ageing specialist Prof Ian Deary put it, “It is difficult to name even one gene that is reliably associated with normal intelligence in young, healthy adults.” Intelligence doesn’t come neatly packaged and labelled on any single strand of DNA. 

So it's strange that he spends so much time with people convinced of the hereditarian hypothesis, and, let's be real, hard-core racists and neo-Nazis who show up at ISIR conferences. 

 

😱 Deary published an article with Plomin that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer.   

 

• Richard Haier - I wrote the first iteration of the new version of the Rational Wiki article (NOT the one discussed here) exploring the extreme Jensen-infused racism of Richard Haier, the most devoted member of the Jensen race cult.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

• Wendy Johnson - appears to be a Jensenite, but did not make a good case for racism when she appeared in an online interview. However, she has published with blatant racist Jan te Nijenhuis. And of course has no problem hobnobbing with all the racist extremists who show up at ISIR conferences.

• Douglas K. Detterman - according to his Wikipedia entry: "Among his achievements, Detterman founded the scientific journal Intelligence in 1977, and was editor in chief from 1977 to 2016 where it was taken over by Richard Haier. He also founded the International Society for Intelligence Research and was its president until 2011." 

The entry doesn't mention that Detterman is also vice president/director of the Jensenite, Pioneer Fund grantee organization the Institute of Mental Chronometry. It is likely that Detterman is just as racist as Gottfredson is and Jensen was, but is more careful to downplay the racism at the heart of his belief-system. 

 

👉Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.    

 

• Linda Gottfredson is hideously racist, shamelessly so - possibly the equal of Jensen and J. P. Rushton. She can be heard ranking "races" with perfect confidence on white nationalist Stefan Molyneux's program. Her career is propped up by her lack of shame and the Nazi money of the Pioneer Fund. Gottfredson introduced Charles Murray to race pseudoscience. Of course this horrific racist ghoul is a long-time and highly admired member of the ISIR klan. They gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. 

👉Author of the defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence. 

• Roberto Colom is a huge fan and defender of the race pseudoscience of political operative and life-long recipient of wingnut welfare Charles Murray. He's also chummy with Murray on Twitter/X. Likes to cite all the biggest race pseudoscience ghouls in his work. Published in ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Five of the top 10 ISIR conference participants signed Gottfredson's "Mainstream Science" claim. 

Another signer was R. Travis Osborne - pro-segregationist, director of the Pioneer Fund. His article "Racial Differences in Mental Growth and School Achievement" was included in a collection of race pseudoscience essays edited by Robert Kuttner, another segregationist. That collection was a big influence on Arthur Jensen.

The race pseudoscience obsession with school achievement has continued from the days of segregationists like Osborne through the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which was originally called "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences" through to Kathryn Paige Harden and "behavioral genetics" arguing that educational attainment is the result of genes, to Richard Haier arguing for manipulating genes to raise IQ.