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.

The racist rodeo - European-style - the 2024 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research

The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) typically alternates between holding its annual conferences in North America and Europe. This is a European year and so the conference is in Zürich.

The line-up appears to have fewer obvious racists this year, although it does have Richard Haier, who is a devotee of 20th century racist Arthur Jensen - ISIR is founded on Jensenism. 

Haier has been spending his time lately hobnobbing with blatant racists like Charles Murray, Bo Winegard (and the gang at Aporia) and Stefan Molyneux, while promoting the idea that Black Americans can have their innate mental genetic defects cured through genetic manipulation.

One half of the respectability power couple of ISIR, Camille Benbow is also listed as a conference participant. To get an idea of the racist world that Benbow and her husband David Lubinski inhabit, consider Charles Murray's introduction for one of his more recently-published race-screeds, Human Diversity (my emphases):

Jensen made this pronouncement in his magnum opus, The g Factor, published in 1998. The list of eminent scholars who have shared that view began with Cyril Burt and Lewis Terman in the early part of the twentieth century and continued through the rest of the century and into the twenty-first century with figures such as Raymond Cattell, Nathan Brody, Hans Eysenck, John Loehlin, David Geary, Diane Halpern, Thomas Bouchard, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow. I should add that Richard Herrnstein and I took the same position in The Bell Curve.

Murray dedicates the book to Supreme Court corrupter, and Bari Weiss's "sugar daddy" Harlan Crow. I'm guessing Crow is one of the monstrously evil plutocrats funding Murray's racist screeds now.

Murray has, you guessed it, also appeared at ISIR conferences. But he isn't listed (so far) for this year's conference. But let's see who is:

Elsbeth Stern is the host and she seems at first glance far more reasonable than the typical ISIR conference attendee, actually admitting to the missing heritability problem in a paper published by Nature :

The search for the genes responsible for the expression of cognitive capabilities has not yet had much success, despite the money and effort invested in human genome projects.

However, the paper shows she's a big believer in the Pioneer Fund-underwritten twins studies and her second citation is of scientifically worthless evolutionary psychology. So she is fundamentally a proponent of sociobiology - which makes her a perfect fit for the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

Brook Macnamara is an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Case Western Reserve, and is interested in "individual differences" a term that usually means "group differences" which is a sneaky way of referring to race pseudoscience. Or as Emil Kirkegaard says: "group differences are just individual differences, really." Kirkegaard has also presented at ISIR meetings, until he embarrassed them. 

Matt McGue has a "collegiate affiliation" in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, and says he is a behavioral geneticist - which is the latest term for proponents of sociobiology.

Wendy Johnson is part of the twin studies sociobiology gang, publishing with Bouchard, McGue and Ian Deary, past president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.

Sophie von Strum is cited several times in "Human Diversity," by Charles Murray. She is Professor of Psychology in Education and Director of the Hungry Mind Lab at the Department of Education at the University of York and she says she wants to discuss Genomic prediction of educational outcomes - one of the favorite topics of the dread Kathryn Paige Harden, who has also appeared at ISIR conferences.

Stephen Ceci is a member of the League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters as well as a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell.

Wendy M. Williams is another member of the League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters as well as a professor of psychology at Cornell.

Franzis Preckel, and Klaus Oberauer seem to be garden-variety researchers, notable (so far as I can tell, yet) by their comfort with associating their names with an organization full of racists.

Once again, the Jensen-founded Institute of Mental Chronometry is paying some bills:

All graduate students and postdocs with an accepted oral or poster presentation for ISIR automatically qualify for $1,500 in travel support (for traveling from outside of Europe) or $1,000 of travel support (for those traveling from within Europe) from the Institute of Mental Chronometry.

That organization is rolling in the dough-re-mi, last year it gave half a million to two race-pseudoscience promoters Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee.

Jordan Peterson and Steve Sailer and Some More News - and Steven Pinker and the right-wing Harvard coup

I've provided a link to this excellent Some More News video about crackpot Jordan Peterson previously, but I hadn't watched it all the way through until yesterday. In my defense it is a really long video, which Cody lampshades several times throughout.

So I hadn't realized that racist filth Steve Sailer got a shout-out in the video. Jordan Peterson tweeted an article by Sailer that distorted the findings of a study about diversity. Some More News points out, accurately, that Sailer is a white supremacist.

The video also mentions Stefan Molyneux, Bari Weiss, Linda Gottfredson and Andy Ngo. 

Remember, billionaire techno-fascist Marc Andreessen admires Peterson.

Now Steven Pinker's alliance with Steve Sailer - from using him as his data guy to including a piece of crap that Sailer wrote in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" - is a prime reason for the existence of this blog. I am motivated to point out that while Pinker was playing a mild-mannered liberal college professor, an image aided and abetted by a compliant, lazy, stupid media, he has a history of over twenty years of promoting white supremacists and racists.

And Pinker has not only never denounced Steve Sailer and has never expressed regret for promoting his career, Steven Pinker is now chummy with Richard Hanania, yet another white supremacist.

Here is Steven Pinker's only subscription on Twitter - to Richard Hanania.

And now Pinker has teamed up with Christopher Rufo, Bari Weiss and all the IDW/Quillette/right-wing, plutocrat-funded ghouls and the GOP in the GOP war on colleges, starting with destroying Harvard's first Black woman president, Claudine Gay.

In the New York Times, Gay rightly notes this is not only about her, it's a campaign to "unravel public faith in pillars of American society."

On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Pinker & friends claim to be so concerned about anti-Semitism, yet I haven't heard a peep out of them about the fact that Substack promotes Nazis. Maybe because some of those Nazis are their friends.

UPDATE: Pinker makes it clear he and his rightwing ghoul mob are gunning for all American education institutions:

Pinker has proposed adopting a clear policy on academic freedom, promoting a wide range of viewpoints and embracing institutional neutrality by avoiding pronouncements on events of the day.

"It’s not just about Harvard, but about higher education and institutions in general,” Pinker said.

Chat GPT spills the tea about Peter Thiel and the Intellectual Dark Web

Since ChatGPT told me that Bari Weiss received a quarter of a million dollars from Peter Thiel in 2017, it occurred to me that perhaps her 2018 article for the New York Times about the splendors of her fellow travellers, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, was a public announcement of who had agreed to be on the Peter Thiel payroll. In addition to all those associated with Quillette.

In the article there were twenty-five individuals named by Weiss as connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, including Steven Pinker, Kanye West, Milo Yiannapoulos, Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones. 

But the most significant of the IDW bunch are those who were photographed for the article, standing in the dark in the bushes. 

I guess the photographer wanted to make a point by posing these Intellectuals in the Dark, but drew the line at literally portraying them in a Web and so had to stick them in some bushes instead.

The eight bush skulkers include Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, Dave Rubin and Eric and Bret Weinstein.

So what does ChatGPT have to say about them?

NOTE:  this must be investigated further, since ChatGPT is known to be factually unreliable.

        Has Peter Thiel ever funded Sam Harris?

Yes, Peter Thiel has provided funding to Sam Harris in the past. In fact, Thiel was one of the early supporters of Harris' podcast and helped fund the creation of the Waking Up app, which was later renamed to the Sam Harris app. Thiel and Harris have also engaged in public conversations and have expressed mutual respect for each other's work in various fields.

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Supposedly Harris says he's done with the Intellectual Dark Web.

I came up empty on a Thiel funding source for Michael Shermer, but ChatGPT did have this info, which is not even available at SourceWatch.

Has the Skeptic magazine received funding from Donors Trust?

Yes, according to public records, Skeptic magazine has received funding from Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that provides support to a variety of conservative and libertarian organizations. Specifically, tax filings from Donors Trust show that they provided funding to the Skeptics Society, the organization that publishes Skeptic magazine, in both 2014 and 2015. It's worth noting that Donors Trust supports a wide range of organizations across the political spectrum, and the fact that an organization receives funding from Donors Trust does not necessarily imply any particular political alignment or agenda. 

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Donor's Trust is the infamous right-wing funding vehicle that also gives millions to racist monsters VDARE.

ChatGPT had nothing about Thiel or Donors Trust funding for Christina Hoff Sommers, but it's not a secret that she's taken money from Koch-funded organizations for decades. ChatGPT agreed:

Christina Hoff Sommers, a conservative writer and critic of contemporary feminism, has received funding from a number of conservative and libertarian organizations over the years, particularly those focused on policy, education, and advocacy. Some of the organizations that have provided support to Sommers     include:

• The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank that promotes free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)
• The Bradley Foundation, a conservative foundation that supports a range of causes, including education, civic engagement, and free markets.
• The Charles Koch Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds research and education programs on a variety of topics, including economics, political science, and civil liberties.
• The Independent Women's Forum (IWF), a conservative organization that advocates for policies and initiatives that promote economic freedom, limited government, and individual responsibility. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)
• The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that focuses on policy research in areas such as urban policy, energy, and education. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)

Here's what ChatGPT had to say about Heather Heying:

Heather Heying has received funding from a number of conservative and libertarian organizations over the years, particularly those focused on science, education, and policy. Some of the organizations that have provided support to Heying include:

• The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank that promotes free speech and intellectual diversity on college campuses.
• The John William Pope Foundation, a conservative foundation that supports a range of causes, including education, healthcare, and public policy.
• The Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds research on science, spirituality, and human purpose.
• The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank that promotes intelligent design theory and critiques of evolutionary biology.
• The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that focuses on political philosophy, constitutionalism, and American exceptionalism.

I'm curious what The Discovery Institute hopes to get from Heying for its money, since it promotes intelligent design and critiques of evolutionary biology.

We do know that Heying and her husband Bret Weinstein have promoted junk science during the Covid pandemic. But that's Game Theory.

When I asked ChatGPT about Dave Rubin it said:

Rubin has expressed support for many conservative and libertarian ideas and causes, and he has collaborated with a number of individuals and organizations in these spheres. Some of the individuals and organizations that have expressed support for Rubin or his ideas include:

• Peter Thiel: As mentioned earlier, Thiel has expressed support for Rubin and his work, but there is no clear evidence that he has provided direct financial support to Rubin.
• PragerU: Rubin has collaborated with PragerU, a conservative educational organization that produces videos promoting conservative and libertarian ideas.
• Turning Point USA: Rubin has also worked with Turning Point USA, a conservative student organization that promotes conservative and libertarian ideas on college campuses.
• The Federalist Society: Rubin has expressed support for the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that promotes originalist interpretations of the US Constitution.
• Republican politicians: Rubin has expressed support for several Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul.

Eric Weinstein of course works for Thiel Capital, but I did not know he and Bret had been Thiel Fellows:

Bret and Eric Weinstein were both fellows at the Thiel Foundation, which provides funding to young entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. The Weinsteins have also been associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a loose network of public intellectuals who are known for challenging mainstream narratives on a range of topics. While the IDW is not a formal organization and does not receive direct funding, many of its members are supported by conservative and libertarian donors who share their views.

Curiously ChatGPT wouldn't say that Bret Weinstein was funded by the same organizations who fund his wife, Heather Heying, which makes no sense. It did say about Weinstein:

Weinstein has also been critical of what he calls "woke ideology" and the progressive movement, and has spoken out in support of free speech and academic freedom. These views have earned him support from some conservative and libertarian organizations and donors. For example, he has appeared as a guest speaker at events hosted by the National Review Institute, a conservative think tank, and has been praised by conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro was another person named in Weiss's NYTimes article as IDW.

I came up with bupkis for Joe Rogan.

So according to ChatGPT,  Sam Harris has taken money from Thiel, and Eric and Bret Weinstein were fellows at the Thiel Foundation, and all the others, except Joe Rogan have connections to lots of other far-right funders.

And since Thiel has funded Quillette we can infer these people have received Thielbucks due to Quillette authorship (my annotations in parentheses):

Quillette is an online magazine that publishes articles on a wide range of topics, including politics, culture, science, and technology. Some of the individuals who have written articles for Quillette include:

• Jordan Peterson: Canadian psychologist and author (IDW member per Weiss article)
• Claire Lehmann: Australian psychologist and founder of Quillette (Quillette is the primary publication of the IDW per the Weiss article)
• Sam Harris: American philosopher and author (see above)
• Christina Hoff Sommers: American philosopher and cultural critic (see above)
• Jonathan Haidt: American social psychologist and author 
• Heather Mac Donald: American political commentator and author
• Gad Saad: Canadian evolutionary psychologist and author
• Bret Weinstein: American biologist and evolutionary theorist (see above)
• Douglas Murray: British author and political commentator (named member of IDW)
• Andrew Doyle: British comedian and writer (or "comedian")
• Cathy Young: Russian-American journalist and author
• Debra Soh: Canadian sex researcher and science writer (named member of IDW)
• Conor Friedersdorf: American journalist and writer
• Peter Boghossian: American philosopher and professor
• Toby Young: British journalist and author (also was Quillette associate editor)
• Maajid Nawaz: British activist and writer
• Meghan Daum: American author and columnist
• Yascha Mounk: German-American political scientist and writer
• Helen Pluckrose: English author and editor of Areo Magazine
• James Lindsay: American author and mathematician
• Bruce Gilley: American political scientist and professor
• Claire Fox: British author and commentator
• Jamie Palmer: British writer and commentator (Quillette editor)
• Heather Heying: American evolutionary biologist and writer (see above)
• Ed Husain: British writer and commentator
• Coleman Hughes: American writer and podcaster
• Frances Widdowson: Canadian academic and writer

This is not an exhaustive list, as many other individuals have also written articles for Quillette.

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It's important to note that Peter Thiel is a democracy-hating far-right funder of monsters like Donald Trump, and has been called both a psychopath and a sociopath. And he's a babbling, Bible-quoting crackpot, with billions to spend on his far-right agenda. 

And those people have taken his money.

Or as David Bertoli, one of the admirers of the Anna Krylov/Jerry Coyne grift might say:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” 

"Defending Western Civilization" is a dog whistle for white supremacy

The latest news about The Proud Boys in Raw Story:

Civil war brewing inside Proud Boys as top leader says he’s done pretending he isn’t a Nazi

It begins:

The far-right Proud Boys gang has long denied that it is a white nationalist organization and has instead claimed that it only exists to defend “Western Civilization.”

However, Newsweek reports that some members of the group are ready to openly embrace being a racist organization and are dropping any pretenses of wanting support of non-white people.

And ends:

(Kyle Chapman) also made clear that he believed talk of defending “Western Civilization” was really just a racist dog whistle all along.

“We recognize that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race,” he wrote.

"the West was built by the White Race" is the most likely reason Quillette staff member and obvious racist Bo Winegard and his brother Ben Winegard declare their love for "the West" and "Western Civilization" in their Twitter profiles.

So what are the connections between the Proud Boys and the Intellectual Dark Web?

Joe Rogan hosted Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes.

Stefan Molyneux - named by Bari Weiss herself as connected to the Intellectual Dark Web - interviewed Gavin McInnes

Mike Cernovich, another named member of the IDW organized a "freedom party" with McInnes and Molyneux 

Ebony Magazine points out that Gavin McInnes and Razib Khan write for the racist Taki's Magazine - Khan's career has long been supported by Steven Pinker 

Both Quillette founder Claire Lehmann and Gavin McInnes worked for right-wing extremist nut job Ezra Levant's Rebel Media.

There are likely more. 

Speaking of McInnes - he likes to portray himself as a decent family man victimized by the Left, often mentioning his wife - who appears to be as extremist as he is - but McInnes made a less than wife-guy appearance in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Why the Alt-Right’s Most Famous Woman Disappeared:

(Lauren) Southern finished on set and ordered an Uber to the airport for her flight home to Toronto. Partway through the ride, her phone rang. It was McInnes. Southern listened to him closely for a few seconds.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this at all,” she said, laughing uncomfortably. Then her face tightened. “See, the thing is, because my moral compass tells me you have a wife and kids, it’s not even in my realm of consideration.” McInnes, according to Southern, had just reiterated an offer he’d made the night before, when she’d been out with him and a group of other far-right friends: “You know you want to fuck me; I’m your childhood hero.”

(When reached for comment, McInnes stated, “As a married man, I have never sexually propositioned Lauren Southern or any other woman.”)

With a grimace, Southern hustled him off the phone. She was speechless for a moment. “Send help,” she said feebly. “Help.”

But really considering how incredibly misogynist Gavin McInnes is - and I don't mean he hates feminists I mean he despises women and especially women's bodies (McInnes is obsessed with ovaries) - you have to wonder what the hell is wrong with Gavin McInnes' wife.

How racist are Stefan Molyneux, Jared Taylor and Biosocial Criminologists?

Although Molyneux's been booted off YouTube, you can still find a small number of his YouTube videos on Archive.org.

This video, titled "An Honest Conversation About Race" Molyneux talks to infamous white nationalist Jared Taylor.

At minute 26, Molyneux says that successful Blacks are successful by countering "the narrative of insurmountable white racism" to which Taylor replies:

               Taylor
Well two points there. First of all, even when you do control for IQ, there are residual differences (between Blacks and whites). These can perhaps be attributed to differences in the willingness to forgo present satisfaction for future gain. There seems to be an independent variable along those lines as well. Blacks, have, I never can remember if there's a greater or lesser ti-... how that works out according to the lingo - 

               Molyneux
Less capacity to defer gratification I think would probably be the easiest way to put it. I have that problem too. 

              Taylor
They are less able to sacrifice now for future benefit. And this is found from childhood on. Even when you control for IQ. But I agree with you, IQ is really the fundamental differential...

Molyneux smiles and nods vigorously. I haven't watched the whole thing because  it is revolting to have to look at Taylor's smiling smug face while he peddles, with total self-confidence, mind-boggling bullshit.

Jared Taylor's publication, the white nationalist American Renaissance has republished several articles that first appeared in Quillette.

Now Taylor and Molyneux are infamous racists and not considered part of the mainstream. But what's important to realize is that Taylor is saying the exact same things as "biosocial criminologists" who hold positions in several American colleges. 

In the 2015 book published by Sage,  The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality, the chapter Human Biodiversity and the Egalitarian Fiction,  co-written by John Paul Wright and Mark Alden Morgan echoes Taylor (my highlight):

...Lynn (2002), in a comprehensive investigation of psychopathology, presents evidence that Native Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics score higher on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventorys (MMPI) Psychopathic Deviate scale compared to Whites, while East Asians score lower. Furthermore, Lynn argues that this racial trend extends to a host of related social outcomes measures including childhood conduct disorder, ADHD, recklessness, aggression, criminality, the ability to delay gratification, marriage rates, and even moral understanding. Across the multitude of studies analyzed, a clear pattern emerges where Blacks score the worst on these measures, Whites intermediate, and Asians the best even when controlling for the effects of age and IQ.

Important items to note about this passage:

• The Lynn cited is white nationalist Richard Lynn, the grandfather of 21st century race science and eugenics, and recipient of funding by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund.

• Although a major point of the essay is that "race" is a biological phenomenon and therefore test scores are genetics-based "racial" traits, the Lynn citation in fact demonstrates that race science and biosocial criminology claims are based on cultural race categories. 

As The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States notes, 

"Latinos across the Americas have differing proportions of Native American, African, and European genetic ancestry, shaped by local historical interactions with migrants brought by the slave trade, European settlement, and indigenous Native American populations."

The paper is co-authored by David Reich, whom race science supporters erroneously believe is one of them.

 So in effect the alleged biological race classifications per Lynn, Wright and Morgan are Black, White, East Asian, Native American, and (Black/White/Native American in unspecified combination who speak Spanish.)

But it's even worse than that. 

As Carl Zimmer (who used the Reich paper as a source) noted in the New York Times article White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier in 2014: 

The scientists also have been developing software that learns to recognize the origins of the short segments of DNA that make up our genomes. Recently they used their program to calculate what percentage of each subject’s genomes was inherited from European, African or Native American forebears. 

“This year we saw that we were in a great position to do the analysis,” said Joanna L. Mountain, senior director of research at 23andMe. 

On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.

So genetically, in Lynn's study, "black" does not mean 100% Sub-Saharan African it means a combination of African, European and Native American that varies from one person to another culturally identified as "black."

Although the Zimmer article references information from 23andMe, it doesn't mention what I think is the worst blow of all to race science claims of test scores and biological race: East Asians and Native Americans are close enough genetically that 23andMe groups them together as a single "global population" which is as close as 23andMe gets to race categorization. 

According to the 23andMe site:

The 45 Ancestry Composition regional populations are organized in a hierarchy, which reflects the genetic structure of global populations. For example, British & Irish is a part of Northwestern European, which is part of European.
In April 2018, we added over 115 new recent ancestor locations which reflect specific countries where your ancestors likely lived during the last 200 years. These recent ancestor locations are noted in each of the regional populations below. You can learn more about Recent Ancestor Locations here. Currently, there are over 150+ recent ancestor locations in the Ancestry Composition Report.
The global populations available in Ancestry Composition are:

• European
• Central & South Asian
• East Asian & Native American
• Sub-Saharan African
• Western Asian & North African
• Melanesian
• Unassigned

What this means is that genetically, East Asians and Native Americans are as close to each other as Europeans are to other Europeans. 

So the biological racial classifications according to Richard Lynn are, in terms of 23andMe's global populations:

• White (European)
• Black (Sub-Saharan African, European and (East Asian & Native American) in various combinations per individual)
• East Asian (East Asian & Native American)
• Native American (East Asian and Native American)
• Hispanic (European, Sub-Saharan African and (East Asian & Native American) in various combinations per individual.)

Demonstrating that race "science" is a pseudo-scientific mess. It is an ideology pretending to be science, using science-sounding language promoted by biosocial criminology college professors.

I'm not the first to notice the scientific failures of biosocial criminology. The 2018 article Biosocial criminology and the mismeasure of race by Julien Larregue of Institute des Science Sociale du Politique and Oliver Rollins, Assistance Professor University of Louisville notes (my highlight):

...We focus on the way biosocial criminologists operationalize race to outline the sociological consequences of what we see as a renewed commitment to the bio-criminalization of race. Biosocial criminologists do not reject that race is socially constructed, but in practice they disregard the main consequences and raison d’être of this postulate. Though biosocial criminologists praise the incorporation of cutting-edge science into criminology, the research programme’s actual findings concerning race do not necessarily align with views from genetic and neuroscientific research. Instead, we argue that biosocial criminology solicits social constructionism as a shield to re-insert antiquated biologic notions of race through a guise of bio-sociality.

Richard Lynn in 2002 did not have access to genetic findings via 23andMe, but John Paul Wright and Mark Alden Morgan, in their 2015 article in an allegedly scholarly publication, certainly did - the Carl Zimmer article I cited is from 2014.

Now if Stefan Molyneux and Jared Taylor were hired by American colleges, there would be a  controversy. So why is there not a peep about the fact there are colleges employing people who are teaching criminology theories based on the same unscientific race theories that are peddled by people like Jared Taylor and Stefan Molyneux?

Biosocial criminologists who have endorsed the racist ideology also promoted by Jared Taylor and Stefan Molyneux includes:

• Beaver, Kevin M - Judith Rich Harris Professor of Criminology · Director, Distance Learning Program, Florida State College of Criminology

• Barnes, J. C. - Professor and Interim Director, College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services, University of Cincinnati

• Boutwell, Brian - associate professor of criminology and criminal justice, associate dean for Research and Corporate Partnerships,  Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice 

• DeLisi, Matthew - College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Professor, Iowa State University Department of Sociology

• Morgan, Mark Alden - Visiting Assistant Professor, Miami University

• Schwartz, Joseph A - Criminology and Criminal Justice, Associate Professor, School of Criminology and Justice, University of Omaha Nebraska

• Walsh, Anthony - Professor Emeritus at Boise State University

• Wright, John Paul - professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati College of Education Criminal Justice and Human Services, as well as its director of the graduate program in criminal justice.

I can't help but laugh at the bitter irony of Brian Boutwell, a fervent believer in race science and a practiced denialist of environment in general and the impact systemic racism has had on Black Americans in particular, being associate dean of a "college for public health and social justice."

There are more race science-swilling biosocial criminologists which I will add as I confirm them. It is unknown whether these colleges endorse the race beliefs of their teachers, whether they don't think it's a big deal that their students are being taught by peddlers of pseudo-scientific garbage, or if they are completely ignorant of the situation.

The colleges:

• Boise State University
• Florida State University
• Iowa State University
• Miami University
• Saint Louis University
• University of Cincinnati

And of course there are other college promoters of race science who aren't officially biosocial criminologists - Ben Winegard has coauthored race science-promoting articles with Brian Boutwell, but is Professor of Psychology at Carroll College.