Who were the biggest racists at the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research?

Steven Pinker was not at the 2025 meeting although he's been to a few others. But he was apparently thrilled that his gutter racist chum Claire Lehmann received an award from ISIR this year. 

ISIR did not make its meeting program available on its website in 2024, unlike every other year prior, possibly because in August 2024 I created a spreadsheet to track all those who have been official participants of ISIR meetings. And without that resource, there is not much data in my database for 2024.

And I feared 2025 would be the same story since the 2025 program was not posted either.

BUT THEN! A MENSA person named Laura Endicott Thomas posted the 2025 ISIR program on the Northern New Jersey MENSA website. Thomas is a hard-core fan of race pseudoscience so I don't think she's being deliberately mean by noting the low attendance for this year's meeting. Thomas is also a Trump supporter and has a theory - a lot of Europeans did not show up because they believed the "propaganda" about Trump and his administration's utter disregard for the rule of law. 

Yeah, I had heard that MENSA people were not very impressive.

So far I've seen no evidence that neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard was at the 2025 meeting although he was clearly welcomed back by the ISIR organization in 2024. But several of his close allies and people he's funded were there.

Russell T. Warne's far-right and racist views are obvious from the list of work published by Warne on his own website. He is unashamed to admit he's published in Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi, racist Aporia Magazine and he's also published in Quillette and Mankind Quarterly. As the Hope Not Hate exposé about Kirkegaard noted:

A recent research paper, published in the respected scientific journal PLOS ONE and co-authored by Mankind Quarterly contributor Russell T. Warne, acknowledged that it had been funded by a grant from HDF. His paper looked to undermine the idea that African Americans suffer from “stereotype threat”, a psychological theory that negative stereotypes internalised by minority groups can damage their cognitive performance.

"HDF" stands for "Human Diversity Foundation" which was the name for Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi umbrella organization until he changed it to the more behavioral genetics-sounding "Polygenic Scores."

I was somewhat horrified to discover that Warne provides a link to an article in which he claims to be "a theatre critic and self-avowed 'Shakespeare fanboy.'" I certainly hope Warne tells the readers of his theater reviews that he is allied with - and funded by - a racist/neo-Nazi. Especially if he reviews "Othello." Oh wait, he has reviewed Othello, in 2011 - maybe that was before Warne became a dedicated gutter racist.

Naturally Kirkegaard is a fan of Warne's work, testifying on his blog in 2023: "Back in 2021, Russell Warne wrote a nice summary article about race differences in intelligence..."

Warne was also one of the censorship ghouls who SLAPP-sued Rational Wiki for telling the truth about his extremism.

At the ISIR meeting, Warne gave a talk on Rethinking Mental Speed: Unraveling the Mystery of Item Response Time. I assume that is related to Arthur Jensen's "Mental Chronometry" which was a big disappointment to race pseudoscience. But they keep trying anyway, I guess.

Warne's business account on Twitter, Riot IQ, promotes the work of evolutionary psychologist David Geary, which makes it it clear that Riot IQ's "science" is based on the joke pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology so exquisitely eviscerated by biologist P. Z. Myers in this video.

No doubt about it - by multiple metrics, Russell T. Warne is a gutter racist.

David Geary, the keynote speaker for the annual meeting, is a gutter racist, appearing on the Aporia podcast after the HOPE not Hate exposé made it crystal clear that Aporia was part of a neo-Nazi network owned by Emil Kirkegaard. Although to be fair, Geary's beat is more about misogyny just-so stories than about race. Still, he co-authored a paper with the race-obsessed twins, Ben and Bo Winegard - Bo Winegard is now one of Emil Kirkegaard's main toadies. So Geary is a definite gutter racist.

Geary's piece for the ISIR meeting was "The nurture of nature: Why sex differences are larger in healthy and wealthy nations" Looks like it's part of the ongoing hereditarian project to prove that girls are genetic losers in STEM subjects.

Michael A Woodley of Menie - unlike these other gutter racists, Woodley is the only one that I know of who has been declared outright a "racist" in the New York Times, in the article "A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting." That article is about Woodley's work showing up in the racist manifesto of the anti-Black mass murderer in Buffalo New York a few years ago. 

Although as I've said many times, it's really unfair to Woodley, as the work of several ISIR meeting participants showed up in the manifesto.

Woodley has co-authored papers with so many other racists, including Kirkegaard, that I wonder if he is capable of authoring a paper with someone who is not a racist.

Woodley is one of the ghouls who used a SLAPP lawsuit to censor Rational Wiki. You can tell it was pure SLAPP intimidation since the New York Times article is at least as damning as the Rational Wiki one, but as far as I know, Woodley did not try to sue the New York Times.

Thomas R. Coyle, past president of ISIR has co-authored several papers with gutter racist Heiner Rinderman who publishes in Kirkegaard's OpenPsych pseudo-journal. According to the ISIR 2025 program "...a new open-access journal, Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities, was established by Thomas Coyle and Richard Haier to reflect the growing need for an unbiased publication platform committed to free inquiry." 

I had heard about this journal, I heard it was a response by the more racist members of the ISIR network to Intelligence magazine saying it would be less welcoming in the future to race pseudoscience. I fully expect that Coyle and Haier's new journal will publish work by Emil Kirkegaard, as Intelligence has done in the past but presumably no longer will. They've already published articles by Warne, Woodley and other racists.

Coyle teamed up with other members of the league of racist villains in a paper responding to critics of race pseudoscience. You can almost smell the burning cross coming from this list of Coyle and his co-authors Michael A Woodley of Menie, Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre, Aurelio-José Figueredo, Geoffrey F Miller, Noah Carl, Fróði Debes, Craig L Frisby, Federico R Leon, Guy Madison and Heiner Rindermann.

At this annual meeting Coyle chaired sessions, introduced Lehmann's speech, and was represented by a paper called "Tilt increases at higher ability levels: support for differentiation theories."

I first heard about "tilt" when I saw Lehmann and Kirkegaard having a friendly chat about it on Twitter.

In case anybody has any doubts about Lehmann's comfort with neo-Nazis.

Coyle wrote about "tilt" for Intelligence magazine, with a somewhat more vivid title:

White-Black differences in tech tilt: Support for Spearman's law and investment theories. 

There appears to be no effort in this paper to determine exactly who counts as "Black" and who counts as "White" - which is absolutely typical of race pseudoscience. 

Douglas K. Detterman was honored at the meeting for founding ISIR. Detterman is part of the old guard of racists, along with white nationalist Arthur Jensen, who is, mercifully, dead.

Detterman was the Vice President of another organization created to promote the work of Jensen, the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, which received Nazi money via the Pioneer Fund. The institute was later renamed Institute for Mental Chronometry, which still exists, and which pays for support services for ISIR meetings and recently donated a large sum to Emily Willoughby and James Lee, board members of ISIR.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Detterman worships Jensen - and because of, not in spite of his racism. On a website created by Emil Kirkegaard to honor Jensen there is an article by Detterman explaining why Jensen was right to suggest that "group differences" in intelligence testing were genetic.

Into this cauldron of social and scientific confusion, Arthur Jensen (1969) published a paper in Harvard Educational Review entitled, “How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?” According to rumors, the paper was based on a talk given at a meeting of the American Association for Educational Research and editors of the Harvard Educational Review invited the paper and perhaps even sought to make it more controversial than the original submission. When the paper came to press, the results were explosive.

A brief synopsis of the paper is that this more than 120 page paper presented evidence bearing on the title question—is it possible to boost scholastic achievement and IQ through environmental intervention. Jensen's answer to the question was that it may not be possible to boost either IQ or academic achievement through environmental interventions because both have a substantial heritable component and are highly correlated with each other. Not more than a few pages of the paper dealt with race and intelligence but given the frequently observed mean IQ differences between groups, there was some inevitable discussion of these differences. The basic thesis of the majority of the paper was that it may not be possible to raise IQ and subsequent academic achievement through environmental interventions.

Jensen had hit every exposed nerve of the time and immediately became a lightning rod for those against the ideas he presented which seemed to be nearly everyone.

Heritable differences between groups were repugnant to psychological environmentalists, to communists, and to those who misinterpreted the fundamental concept of democracy that “all people are created equal” (instead of equal under the law). His thesis was also difficult to accept for those who believed that all differences between people could and should be accounted for by environmental differences.

As usual with hereditarians, Detterman misuses the term "heritable." And obviously Detterman agrees with Jensen's idiotic racist beliefs. The problem, in his mind, is all those communists who refuse to accept that some "groups" are clearly intellectually, genetically inferior. 

Detterman is predictably a big fan of indisputable gutter racist Charles Murray. In his glowing review of Murray's more recent piece of hereditarian garbage, "Human Diversity," he piously lectures those of us who are not afraid to point out that Charles Murray is a racist:

Do not engage in ad hominem attacks. Calling people racists or fascists or other nasty names does not resolve scientific debates. 

Like E. O. Wilson, Detterman would like to be seen as a genteel racist, and genteel racists are shocked by naughty words like fascist and racist. 

Something that Murray's defenders reliably fail to mention: Murray is not a life scientist, he's a political scientist. And as such, he's had a very successful career - thanks in large part to far-right reactionaries funding wingnut welfare -  convincing the stupid and the gullible that he speaks as a scientist about race, intelligence and genetics. It's fascinating that Detterman fully accepts Murray as an expert on scientific issues. But then, Detterman is a psychologist, which is only a slightly more scientific field than political science.

Detterman also signed gutter racist Linda Gottfredson's defense of the Bell Curve with dozens of other racists and assorted right-wing ghouls.

I'm certain that every one of them considers Charles Murray a better source of science information than Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, in part because they hate Gould's political views. Politics is everything to race pseudoscience.

Not only does Detterman adore Jensen, he attempted to mainstream the career of gutter racist Jean-Phillip Rushton. As Rushton testifies in his paper The Equalitarian Dogma Revisited: 

Fortunately, albeit after another lengthy review process, Douglas Detterman accepted the paper for Intelligence (Rushton, 1994), and invited me to write this editorial.

"Equalitarianism Dogma" is the term that race pseudoscience racists use to attack their critics, claiming that the only reason anybody opposes hereditarianism is because of politics, not because of science. The term was used by segregationist Henry Garrett in 1961 in Mankind Quarterly (now owned by Emil Kirkegaard) and more recently by Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard and associates in 2023.

Here is some of what Rushton says in the editorial published by Detterman:

Evolutionary hypotheses for why Asians average the largest brains and have the most intelligence have been provided (Rushton, 1995) . The currently accepted view of human origins, the "African Eve" theory, posits a beginning in Africa some 200,000 years ago, an exodus through the Middle East with an African/non-African split about 110,000 years ago, and a Caucasoid/Mongoloid split about 40,000 years ago. Evolutionary selection pressures are different in the hot savanna where Africans evolved than in the cold arctic where Mongoloids evolved. The further north out of Africa that populations migrated, the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering, and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children during prolonged winters . I proposed that as the original African populations evolved into Caucasoids and Mongoloids, they did so in the direction of larger brains, slower rates of maturation, and other traits differentiating the populations .

To further account for why Negroids are also, on average, more fertile, faster maturing, and more sexually active, I proposed a gene-based evolutionary theory familiar to population biologists as the r-K scale of reproductive strategy . At one end of this scale are r-strategies, which emphasize high reproductive rates, and, at the other, K-strategies, which emphasize high levels of parental investment (nurturing). The scale is generally used to compare different species, but I used it to describe the immensely smaller variations within the human species . I hypothesized that Mongoloid people are more K-selected than Caucasoids, who in turn are more K-selected than Negroids,

In the first paragraph, Rushton calls on the 19th-century "cold winters" fantasy, in the second, he uses E. O. Wilson's work on r/K strategies, to basically suggest that "Negroids" are a separate species from "Caucasoids" and "Mongoloids." We know he did that with the complete approval of Wilson.

But how DARE you call that racist! Quick, Detterman, the smelling salts!

Conclusion: If E. O. Wilson is a gutter racist for aiding and abetting Rushton, than Douglas K. Detterman is also a gutter racist.

Curtis Dunkel is part of Kirkegaard's network. Dunkel's contribution to the ISIR meeting is a paper, "A cross-trait analysis of the Dunning-Kruger effect" co-authored with Dimitri Van Der Linden, who has also co-authored a paper with racist extremists Edward Dutton and the mercifully dead Richard Lynn.

So those are the biggest racists of the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research. I'm sure there were plenty more at this meeting, in spite of its low attendance, but those are the names that jumped out at me. But the ISIR is never going to rid itself of racist extremists because without them and the beliefs they represent, ISIR would barely exist.

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

Charles Murray is done

Just a wretched excuse for a 
human being - which is why
the American Right loves him
------------------------------------------------------

I completed the Rational Wiki article on Charles Murray. He is just an absolute stinker of a human being. 

Probably my favorite parts of the piece are:

• Casting doubt on Murray's claim that as a "bright" high school senior, planning to attend college, he had no idea that burning a cross would be racially charged.

• Pointing out that Murray was motivated to trash "Hidden Figures" because Twitter critics did not like his tweet that cast doubt on the mathematical accomplishment of two Black teenage girls. Murray got his revenge!

• Digging up astronaut Michael Collins' criticisms of Murray's no-longer-in-print book "Apollo: The Race to the Moon"

And having another excuse to share Al Franken's rip on The Bell Curve.

Racist Rodeo's a-coming - the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research is only weeks away

David Lubinski yukking it up with
Linda Gottfredson in 2016 - isn't racism jolly?
--------------------------------------------------------------------

The Racist Rodeo is coming up, July 26 - 29 in Berkeley California.

This is the twenty-third annual meeting of the race pseudoscience gang. 

Seems like only yesterday when extreme racists like J. P. Rushton, Linda Gottfredson and Arthur Jenson met for the first rodeo in Cleveland Ohio to discuss why those Blacks (and other "races" like Hispanics) are so damn genetically inferior. And look how quaint, their first program cover uses the Comic Sans typeface. 

I guess to present the casual, friendly side of "race realism."

The latest update for the upcoming Rodeo indicates that the timetable for the conference is still being finalized. But I see the "conference will feature a special symposium on giftedness with invited talks by giftedness researchers Michael Mhlolo and Camilla Benbow, among others."

Mhlolo is Black, so they now have two Black people attending this Racist Rodeo. But never fear, Camilla P. Benbow will be there to balance him out. Benbow is the wife of race pseudoscience hardcore David Lubinski, who is apparently the interview guy for the ISIR - here he interviews Charles Murray.

I discussed Lubinski conducting an interview with Pinker, asking Pinker why it took him a half-minute before joining the race pseudoscience true believers club. Or as Dubinsky calls it, "human psychological diversity."

It's clear that the push to legitimize race pseudoscience is not simply the project of weirdos like Emil O. W. Kirkegaard (will he show up at the ISIR this year now that Abdel Abdellaoui isn't there to chase him away?) This is a mainstream project with establishment people involved - Lubinski is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt, and Benbow is Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development, Office of the Dean at Vanderbilt.

We know their project is mainstreaming race pseudoscience because Lubinski signed Linda Gottfredson's race pseudoscience manifesto back in 1994, "Mainstream Science on Intelligence." This document is the Declaration of Independence of the ISIR - if you signed it, you are a founding father of twenty-first century race pseudoscience.

The ISIR's devotion to hereditarianism is obvious on its articles page. The fifth item down is "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" with the comment "The article is a classic. It’s one of the best overviews of intelligence, its causes, and its consequences."

The first two articles include incorrect definitions of the term "heritability." 

I've written on this blog about the misuse of the term. A great resource is The heritability fallacy by David S. Moore and David Shenk published in 2016, which states:

Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is.

Now they say "popular belief" which might indicate the general public. But the articles presented by the ISIR are written by people whose careers are staked on hereditarianism and should know better. 

And yet the first paper Genetics and Intelligence Differences by Robert Plomin and Ian Deary states:

For some areas of behavioural research—especially in psychiatry —the pendulum has swung so far from a focus on nurture to a focus on nature that it is important to highlight a second law of genetics for complex traits and common disorders: All traits show substantial environmental influence, in that heritability is not 100% for any trait.

They are using the term "heritable" as an exact synonym for genetically inheritable, and contrast that with "environmental influence."

The second paper in the list, Heritability in the genomics era - concepts and misconceptions states in its first key point:

Heritability, the proportion of variation in a particular trait that is attributable to genetic factors, is a fundamental parameter in genetics.

Now why would hereditarians so often mis-define the term heritable? Is it deliberate, with the goal of claiming that GWAS studies prove the hereditarian hypothesis? Or could it be that their belief in the ability of genes to control social outcomes is so reflexive that they can't imagine the term "heritable" could mean anything else?

Or could it be that the ISIR and fellow race pseudoscience travelers don't care so much about actual science - as long as their beliefs are presented in a way that sounds sufficiently sciencey to the lazy gullible media and the general public - as they do about political goals? 

The "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" paper, so essential to the ISIR and the race pseudoscience project ("a classic"), was written as a defense of The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve's co-author Charles Murray made it obvious, two years ago, that he would be happy to see a return to hiring discrimination, based on the beliefs of race pseudoscience.

Like Charles Murray, Thomas Bouchard, the twins studies guy and one of the ISIR's favorites, is the beneficiary of far-right racist funding:

 ...of the largest single beneficiaries of Wickliffe Draper’s generosity in the 20th century was the psychologist Thomas Bouchard, currently the director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota, whose twin studies remain influential in intelligence research circles. Most recently, Bouchard’s work was cited in a 2022 paper in the Nature journal npj Science of Learning looking at genetic effects on cognitive performance as people learn over time. 

‍

In her 2012 book “Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study,” the evolutionary psychologist Nancy Segal claims that Bouchard had never heard of the Pioneer Fund until its staff contacted him in 1980 or 1981. Despite concerns among his colleagues about accepting money from what was known to be a disreputable source, according to Segal, Bouchard admitted in 2009 that, “If not for Pioneer we would have folded long ago.” 

‍

Wickliffe Draper was a political activist and the Nazis were big fans - and vice versa.

Racists funding race pseudoscience for political ends. That's what the ISIR is ultimately all about.

Fun fact - of course like Bo Winegard, racist weirdo Emil Kirkegaard has a Substack account. That's because Substack is run by people with Peter Thiel connections who have no qualms about hosting racism.

Another fun fact: Charles Murray is a big fan - and funder - of Bo Winegard and Emil Kirkegaard.

Andrew Sullivan, still promoting racist pseudoscience

Andrew Sullivan is well-known for promoting the racist nonsense of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.

More recently, when confronted by a New York Times reporter, Sullivan stepped back just a tiny bit from race pseudoscience.

I tried out my most charitable interpretation of his view on race and I.Q. (though I question the underpinnings of the whole intellectual project): that he is most frustrated by the notion that you can’t talk about the influence of biology and genetics on humanity. But that he’s not actually saying he thinks Black people as a group are less intelligent. He’d be equally open to the view, I suggested, that data exploring genetics and its connection to intelligence would find that Black people are on average smarter than other groups.

“It could be, although the evidence is not trending in that direction as far as I pay attention to it. But I don’t much,” he said. (He later told me he’s “open-minded” on the issue and thinks it’s “premature” to weigh the data.)

“I barely write about this,” he went on. “It’s not something I’m obsessed with.”

But he also can’t quite stop himself, even as I sat there wishing he would. “Let’s say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I’m just saying — there’s something there, I think. And I’m not sure what it is, but I’m just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over.”

It was obvious that Sullivan was still committed to race essentialism and pseudoscience by his mentioning Jews and the Nobel Prize - he's referencing the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis, created by racists, with the goal, I believe, of inventing a "scientific" justification for a long-standing racist belief about Jews. 

In the past week, Sullivan not only recommitted himself to race pseudoscience, he did it via an even less-reputable individual, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, best known as being described by comedian Stewart Lee as "weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil."

Emil Kirkegaard has such a bad reputation that even Abdel Abdellaoui refused to participate in a conference unless Emil O. W. Kirkegaard was disinvited from the Racist Roundup.

I think it's likely that Abdellaoui is just as committed to sociobiological (hereditarian) explanations of human hierarchies, given that he is an ally of anti-Black racist Razib Khan, as Kirkegaard. I think the issue is about status - Kirkegaard doesn't have the academic credentials that most people associated with the International Society for Intelligence Research, aka "the Racist Roundup" have.

UPDATE - SULLIVAN RETRACTED

However, I doubt this indicates that Sullivan is no longer a believer in race pseudoscience.

Then Kirkegaard jumped on the thread to defend white supremacy.

Scary Peter Thiel and Google censorship

So Google decided to censor my blog post "Scary rightwing anti-democratic Quillette-funding Peter Thiel" - and while it certainly could be political censorship, it could also be due to Google stupidly using AI to moderate Blogger content now.

The claim was that the post somehow violated "community standards" but I don't see how. And Google does not tell you exactly why it flags a post for censorship - you are supposed to guess. 

I will be moving this blog to a new platform as soon as possible.

You can read the original article here.

VIVE LA INDEPENDENT WEB!

Michael Shermer and Equalitarianism and the Citizens' Councils

Last time I wrote about Quillette author Michael Shermer it was to note his agreement with Quillette author Nathan Cofnas on the issue of "genetic diversity." 

Lately I've found that Michael Shermer is in agreement with racist Bo Winegard on the issue of the term "equalitarian." Both believe it would be a good term to use against those who oppose and criticize race pseudoscience and racism - the ideological enemies of Shermer and Winegard.

Shermer cites Thomas Sowell, a rightwing economist. From a Washington Post review of a book by Sowell:

Sowell’s central message is that the reason some people are poor — in any country, at any period in history — is not discrimination or exploitation or malicious actions on the part of the rich. Rather, people are poor because they don’t or won’t produce. For him, the only mystery is why.

Michael Shermer and his friends are ready to supply the answer to the mystery, via pseudoscience: they believe poor people have genes that make them poor. 

This belief isn't new of course, racist Charles Murray has made a career out of that belief since at least The Bell Curve. 

The term equalitarian is not new either. It was a favorite term of segregationist Carlton Putnam as noted by Neil R. McMillen in The Citizen’s Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction:

Setting forth his ethnological assumption in an influential and widely circulated book, Race and Reason (1961), Putnam asserted that one need not have advanced scientific training to dispute theories of racial equalitarianism: “Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo… can compare this settlement with London or Paris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence…” That so few informed Americans saw things so clearly was compelling proof to Putnam that the nation had been victimized by a “pseudo-scientific hoax” popularized by such early exponents of racial equipotentiality as Franz Boas and several subsequent generations of like-minded anthropologists more devoted to “the demo-goddess of Equalitarianism” than to “the Goddess of Truth.”

Putnam's pro-segregation pamphlet "High Court's Arrogance is Viewed by Northerner" was published by the Educational Fund of the Citizens' Councils of Greenwood, Mississippi.

If you do a search for "equalitarian" you can see how popular the term is with racists:

• The Equalitarian Dogma by HE Garrett · 1961 · 

• The equalitarian dogma revisited by JP Rushton · 1994  

• (PDF) Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias by Bo Winegard, Cory Clark, Connor Hasty, Roy Baumeister - Oct 30, 2020 

• "Equalitarianism" and Progressive Bias - Quillette by Bo Winegard 2018

Garrett was a segregationist and briefly a director of The Pioneer Fund. J. P. Rushton was an infamous racist and racemonger.

Rushton's "The equalitarian dogma, revisited," is a defense of Garrett's "The Equalitarian Dogma."

Rushton is listed as a reference in "Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias" by Winegard, Clark, Hasty and Baumeister.

I don't believe any of these authors are ignorant of the use of "equalitarianism" by segregationists, racists and racemongers. I think that, more likely, this attempt to revive the term "equalitarian" by Shermer, Winegard, Clark, Hasty and Baumeister is a knowing homage to 20th century racists, and perhaps a dogwhistle to other promoters of race pseudoscience.

Cory Clark is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and co-author with Bo Winegard of this retracted paper; Connor Hasty is a professor at Florida State University; and Roy Baumeister was associated with Winegard at Florida State University and is now Emeritus professor at the University of Queensland.

Putnam's Wikipedia entry includes these passages from his book "Race and Reason: A Yankee View": 

In the next 500,000,000,000 years I would be quite prepared to concede the possibility the Negro may, through normal processes of mutation and natural selection within his own race, eventually overtake and even surpass the white race. [...] When the Negro has bred out his limitations over hundreds, or thousands, of years, it will be time enough to consider absorbing him in any such massive doses as would be involved in the South today.[6]: 53 

The mulatto who was bent on making the nation mulatto was the real danger. His alliance with the white equalitarian often combined men who had nothing in common save a belief that they had a grudge against society. They regarded every Southerner who sensed the genetic truth as a bigot [...]. Here were the men who needed to be reminded of the debt the Negro owed to white civilization.[6]: 117 

Contemporary racemongers must be so jealous of Putnam, who could get away with such blatant public racism and still have a career in business, serving as chief executive officer of Delta Airlines after he published his racist swill.

Winegard's career seems to be wholly supported by the racist wingnut welfare system via Quillette, but Shermer still has Skeptic magazine. I can only assume Skeptic is supported by racists and idiots who either don't know Shermer is a racist, or don't care.

Fun fact: Ruby Bridges, whose quest for desegregated education was supported by the "equalitarians" so hated by Shermer, Putnam, Garrett, Rushton, Clark, Hasty, Baumeister and Winegard, is 67 years old. The same age as Steven Pinker (within 10 days) and Michael Shermer (same birthday) and one year younger than Roy Baumeister.

The Left, the hereditarian Right and the New Yorker

I've spoken admiringly in the past of the work of Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in particular his in-depth look at the work of David Reich.

Lewis-Kraus has recently published an article in the New Yorker along a similar theme - left-leaning hereditarian whose work has provided some comfort to purveyors of race pseudoscience.

In this case it's an article about Kathryn Paige Harden entitled Can Progressives Be Convinced that Genetics Matter? which, as some on Twitter pointed out, is a bullshit question.

Something that really jumped out at me in the article (my highlights):

Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right. In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” ​(Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and arguing with them.”)

With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity on the other.”

But Razib Khan isn't just a race science guy who thought Harden's book was good. Razib Khan considers Kathryn Paige Harden to be his friend:

My friend Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality is a well-written book that presents a somewhat tendentious position, at least to many of a progressive bent, that genetics must be considered when we design a liberal order. You can read my review over at UnHerd, though if you are subscribed to the paid version of this newsletter I’ll eventually be posting a much longer version of the review on this Substack.

How merciless can Harden be, if Razib Khan considers her a friend? I found that when I have been merciless towards the race pseudoscience of Razib Khan, he blocked me on Twitter. 

The New Yorker article mentions Quillette, Razib Khan and Charles Murray, but somehow neglects to mention that in July of this year, Khan wrote a positive review of Charles Murray's latest book for Quillette. 

And by the way, Khan declares Charles Murray to be his friend too. Is that how it works in the world of race-mongering? Friends always review the work of friends? 

The New Yorker piece demonstrates, contrary to its main theme, how much more extreme and politicized the hereditarian right is in comparison to the hereditarian left. 

Lewis-Kraus writes:

Her rhetoric is grand, though the practical implications, insofar as she discusses them, are not far removed from the mid-century social-democratic consensus—the priorities of, say, Hubert Humphrey. If genes play a significant role in educational attainment, then perhaps we ought to design our society such that you don’t need a college degree to secure health care.

As one Twitterer responded:

Meanwhile this is what the hereditarian right is saying. In his review of his friend Charles Murray's book, Razib Khan writes:

But why read a book on this topic when you can discover these facts within a few minutes? Tables on SAT scores by race are available in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, which pointed out in 2005 that “whites were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the verbal SAT.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, has an entry entitled “Race and Crime in the United States,” which plainly states that a bit over 50 percent of victims and offenders in homicides are African American. The same website tells us that African Americans are about 13 percent of America’s population. Would you also be surprised to face the reality that the perpetrators of homicides are overwhelmingly young and male as well? These dots are there for anyone to connect if they like.

And yet very few choose to do so. Indeed, the failure—refusal, even—to connect the dots has become a vaunted feature, not a bug, of 2021’s regnant culture. Acknowledging unambiguous patterns of this kind will often result in the rebuke that some beliefs are divine mysteries, to be accepted on faith rather than analyzed more deeply. Which is precisely why Murray wants to inject these taboo realities into the intellectual bloodstream of our society. Despite being a brisk read, Murray’s short book lays out all the inferences and conclusions that remain lacunae in our public discourse. Without these facts on the table, the contemporary American debate has had to rely upon the ether of social science and nebulous theoretical explanations of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” Cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer has remarked that “theory is information for free,” and these are theories which purport to explain everything in American history.

How can this be interpreted in any way but "as long as we believe Black Americans are the victims of systemic racism and white supremacy we will not "connect the dots" about them and therefore fail to arrive at the truth: their real problem is their genetic inferiority"?

And this conclusion is not just something we can all agree to disagree about, according to Murray. As Khan writes earlier in the review:

The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race—Murray has described it as a cri de coeur.

 

So according to the hereditarian right, we face DISASTER if we don't face the truth of Black American genetic inferiority.

That's quite a bit stronger than: "if genes are important then everybody should get healthcare."  

But for some reason, Lewis-Kraus, who has already acknowledged the existence of Quillette, Murray and Khan doesn't mention the review. Instead, when he mentions Quillette, it's part of a both-sides theme:

In Quillette, the researcher Richard Haier compared Harden and Turkheimer’s repudiation of Murray to climate-change denial—the second time in a year that Harden had been thus indicted, this time from the right.

Quillette published a review that says unless we acknowledge the genetic inferiority of Black Americans we face disaster. 

You would think that would be of some interest in an article that includes discussions of the dangers of race pseudoscience.

Richard Haier, it must be noted, writes for the far-right Federalist. In this tweet he reveals that Charles Murray is a political operative on the payroll of the Koch-funded AEI.

But of course this entire Pinkerite blog has demonstrated again and again how very well-financed the hereditarian right is by right-wing plutocrats. This is a hugely important issue in discussions of the political impact of hereditarianism, and one that Lewis-Kraus ignores. 

I'm very disappointed, New Yorker.

Razib Khan and the curious Insitome Institute part 1

Khan trashes the World Health Organization. 
It's interesting in view of his patron,
the Insitome Institute. More on this below.

I hate to have to think about Razib Khan and his race-obsessed career, which I have had the displeasure of following for at least fifteen years now.

But then he went and wrote a review of Charles Murray's latest race-baiting travesty, "Facing Reality" for Quillette, the leading source of race pseudo-science this side of American Renaissance.

Fun fact: American Renaissance has reprinted lengthy excerpts from many of Quillette's race-related articles. Last I checked they'd reprinted twenty-five articles.

As I have mentioned on several occasions, Khan is a bad writer, on top of his idiotic race-obsessed beliefs. His poor style is compounded by his dishonesty, as when he writes:

...I had the pleasure and honor of becoming (Charles Murray's) friend. And rather like Murray, I am now the sort of public figure that certain types of people feel they have to publicly denounce in order to establish their own group bona fides.

Given this personal history, you might reasonably ask why I agreed to write about Murray’s latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. The answer is simply that I am one of the few people willing to write about it. The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race—Murray has described it as a cri de coeur. But the difficulty of finding someone willing to admit to even reading one of Murray’s books, let alone someone willing to review it, may doom the project before anyone turns the first page. After all, most of those willing to listen to Murray are already familiar with the data he presents here, and those who are unaware of the uncomfortable facts he wants us to confront would never admit to touching one of his books for fear of peer condemnation. 

Such a drama queen:

"the difficulty of finding someone willing to admit to even reading one of Murray’s books, let alone someone willing to review it, may doom the project before anyone turns the first page"

This is easily demonstrated to be pure bullshit. I did a series looking at The Bell Curve on this blog. I haven't finished the series, unfortunately, but the fact remains I reviewed - in depth - some of the book and nobody had a word of complaint about it.

And of course it takes two seconds to Google and find reviews of "Facing Reality." But the mental midgets who read Quillette are not likely to check up on Khan. 

Speaking of mental midgets, Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, is ultimately responsible for book review assignments, so of course race pseudo-science promoter Razib Khan was assigned to review a book written by his friend Charles Murray, another race pseudo-science promoter. Which is no surprise, Quillette assigned blatant racist Bo Winegard and race-monger Noah Carl to review "Superior" by Angela Saini exactly because "Superior" criticizes race science.

Lehmann joined the comments section of Khan's review.

Note to Lehmann: nobody thinks you have, at best, "moderate abilities" due to inability to remember your password. It's for things like this:

But back to the lies of Razib Khan. 

Contrary to Khan's claim that nobody would review Murray's book, it was reviewed in The Washington Post, The Times of London Literary Supplement, and National Review, to name the first big media platforms I found by Googling. And of course it was promoted by the usual race swillers from Unz to American Renaissance.

Although I am surprised the non-racist media outlets reviewed the book - not because reviewing it is a scandalous transgression - but because there's nothing new in it. It's the same old race pseudo-science that Murray has been yammering on about since "The Bell Curve," which was published in 1994. The "science" hasn't changed since 1994, since it was never actual science. Charles Murray, political scientist, has always been and remains a right-wing operative whose entire career has been funded by right-wing racist plutocrats, from William Hammett to Charles Koch.

Khan came to the United States from Bangladesh when he was five. He claims he experienced racism.

I'm sure Khan believes that racism against him was unjustified, but racism against Black people is justified, because it isn't really racism it's "facing reality."

My theory is that, like so many European immigrants over the past two centuries, Khan decided the quickest way to climb the social ladder and stake a claim as a true American was to express contempt  for Black people. The US immigrant tradition: no matter how new you are to the US, you can always tell yourself you are superior to Black Americans.

The only difference is that Khan, like Murray and all other promoters of race pseudo-science, attempts to justify his contempt for Black people, as a group, by claiming Black people are inadequate human beings because they have bad genes.

Fun fact: as a teenager Charles Murray burned a cross. Then claimed he and his friends had no idea what it meant. Which means Murray was either an idiot when he was a teenager, or he is a shameless liar.

So what is the "reality" Khan and Murray claim Americans are not facing?

His review is painfully long and rambling as he dances around his hereditarian beliefs and focuses on the usual grievances of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex. 

Khan comes closest to admitting his hereditarian views in this section:

Tables on SAT scores by race are available in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, which pointed out in 2005 that “whites were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the verbal SAT.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, has an entry entitled “Race and Crime in the United States,” which plainly states that a bit over 50 percent of victims and offenders in homicides are African American. The same website tells us that African Americans are about 13 percent of America’s population. Would you also be surprised to face the reality that the perpetrators of homicides are overwhelmingly young and male as well? These dots are there for anyone to connect if they like.  

 

And yet very few choose to do so. Indeed, the failure—refusal, even—to connect the dots has become a vaunted feature, not a bug, of 2021’s regnant culture. 

He never explains what exactly would be the result of "connecting the dots" but he hints at his views by claiming racism and white supremacy are insufficient to explain Black failure to thrive. And if you are a Quillette reader, you don't need the dots connected for you, you know what Razib Khan believes is the real reason for Black failure to thrive.

I've mentioned before the plainly-stated desire of Khan and other race pseudo-science promoters to erase Black history. Because if you erase 400 years of slavery, oppression, bigotry, looting, redlining, etc. etc. you can then claim the only reason for Black failure to thrive is genetics. Khan's fellow race pseudo-science mongers, the Winegard brothers, did exactly the same thing in their Quillette article defending The Bell Curve. Except they used the word "hereditarian" to describe their belief. Khan is not nearly so honest.

The desire to erase Black history is why Khan & friends hate the 1619 Project so much.

But six years ago, Gawker noted that Khan was careful not to blatantly state his beliefs:

He merely treats what white racists taken for granted—that non-whites, and especially blacks, are intellectually inferior—as an open question worth exploring in the name of scientific inquiry. Still, Khan is careful with his actual words; he never says black people are less intelligent. 

But his willingness to treat black intelligence as a matter of debate has not hampered his career in the slightest. He’s written for Slate, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian. Indeed, he’s already placed two op-eds, about the evolution of cats and abortion politics, in The New York Times.

And even getting "cancelled" from the NYTimes was no big deal, according to Khan himself.

But then being a bigot hasn't hurt the career of Khan's buddy Richard Hanania either.  Richard Hanania is a Research Fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. 

And now we see Khan has another patron to enable his career. A 501(c)3 non-profit think tank called Insitome Institute, where Khan has found a place as their Director of Scientific Content.

The Founder and Executive Director of Insitome is Spencer Wells, PhD., "geneticist, anthropologist, author and entrepreneur. For over a decade he was an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and Director of the Genographic Project."

I found something interesting on the Institute's Partnerships page:

We recently partnered with Unilever and the newly formed Unstereotype Alliance - a global alliance convened by UN Women (the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women) and including Facebook, Google, Mattel, Microsoft, J&J, AT&T, and others - to banish stereotypical portrayals of gender in advertising and other promotional content.

Putting aside Khan's reputation as an anti-feminist (which he admits here), it's very odd that Khan has no qualms about publicly disparaging another project of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, as he can be seen doing at the top of this page.

Is Razib Khan that stupid, or doesn't it matter to the Insitome Institute that he publicly disparages one of their partners?

I certainly won't rule out that Khan is a dumbass, but there are other curious disconnects between Khan and the Insitome Institute which I will discuss in part 2.

Bari Weiss and her allies

Although James Lindsay, Christian nationalist ally/business partner and Trump-lover and shameless hypocrite, was not mentioned in Bari Weiss' article about the Intellectual Dark Web, I was not kidding when I said that he is what passes for an intellectual in the IDW world.

Today we see Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, who then retweeted her retweet.

 

The "liberals aren't liberal, right-wingers are the new liberals" line that Weiss is promoting in this tweet is a leading strategy for those associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a strategy which Claire Lehmann admitted in her reference to the "Overton Window."

A stooge like James Lindsay, who claims to be a leftist while voting for Trump is a prime example of that IDW rat-fucking strategy.

Currently Bari Weiss' pinned Tweet is promoting a variation on the same IDW strategy, suggesting that American liberalism is a dangerous ideology now.

She's worried about the Jews, but she doesn't seem to be at all worried about the fact that leading IDW intellectual James Lindsay has a business partnership with a Christian nationalist kook like Michael O'Fallon, nor that he is cozy with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

It's striking how supportive these IDW-connected people are of each other, refusing to criticize each other for anything. It's almost as if they are all working for the same bosses and the bosses wouldn't like to see signs of disharmony among the employees. 

The possibility that the IDW gang are getting paid by a group of rightwing plutocrats would go a long way towards explaining the disconnect between what they say they care about and what they actually care about, well-illustrated by this Twitter thread.

As Jamison Foser points out, the people who signed onto the Harpers letter seem far more concerned about the well-known and well-paid being criticized for their right-wing opinions than the Trump administration's abuses of power. Bari Weiss seems perfectly comfortable that her pal James Lindsay is an outspoken Trump supporter.

It seems that anything goes in the IDW world as long as someone hates the 1619 project and "critical race theory" as James Lindsay does. 

Here he is demonstrating once again how to have difficult conversations through civility.

The IDW gang, although dominated by white conservatives, does have Black associates, whose primary focus is to attack the work of other Black people. Coleman Hughes, Quillette author who also works for the Koch-funded City Journal is a leading example. 

Here is a City Journal piece from yesterday, promoting Charles Koch's thoughts on "solving America's social problems."

Fourteen percent of the people who signed the Harpers letter had Koch connections and the initiator of the Harpers letter, Bari Weiss' friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, (the "self-expelled guy,") was given a job at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute some months after the Harpers letter was published.

Thanks to Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, I discovered another Black Quillette author,  Chloe Valdry, being promoted by Weiss as providing an alternative antiracism to DiAngeloism.

I'm a long-time critic of Robin DiAngelo & White Fragility, but I doubt that an antiracism campaign created by someone aligned with the race science-promoting Quillette is a significantly better alternative. Valdary's IDW connections indicate she is unlikely to have any problems with "racial essentialism" - or at least not enough to cut her connections to the IDW & Quillette.

Valdary runs a project called Theory of Enchantment and there is no information on its site as to where Valdary gets her funding. I have a few theories about that.

So why doesn't Bari Weiss criticize James Lindsay for supporting Trump, or for being friendly with Richard Spencer or for going into business with Michael O'Fallon? Why are Coleman Hughes and Chloe S. Valdary unconcerned that Quillette and the IDW promote race science? 

The answer as always is likely wingnut welfare. As Krugman said:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

The plutocrats who fund wingnut welfare are keenly interested in swaying pubic opinion, as we see with Charles Koch sharing his thoughts on "solving America's social problems." And they have access to incredible amounts of money. Why wouldn't they use it to buy people to support their right-wing causes? And they don't even care if the people they buy are smart - James Lindsay is a manifestly stupid oaf. But he had a success in the conservative world with his laughable hoax grift - for which he was paid although he refuses to say who paid him. Plutocrats don't care if Lindsay is a fool - he is willing to spend hours online promoting their interests which are then retweeted by the higher-profile Bari Weiss or praised by Steven Pinker.

And if we look at the things James Lindsay says online, when he isn't insulting those who question him or disagree with him, it's clear that one of the things his bosses care about most is erasing Black history in order to promote the notion that Black people are innately less intelligent and their failure to thrive, post-Emancipation is the fault of their own bad genes.

Bari Weiss' pal Andrew Sullivan is well-known for that very thing, from promoting the Bell Curve to his attacks on the 1619 project.