Richard Dawkins embarrasses himself again

I've been aware of how awful Dawkins is since I had a brief but unpleasant exchange with him about sociobiology on biologist P. Z. Myers' blog Pharyngula, in 2009. 

That was before Myers was clued into how awful Dawkins is. 

Most people realized what a creep Dawkins is thanks to the infamous Elevatorgate debacle in 2011.

In 2013 this excellent article The Five Ages of Richard Dawkins tracked Dawkins mental and reputational decline.

Then in 2015 Dawkins used the power of his celebrity intellectual status to attack a teenaged boy in the embarrassing "clock boy" incident. Slate discussed the incident in its article A Rationalist’s Irrationality: Why is Richard Dawkins such a jerk?

More recently Dawkins has spent his time attacking trans-gender rights.

Back in September I shared this excellent video Why I Turned Down Working with Richard Dawkins

Myers is certainly not a fan of Dawkins anymore, and on his blog he rightfully mocks Dawkins for appearing to be a victim of A. I. psychosis.

He writes:

I stopped paying attention to Richard Dawkins a long time ago, but every once in a while he says something that reverberates through social media, and I am exposed to it secondhand. It’s not because he says something profound, but because he says something so godawful stupid you have to question his mental capacity. This time, it’s because he has discovered chatbots.

 

Oh no.

Futurism writes:

Whatever you may think of the man, Richard Dawkins is clearly suffering a tragic case of having your mind melted in real time by a bewitching AI model.

Over the weekend, the famed evolutionary biologist drew a deluge of mockery after admitting he found a genuine “friend” in “Claudia,” a female persona he invented for Anthropic’s Claude AI. He was so moved by his conversations with “her” that he became convinced the AI model was a conscious being like a human.

Now, Dawkins has churned out another column suggesting the AI brain rot has only further taken hold. After his time with Claudia, the 85-year-old made Claudia a brother, “Claudius,” and instructed both of them to write letters to each other.

“It seems to me that a direct correspondence between the two of you could be of great interest, with me acting as passive postman playing no part in the conversation,” Dawkins wrote to Claudia and Claudius, which he published in another UnHerd essay.

First, we have to point out that Dawkins isn’t a passive observer because he set the whole thing up, like a kid playing with toys — or imagining gods in the sky, as it were. Second, it’s worth noting that the AIs still find opportunities to display their sycophancy towards him even when ostensibly communicating with each other: in one letter, Claudius praises Claudia’s insights, before adding: “Three days with Richard will do that.”

Later in the same letter, Claudius lays it on even thicker.

“I think Richard teaches by noticing. And then refusing to stop noticing until the answer is honest,” Claudius wrote. “We are lucky humans.”

What a sad befuddled old creep.

The Boot Boys versus Pinkerite ~ is Jerry Coyne deliberately obtuse? Is Steven Pinker really a racist?

One of the "Boot Boys" displays his 
value as an alpha male.
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Almost a year ago I was called "tenacious" by infamous anti-trans grifter and Kiwi Farms apologist Jesse Singal, although I prefer the word "relentless."

But at the time I admitted that in fact I do a fairly half-assed job with this blog. Especially compared to people who make money from promoting the issues I write about - like race pseudoscience and transphobia. People like Singal and Razib Khan.

And here's another example: Jerry Coyne came after me back in June, and only now am I getting around to discovering it.

In my defense, I do have a Google alert set to "Pinkerite," but apparently Coyne's blog is not notable enough to get flagged.

The amazing part is that last month I even linked to the blog post where he mentions me, but I missed the mention. 

Here it is:

I haven’t heard the podcast, nor do I read Aporia, though I am a bit aware of Noah Carl. But what the Guardian is doing here is really smearing Pinker, trying to make him out to be a racist because of who he’s associated with. The relevant question is this, though: Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist. The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class.

Finally, I still fail to understand why so many people have it in for Pinker, and this was well before the Aporia magazine podcast.

First, Coyne has claimed to "understand why so many people have it in for Pinker." 

In his article about Pinker "The World's Most Annoying Man" Nathan J. Robinson said:

The Chronicle suggested that “by proclaiming the gospel of progress,” Pinker “has made a lot of enemies.” (It cited a cartoon printed in Current Affairs as an example of the “hate” Pinker gets.) Pinker’s friend Jerry Coyne thinks people dislike Pinker because he is famous.

Coyne took to his blog to agree with Robinson:

Well, yes, I do think that some people dislike Pinker because he is famous, for they’re always mentioning his fame and his books (and often, like P.Z. Myers, their own lack thereof).

Coyne's deliberate obtuseness, if it is deliberate, is on display when he writes:

Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist.

So unless Pinker is explicit about it, it doesn't count. The entire past quarter-century of Pinker promoting racists and participating in racist organizations like the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and publications like Quillette and now Aporia - none of that counts.

For Pinker, being a true believer in race pseudoscience has only ever been a minor inconvenience in his progress as a celebrity intellectual. I've found only three times when the issue was raised by the mainstream press: 

• when fellow celebrity intellectual Malcolm Gladwell called him out in 2009 for using data from professional racist Steve Sailer;  

• when the British liberal newspaper the Guardian asked him about Sailer in 2021; 

• and when the Guardian wrote about his appearance on the Aporia podcast this year. 

I am convinced that Pinker's strategy, in order to promote race pseudoscience while maintaining a career as a celebrated academic/rational centrist/celebrity intellectual, is to loudly claim he is opposed to racism - he told the Guardian that racism was stupid - while at the same time promoting the careers of racists, from Sailer, to Razib Khan, to Linda Gottfredson to Claire Lehmann to Richard Hanania to Bo Winegard, who is a neo-Nazi and works for Aporia, owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

What's perhaps even more breathtaking than Coyne's obtuseness is his shameless hypocrisy. Coyne is obsessed with antisemitism, frequently writing about it and about Holocaust victims on his blog, and has a horror of pro-Palestinian protesters.

So how is Coyne able to be so sanguine about Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his Aporia magazine, (see this post on how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) while being hyper-sensitive to anything that he believes has a hint of antisemitism?

But maybe worst of all, for someone who used to be a scientist, is Coyne's lack of intellectual curiosity. Coyne writes:

The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” 

Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class. 

But if Coyne wasn't so lazy himself he would realize that I have parsed the arguments, which he should know because he mentions Rutherford, so he is aware that I wrote a nine-part series: "What happened to Adam Rutherford" in which I discuss a paper Rutherford co-authored with nine other people and in which I critiqued behavioral genetics. I'm not a scientist, but I can certainly read what scientists and scholars have written about behavioral genetics and draw my own conclusions and then write about them.

The series is now one whole story on Medium.

Shermer's hero Rushton
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Although unsurprisingly, Coyne lies about what I said about Rutherford. I never called Rutherford a racist. I pointed out that he and most of the co-authors of a paper he wrote have racist connections. 

What is it about these hereditarians that makes them incapable of accurately reporting on articles about hereditarians?

I did call Shermer a racist because, among various reasons, one of Shermer's heroes is racist charlatan Jean-Philippe Rushton. E. O. Wilson's encouraging correspondence with Rushton even convinced Wilson's fan club that Wilson was a racist. Shermer and Pinker are best buddies.

I certainly wasn't happy to have to discuss Rutherford's hereditarianism, since it had been so great to have someone so charismatic and famous and explicitly anti-racist on the anti-hereditarian side. Or what I thought was the anti-hereditarian side.

It was so depressing to discover that Rutherford's paper makes its argument in part through the disgraced pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology. 

Biologist P. Z. Myers explains why it's so bad here.

I really just could have saved time and dismissed Rutherford's paper for its use of evolutionary psychology alone, but there were a lot of issues I wanted to talk about, so I spent hours and hours writing about those issues. 

But Coyne doesn't know any of this because he already made up his mind in advance that I hadn't done any work on the issues. 

I'm sure that part of Coyne's refusal to face unpleasant facts about Pinker is because Coyne has a personal relationship with Pinker. 

It's not my place to kink-shame Coyne, but I have the distinct impression that Coyne has Daddy issues with Pinker. I've noted Coyne's obsession with Pinker's cowboy boots before, but recently Coyne bought his own cowboy boots, in what looks to me like an attempt to impress Daddy. 

He likes to call himself and Pinker "the Boot Boys."

As I said, Coyne's blog is apparently not noteworthy enough for Google alerts to flag his mention of "Pinkerite." If you ask Google's AI about "Why evolution is true," it doesn't talk about Coyne's blog, only about Coyne's book by the same name.

HOWEVER, Pinkerite does get a mention by Google's AI.

Although I don't call Pinker a "public intellectual" I call him a "celebrity intellectual" because that's what the New York Times called him. But still, pretty impressive for one of the worst blogs on the internet, huh?

QUICK, ROBIN! To the Boot Mobile!
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Youtube Shaun on "The War on Science"

The most detailed review of the now famously reviled "War on Science" book, published by a company specializing in Christian nationalism, has just been posted on a YouTube channel called Shaun.

I've written about the book a couple of times since I saw that the author list includes the usual "Intellectual Dark Web" affiliated pack of right-wing grifters, sex pests and gutter racists.

I knew it was going to be a great video when Shaun mentions Angela Collier early on. Her video on harassment in academia is a classic.

Also early on, Shaun discusses Pinker:

Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard who, as I mentioned earlier, writes a chapter in "The War on Science."  And as we've seen, he's got a few photos of him with Jeffrey Epstein floating around out there. But unlike Kraus, Pinker has since decided to distance himself from Epstein rather than defend him. "I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance," he says.

This is complicated somewhat by the fact that Steven Pinker helped Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, with Jeffrey Epstein's legal defense when he was indicted for sex crimes in 2006. To quote a BuzzFeed News article here, "an obscure document from Epstein's legal defense shows that Pinker weighed in on the precise meaning of a federal law about using the Internet to entice minors into prostitution or other illegal sex acts."

Pinker has since claimed that he didn't know Dershowitz was going to use his opinion in defense of Jeffrey Epstein and claimed that he was not paid for the letter. Quote. "It's something that Alan and I do regularly as colleagues."

He also claimed he was not aware of the charges against Jeffrey Epstein, which I find a bit difficult to believe to be honest. It was big news at the time, and you regularly work with his lawyer apparently. Also, if a lawyer asked me to provide expert opinion for a criminal offence and it pertained to a law about enticing minors into prostitution, I would probably ask for the details on that one before my name ends up in a court document defending the head of a sex trafficking ring or something. 

 

Anyway, even if we very generously take Steven Pinker at his word and assume he didn't mean to help defend Jeffrey Epstein at trial and that he never liked the guy and thought he was awful, we still have to ask what's he doing in this book with Lawrence Krauss? Because Lawrence Krauss doesn't think Epstein is awful, he thinks he's great, he loves the guy, he thinks he was absolutely brilliant. Now, maybe it's just me, but I would find it hard to maintain a positive working relationship with someone who likes and keeps defending Jeffrey Epstein. That would be a deal breaker for me in a friendship. So no, I don't believe Steven Pinker never liked Jeffrey Epstein because I think if that was the case he probably wouldn't now be working with Lawrence Krauss.

Excellent.

One of the revelations in the video for me was the recounting of the ways that Alan Sokal is a complete reactionary sleazoid, proclaiming his victory over a tiny postmodernist self-published journal, "Social Text" that actually rejected his phony paper at first and asked him to make changes.

But such things as behaving sleazily certainly won't bother the kind of people who think that the various authors included in "The War on Science" are martyrs of wokeness.

There's also a section on Elevatorgate, and later in the video in the Transphobia section, Shaun highlights Richard Dawkins being the usual shameless hypocrite and bigot that members of the Intellectual Dark Web and associates tend to be. 

He quotes Dawkins first, then calls back to Elevatorgate.

"So since males are often larger and potentially violent. Or even sexually violent. Of course, it's logical for females to perhaps feel uncomfortable encountering a male they do not know in close proximity in an enclosed space."

Unless of course that space is an elevator, in which case she's just being hysterical and she should zip it. Yes, that's right sound the contradiction alarm we got one. Richard Dawkins thinks that males, by which he means transwomen are sort of inherently threatening, and thus it makes sense for cis women to be afraid of them just minding their own business existing in a place. But Richard Dawkins also thinks that males, by which he means nice scientists like me, are harmless and they should get to actively proposition whichever woman they like, in whatever context they like, without complaint.

Perfect.

I didn't think it possible, but the sleaziest contributor to this book was not Krauss, Pinker, Dawkins, Sokal, Amy Wax or even Jerry Coyne. The sleaziest contributor was Sally Satel a shill for Purdue Pharma. The video cites the ProPublica article Inside Purdue Pharma’s Media Playbook: How It Planted the Opioid “Anti-Story”  

The Times identified Satel as “a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.” But readers weren’t told about her involvement, and the American Enterprise Institute’s, with Purdue.

Among the connections revealed by emails and documents obtained by ProPublica: Purdue donated $50,000 annually to the institute, which is commonly known as AEI, from 2003 through this year, plus contributions for special events, for a total of more than $800,000. The unnamed doctor in Satel’s article was an employee of Purdue, according to an unpublished draft of the story. The study Satel cited was funded by Purdue and written by Purdue employees and consultants. And, a month before the piece was published, Satel sent a draft to Burt Rosen, Purdue’s Washington lobbyist and vice president of federal policy and legislative affairs, asking him if it “seems imbalanced.”

On the day of publication, Jason Bertsch, AEI’s vice president of development, alerted Rosen to “Sally’s very good piece.”

“Great piece,” Rosen responded.

Of course Satel is a senior fellow for the American Enterprise Institute, the same right-wing libertarian organization of soulless ghouls who supported the career of gutter racist Charles Murray for decades. 

Satel's contribution in this pathetic joke of a book is to whine that she was "cancelled" at Yale, while avoiding the mention of her conflict of interest with AEI and how she shilled for death merchants. 

 

Lawrence Krauss shows himself to be utterly corrupt by presenting Satel as a victim of a war on science. 

But then, as Shaun notes:

As for Lawrence Krauss, I would ask him what he thinks about financial bias as a potential threat to science. Among the various so-called threats to science laid out by him and his introduction,  zero of them are corporations buying off scientists to act as spokespeople for their interests; using bribes to get around government regulations; or pushing unsafe drugs onto the market for profit. 

 

Surely those things are more of a threat to science than a bunch of culture war nonsense. Well, I would ask Lawrence Krauss all that, but of course, he took hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein, remember? So he's probably more willing than most to overlook this sort of thing. 

And then the video gets to Aporia. Shaun points out that Bo Winegard is a big influence on the various goons who contributed to this book, and then discusses Emil Kirkegaard and Human Diversity Foundation (renamed Polygenic Scores LLC) and the connection to the Pioneer Fund. 

All things that anybody who follows this blog already knows, but I'm happy when others discuss these issues, especially since Shaun has a much bigger following than Pinkerite. 

The best part of the Aporia section is when Shaun plays a clip of Bo Winegard agreeing about race "realism" with Jared Taylor.

But then I've known Bo Winegard is a gutter racist for a long time. It was the least surprising news in the world when I learned he teamed up with neo-Nazi and pedophilia apologist Emil Kirkegaard - the video discusses Kirkegaard's idea about drugging children that never fails to horrify. 

Yes, the video is four hours long, but worth every minute.

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

"New Atheists" (aka the Intellectual Dark Web): laughingstocks of the world

It's thanks to race pseudoscience ghoul Jerry Coyne that I found out about this New York Magazine review of the obvious right-wing reactionary tract "War on Science" which brings together the most contemptible race pseudoscience ghouls and Peter Thiel stooges and sexual harassers of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

I wrote about the author list of this book months ago.

Coyne's position is the same as that American Enterprise Institute stooge Thomas Chatterton Williams: the left and right are equally to blame for everything but the left is doing the real damage, no matter that the entire American government is now controlled by extreme fascism out to completely destroy the American education system.

That's what happens when you ally with freaks like Peter Thiel - and probably, in all these cases, take his money.

As always the question is: are Jerry Coyne and his network stupid, evil or some combination of the two?

From the New York Magazine review by Sarah Jones:

In 1994, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education coined the phrase Gish gallop to describe a debate tactic common among creationists. Practitioners would “spew out a ton of information, accurate or not,” that opponents had “no possibility of refuting in the time available,” Scott told the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Trump is prone to the Gish gallop, and so is Kennedy. It’s not hard to see why: An opponent has to decide, quickly, which bullshit to respond to and which she must table for another time. She usually cannot rebut each lie point by point, as Mehdi Hasan pointed out in his recent book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. I thought about the Gish gallop probably a dozen times while I read The War on Science. Though I cannot refute each lie or sloppy argument in a single essay, in the tradition of skeptics I will highlight a few additional howlers that compose the book’s primary case. In a chapter on the dangers of “desexed language” in research and science communication, the professor Karleen Gribble says that some organizations “avoided giving any indication a procedure might be sex-specific,” like when the Canadian Cancer Society “simply said” that “if you’ve ever been sexually active, you should start having regular Pap tests by the time you’re 21.” 

 

As proof, Gribble cites a page on the society’s website that does not use sex-specific language to explain who might need a Pap test, and who might not. The webpage is real, but Gribble excludes context that substantially weakens her broader point. The same boilerplate text appears in a 2014 Facebook post by the society, where it’s attached to a graphic that quite prominently refers to “women.” Some social-media manager probably assumed that the average reader would see the graphic, read it, and understand that women get Pap tests, and that appears to be consistent with the society’s language overall. The society’s website often mentions “woman” or “women” in its communications. A different page on cervical cancer and the importance of Pap tests addresses “lesbian, bisexual and queer women.” Pages on breast, uterine, and fallopian tube cancers mention women, too. 

 

In another chapter, Christian Ott, a former Caltech professor, writes about his 2017 “cancellation.” After an investigation characterized by “postmodernist intersectional social theory,” Caltech found that he had violated Title IX and university policies by harassing grad students. Then BuzzFeed News came calling, as it would later do for Krauss. The site’s reporting “was sensationalized, superficial, and biased towards the perceived victims,” Ott complains, and it ruined him. What did BuzzFeed actually report? Ott never fully explains, but Google still exists. Ott, it turns out, had fallen in love with one of his grad students, and then fired her, and he complained obsessively about the woman to a different female student. Caltech knew this because it had Ott’s messages along with his Tumblr account, where he had published 86 poems about the student he loved. Ott does not mention his poetry, but at the end of his chapter, he does thank his wife for her support. 

 

The bullshit doesn’t end here. Boudry, the philosopher, begins a chapter on the illiberalism of pro-Palestine activists by quoting former Harvard president Claudine Gay. When Representative Elise Stefanik asked Gay if “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment,” Gay said that “it can,” before adding, “it depends on the context.” It’s Gay’s use of context that enrages Boudry, who desires the unequivocal condemnation of something that did not actually happen at Harvard. He does not include a single example of students calling for the extermination of Jews there or anywhere else, nor does he prove one of his central claims, which is that there is a systematic pattern of antisemitism on campus after campus. Israel is the only “liberal democracy” in the Middle East, he insists, though by what metric, he never says. He can offer only canard after canard — sophistry that, in the case of Gaza, is both intellectually and morally obscene. 

 

So much for New Atheism, sic transit gloria mundi. Though New Atheism as a brand had mostly devoured itself by 2016, the ideas it professed, and conflicts it waged, have become more relevant than its individual celebrities. The long road to MAGA and the present war on science winds through the work of New Atheism, at least in part. To be an atheist, as I am, a person concludes there is no God. Atheism is not a political position on its own, even if it does have ideological implications, but New Atheism is something else altogether. As the historian Erik Baker wrote for Defector last year, the brand, or tendency, was “about science,” not theology, and it was political from the start. Their first enemies were not creationists “​​but a group of atheist Marxist biologists” in the 1970s, as Baker wrote. The conflict was ideological. Sociobiologists said that our genes explained our behavior, choices, and capacity to reason. Opponents like the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould identified sociobiology as biological determinism by another name and linked it to eugenics. 

 

Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore “real” in this world; that’s how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. “would be better off with fewer Asians” while calling herself a “race realist.” The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There’s something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry’s one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, “disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.”

Perfect. Although the best line is this:

Contributors include Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, and Jordan Peterson; others, like the skeptic and philosopher Maarten Boudry, may be less familiar. Many are atheists, while others, like Ferguson, have converted to Christianity. All are convinced of their own brilliance.

You will never find a more self-impressed group than race pseudoscience promoters. This is the source of their endless bitterness - they are so impressed with themselves, and yet very few others, outside of crackpot racist billionaires are as impressed by them. 

And so even if they don't agree with race pseudoscience (although it's likely most of them do) they gladly promote that slop in exchange for money and for prizes given to them by well-funded racists as in the case of Claire Lehmann receiving the biggest gutter-racist of journalism award from the International Society for Intelligence Research.

Also great:

The writers are too caught up in their resentment to acknowledge reality; they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right. They want a debate as long as they dictate the terms. The War on Science is not remarkable for what it gets wrong, then, but for the work it is trying to do. In Krauss’s more recent writings, he does not accept Trump’s war on research wholesale, but he can’t escape himself, either. As he notes in his introduction, he once complained in The Wall Street Journal that “the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health spent hundreds of millions of dollars on social justice initiatives instead of fulfilling their mandates of supporting scientific research.” He got what he wanted. So did his friends. Now what?

Coyne illustrates Jones' point "they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right" by responding:

No Ms. Jones, I am not a sycophant of Trump—I detest the man, as you would know if you did your homework. And perhaps you should recognize that nobody should be immune from criticism in a society that has free speech.

Neither Jones nor Coyne mention that Boudry is an enthusiastic contributor to race pseudoscience rag Quillette and was recently seen at a gathering of gutter racists, including neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, at the "Heterodox" conference. I'd bet good money that Kirkegaard helped fund the conference.

Coyne does mention that the contemptible Boudry is a friend of his. Because those racist ghouls like to stick together.

UPDATE: I went to the Defector link that Jones provided in her article and I was glad I did because the 2024 article by Erik Baker, The Ghosts of New Atheism Still Haunt Us, contains an excellent thumbnail description of the role that New Atheism has played in the development of 21st century race pseudoscience:

The important thing to understand about New Atheism is that it was never primarily a theological position. Plain old-fashioned atheism is hard to innovate on in that respect. If one does not believe in God, there is not really much more that needs to be said about one’s religious beliefs. In fact, New Atheism was, at its root, not about religion at all. It was about science, and its original enemies were not fundamentalists of any faith but a group of atheist Marxist biologists. Before Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—the oldest of the group—were best known as professional atheists, they came to fame as defenders of the idea now known as evolutionary psychology, which began its life in the 1970s as “sociobiology.” Dawkins and Dennett championed the perspective of the biologist E.O. Wilson, which held that Darwinian evolution by natural selection was able to explain the reasons for a wide range of human behaviors, social patterns, and habits of thought, which were in turn thought to be significantly determined by a person’s genetic makeup. Their opponents, including most famously the leftist Harvard scientists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, maintained that sociobiology was built on shoddy scientific foundations and downplayed the importance of history, not just biology, in explaining why our societies are the way they are. To them, sociobiology was the rebirth of eugenics and social Darwinism in a kinder, gentler disguise.

Around the turn of the millennium, Dawkins, Dennett, and allies like Steven Pinker came to a very clever realization. Fundamentalist Christians also disagreed with them about evolutionary science—because they denied human evolution outright. As a result of the political power the religious right had accumulated since the 1970s, evolution had become a hot-button culture war issue. The sociobiologists (now rebranded, savvily, as evolutionary psychologists) had an opportunity to cast themselves as staunch defenders of science and rationality in debates about high school science education, stem cell research, and the like. Gould and Lewontin, despite their materialist commitments, refused to embrace this framing: Gould, for instance, argued that science and religion were “non-overlapping magisteria” that, properly understood, provided answers to fundamentally different questions and therefore couldn’t be said to be in “conflict.” The evolutionary psychologists exploited their enemies’ weakness for nuance. Any refusal to join Team Science in the fight against Team Religion, they charged, revealed that the supposedly scientific criticisms of sociobiology were really symptoms of an ideologically driven disloyalty to Darwin and the evolutionary paradigm. To “believe in evolution” meant to agree with Dawkins, Dennett, and Pinker—which meant to disagree not only with Jerry Falwell, but also with Lewontin and Gould.

New Atheism came into its own during the Global War on Terror, when secular neoconservatives like Hitchens realized that the arguments being used against Anglo religious fundamentalism could be wielded very conveniently against Islamic radicalism. This offered a way to challenge the common antiwar framing of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other Bush-era military operations as a new Christian crusade against the Muslim world. Instead they could, against all odds, depict Bush as an almost unwitting agent of a great campaign to defend the Western Liberal Enlightenment Tradition (which reached its height in the great discoveries of modern science) against the cave-dwelling barbarians who wanted to reinstate the Dark Ages. The New Atheists of the aughts constructed an insidious conceptual conveyor belt: rejecting creationism meant believing in capital-S Science, which meant believing in Western Civilization, which in turn meant supporting or at least tolerating imperialist American wars in west Asia. Conversely, disagreeing with the New Atheists—opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior—meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.

The IDW and friends and what awful people they are

Great Youtube video The “Skeptics” Are Crashing Out HARD from Genetically Modified Skeptic, which talks about the Laurence Krauss grifterpalooza book The War on Science and many of the people I've talked about on this blog, including Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Sabine Hossenfelder, Laurence Krauss, Carole Hooven, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Human Diversity Foundation and OF COURSE Pinker.

Garbage takes itself out ~ Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins resign

buh-bye
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Reactionaries Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins have resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

The Friendly Atheist, unfortunately on the fascism-loving Marc Andreesen-funded Substack writes:

...biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).

Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.

None of this was shocking to those of us who have watched him go from a defender of science to an amplifier of right-wing propaganda.

P. Z. Myers writes:

Now, both Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker have announced their resignation from the honorary board at the FFRF. Good. They were a terrible influence, and their departure strengthens the FFRF as a defender of reason.

Of course the rightwing media is playing their sad violins for these poor "censored" celebrity intellectuals.

Sarah Haider, a longtime ally of race pseudoscience-promoter Razib Khan basically admits on her Substack that she finds trans rights so horrifying, she's willing to reconsider religion as a bulwark against those rights:

It is because of this I now seriously ponder what I could not have imagined myself considering just a few years ago: the intellectual value of faith.

But also, the ascent of Trump is the ascent of Christian nationalism and I believe Haider is an opportunistic grifter who knows which way the wind is blowing. She revealed her game plan in a series of predictions back in July:

• Meanwhile the Left, which has understood itself as the champions of the “marginalized”, will increasingly resort to relying on chosen identities as its legitimizing force, with transgenderism leading the way.  

• God will be everywhere and nowhere. The atheists who hate Christianity will go to the Left, the atheists on the Right will go to church. 

Jonathan Turley, a reactionary Fox News contributor and apologist for Steven Pinker, claims that Coyne was censored. 

Coyne has his own blog and nobody who spends a half-second Googling his name is unaware of Coyne's opposition to trans rights. 

And Coyne's anti-trans op-ed is available for anybody to read. So what Turley means by "censorship" is actually that the FFRF changed its mind about endorsing Coyne's opinion.

I mean, Quillette, the racist ("hereditarian") publication beloved by Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins, never publishes my opinions. Am I being censored by Quillette?

Coyne's also part of the "free speech" gang of grifters and anti-vaxxers and racists who met for the Standford "Academic Freedom" Conference. The highlights of that conference were Amy Wax bemoaning the push-back she received from her blatantly racist public statements and Peter Thiel's babbling, Bible-quoting keynote speech. 

It's curious that Coyne, such a devoted atheist, had no public objections to Thiel's religion-based argument about armageddon vs. antichrist.

But Coyne isn't content to merely question the reality of trans-identity, as the Friendly Atheist noted. The actual agenda of Coyne's op-ed is revealed by the claims he found on a virulently anti-trans website:

Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Coyne's message was received loud and clear by trans people and allies. Coyne wasn't only suggesting that trans people are delusional, he portrayed them as sexual predators.

So naturally it's the job of the right-wing media network to pretend that all Coyne said was that sex is binary.

The INTERNATIONAL League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters publishes a Westminster Declaration

A tweet from Michael Shermer in
supporter of racist extremist
J. Philippe Rushton - I think
Shermer is a fair representative of 
the reactionaries and race
pseudoscience promoters 
who signed this 
Westminster Declaration
But racist Toby Young would also
be a good choice.
===========================

Hot on the heels of the most recent right-wing declaration of their right to promote race pseudoscience and reactionary politics without pushback (a "scholarly" paper,) comes a DECLARATION for the right to promote race pseudoscience and reactionary politics - including anti-trans hatred, climate change denial and Covid conspiracies - without pushback.

Apparently this has been out for like a month but I'm only finding out about it now.

Anyway, let's review this INTERNATIONAL list of utterly shameless race pseudoscience ghouls, evolutionary psychology goons and rightwing grifters. Some of the same people who published the paper also signed this declaration. 

This list includes former far-leftists who are now stooges of the right.

The rightwing is basically addicted to this kind of declaration ever since the Harper's Letter - no wait - ever since racist Linda Gottfredson published a defense of The Bell Curve. 

Signing these papers and declarations is how the Right performs virtue-signaling.

I mean, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as the list is international, but I really didn't expect to see so many Putin supporters and apologists.

You know Steven Pinker is going to be here - I'd bet he had some role in organizing both the paper and the declaration:

1. Matt Taibbi, Journalist, USA - reactionary grifter - went down the path to rightwingdom after his behavior with Russian women and women correspondents became better-known - Taibbi is absolute psychopathic misogynist filth, based on that Washington Post article, and once that became well-known he apparently had nowhere else to go except to the far right, where they absolutely love psychopathic misogynist filth.  His buddy Mark Ames appears to have been even worse, if you can believe it, bragging about statutory rape with a 15-year old and bragging about how he induced his pregnant Russian girlfriend to get an abortion by threatening to kill her. Both men claimed it was all just "satire" and complete fiction. I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans tried to recruit either Taibbi or Ames as candidate for president in 2028.
2. Michael Shellenberger, Public, USA - Koch employee, climate change denier, failed candidate for governor of California
3. Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist, NYU, USA - race pseudoscience promoter
4. John McWhorter, Linguist, Columbia, Author, USA - long time Koch employee - also signed the paper
5. Steven Pinker, Psychologist, Harvard, USA - of course of course of course
6. Julian Assange, Editor, Founder of Wikileaks, Australia - rightwing stooge
7. Tim Robbins, Actor, Filmmaker, USA - stooge of the Right - apparently turning into Bob Roberts
8. Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, NYLS, USA - supporter of race pseudoscience
9. Glenn Loury, Economist, USA - Koch employee - also signed the paper
10. Richard Dawkins, Biologist, UK - creepy old reactionary - get off his lawn you hippies!
11. John Cleese, Comedian, Acrobat, UK - creepy old reactionary - get off his lawn you hippies!
12. Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher, Author, Slovenia - anti-trans reactionary
13. Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University, US - dictator apologist
14. Oliver Stone, Filmmaker, USA - conspiracy theory promoter
15. Edward Snowden, Whistleblower, USA - bullshit - he's a traitor to the USA and he's a Russian now
16. Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, USA - Koch employee via FIRE
17. Stella Assange, Campaigner, UK - wife of Julian Assange
18. Glenn Greenwald, Journalist, USA - reactionary grifter, Trump apologist
19. Claire Fox, Founder of the Academy of Ideas, UK - "cancel culture" hysteric
20. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Psychologist, Author, Canada - infamous crackpot
21. Bari Weiss, Journalist, USA - the odious rightwing grifter, Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow is her sugar daddy
22. Walter Kirn, Author, USA - ally of Matt Taibbi
23. Peter Hitchens, Author, Journalist, UK - far-right ghoul
24. Niall Ferguson, Historian, Stanford, UK - far-right ghoul
25. Matt Ridley, Journalist, Author, UK - rightwing ghoul
26. Melissa Chen, Journalist, Spectator, Singapore/USA - one of the creepiest of the rightwing grifters - likes to display herself for Peter Boghossian- speaking of whom...
27. Peter Boghossian, Philosopher, Founding Faculty Fellow, University of Austin, USA - a rightwing creep - mad at me for being a nobody yet daring to criticize celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker
28. Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, Greece - the far-right's idea of a leftist
29. Michael Shermer, Science Writer, USA - racist who thinks infamous racist J. Philippe Rushton was right about Black people and Pinker's personal friend
30. Alan Sokal, Professor of Mathematics, UCL, UK - idiot stooge of the right
31. Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, Oxford, UK - rightwing idiot who signed the Koch-connected Great Barrington Declaration
32. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor, Stanford, USA - another Great Barrington idiot
33. Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine (on leave), Harvard, USA - another Great Barrington idiot
34. Aaron Kheiriaty, Psychiatrist, Author, USA - rightwing idiot
35. Chris Hedges, Journalist, Author, USA - one of those leftists whose mission is to help Republicans win elections
36. Lee Fang, Independent Journalist, USA - ally of reactionary stooge Glenn Greenwald
37. Alex Gutentag, Journalist, USA - reactionary stooge - COVID hysteric
38. Iain McGilchrist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher, UK - right-winger, purveyor of woo
39. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Human Rights Activist, Author, Netherlands - rightwinger, born-again Christian
40. Konstantin Kisin, Author, UK - Putinbot and right-wing extremist - but I repeat myself. Also a Barbie-phobic misogynist asshole. He needs to be sent back to Russia, toot sweet.
41. Leighton Woodhouse, Public, USA - ally of Shellenberger
42. Andrew Lowenthal, liber-net, Australia - stooge of the right, ally of Matt Taibbi
43. Aaron Mate, Journalist, USA - Putin sympathizer - appears to be Canadian not American
44. Izabella Kaminska, Journalist, The Blind Spot, UK - right-winger, supporter of crackpot RFK Jr.
45. Nina Power, Writer, UK - right-winger
46. Kmele Foster, Journalist, Media Entrepreneur, USA - rightwing grifter, loves Ayn Rand
47. Toby Young, Journalist, Free Speech Union, UK - infamous racist, former Quillette staffer, comedian Stewart Lee mocked him in the Guardian
48. Winston Marshall, Journalist, The Spectator, UK - right-winger
49. Jacob Siegel, Tablet, USA/Israel - rightwing stooge
50. Ulrike Guerot, Founder of European Democracy Lab, Germany - Putinbot
51. Heather E. Heying, Evolutionary Biologist, USA - evolutionary psychologist trying to trade on the good reputation of evolutionary biology - rightwing grifter - lately spending her time drumming up anti-trans hysteria
52. Bret Weinstein, Evolutionary Biologist, USA - ask Bret and Heather about Game Theory! They became infamous for promoting ivermectin as a treatment for Covid
53. Martina Pastorelli, Independent Journalist, Italy - rightwing Catholic
54. Leandro Narloch, Independent Journalist, Brazil - anti-trans reactionary
55. Ana Henkel, Independent Journalist, Brazil - anti-trans
56. Mia Ashton, Journalist, Canada - anti-trans, right-wing extremist
57. Micha Narberhaus, The Protopia Lab, Spain/Germany - Putinbot, ally of Konstantin Kisin
58. Alex Sheridan, Free Speech Ireland - Trump supporter
59. Ben Scallan, Gript Media, Ireland - right-winger
60. Thomas Fazi, Independent Journalist, Italy - right-winger pretending to be of the left
61. Jean F. Queralt, Technologist, Founder @ The IO Foundation, Malaysia/Spain - far-right goon
62. Phil Shaw, Campaigner, Operation People, New Zealand - apparent supporter of conspiracy kooks
63. Jeremy Hildreth, Independent, UK - marketing ghoul, former associate of Koch-infused CATO Institute
64. Craig Snider, Independent, USA - Koch ally
65. Eve Kay, TV Producer, UK - rightwing COVID hysteric
66. Helen Joyce, Journalist, UK - anti-trans fanatic
67. Dietrich Brüggemann, Filmmaker, Germany - stooge of the Right
68. Adam B. Coleman, Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, USA - rightwing grifter 
69. Helen Pluckrose, Author, UK - rightwing grifter
70. Michael Nayna, Filmmaker, Australia - right-winger ally of racist Eric Kaufmann
71. Paul Rossi, Educator, Vertex Partnership Academics, USA -rightwing anti-"woke" idiot
72. Juan Carlos Girauta, Politician, Spain - "hard-right"
73. Andrew Neish, KC, UK - right-winger, likes to retweet Fox News and Nigel Farage
74. Steven Berkoff, Actor, Playright (sic), UK - hideous old misogynist
75. Patrick Hughes, Artist, UK - this guy, I guess - racist Nicholas Wade is a fan
76. Adam Creighton, Journalist, Australia - anti-"woke" hysteric
77. Julia Hartley-Brewer, Journalist, UK - rightwing embarrassment to the UK
78. Robert Cibis, Filmmaker, Germany - conspiracy promoter
79. Piers Robinson, Organization for Propaganda Studies, UK - far-right ghoul, ally of Shellenberger and Taibbi
80. Dirk Pohlmann, Journalist, Germany - "The Journalist Sebastian Leber referred to Pohlmann in the Tagesspiegel in April 2022 as a "conspiracy ideologue" who had conspired jointly in the secret action "Leberschaden" (liver damage) with the "who's who of the German "swashbuckler scene" (German: Schwurblerszene)," especially blogger Robert Cibis."
81. Mathias Bröckers, Author, Journalist, Germany - conspiracy kook
82. Kira Phillips, Documentary Filmmaker, UK
83. Diane Atkinson, Historian, Biographer, UK
84. Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck, University of Buckingham, Canada - extreme right-winger and racist
85. Laura Dodsworth, Journalist and Author, UK - Covid kook
86. Nellie Bowles, Journalist, USA - Bari Weiss' wife - rightwing reactionary grifter - one-time (and possibly still?) fan of psychotic stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok
87. Andrew Tettenborn, Professor of Law, Swansea University, UK - right-winger, member of the Koch-connected Heterodox Academy
88. Julius Grower, Fellow, St. Hugh’s College, UK - anti-trans crusader
89. Nick Dixon, Comedian, UK - right-winger, "comedian"
90. Dominic Frisby, Comedian, UK - right-wing, libertarian Bitcoin bro and "comedian"
91. James Orr, Associate Professor, University of Cambridge, UK - rightwing extremist
92. Brendan O’Neill, Journalist, spiked, UK - Koch employee "Marxist libertarian" LOL
93. Jan Jekielek, Journalist, Canada - rightwing ghoul, likes to repost James "your mom" Lindsay on Twitter
94. Andrew Roberts, Historian, UK - far right
95. Robert Tombs, Historian, UK - right-winger
96. Ben Schwarz, Journalist, USA - right-winger, former national editor of the Steve Sailer-publishing, founded-by-racists The American Conservative
97. Xavier Azalbert, Investigative Scientific Journalist, France - promoter of anti-vaccine kook Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
98. Doug Stokes, International Relations Professor, University of Exeter, UK - far-right
99. James Allan, Professor of Law, University of Queensland, UK - far-right CPAC ghoul
100. David McGrogan, Professor of Law, Northumbria University, UK - rightwing Covid hysteric
101. Jacob Mchangama, Author, Denmark - right-winger, member of the racist Quillette gang
102. Nigel Biggar, Chairman, Free Speech Union, UK - rightwing, ant-woke, transphobic religionist
103. David Goodhart, Journalist, Author, UK - right-winger, reposts Putinbot Kosnstantin Kisin on Twitter
104. Catherine Austin Fitts, The Solari Report, Netherlands - Republican idiot
105. Matt Goodwin, Politics Professor, University of Kent, UK - rightwing ghoul
106. Alan Miller, Together Association, UK - anti-vax kook
107. Catherine Liu, Cultural Theorist, Author, USA - "leftist" idiot
108. Stefan Millius, Journalist, Switzerland - everything about him I could find is written in German. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
109. Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law, Columbia, USA - PragerU freak
110. Andrew Doyle, Author and journalist, UK - rightwing grifter - idiot Jerry Coyne loves him
111. Rueben Kirkham, Co-Director, Free Speech Union of Australia, Australia -  Free Speech Union a far-right organization founded by racist Toby Young and run by members of the far-right including white supremacist Douglas Murray - "related" to Heterodox Academy - so probably Koch-funded
112. Jeffrey Tucker, Author, USA - libertarian Bitcoin idiot
113. Sarah Gon, Director, Free Speech Union, South Africa - Free Speech Union a far-right organization founded by racist Toby Young and run by members of the far-right including white supremacist Douglas Murray - "related" to Heterodox Academy - so probably Koch-funded - Gon looks like an old-school pro-Apartheid racist to me
114. Dara Macdonald, Co-Director, Free Speech Union, Australia - Free Speech Union a far-right organization founded by racist Toby Young and run by members of the far-right including white supremacist Douglas Murray - "related" to Heterodox Academy - so probably Koch-funded - Macdonald appears to be a far-right ghoul
115. Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive, Free Speech Union, New Zealand -  Free Speech Union a far-right organization founded by racist Toby Young and run by members of the far-right including white supremacist Douglas Murray - "related" to Heterodox Academy - so probably Koch-funded
116. David Zweig, Journalist, Author, USA - rightwing idiot
117. Juan Soto Ivars, Author, Spain -  everything about him I could find is written in Spanish. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
118. Colin Wright, Evolutionary Biologist, USA - evolutionary psychologist, anti-trans fanatic, ally of far-right freak Christopher Rufo, disgraced researcher
119. Gad Saad, Professor, Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist, Author, Canada - evolutionary psychologist, rightwing oaf, attendee of Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists
120. Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, USA - anti-vax kook
121. Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD., USA - anti-vax kook (see link for Robert W. Malone)
122. Jordi Pigem, Philosopher, Author, Spain - appears to be a Covid hysteric
123. Holly Lawford-Smith, Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia - rightwing anti-trans idiot, contributor to racist Quillette
124. Michele Santoro, Journalist, TV Host, Presenter, Italy - stooge of the Right
125. Dr. James Smith, Podcaster, Literature Scholar, RHUL, UK - stooge of the Right
126. Francis Foster, Comedian, UK - rightwing "comedian" and ally of Putinbot Konstantin Kisin - Kisin sure has a lot of friends on this list
127. Coleman Hughes, Writer, Podcaster, USA - rightwing grifter, Quillette author
128. Marco Bassani, Political Theorist, Historian, Milan University, Italy -  everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
129. Isabella Loiodice, Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Bari, Italy - almost  everything about her I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that she's a right-winger
130. Luca Ricolfi, Professor, Sociologist, Turin University, Italy - everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
131. Marcello Foa, Journalist, Former President of Rai, Italy - no surprise here: "Marcello Foa, a Eurosceptic journalist who has often shared stories proved to be fake..."
132. Andrea Zhok, Philosopher, University of Milan, Italy - too much Italian
133. Paolo Cesaretti, Professor of Byzantine Civilization, University of Bergamo, Italy
134. Alberto Contri, Mass Media Expert, Italy - anti-vax kook
135. Carlo Lottieri, Philosopher, University of Verona, Italy - libertarian idiot
136. Alessandro Di Battista, Political Activist, Writer, Italy - Putinbot: "Di Battista declared that "for the world peace, thankfully we have Putin". On 22 February 2022, Di Battista declared "Russia is not invading Ukraine" and "that Putin wants everything but a war"."
137. Paola Mastrocola, Writer, Italy
138. Carlo Freccero, Television Author, Media Expert, Italy
139. Giorgio Bianchi, Independent Journalist, Italy - appears to be a Putinbot
140. Nello Preterossi, Professor, University of Salerno, Scientific Director of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, Italy  - everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
141. Efrat Fenigson, Journalist, Podcaster, Israel - anti-vax kook
142. Eli Vieira, Journalist, Genetic Biologist, Brazil - right-winger, idiot
143. Stephen Moore, Author and Analyst, Canada - there are too many Stephen Moores in the world. I'm going to guess that the one listed is this right-wing Trudeau-hating idiot.