What does Manhattan Institute pay Colin Wright for?

Apparently Colin Wright's job is to post this emoticon all day on his Bluesky account. He's posted it at least a dozen times.

😘

It reminds me of Wright's buddy James Lindsay, who thought it very clever indeed to respond to people on Xitter with some variation of "your mom."

Wright, former managing editor of racist Quillette, testified on Xitter what a big influence the oafish anti-Semite Lindsay was on his own political views.

Colin Wright and James Lindsay count as intellectuals in right-wing circles. Which is why, I assume, the Manhattan Institute made Wright one of its fellows. Colin Wright is officially on wingnut welfare.

The Manhattan Institute is right-wing trash, and it publishes garbage rag City Journal. I was just talking about City Journal and its connection to Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald a week or so ago.

As readers of Pinkerite may recall, City Journal was sued last year for publishing a defamatory article against a guy who was - and still is - owed money by neo-Nazi kook Emil Kirkegaard. 

City Journal retracted the article.

It seems very likely that either Kirkegaard wrote the article himself, or it was written at his request. 

Now it must have been pushed for publication by an important Manhattan Institute donor (Kirkegaard himself?) because I don't think even the ghouls who edit City Journal are really interested in Emil Kirkegaard's personal finances. 

But City Journal does have alleged editors:

• Brian C. Anderson Editor, City Journal
• Steven Malanga Senior Fellow | Senior Editor
• Paul Beston Managing Editor
• John Hirschauer Associate Editor
• Daniel Kennelly Associate Editor
• Theodore Kupfer Associate Editor
• Jordan McGillis Economics Editor, City Journal

One of Colin Wright's biggest thrills was from his stickman cartoon, which was re-tweeted by Elon Musk. 

Wright immediately tried to monetize it.

I assume that like the oafish Lindsay, Wright thinks he's very clever. But in fact, his cartoon is simply an illustration of what life has always been like for people who are conservative by nature. 

The illustration shows Colin Wright - I assume that's who "me" is. In 2008 he was left of center. But those "woke progressives" ran farther away from the center, somehow causing the hapless Wright to slide to right of center.

Now in this example, this slide happened due to "woke" beliefs - the beliefs that Black Lives Matter and that trans lives matter. 

But I'm sure many "left of center" people throughout human history have gone on the same "political journey" as Wright as they've gotten older.

Take the issue of slavery. Those on the right were whole-heartedly in favor of slavery. But those slightly left of center believed that slaves should be set free some day, maybe when slavery died out all by itself. And once they were free they should move to Haiti.  

Meanwhile the left was saying that slaves had the right to be free, immediately, and live in the United States.

Then one day John Brown came along and tried to start a slave insurrection. Many on the left thought that it was a great idea. That was when the left stretched farther to the left, as in Wright's stick figure graphic - thanks to the hardcore abolitionists of 1859.

They were considered so radical they were even called "Radical Republicans" back in the day long before the Republican Party became the party of fascism. 

But conservatives who thought they were pretty liberal - center left - for believing that slavery should end some day thought the Radicals were crazy, and suspected them of being open to personal, even sexual relationships with Black people, a thought that horrified the "center left."

And so it goes, from one progressive cause to the next - women's suffrage, the labor movement, gay rights, etc. etc. All causes that were once considered radical.

When he was young, Colin Wright approved of things that had been radical twenty years before. But as he got older and was confronted with new progressive causes that he did not grow up with - trans rights and diversity, equity and inclusion - he decided that change should stop.

So Colin Wright's political journey is nothing new. It's the same old same old.

It's just a matter of time before Wright is telling those kids to get off his lawn, like his ideological ally Jerry Coyne.

Compare people like Colin Wright to Abraham Lincoln. Like Wright, when he was younger, Abe Lincoln was center-left - he wanted slaves to be free, and he believed that slaves would eventually be free, maybe in about a hundred years. And he was in favor of "colonization" the term for sending free Black people to Haiti or elsewhere.

When the Civil War came, probably influenced by Frederick Douglass and others, Abraham Lincoln moved towards the left until, at the very end of the war, he gave a speech in favor of Black voting rights, an extremely radical position at the time.

That's the primary reason John Wilkes Booth shot him, according to historian Michael Burlingame. 

I think it's a safe bet that Colin Wright will never die for a noble cause.

I'm reminded of this excellent comic.

My letter to Pamela Paul ~ plus Bari Weiss, Peter Thiel and Chat GPT

Dear Ms. Paul

Your latest op-ed claims that "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals” without mentioning that many of those who wrote this paper are associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web” and/or have written for racist far-right Thiel-funded Quillette.

I am including Jerry Coyne, Peter Boghossian, Anna Krylov, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Lee Jussim and Jay Tanzman - and those are the names I recognize immediately. 

I suspect they are not the only co-authors with right-wing views. I will investigate further - something that you apparently refuse to do. Or worse, you are deliberately hiding what you know about their political views.

After all, your former spouse was caught promoting race pseudoscience and his IDW friends rushed to his defense. It would not be surprising if you had your own IDW connections.

https://www.pinkerite.com/2020/05/four-koch-toadies-defend-race-science.html

I addressed Krylov’s dishonest, hysterical screed on the same topic on my blog a couple of years ago, and it's also available on Medium.

https://medium.com/@nancymcclernan/anna-krylov-and-the-peril-of-bullshit-31ca795583d5

You seem to be, at the very least, a deeply unethical employee of the New York Times.

Nancy McClernan

Pinkerite

-------------

The paper in question was published in "The Journal of Controversial Ideas" thus confirming that it is, along with Quillette, a tool of the Intellectual Dark Web which many of us always suspected it was.

The paper appears to have been organized by reactionary bullshit-swilling Anna Krylov, who I assume is by now on Peter Thiel's payroll. She was also an organizer for Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. 

And while many of the co-authors are horrible reactionaries and hawkers of racist "science," the references for the paper are even worse - no less than three links to Quillette, plus citations of race pseudoscience promoters Pinker and Andrew Sullivan and grifters Pamela Paresky, Katie Herzog, Helen Pluckrose and the thoroughly grotesque Trump-loving asshole James Lindsay.

More and more it appears to me that Pamela Paul was hired to ensure that the NYTimes has someone to represent the interests of the Intellectual Dark Web, now that Bari Weiss has gone on to more obviously rightwing plutocrat-serving gigs. 

This is from TODAY. Note how Weiss describes right-wing ghouls Blake Masters and JD Vance as "anti-establishment." 

I think you mean fascist, you sleazy shameless handmaiden of stochastic terrorist monsters and babbling lunatics.

I asked Chat GPT about Weiss's connection to Thiel. 

Bonus link - Majority Report (again!): Bari Weiss HUMILIATED When Trans Child's Powerful Response To Her Lies Goes Viral. Pamela Paul is also infamous for beating the anti-trans hate drum.

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

UPDATE - someone put me on the "In Defense of Merit" mailing list and so I received an email today that links to this "In Defense of Merit" website. 

Apparently the people behind this grift felt that it wasn't clear enough that this is a project of right-wingers, race pseudoscience promoters and associates of the Intellectual Dark Web, so the page includes testimonials, not only from the odious Bari Weiss and Pamela Paul, the IDW-cheerleader twins, but from:

Richard Dawkins - anti-Muslim crackpot and instigator of the infamous stochastic terrorist pioneer event known as "elevatorgate"

Jordan Peterson - reactionary crackpot beloved by Quillette

Jeffrey Flier - Quillette author and a co-president of Pinker's Council of Academic Freedom grift 

Jonathan Rauch - Thielbucks via Quillette, Kochbucks via Reason Magazine

Jesse Sabatini - right-winger opposed to COVID lockdown

David Bertoli - right-winger who likes to retweet people like Nicholas Christakis and Conor Friedersdorf. Hilariously Bertoli tweeted the Upton Sinclair quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” while praising people who are indisputably political operatives working for Charles Koch and Peter Thiel. The lack of self-awareness and/or hypocrisy of these IDW goons is always mind-boggling.

Judith Curry - climate change denier who "receives funding from the fossil fuel industry" - what a surprise. Maybe David Bertoli can lecture her on the topic of salary sources and not understanding things. Predictably, the Koch-funded City Journal loves her.

The College Fix - funded by Koch and other right-wing plutocrats

And best of all...

Noah Carl loves neo-Nazi Bo Winegard
and "human biodiversity" -  if
I had to guess, I'd say everybody
who contributed to this grift
is fine with race pseudoscience

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Noah Carl - hardcore but sneaky racist and promoter of race pseudoscience and co-author with neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard. According to RationalWiki, Carl

is a British sociologist who, outside of his respectable sociology work, publishes racialist pseudoscience and wrote an Islamophobic paper for OpenPsych and a paper for the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly.[2] For this reason, he has been described as living a "double life".[3] After the latter was exposed in December 2018, hundreds of academics signed a letter calling for Cambridge University to reconsider the award of his fellowship and to stop employing him as a postdoctoral researcher.[4][5]

Krylov and her IDW pals are not even pretending anymore - they are just blatant about being far-right and racist ghouls.

I asked ChatGPT about Krylov and it said she

...holds the Stephen and Laura Hsu endowed chair in analytical chemistry.

Which certainly sounds plausible especially if that Stephen Hsu is the supporter of race pseudoscience. That Hsu can be seen Tweeting encouragement for her earlier attempt at building a culture war moral panic grift.

Like many other hawkers of race pseudoscience, Hsu gets serious funding:

...Even though mainstream science has pretty much scrapped the notion that race has any kind of biological basis long ago, that hasn’t stopped Steven Hsu from trying to link intelligence with race and getting a billion and a half dollars for research based in China. 

I don't think Krylov has ever met a race pseudoscience hawker she doesn't like. But Google couldn't find any evidence of Krylov's connection to this endowed chair and there's no mention of it on her USC page.

But WHERE IS PINKER? This IDW-heavy grift is right up his alley and he is pals with the two people I think organized the paper, Krylov and Jerry Coyne.

Pinker was hanging out with Anna Krylov at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists and Coyne adores Pinker.

Pinker, left and Krylov  wearing glasses behind and on the right of him
at the very skewed old-white-man CPAC for racists keynoted by 
(and funded by, I suspect,) crackpot Republican fascist Peter Thiel
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Did Peter Thiel tell Pinker to stand down and focus his attention on his "Academic Freedom" grift?

Never fear, loyal Pinkeriteers, more about Steven Pinker tomorrow.

That sleazy Harper's Letter, almost three years later, let's review

Basically, anywhere there is an obscenely wealthy plutocrat funding right-wing/Libertarian political causes, there you will likely find Bari Weiss

How bad was the infamous Harper's Letter?

Consider first, that it was created by Thomas Chatterton Williams who, I don't believe coincidentally, was put on wingnut welfare via the Koch-funded AEI a few months later.

I once admired Williams, but by the time of his embarrassing chateau incident (he declared on Twitter that he kicked a friend out of his home in France for criticizing Bari Weiss) I had realized he was in deep with the right-wing Libertarian ghouls in and around the Intellectual Dark Web. 

That was bad enough, and then the New Yorker's Ian Chotiner interviewed Williams and revealed what an extreme intellectual lightweight he is. 

Williams' friendship with Bari Weiss is key. She is a central figure in the Intellectual Dark Web, a member of the far-right leaning FAIR, an organization based on the cynical, sleazy right-wing campaign against "critical race theory" and more recently a supporter and defender of far-right homophobic treasonous, stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok, funded by Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon, while aiding and abetting far-right goon Elon Musk.

Here is Weiss in June 2020, promoting her people: Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill); another Koch employee Kmele Foster (@kmele) a devotee of Ayn Rand; stochastic terrorist James Lindsay (@ConceptualJames), a Trump supporter and partner of far-right religious extremist Michael O'Fallon, Lindsay was banned from the old Twitter for being a neo-Nazi; and IDW founder and crackpot Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein), employee of scary weirdo Peter Thiel. 

Basically, anywhere there is an obscenely wealthy plutocrat funding right-wing/Libertarian political causes, there you will likely find Bari Weiss.

At the time of the Harper's Letter, Tom Scocca in Slate discussed how sleazy the stunt was:

What were the Harper’s signatories trying to accomplish? For a document announcing an emergency, their letter (addressed, as the writer Luppe Luppen pointed out, to no one) was studiously vague about exactly what it meant to warn the reader against. It presented a nonspecific and mostly pluralized litany of complaints:

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

At least one item—”a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed study”—did seem to have an identifiable antecedent: David Shor, a researcher at the consulting company Civis Analytics, tweeted out a study concluding that voter backlash against violent protest in 1968 had tipped the presidential election to Richard Nixon and was fired after people denounced the tweet. There seems to be fairly broad agreement, among people who would even know about this incident, that Civis was wrong to fire him, and the incident does look like a classic example of a company sacrificing an innocent for “panicked damage control.” But this pattern of targeted pressure and overreaction is not a new crisis. It has been established for years by now, in right-wing and left-wing outrage campaigns alike, and the fault lies with the institutions that still haven’t figured out how it works, not with the generalized, newly ascendant cultural revolution that the Harper’s letter or Trump wishes to raise the alarm about.   

Yet, rather than defending Shor and criticizing Civis by name, the letter anonymized his case and stuck it next to a complaint about powerful people losing their jobs “for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes”—a rickety construction that leaves the reader wondering if it’s supposed to cover the times that aren’t just clumsy mistakes, or how one is to decide which mistakes are more than just clumsy. Also, which “journalists are barred from writing on certain topics”? In June, two Black journalists were prohibited from covering the Black Lives Matter protests by the owner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but the letter admonishes the reader that “resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion,” while the Post-Gazette is in the hands of a passionate Trumpist.

But it wasn't only sleazy in its hypocrisy, but also in the sense of using phony bipartisanship, a favorite Koch tactic, by recruiting well-known people on the left who should have known better: Katha Pollitt, Dahlia Lithwick, Jeet Heer and Gloria Steinem.

Here is a list of all the signers of the Harper's letter: the Quillette contributors, the transphobes, right-wingers, Koch employees and the feckless dummies of the center and left.

1. Elliot Ackerman |  journalist
2. Saladin Ambar |  academic
3. Martin Amis | Islamophobe novelist
4. Anne Applebaum | journalist and defender of Roman Polanski
5. Marie Arana | author
6. Margaret Atwood | sort-of-feminist novelist
7. John Banville | author
8. Mia Bay | historian
9. Louis Begley | novelist
10. Roger Berkowitz | Bard College and author at right-wing racist Quillette
11. Paul Berman, writer | author at Quillette
12. Sheri Berman | Barnard College
13. Reginald Dwayne Betts | poet
14. Neil Blair | agent of transphobic J.K. Rowling
15. David W. Blight | Yale University historian - should have known better
16. Jennifer Finney Boylan | transgender author - rescinded signature (although it's still listed at Harpers) when she realized what this stunt was really about, when she saw that J.K. Rowling had signed it. More recently she wrote a piece about Rowling.
17. David Bromwich | Yale University
18. David Brooks | annoying center-right columnist
19. Ian Buruma  | Bard College
20. Lea Carpenter | writer
21. Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus) - should have known better
22. Nicholas A. Christakis | Yale University, right-wing, defender of Razib Khan
23. Roger Cohen | center-right journalist
24. Ambassador Frances D. Cook | career politician
25. Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project | should have known better
26. Kamel Daoud | journalist
27. Meghan Daum, writer | former liberal, current member of the IDW/Quillette gang
28. Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis | should have known better
29. Jeffrey Eugenides | writer
30. Dexter Filkins | journalist
31. Federico Finchelstein | The New School
32. Caitlin Flanagan | anti-feminist
33. Richard T. Ford | Stanford Law School
34. Kmele Foster - Koch employee, Ayn Rand fan, promoted by Bari Weiss
35. David Frum | former Bush speechwriter
36. Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University | Quillette author, Reason Magazine contributor
37. Atul Gawande | Harvard University, Biden administration
38. Todd Gitlin | Columbia University
39. Kim Ghattas | journalist
40. Malcolm Gladwell | Koch funded-Reason Magazine contributor
41. Michelle Goldberg, columnist - should have known better
42. Rebecca Goldstein | married to Steven Pinker
43. Anthony Grafton | Princeton University
44. David Greenberg | Rutgers University
45. Linda Greenhouse - should have known better
46. Rinne B. Groff | playwright
47. Sarah Haider | Quillette cause
48. Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern - long-time promoter of race pseudoscience
49. Roya Hakakian | writer
50. Shadi Hamid | Brookings Institution
51. Jeet Heer, The Nation - should have known better
52. Katie Herzog, podcast host |  defender of Andy Ngo, fan of Quillette, Reason Magazine
53. Susannah Heschel | Dartmouth College
54. Adam Hochschild | author
55. Arlie Russell Hochschild | author
56. Eva Hoffman | writer
57. Coleman Hughes | writer for (Koch-funded) Manhattan Institute, author at Quillette
58. Hussein Ibish | Arab Gulf States Institute
59. Michael Ignatieff | politician
60. Zaid Jilani, journalist | member of the IDW/Quillette gang including FAIRforall, Quillette author
61. Bill T. Jones | New York Live Arts
62. Wendy Kaminer | advisory council member of Koch-funded FIRE, Reason Magazine contributor
63. Matthew Karp, Princeton University | far-left
64. Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative | the chess guy
65. Daniel Kehlmann  | writer
66. Randall Kennedy | law professor
67. Khaled Khalifa | writer
68. Parag Khanna | author
69. Laura Kipnis | Northwestern University, Reason Magazine contributor
70. Frances Kissling | Catholics for a Free Choice
71. Enrique Krauze | historian
72. Anthony Kronman | Yale University
73. Joy Ladin | Yeshiva University
74. Nicholas Lemann | Columbia University
75. Mark Lilla | Columbia University
76. Susie Linfield | New York University
77. Damon Linker | works for Libertarian Niskanen center, dictator appeaser
78. Dahlia Lithwick, Slate - should have known better
79. Steven Lukes | New York University
80. John R. MacArthur | Harper's publisher
81. Susan Madrak | writer - should have known better
82. Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer for right-wing Unheard, friend of Quillette
83. Greil Marcus | music journalist
84. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center - should have known better
85. Kati Marton | author
86. Debra Mashek worked for DonorsTrust -funded Heterodox Academy
87. Deirdre McCloskey | Libertarian, Reason Magazine contributor
88. John McWhorter | Reason Magazine contributor
89. Uday Mehta | City University of New York
90. Andrew Moravcsik | Princeton University
91. Yascha Mounk |  Persuasion - appears to be another media outlet for the IDW, with several Harper's Letter signers including McWhorter, Yoffe, Haidt and Pinker.
92. Samuel Moyn | Yale University
93. Meera Nanda | writer and teacher
94. Cary Nelson | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
95. Olivia Nuzzi | New York Magazine
96. Mark Oppenheimer | Yale University
97. Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer - should have known better
98. George Packer | writer
99. Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita) - should have known better
100. Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – should have known better
101. Orlando Patterson | Harvard University
102. Steven Pinker - ugh
103. Letty Cottin Pogrebin - should have known better
104. Katha Pollitt, writer - should have known better
105. Claire Bond Potter, The New School - should have known better
106. Taufiq Rahim | New America
107. Zia Haider Rahman | writer
108. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen | University of Wisconsin
109. Jonathan Rauch | Brookings Institution/The Atlantic, Reason Magazine contributor, Quillette contributor
110. Neil Roberts | political theorist
111. Melvin Rogers | Brown University
112. Kat Rosenfield | Reason Magazine contributor
113. Loretta J. Ross | Smith College
114. J.K. Rowling | children's book author, infamous transphobe
115. Salman Rushdie, New York University
116. Karim Sadjadpour | Carnegie Endowment
117. Daryl Michael Scott | Howard University
118. Diana Senechal | teacher and writer
119. Jennifer Senior | columnist
120. Judith Shulevitz | writer
121. Jesse Singal, journalist | infamous transphobe, Reason Magazine contributor
122. Anne-Marie Slaughter | lawyer
123. Andrew Solomon | writer
124. Deborah Solomon | critic and biographer
125. Allison Stanger, Middlebury College | became a political cause of the race pseudoscience right for her support for infamous race pseudoscience racist Charles Murray
126. Paul Starr | American Prospect/Princeton University
127. Wendell Steavenson | writer
128. Gloria Steinem - should have known better
129. Nadine Strossen | defender of race pseudoscience, Reason Magazine contributor
130. Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., | Harvard Law School
131. Kian Tajbakhsh | Columbia University
132. Zephyr Teachout | Fordham University
133. Cynthia Tucker | University of South Alabama
134. Adaner Usmani | Harvard University
135. Chloe Valdary - part of the Quillette/IDW world
136. Helen Vendler | Harvard University
137. Judy B. Walzer | academic
138. Michael Walzer | academic
139. Eric K. Washington | historian
140. Caroline Weber | historian
141. Randi Weingarten | American Federation of Teachers
142. Bari Weiss - I would bet she was one of the instigators of this stunt
143. Cornel West | public intellectual
144. Sean Wilentz | Princeton University
145. Garry Wills | historian
146. Thomas Chatterton Williams | Koch employee, creator of the Harper's Letter stunt
147. Robert F. Worth | journalist and author
148. Molly Worthen | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
149. Matthew Yglesias | political operative at Libertarian think tank, friend of Razib Khan
150. Emily Yoffe, journalist | right-leaning "cancel culture" hysteric, Reason Magazine contributor
151. Cathy Young, journalist | Koch-funded career, pioneer of stochastic terrorism IMO
152. Fareed Zakaria | political commentator

Pinkerite's 4th Anniversary ~ Peter Thiel and the race pseudoscience network

Yesterday, November 17 was the fourth anniversary of this blog. I really can't believe I've kept it going this long, with my day job and my playwriting and French classes but the machinations of the race pseudoscience network keep annoying the hell out of me so I have to come here to write about it.

The big news in the past year in the world of Steven Pinker the Intellectual Dark Web and race pseudoscience was the revelation that Peter Thiel has funded - and likely still does, the leading mouthpiece of the Intellectual Dark web (according to Bari Weiss) - the far-right racist Quillette.

This was bookended by Peter Thiel's keynote speech a few weeks ago, for the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, AKA Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. Thanks to the appearance of Amy Wax at the conference, it was crystal clear that the Freedom the conference means is the freedom to be a public racist.

Meanwhile, Thiel's old business partner Elon Musk is on track to destroy Twitter, which, much like the twin towers of the World Trade Center, won't really be appreciated until it's gone.

More items of interest in the past year:

• Confirmation that E. O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology, aided and abetted racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton in a way that very much reminds me of the way Steven Pinker has promoted the careers of racists Steve Sailer and Razib Khan.
• James Lindsay was kicked off Twitter for being a neo-Nazi. Then it turned out that the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi was a big fan of Lindsay.
• Two people associated with Harvard University, Larry Summers and Carole Hooven each expressed their support for neo-Nazi racist Bo Winegard.
• I began posting some items from Pinkerite to Medium, including my proposal for taking out the trash on Stone Mountain
• Jon Stewart gave Andrew Sullivan an appropriately bad time about Sullivan's claims about "Black culture."
• I finally became aware of the racism-friendly International Society for Intelligence Research

The top most-visited posts this year:

• The appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan  - 1.51K
• Perjurer & racist Emil O W Kirkegaard comes for me - 1.4K
• Timothy B. Lee of Full Stack Economics and the career of Razib Khan - 1.06K
• Is Peter Thiel a babbling lunatic? - 846
• Steven Pinker, Steve Sailer and the Cousin Marriage Conundrum part 1 - 732
• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 544 (third year in a row in the top 10)
• Scary rightwing anti-democratic Quillette-funding Peter Thiel - 482
• Unz Foundation grants to Gregory Cochran, Steve Sailer and Razib Khan - 430
• Jerry Coyne learns who J. Phillippe Rushton was, Kathryn Paige Harden denies being an hereditarian, E. O. Wilson was a racist - 397
• Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - 396

Attempted Pelosi assassin is a fan of James Lindsay

Those of us who have memories longer than that of a goldfish remember how people like Bari Weiss, Christopher Rufo, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Andrew Sullivan supported James Lindsay.

Many of us could see what a right-wing extremist loony-toon Lindsay is, but these associates of the Intellectual Dark Web couldn't see it - or refused to admit it. Probably because Lindsay was promoting the right-wing swill that they love and/or get paid by plutocrats to promote.

Meanwhile, Lindsay was so sensitive to criticism he came after a nobody blogger like me.

But eventually it began to dawn on the feckless dummies that James Lindsay might just be a complete asshole, when Lindsay said he was voting for Trump. And later when Lindsay showed up at CPAC. 

Please note this is the original CPAC, not the upcoming CPAC for racists lead by democracy-hating, racist-funding, Trump-loving Peter Thiel.

Finally, even a leading intellectual of the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette network, Claire Lehmann, was calling Lindsay "retarded."

Then Lindsay was kicked off Twitter for being a neo-Nazi. It remains to be seen whether man-baby troll Elon Musk will bring him back or not.

But Lindsay is not only a laughable goon. He has influence of the worst kind as can be seen by the archived version of the web site of David DePape, the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi, who assaulted her husband Paul when he couldn't find the Speaker of the House.

Along with then-Vice President Mike Pence, Pelosi was a main target of Trump's crazed murderous mob on January 6. So of course DePape's list of interests includes "Voter Fraud" as well as the anti-trans hatred promoted by Quillette and the GOP. 

But DePape also includes one name among his interests - "James Lindsey" - I think we can assume he means James Lindsay but misspelled the name, since the links on his James Lindsey page go to New Discourses podcasts, a project of James Lindsay and his Christian nationalist sugar daddy Michael O'Fallon.

Jerry Coyne promoted the New Discourses site on his site as a "resource." 

I will never forget how race pseudoscience promoting stooges Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Andrew Sullivan and the rest of the gang helped promote the grifting insanity of James Lindsay and what the insanity of James Lindsay led to.

And of course Coyne, Pinker, Sullivan and the rest of the gang will never admit how badly they screwed up with Lindsay. But maybe it wasn't an innocent screw-up. Maybe they were just doing what they had been paid to do.

James Lindsay, banned from Twitter for being a neo-Nazi

A tweet by James Lindsay,
darling of the Intellectual Dark Web
and a neo-Nazi

Anybody could see that James Lindsay was a right-wing extremist kook.

I first mentioned his extremism back in 2019. I mentioned him a few times since then, the most prominent was when he came for me, which gave a nice little boost to this blog, and a good chance to talk about his insane "your mom" hypocrisy.

(His partner in grift, Peter Boghossian, also came for me.)

So I'm not surprised Lindsay rode the right-wing extremist grifter gravy train to its logical conclusion: anti-Semitism, as reported in The Daily Beast. 

I mean, he was already teaming up with Richard Spencer in 2020. 

Finally, Twitter gave him the boot for hateful conduct.

But this blog could not call itself Pinkerite with any self-respect without spending a moment to mention how much Steven Pinker loved and supported James Lindsay. Along with Andrew Sullivan and Jerry Coyne.

Ending, one hopes, at least by the time Lindsay went full neo-Nazi.

Pinker praising Lindsay's book Cynical Theories.

John Oliver vs. CRT Panic

Excellent episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" in which he discusses the end-goal of the CRT panic, created out of thin air by Koch employee and Trump supporter Christopher Rufo.

Rufo is a former member of the Koch-connected and race pseudoscience-friendly FAIR board of advisors.

I have to do an update on FAIR soon because I think it's now even further right-wing than ever. They've added nuclear energy shill Michael Shellenberger and yet another Quillette author, Jacob Mchangama.

I think the presence of so many Quillette authors (and Quillette editor Jon Kay) and race pseudoscience promoters Andrew Sullivan, Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer is a signal that the purpose of FAIR and its CRT panic is not only the standard right-wing scheme to force the US government to fund religious schools via "school choice."

Race pseudoscience, which claims Black Americans are innately, genetically inferior - and therefore as stated in a Quillette review by Razib Khan - an existential threat to America - cannot survive if Black American history is well-known. The reason Black Americans have not thrived is due to the legacy of slavery itself, plus Jim Crow, plus redlining, plus terrorism like the Tulsa massacre, etc etc. The attempt to erase Black history is the attempt to declare that Black American failure to thrive is the result of bad genes.

And that's why FAIR is not only against CRT, it is against teaching Black history, period, especially the 1619 project.

Michael Shermer, an official member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" who has been a member of the FAIR board of advisors since the very beginning of the organization, is very much a supporter of race pseudoscience as I discussed in the post Michael Shermer and Equalitarianism and the White Citizens' Councils. He also likes to call critics of Steven Pinker "cockroaches." He's also an admirer of pedophila apologist Camille Paglia.

Here we see FAIR board member Michael Shermer "debunking" the 1619 project with far-right historian Mary Grabar, who supports anti-1619 Project legislation:

Mary Grabar, a fellow at the right-wing Alexander Hamilton Institute, has written an essay praising Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) for introducing the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.” This is the right-wing version of “cancel culture,” except it adds government repression to the mix, making it far worse.

Grabar endorses censorship because she dismisses the idea that teachers are competent professionals who can be trusted to analyze complex concepts: “few teachers have the ability or the time to teach beyond the materials given to them.”

Grabar compares the 1619 Project to Howard Zinn, about whom she wrote a book called Debunking Howard Zinn because “Howard Zinn was bad–a communist, a corrupt teacher, a fraudulent historian, and an anti-American agitator.”

Like the 1619 Project, legislators have tried to ban Zinn from schools. Grabar complains that “When in 2017 Arkansas State representative Kim Hendren, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of Zinn’s book in state-funded classrooms,” the Zinn Education Project “framed the attempt as censorship.” Yes, how shocking, to describe legislation literally banning a book from public school as censorship.

Funny how often "free speech" advocates on the right end up supporting censorship.

The Lockwood Saga

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What to do when your stupid Twitter argument 
is winding down but you want to keep it going
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I think the new book by Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power is very good, although very concerning, considering Thiel is, like Charles Koch, a right-wing extremist billionaire who is happy to throw his money behind horrible people and evil causes. 

As I demonstrated in the previous post, long before me, people were calling Peter Thiel a psychopath or a sociopath. 

It isn't only because of his political positions, as repellent as they are, but because of the ways he expresses himself,  and because of his priorities, which seem to be exclusively wealth and power. 

But recently I got into a stupid argument on Twitter with an individual named Dr. Patrick Lockwood, because Lockwood didn't like my use of the term "psychopath" to describe Thiel.

Now without stupid Twitter arguments, Twitter itself would scarcely exist, and I wouldn't usually mention the argument on Pinkerite.com. But it turned out that Patrick Lockwood, who I initially assumed was some garden-variety false-certainty Twitter rando, is part of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex. Oh lucky me.

A pretty strong hint about the Quillette/IDW connection was when, after the stupid argument was winding down, and without my knowledge, Lockwood posted one of my tweets and asked for opinions about me. Lo and behold, Quillette managing editor Colin Wright and Quillette author, Gamergate cheerleader and Koch money recipient Cathy Young popped up.

Colin Wright claimed I was a psychopath because that's what Colin Wright always does because I criticize his political views and his employer. Since his views and employer are indefensible, he has no option but to defame me. 

Cathy Young had a vicious thing to say about me because that's who Cathy Young is. 

But hey - although my conflict with the Quillette/IDW industrial complex is a war of words, it's still a war and war is hell. 

I did a little Googling and discovered Lockwood has had a profile for almost a year in a little club called "Reality's Last Stand" along with a bunch of people associated with Quillette and race pseudoscience, including Claire Lehmann, Jonathan Haidt, Razib Khan and Wright.

Eventually I discovered that Lockwood had recorded a very cordial interview with Quillette author and racist Bo Winegard. 

I'm not calling Winegard a racist because of his race pseudoscience beliefs, as idiotic as they are - I'm calling him a racist because of his neo-Nazi policy dream of national race quotas. 

But, you see, he doesn't think it's racist to want to "preserve a country's demographic composition." The boldness of Bo Winegard's stupidity is un-freaking-believable. 

Now of course unlike the Nazis, Winegard doesn't specify which racial groups he has in mind and how exactly the "demographic composition" would be apportioned, and how exactly he would achieve his ideal composition.

But then, the Nazis took quite a while to figure out a final solution to their racial demographics apportionment quandary, long after they had a racial demographics concept in mind.

Many people were annoyed with Sam Harris because he gave a very friendly interview to Charles Murray - another indisputable racist - without pushback against Murray's race pseudoscience beliefs. Ezra Klein debated Harris about it, and the late Michael Brooks did a smart and funny episode on his show about it. 

In this video, Lockwood and Winegard are a second-string Harris and Murray. They even mention the Harris/Murray controversy early on in the conversation. Warning: the video is 90 minutes of self-serving race pseudoscience justification and appeasement.

I will be discussing the lowlights below the video. 

LOWLIGHTS

At around minute 3, Winegard expounds on his "sacred values" theory, the transparently self-serving claim that anybody who has issues with his race pseudoscience is simply reacting out of taboo aversion rather than reacting to the clownishness of his "science."

Lockwood responds: 

Interesting so this would probably partially I think explain maybe one of the reasons why people are so just flabbergasted by the concept of a race and IQ when it shows up online or in a Sam Harris talk or whatever, like people lose their minds over this concept because it seems to be reinforcing racism and bias and prejudice in a way that, you know, we shouldn't be using science to do that, I guess it's the attitude because of the sacred values.

Lockwood's turn of phrase doesn't indicate that critics of race pseudoscience might have rational reasons for their criticism, but rather Lockwood, a clinical psychologist, describes the critics of race pseudoscience as people who "lose their minds" over the concept.

I'm not gonna lie -  it was painful to listen to these two dummies affirm Bo Winegard's idiotic belief-system, with Winegard moaning about his role as martyr for The Pure Scientific Truth while Lockwood smiles and nods. 

Adding to the pain of listening is Winegard's extreme vocal fry. He sounds like a 14-year-old goth girl. Also his speech patterns occasionally reminded me of Forrest Gump, which is awful because I love Tom Hanks and there's no comparison between him and a grubby neo-Nazi like Bo Winegard.

At minute 11:55 Lockwood mentions Helen Pluckrose as if she's the voice of sweet reason. Pluckrose is an infamous grifter, only slightly less repellent than James "your mom" Lindsay and bitter Peter Boghossian with whom she perpetrated her big grift. Haaratz did an excellent piece on the scam they ran to get themselves noticed by the gullible of this world:

According to their own account, the writers took parts of the chapter and inserted feminist "buzzwords"; they "significantly changed" the "original wording and intent” of the text to make the paper "publishable and about feminism." An observant reader might ask: what could possibly remain of any Nazi content after that? But no one in the media, apparently, did.

Indeed, in public, the trio constantly downplayed the amount of re-writing they did to the original text. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in October 2018, Lindsay described how they'd "modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly," and in another interview explained that this was to "get past plagiarism." 

Chapter 12, he noted, included sentences like: "This is why we need the Nazi Party, and [this is] what is expected of people who are going to be part of it." What did they change? "We took that out [the Nazi party reference] and replaced it with ‘intersectional feminism.’" What's left is an entirely anodyne sentence, stripped of any identifiable Nazi vestiges. Hardly "owning the grievance warriors."

So what did the text in the article accepted by Affilia actually look like? Was it, as Fox News claimed, a "feminist Mein Kampf", suggesting men should be treated the same way as Hitler victimized Jews?

It is surprising, to say the least, that none of the journalists reporting on the controversy actually bothered to compare the two texts. If they'd done so, they would have found that the Affilia article didn't contain anything that could be recognized as "Mein Kampf" even by a Hitler expert, let alone a lay person

After a positive reference to an ethics-free grifter, and after having suggested critics of race pseudoscience lost their minds, Lockwood shifts into appeasement mode:

LOCKWOOD

I was just chatting with Helen Pluckrose about this a little bit. It seems like there's a spirit or an intention that people are missing out on, and how do we arrive at this intention or spirit of, kind of a charitable or favorable attitude towards our quote-unquote opponents and -

WINEGARD

- Yeah 

LOCKWOOD

- and from from my take just as a clinical psychologist not a research psychologist, it seems like most of what I observe online with incendiary characters and topics is, people start off with, it seems like people start off with the intention to prove someone wrong. And that might end of itself be the place to start with a respectful disagreement - is as opposed to having this intention to prove someone wrong, what if we had the intention to understand. And that's why I like kind of the Buddhist concepts of beginner's mind and whatnot. Because if you have the idea in your head that you know nothing then generally speaking you're more apt to learn something and respectfully disagree like I'm walking into this chat with you knowing almost nothing about your research, kind of on purpose because I could easily kind of creep on you online to figure out what you've written. I'm not going to do that because I actually want to kind of learn for the first time from you what you believe. And without any bias or preconceived notions on my part, you know what I mean?

Yeah because why would you want to prove that racist bullshit, presented as science, is factually incorrect? How rude.

And of course Lockwood knows exactly what Winegard's "research" is about, that's why they talk about the Sam Harris/Charles Murray controversy right at the beginning of the interview. That's what prompted Lockwood to say "people lose their minds."

Throw in Lockwood's reference to Buddhist beginner's mind ("and whatnot") and that paragraph is a recipe for vomit stew. If you did not feel like puking after reading that paragraph (and hearing it spoken is ten times worse) you have a stronger stomach than I do, my friend.

I'm calling it now - Patrick Lockwood is the Neville Chamberlain of race pseudoscience.

But there's only so much I can take of this double-barrel bullshit in one sitting. I will discuss more lowlights in the future. 

After my gorge lowers back the hell down.

Part 2 of the Lockwood Saga: the influence of Jordan Peterson