Meet techno-fascist Marc Andreessen

Techno-fascist Marc Andreessen and his Substack stooge Razib Khan
Like Thiel and Musk, Andreessen can easily afford thousands
of courtiers like Khan, ready to say whatever their liege desires 
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I have ignored Marc Andreessen on this blog for far too long. 

Mostly because the connections between Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the Intellectual Dark Web and race pseudoscience have been much more obvious for much longer. 

Thiel especially, has been a player in right-wing politics since he was in college. And it has been credibly claimed he "secretly" funded the admittedly hereditarian, racist rag Quillette. 

Steven Pinker is a big fan of Quillette, even writing for Quillette, which completes the third component of the race pseudoscience - Intellectual Dark Web - Steven Pinker Dark Triad.

So I've made a big deal about possible connections between Peter Thiel and Substack while ignoring the indisputable connection between Andreessen and Substack. 

And now, here from last week is Andreessen promoting a tweet by racist Razib Khan, whose career has been promoted by Steven Pinker for decades.

And like Peter Thiel, the indisputable fascist, Andreessen has a friendly relationship with infamous white supremacist Richard Hanania.

Andreessen is a libertarian megalomaniac, which has been public knowledge for at least the last decade, but recently that's been made more obvious by his famously unhinged rant, which the Washington Post called "a self-serving cry for help." And:

The venture capitalist’s grievances are many, as are his out-there pronouncements. Universal basic income “would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.” Global population “easily” could grow to 50 billion (from about 8 billion today)— “and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.” And he has a Fox News-ish fear of a grab-bag of hobgoblins: “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”

Vice points out the connection between Andreessen's beliefs and fascist beliefs:

Andreessen also calls out Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as one of his patron saints. Marinetti is not only the author of the technology- and destruction-worshipping Futurist Manifesto from 1909, but also one of the architects of Italian fascism. Marinetti co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and founded a futurist political party that merged with Mussolini's fascists. Other futurist thinkers and artists exist. To call Marinetti in particular a "saint" is a choice. 

You can't be more obviously in love with fascism than that - to call a Mussolini-era fascist a "saint." To those of you unfamiliar with history, Mussolini was an ally of Hitler.

So should we really be surprised that Substack, a platform that Andreessen has heavily invested in, is not only platforming Nazis and profiting from Nazis, but unashamedly promoting Nazis?

A software developer on Github compared Andreessen to Karl Marx and Ted Kazinsky (the "Unabomber") - 

In the vein of Ted Kazinsky, Karl Marx, and others before him, Marc Andreessen has proudly penned a manifesto, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto . Or more properly, “a rant.”

I chose the word “rant” with care. He’s ranting against something, but it’s a terrible essay riddled with citations from racist writers (whom he admires), straw men, false dilemmas, and reads like a high school sophomore barely squeaked out a passing grade in a macroeconomics course.

Lucas Roper in Gizmodo, in an article entitled Marc Andreessen Is Wrong About Everything writes:

Here’s the bottom line: The techno-optimist tribe gives off the distinct impression of people who have been so ridiculously rich for so long that they’ve just completely lost the plot about how the real world works. To be fair, this is an apt description of most of Silicon Valley. These days, if you’re not vampirically using your teenage son’s blood to regenerate your own aging body, or torturing monkeys to death in the hopes of creating the Matrix, or trying to get a belligerent reality TV star elected president, you’re just not winning. The tech industry is fueled by people with bad ideas, and Jezos, Andreessen, and company are just some among many. What makes this crowd somewhat different (and a little more dangerous) is that they’re now writing Unabomber-style manifestos that give some pretense of intellectual legitimacy to their terrible ideas. They’re then using that legitimacy to push for a totally unregulated tech industry that stands to “disrupt” (i.e., potentially destabilize) large parts of society.

This makes it all the more ironic that Andreessen names as one of his so-called “enemies” those who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Frankly, there’s no better description of the “techno-optimist” crowd—a gaggle of out-of-touch tech bros who think their wealth gives them license to chart a future nobody else wants.

It should be obvious to all by now that the United States - and the world - has a deadly-serious billionaire techno-fascist problem.

Now I want to take a moment to mention the epic post about Substack shenanigans by Allan Stromfeldt Christensen of the curiously named "Filmers to Farmers" website. This is the first time I've seen someone else discuss some of the issues about Substack that I have raised in the past couple of years. I will have more to say about this epic post soon, but for now I just want to quote this bit:

Because yes, the notion of Substack's "hands-off ... moderation stance" ostensibly being part of a 10-15 year Andreessen-aligned covert plan can be a bit too conspiratorial to swallow, but it nonetheless turns out that there's nothing covert at all about Substack's extremist machinations, and it's getting harder and harder to not admit that Substack is increasingly turning into something rather similar to what Musk has transformed his Twitter/X platform into.

As I said back in July:

With all the racists it is platforming (Hanania, Kirkegaard, Bo Winegard, Razib Khan, Indian Bronson - undoubtedly many more, those are just off the top of my head) and now promoting, it sure looks like Substack is going the way of Twitter - and if it's less obvious than with Twitter, that's probably because Peter Thiel is stealthier than Elon Musk.

Of course I should have said Marc Andreessen - but don't count Thiel out yet - he does indeed like to do things secretly.

I 💗 Some More News

I recently discovered Some More News, hosted by Cody Johnston and it's taken me too long to do it - these guys have discussed many of the members of the Intellectual Dark Web and its most powerful funders and supporters:

Peter Thiel And His Dorky Little Goons

A Brief Look at Jordan Peterson

The Talented Mr. Musk Part 1: Free Speech

The Talented Mr. Musk, Part 2: The Elon Files

Elon Musk is Not Your Friend

Musk's War on Journalism, Unions, and Safety & MORE (This is from 4 years ago!)

Elon Musk "Versus" Twitter

Perhaps Ben Shapiro Shouldn't Be Taken Seriously By Anyone About Anything

Candace Owens, Congress, and How They Helped Each Other Lie

What and Why is "Cancel Culture"? - mentions Andy Ngo, Bill Maher and Bari Weiss

Cancel Culture Isn't a Thing, You Snowflakes

The GOP Sure Hates Queer People - mentions Libs of TikTok

Why is Critical Race Theory?

And How To Pretend Systemic Racism Doesn't Exist 

So I became a Patreon supporter of their project.

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

Stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok Chaya Raichik is also a traitor against the United States of America

Stochastic terrorist and obvious sociopath Chaya Raichik creator of terrorists' favorite target generator, Libs of TikTok, has decided to surface from her bunker to join forces with Fox News' Tucker Carlson to demonize LGBTQ people.

Apparently she was also part of the treasonous mob on January 6.

Will this evil freak ever be held accountable?

And will anybody ever ask Bari Weiss on the record why she has supported this homophobic monster?

The YouTube channel of HasanAbi has the details.

Never forget that this monster is funded by the Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon, who is on very friendly terms with Elon Musk.

I was blocked on Twitter by Libs of TikTok for asking that monster why she never seems to have a problem with the way the Hooters restaurant chain encourages children to come visit, so much so that it has children's menus.

Elon Musk Jet Tracker ✈ ✈ ✈ ✈ ✈ ✈ ✈

But we all knew that in addition to being a stochastic terrorist, Elon Musk is a lying hypocrite:

Twitter on Wednesday suspended more than 25 accounts that track the planes of government agencies, billionaires and high-profile individuals — including one that followed the movements of the social media company’s owner, Elon Musk, who has said he was committed to “free speech.”

 

Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast, said he woke up on Wednesday to find that his automated Twitter account, @ElonJet, had been suspended. In recent months, the account amassed more than 500,000 followers by using public flight information and data to post the whereabouts of Mr. Musk’s private plane. Twitter later reinstated the @ElonJet account before suspending it again. 

 

Mr. Musk had been aware of @ElonJet for months. After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, he said that he would allow the account to remain on the platform. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Mr. Musk tweeted last month. 

 

Mr. Sweeney’s personal Twitter account was also suspended on Wednesday, along with the other accounts that he runs that track the planes of tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Mr. Sweeney shared a message that he had received from Twitter, which said his account had been suspended for violating rules “against platform manipulations and spam.”

However, this blog is hosted by Blogger, which is owned by Google, not Elon Musk. So enjoy

🛫 ELON MUSK'S JET TRACKER 🛬

UPDATE: 

ELON MUSK'S JET IS ON 

MASTODON NOW

Twitter is now part of the Intellectual Dark Web

Can there be any doubt that Musk has joined the network of right-wing plutocrats who support the Intellectual Dark Web?

On Friday, a more unexpected sighting came in the form of Weiss, the conservative newsletter writer who was previously a New York Times opinion columnist. Weiss was in the San Francisco office that evening, speaking and "laughing with" Musk, two employees said.

By Saturday, Musk said Weiss would take part in releasing what he's dubbed "the Twitter files," so far consisting mainly of correspondence between Twitter employees and executives discussing their decision in 2020 to block access to a New York Post article detailing material on Hunter Biden's stolen laptop. Now, Weiss has been given access to Twitter's employee systems, added to its Slack, and given a company laptop, two people familiar with her presence said.

The level of access to Twitter systems given to Weiss is typically given only to employees, one of the people familiar said, though it doesn't seem she is actually working at the company. Matt Taibbi, the other newsletter writer through whom Musk has released the Twitter files, didn't seem to receive this degree of access, the person added.

 

More disagreements in IDW land

The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), defined by, and introduced to the world by Bari Weiss, who is on the record as a fan of the stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik of "Libs of TikTok," is tied together mainly by a right-libertarian point of view and a predilection for race pseudoscience. 

But they do sometimes have their disagreements.

Two named members of the Intellectual Dark Web, Claire Lehmann and Sam Harris, left Twitter when Donald Trump returned. However, their businesses remain: Lehmann's Quillette, allegedly funded by babbling lunatic Peter Thiel among other plutocrats, and Harris' MakingSense. 

This fact was noted by ivermectin-promoting, game theory loving crackpot Bret Weinstein, also a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Meanwhile the Cato Institute's "Human Progress" has gotten around to critiquing Peter Thiel's crackpot, Bible-citing keynote speech for the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference (Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists) for not appreciating the last 50 years of Human Progress.

Steven Pinker, who Bari Weiss considers the exemplar of respectability on the IDW spectrum, linked to the "Human Progress" article from his Twitter account. 

It's a safe bet that Pinker will never leave Twitter based on a principled stand. 

"Impressionistic" is a very generous way to describe Thiel's babble, but considering  how Thiel funds organizations that Pinker counts on to support race pseudoscience and right-wing reaction, like Quillette, he can hardly be scathing and expect to remain a member in good standing of the plutocrat-supported IDW.

But some mild criticism is likely welcomed by Cato, since it is largely a Charles Koch vehicle. 

Although Koch and Thiel agree far more than they disagree, there must be a rivalry there, and Koch may not be displeased when Thiel gets some mild criticism. 

The article does not mention Thiel's bizarre Antichrist reference, complete with Bible citation, but then, one of the two authors of the piece is Gale L. Pooley, a senior fellow at the intelligent-design promoting Discovery Institute. Discovery used to employ far-right Trump flunky CRT/trans-panic mongering Christopher Rufo.

This section of the Human Progress piece caught my attention

Progress has been especially good for the poor – especially when considering time inequality. A person in China working eight hours a day to earn enough money to buy food in 1960, would only need to spend around 18 minutes to do the same in 2021. For the time it took to buy one meal in 1960, he or she would get 27 meals in 2021. The Chinese gained 7 hours and 42 minutes a day to do with as they please. Indians gained 6 hours and 30 minutes a day over the same period. Some 3 billion people now have much more time to learn and contribute to knowledge discovery and creation.

How absurd to include that, as if right-wing libertarian plutocrats cared about the poor.

Peter Thiel is infamous for his lack of human empathy, justifying apartheid as a good economic system. 

And Cato, well Cato's idea of "Human Progress" is to attempt to end taxation for the rich. A belief-system that now rules the Republican Party.

If the poor have benefitted from progress, it is not thanks to the plutocrat-forward policies of Cato and friends. Thanks to their policies, economic inequality has, after being relatively low since the end of WWII, skyrocketed starting with the Reagan administration.

Based on their policies, the endgame of Thiel, Koch, Musk and other right-wing plutocrats must be to create a world controlled by about one hundred obscenely wealthy men - a global feudalism.

Which is why they hate democracy so  much, as this video notes.

Another excellent YouTube video on the evil of a human society controlled by billionaires.

Does Jerry Coyne read his own blog?

Well after almost four years of this Pinkerite blog, you'd think I would have learned to never take members of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex at their word. 

When Jerry Coyne claimed on his blog ("Why Evolution is True") on October 21 that he'd never heard of Peter Thiel, the Trump-funding, Quillette-funding anti-democracy sociopathic keynote speaker for the CPAC for racists (aka the Stanford Academic Freedom conference) I should have immediately run a search on his blog, instead of just accepting his claim.

So it finally occurred to me to run the search, and of course Peter Thiel is mentioned several times on Coyne's blog prior to October 21 of this year.

The most recent instance of Peter Thiel showing up on Coyne's blog was just two months before he claimed he never heard of him. Coyne is quoting a right-winger on Bari Weiss's Substack:

Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance managed to win his primary in Ohio with just 32 percent of the vote but rarely goes a week without some sort of gaffe, such as suggesting that women should stay in violent marriages. He now finds himself mired in a surprisingly tight general election against undistinguished Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, whose main strategy is calling Vance, who’s worked for billionaire Peter Thiel, a plutocratic carpetbagger and repeating the word China over and over again to Rust Belt audiences. Then there’s another Thiel-backed political virgin, Arizona’s Blake Masters, who just this week flipped his position on abortion from being “100% pro-life” and supporting a federal personhood law to suggesting he’s only against late-term and partial-birth abortion. These aren’t even rookie mistakes.

I get that sometimes Coyne has other people write his blog posts. But does he ever bother to read them? Is he not capable of retaining information from them? I mean a billionaire is a pretty unusual type of person. You'd think that would be memorable enough.

So in May of this year, Coyne again mentions Thiel, in his post Elon Musk's list of must-read books. 

Now Coyne doesn't say why anybody should care what an asshole like Elon Musk reads. Musk had already threatened to buy Twitter a month before this post (Coyne was in favor of it) but Coyne only mentions that Musk is famous in the must-read books post. 

But clearly Coyne felt it was important to share. But somehow he doesn't remember that one of the books Musk loves was written by sociopath democracy-hating, racist CPAC keynote speaker Peter Thiel:

3.) Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Master. It’s about how to build a business; I haven’t read it.

But back in 2016, so before Coyne was as far down the road of senescence as he is now, he published an entire post about Peter Thiel's efforts to use his wealth to punish anybody who criticizes him, because you know, he loves free speech so much: Open thread: Press freedom, free speech, Gawker and public humiliation. 

Now it was written by someone name Grania Spingles but still, doesn't Coyne read and remember what gets published on his own platform?

O my prophetic soul

So a couple of weeks ago, when Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter was still only a strong possibility, I speculated that once Musk took over, people like professional transphobe, Quillette contributing editor Colin Wright would be free to say hateful things without occasionally being called out for it. 

So yesterday Elon Musk retweeted a graphic created by... Colin Wright. 

Clearly Musk is a friend of the right-wing IDW Quillette ideology.