This week, Mr. Thiel arrived in Rome to deliver four lectures on the Antichrist. The series, which began on Sunday, is exploring how “occult forces are ceaselessly at work, intent on destroying what remains of the West,” according to the conservative Christian group hosting him.
In response, Catholics have decried Mr. Thiel’s vision in several articles over the past week. One was titled: “American heresy: Should we burn Peter Thiel?”
Mr. Thiel held similar lectures in San Francisco last year and in Paris in January, prompting relatively little reaction from Christian thinkers. But proximity to the Vatican appears to have prompted some Roman Catholic commentators to issue a more sustained response. In the “American heresy” essay, the Rev. Paolo Benanti, an adviser to the Vatican on A.I., described Mr. Thiel’s vision as “disturbing.”
I mean, I can't stand the Catholic Church either, with its long tradition of hating women's sexuality and trying to control women's bodies, but it is probably still wealthier than Peter Thiel and so one of the few forces capable of shutting down his nutty antichrist babblings.
It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. "If you don’t read Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence," says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. Conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan says that Bowles's columns "have the exact spirit of the 70's writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny—and also deeply in the know. "
NYTimes columnist Bouie is a long-time critic of the race pseudoscience gang, even linking to my personal blog over ten years ago when racist Razib Khan was on the verge of being hired by the New York Times. Which is most likely why Khan hates Bouie so much.
Weiss of course was an employee of the New York Times, which helped boost her grifting right-wing reactionary career, leading to the destruction of CBS news. Unfortunately the only alternative to the New York Times is the even-worse, oligarch owned and controlled Washington Post.
That's what happens to mainstream journalism in an age of oligarchs and fascism.
I got a copy of the program for the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research although they did not post it on their website.
The "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is still an untested and far-fetched paper authored by racists, now 20 years old.
As we've seen, militant atheist Pinker is perfectly capable of ignoring the religiosity of his allies when it suits him, as when he gave a mild critique of Peter Thiel's antichrist-themed speech, without a single complaint about Thiel's religious extremism.
But I guess this is where Pinker draws the line: Murray published an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Can Science Reckon with the Human Soul?" apparently in support of a book he recently published.
If I were to be cynical I'd say the difference between the way Pinker responds to Peter Thiel's religiosity versus Murray's is due to Thiel having far more money to donate to causes that Pinker cares about, like anti-trans and anti-DEI than Murray.
Murray is supposedly retired but that doesn't stop him from continuing his career-long efforts to make the world a worse place.
Now I had assumed that like most libertarians, Murray was an atheist - their thought leader Ayn Rand was an atheist. And he was, but now he's having second thoughts, apparently through the feminizing influence of his wife and the supremacy of Western Civilization (aka White people):
Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked.
Murray's religious epiphany offers that old chestnut, the god of the gaps:
I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should. It took 18 years before Einstein’s theory of special relativity accommodated the anomaly.
We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.
If we have not yet explained "anomalies" therefore it's a god.
He admits that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet his “soul of the gaps” argument—there’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it—is extraordinarily weak.
The empirical challenge to the materialist position from terminal lucidity implies that consciousness can exist independently of the brain but isn’t necessarily “evidence for the human soul.” That was a speculative leap on my part. I plead guilty.
But he got some attention for his book and that was likely the point of this exercise. In spite of Murray's spiritual concerns, the endless quest for material wealth, even after being retired for years, seems ultimately what matters most to Murray.
"groups" meaning "race" ------------------------------------
This bio implies (Brook's) a conservative whose trade books are mostly of the self-help genre. And this one article certainly is in that genre, because it gives people license to accept God. It’s part of the new spate of books touting belief in divine beings—of a piece with recent works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, Ross Douthat, and so on. Why this sudden surge of goddiness? You tell me!
Because they are all grifters.
Charles Murray's entire career of shitting on the poor has been funded by AEI and other right-wing plutocrats. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has had a long association with AEI; the same with Brooks and Douthat.
When their patrons decide it's a good political move right now to promote religion, they are going to promote religion.
If there is a Jesus in heaven, the same Jesus who said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me," then Charles Murray is certainly bound for hell.
But even I was shocked by how completely bonkers Thiel sounded in his keynote speech.
Here's a small excerpt from the transcript I created, where Thiel compares environmentalism to Charles Manson:
...You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component...
It's hard to know when to begin and end the excerpt because it is not a collection of discrete, inter-related thoughts, but rather a stream-of-consciousness ramble.
And by the end of the speech he introduced the Antichrist:
...Start it seems, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous and uh and that and uh that, you know, whatever the dangers are in the future, we need to never underestimate the danger of, you know, one world, totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard hard to see what it ends. But, you know, there's always. You know, I there's always sort of the, the frame where. First Thessalonians five, chapter 3. The the political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. And and I think you know what I what I want to suggest is that and and you get it when you have sort of a homogenized one world totalitarian state and and what I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would uh do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon, thank you very much.
So three years ago, I found it disturbing that one of the richest and most politically powerful men in the world was ranting about the Antichrist and even more disturbing that nobody else seemed to care.
I mean, not even the militant atheists connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, who also gave speeches at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, had much to say about Thiel's Christian apocalypse spiel. The worst Steven Pinker had to say was that Thiel's keynote speech was "data-light and impressionistic."
Jerry Coyne, another IDW militant atheist at the Conference, never said anything about Thiel at the time, although thanks to Bari Weiss' The Free Press touting religion recently he - three years later! - took note of Thiel's religiosity, but utterly ignores the Antichrist babble and makes Thiel sound almost mainstream in his critique.
Pod Save America posted an episode about the South Park episode "Twisted Christian," explaining the various cultural references like the 6-7 phenomenon and pointing out that Thiel really did hint that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.
Kudos to the South Park team - it was absolutely inspired to give Peter Thiel a song and dance routine.
Between this and John Oliver's take-down of Bari Weiss, I feel like the mainstream is finally beginning to pay attention to issues I've been shouting about for the past seven years.
And I have never had a better reason to post a Collier video than this one, her latest, which calls Intellectual Dark Web namer and Peter Thiel flunky Eric Weinstein a "grifter, " calls IDW-associated physicist Sabine Hossenfelder a "grifter" and calls the infamous "The War on Science" book "unreadable." She also gives shouts out to two other YouTube creators I've mentioned here, Professor Dave and Shaun.
ISIR president Thomas R. Coyle and Claire Lehmann, spreading their racist propaganda at Northwestern University ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Claire is receiving the award for distinguished journalism, recognizing her contributions to public discourse on intelligence research. She joins a long line of distinguished Holden awardees whose names I put on the slide. Those include Toby Young, who is currently associate editor of The Spectator, Alice Dreger, journalist and author of "Galileo's Middle Finger," Susan Pinker and Bo Winegard, who was former associate editor at Quillette, who is now executive editor, I believe, at Aporia.
Lehmann herself lovingly nurtured the career of Bo Winegard from when he was but a wee baby graduate student racist. Lehmann attacked me back in 2018 for daring to point out the fact that Bo Winegard is a racist, before he became a professional Neo-Nazi, working for Emil Kirkegaard.
Being an apologist for pedophilia is obviously not a problem for Claire Lehmann. In her acceptance speech she traces her journey from her days as a sweet summer child who loved Shakespeare only to be betrayed by Academia and forced to read twentieth-century literature and even ideas she may not necessarily agree with, to being rescued from despair by famous oaf Camille Paglia, headlined in the text version of Lehmann's speech in Quillette as "Finding My Athena."
Lehmann says:
“Poststructuralism is a corpse!” Paglia declared. She described Foucault’s scholarship as weak and bloodless, imitative of Nietzsche, and lacking in rigour. But she didn’t just attack Foucault’s work, she assailed the entire academic establishment for elevating him as a guru...
Lehmann considers Paglia an antidote for Academia's love of Michael Foucault, but avoids mentioning what Paglia and Foucault had in common: a love of pederasty.
Lehmann was born in 1985, so she discovered Paglia well after Paglia had written her 1997 Salon article entitled The Purity of Alan Ginsberg's Boy-Love. Paglia was aware of Foucault's pederasty but naturally his was the bad kind:
Allen Ginsberg was the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality. Like the expansive, sensual, democratic Whitman but unlike the twisted, dishonest, pretentious Foucault, he saw the continuity between great nature and the human body, bathed in waves of cosmic energy. Seen from this pagan perspective, Ginsberg's celebration of boy-love was pure and sinless, demonstrating the limitations of Judeo-Christian paradigms of sexuality.
Rather than the virgin-goddess Athena, I would say that Camille Paglia is more like Lehmann's Zeus, who was fond of pederasty.
But in spite of Paglia, it was too late for Lehmann - betrayed by the English department, she moved to psychology, where she discovered her true calling: race pseudoscience:
Jensen expressed something that is often taken for granted but rarely articulated—that reality exists independently of our theories about it, and that it can be studied honestly through careful scientific work. I realised then that critics like Gould and the poststructuralists were not offering up methodological refinements in their critiques with the purpose of furthering inquiry; they were mounting a challenge to the possibility of studying human nature in the first place.
Now I'm not sure exactly what Lehmann is up to with "critics like Gould and the poststructuralists were not offering up methodological refinements in their critiques with the purpose of furthering inquiry" other than an effort to conflate Gould with poststructuralists, but if what she means is, Gould never explained in detail why he thought Jensen in particular and hereditarianism in general were wrong, well of course he did. As in Gould's New York Review of Books review of Jensen's 1980 book "Bias in Mental Testing" for one very easily obtainable example.
It can never be pointed out enough that race pseudoscience promoters are far more impressed by psychologists, like Jensen, and political scientists, like Charles Murray and even someone with a marketing degree like Steve Sailer, than they are by a life scientist like evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
In her post on Bluesky in December 2024, Lehmann can be seen recommending racists for others to follow, including Sailer and Aporia.
Then, while studying for her degree, Lehmann found her people - evolutionary psychologists, cranks and gutter racists:
On Twitter, I met a biosocial criminologist named Brian Boutwell, a geneticist named Razib Khan, evolutionary psychologists like David Schmitt, Geoffrey Miller, and Diana Fleischman, and I spent time reading papers by psychologists like David Buss and Roy Baumeister.
Lehmann gives credit to Steven Pinker too, which is only fair, since Pinker is basically the leading mainstream evangelist for race pseudoscience:
It occurred to me that intelligence research ventured into sacrilegious territory. It undermines a vision of human nature that Steven Pinker described in his 2000 masterpiece The Blank Slate.
Lehmann whines about being called out for being a sleazy far-right political operative.
In 2019, during the peak of the “Great Awokening,” prominent figures like Nassim Taleb repeatedly described me as a “neo-Nazi” online, and the Columbia Journalism Review called me a disinformation “villain” and listed me alongside Mohammed bin Salman and Yevgeniy Prigozhin.
Is it fair to call Claire Lehmann a Neo-Nazi? After all, she only has a friendly relationship with Emil Kirkegaard and promoted the career of Neo-Nazi Bo Winegard. And she only showed up in person to receive an award from an organization that loves to platform Emil Kirkegaard.
Just because she has no problem with allying with Neo-Nazis, how dare you describe her as a neo-Nazi.
Then in her speech, Lehmann pulls out the classic race pseudoscience lie - that critics of race pseudoscience don't care about the "science" behind her beliefs, but only its morality:
But it was obvious that attacks like these were not about specific findings or methodological disagreements. Like Gould’s attacks on Jensen, or like Katz’s attacks on sexology, the criticism rained on my young publication was moralistic in nature. Rather than focusing on what was true or false, my critics wanted to reframe the question as being one of right and wrong.
Lehmann's own mentee, Bo Winegard used the term, for the same exact purpose, in a paper he wrote with his brother Ben and David Geary, this year's ISIR annual meeting keynote speaker, called Equalitarianism and Progressive Bias. Such a perfect demonstration of the direct line between that olde-thyme Jim Crow gutter racism and today's race pseudoscience gutter racism.
The reason that race pseudoscience ghouls like Lehmann won't acknowledge the actual scientific objections to their racist beliefs is a. they're too stupid to understand real science and b. they suspect they would have their beliefs thrashed soundly, and in Lehmann's case, her racist beliefs are her meal ticket - although naturally she doesn't mention who has funded Quillette, in her speech. So why risk having an actual debate with an actual scientist when you can stay in your far-right safe space bubble and take money for an easy job like regurgitating 19th century racist "science" endlessly?
Laziness, half-truths, racist bullshit and sins of omission are what get you a journalism award from the gutter racist organization the International Society for Intelligence Research.
Especially when you are a gutter racist like Claire Lehmann.
→ Zohran Mamdani is not a real socialist: Don’t worry, silly readers. Zohran Mamdani is not a real socialist. Sure, he describes himself as a democratic socialist whose team includes so very many communists. But there’s nothing to worry about. Here’s The New York Times: “The closest Mr. Mamdani gets to socialism is in his belief in treating people more equitably.”
It’s not socialism, it’s being kind. Are you anti-kindness? It sounds like you are, the NYT reporter says, his boot on your neck. We’re just all treating people nicely, okay?
Apropos of that, various reports are coming out about Zohran Mamdani’s team, who we can expect to see in power and running New York City soon. Like, let’s take his new housing adviser, Celia “Cea” Weaver. The New York Post found these gems on her X account: “Seize private property!” And: “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.”
That’s not socialism, silly. This policy adviser is just advocating for sharing. Essentially, she wants to do a weapons buyback program. It’s just smart policy. Are you anti-sharing now too?
Coyne claims to be opposed to Trump, but in so many ways he sounds like a stupid MAGA.
Too bad for Lehmann, Coyne and their circle of jerks, MAMDANI WILL BE MAYOR.
I cordially invite Coyne to stay in Chicago and Lehmann to stay in Australia and, along with all their fellow gutter racists, to stay the fuck out of New York City.
PZ Myers has this to say while writing about "War on Science" -
(I hope Jerry is enjoying the sight of the National Guard patrolling his campus, the fucking moron.)
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.
Coyne's position is the same as that American Enterprise Institute stoogeThomas 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.
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.
I think someone in the Dispatch graphics dept. is secretly opposed to the gutter racism represented by Claire Lehmann ------------------------------------------
You see, Lehmann and her right-wing cohort are harboring the delusion that Lehmann is a journalist because the gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) gave her a journalism award at the 2025 annual ISIR meeting of gutter racists.
Before I get into the article, I will say that the Dispatch runs a magnificently unflattering image of Lehmann on her author page, which makes me suspect that there might be one - but only one - member of the Dispatch staff who is opposed to racism.
In the article, Lehmann frets that if Mamdani becomes mayor of New York City, it might threaten the white nationalist fascism that she and other toadies of Peter Thiel are working so hard to achieve:
Which brings us back to Mamdani. The son of a postcolonial academic and a filmmaker, he is, in every sense, the next generation of wokeness. He combines the cultural fluency of elite progressivism with the language of bottom-up economic grievance, bridging two worlds that rarely align. As al-Gharbi points out in his book, until now, wokeness has been largely an elite project, preoccupied with identity issues of race, sexuality, and gender, as opposed to economic inequality. But if this movement mobilizes the working class and the downwardly mobile middle classes, it will no longer be confined to the campus or cultural niches. On the contrary, it will ignite into a truly mass movement.
Like many who support Mamdani, I am not a socialist. But given Mamdani's clear pro-New York City policy plans and the outright evil of the other leading candidates Trump-boy Adams and sexual predator Andrew Cuomo - ALSO a Trump-boy - I am absolutely thrilled to be one of those who will vote for Mamdani.
Freaking out far-right racists like Claire Lehmann is just the cherry on top.
I'll be thinking of you when I check the box for Mamdani, fascist biznatch.
Lehmann was absolutely thrilled with the NYTimes' racist-fueled attack on Mamdani - and I suspect she was part of the organized effort against him - in alliance with the most revolting racists like Jordan Lasker, aka "Cremieux."
Because Claire Lehmann is not a journalist, she's a racist right-wing political operative living off right-wing racist plutocrats.
Earlier this summer, I traveled to the University of Buckingham for the inaugural conference of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science—a gathering that focused refreshingly on analysis as opposed to polemic. Speakers included American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, Dispatch contributor and political scientist Yascha Mounk, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, and Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker—as well as many others—each examining hyper-progressivism from different angles. I also presented at the conference, with my contribution focusing on wokeness through the lens of gender.
Neo-Nazi, pedophile defending Emil Kirkegaard was also in attendance although Lehmann doesn't mention it. I think it's very likely Kirkegaard helped fund the conference, one of the biggest public round-ups of gutter racists outside of the annual ISIR meeting.
Lehmann gave a "how I became a gutter racist" speech while the ISIR was giving her the journalism award. I will be writing about that and her grotesque racist career soon.
Professor Dave notes in his latest video that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is parroting Peter Thiel's talking points about the alleged slow-down of scientific advancement, and speculates that Hossenfelder is on the Thiel payroll. Something I've been wondering about for years now.
The fact that Hossenfelder has decided to support infamous crackpot and Thiel employee Eric Weinstein - often given credit, if you can call it that, for coining the name "Intellectual Dark Web" - is something she would be more likely to do if she, too, was on the Thiel payroll.
Although I suppose it's possible she decided to torch her science career out of sheer stupidity.
I recorded Peter Thiel giving a speech at Stanford in 2022 - and created a transcript - and in his stream-of-consciousness babble, he explains his paranoid belief that there is a nefarious influence preventing scientific advancement, which boils down to, basically, hippies, claiming they were influenced by Charles Manson (my highlighted emphasis):
But but if I had if I had to sort of give a single again steelman idea. The best argument for why, why this has been so slow for the last 50 years and I think we have to somehow engage with and take take more seriously. Is that there is something about science and technology that has taken you know very dystopian very destructive turn in the um, in the in the 20th century and there are you know it, it is, it is not we're not in the 18th century 19th century you know rationalist enlightenment age, where it seems to be simply making everything better in every way, all the time. You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component.
You can blame at least some of the insanity of our current political situation on the malign influence of crackpot plutocrats like Thiel.
Physicist Angela Collier explains why the claim that science, or at least physics, has slowed down is bullshit in this video. At minute 0:31, Collier makes a passing reference to Hossenfelder's article Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years.
And on top of Thiel's wacky talking points, propagated thanks to money or stupidity by the likes of Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hossenfelder, there's the whole TESCREAL crackpottery. But that's a post for another day. But for now, here is a good intro - Peter Thiel's name is dropped at minute 4:25.
“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows.
That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.” Sailer, one of the most prominent peddlers of race science in the United States, has made a career out of noticing things. (Last year, he published an anthology of his writing titled Noticing.) He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs). Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.
The end of the New Yorker article describes Yarvin meeting Camus, and Camus's response:
When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.”
It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”
Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine (Yarvin's wife) said, “You can’t just ask people that!” Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France.
As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?”
Yarvin is clearly an emotionally volatile, far-right extremist nut job, which explains why fascist freaks like Marc Andreeessen and Peter Thiel love him.
Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.)
And our old racist pals Razib Khan and Steve Sailer are mentioned in the article:
In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me...
...Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”
Khan was recently expressing his hatred for NYTimes op-ed columnist Jamelle Bouie, again.
To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”
Like Richard Haier, Yarvin doesn't think environment matters at all. As Haier told Stefan Molyneux:
Not many people are talking about manipulating genes that raise IQ. This is not really a public conversation, and to the extent it is, it's usually framed in some negative context of eugenics or or racism or or or or something like that.[62]
Richard Haier is no longer an editor at the journal "Intelligence," so he and some racist pals - all associated with the International Society for Intelligence Research - started a new publication that will no doubt welcome race pseudoscience. More about that soon.
