The Free Press - the right-wing racist Bari Weiss grift

Bari Weiss calling her media outlet "The Free Press" is about as accurate as Donald Trump calling his media outlet "Truth Social." But many people are stupid and willing believers of right-wing grifters and fascist traitors.

I recently predicted in a comment on Threads that NPR's former editor Uri Berliner will soon reappear as either an employee of Weiss; running a right-wing plutocrat-funded Substack; or as a member of a right-wing think tank. So far my comment has received 223 likes. People are finally beginning to recognize the right-wing grift that was practiced by Weiss herself.

Weiss threw a fit and quit the New York Times, claiming it was too liberal and Uri Berliner quit NPR for the same reason. Weiss quit not long after she had a chance to promote her good buddies as "The Intellectual Dark Web." 

In 2020 I discovered Quillette's former editor Toby Young (recently seen on the racist Substack Aporia) complaining that the big article Weiss was planning about him and other far-right racists - no doubt another excuse to complain about liberals and the left - was not going to be published since Weiss had quit.

I suspect that the NYTimes refused to run a second "Glory of the IDW & friends" article and that is one of the reasons Weiss quit. 

Weiss has done very well for herself since then - financially, if not reputationally - by making friends with a bunch of right-wing activist billionaires, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and most notoriously, that corrupter of Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court, Harlan Crow, Weiss's "Sugar Daddy." 

"The Free Press" has a soft spot for filthy, treasonous, would-be dictator Trump, as discussed in this New York Magazine article.

Berliner hasn't yet revealed his new career as a right-wing grifter, but I'm keeping a look out. I took a look at "The Free Press" writers list to see if he is there yet, but did not see him. But as you might have guessed, the list is full of right-wing ghouls, grifters and racists, many of whom have written for far-right racist Quillette:

• Francesca Block - right-winger who claims on Twitter that her working for right-wing propaganda outlet "The Free Press" means journalism is not dead. I assume she was hired on the basis of her work for the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, writing articles like "Meet the American millionaire Marxists funding anti-Israel rallies."

• Nellie Bowles - wife of Bari Weiss. She's a big fan of stochastic terrorism-promoting psychopathic LibsofTikTok. 

• Katherine Boyle is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is a leader of techno-fascism. So I should add Marc Andreessen to the list of Bari Weiss's right-wing billionaire pals.

• Margi Conklin - hyper-natalist Nazi-sympathizer Elon Musk better not find out about Conklin's refusal to have children. Conklin is managing editor of "The Free Press" and doesn't appear to have written anything for it yet. Unfortunately for Margi, her husband Christopher Yates has nice things to say about NPR - the current target of the Uri Berliner-lead attempt to defund public radio. Margi's bosses better not find out!

• Matti Friedman - appears to write exclusively about Israel, and was accused by the Associated Press of lying when Friedman claimed the AP was biased against Israel. Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him for this round of Israel-Gaza hostilities. Attacking critics of Israel is Bari Weiss's oldest and possibly favorite public cause.

• Martin Gurri - right-wing ghoul, works for the Koch-funded and -controlled think tank the Mercatus Center, author at the disgraceful, sued-for-libel City Journal and denier of systemic racism (of course.)

• Rob Henderson - right-wing racist ghoul who loves Peter Thiel oh so much, has written for Quillette. Pals around with neo-Nazi Richard Hanania.

• Coleman Hughes - a reliable source of attacks on all Black-related issues such as reparations and the 1619 Project and is a defender of race pseudoscience in Quillette. 

• Eli Lake - claims to be anti-Trump but often defends Trump and others on the far right. Promotes Quillette on Twitter.

• Walter Kirn - business partner of disgraced journalist  and infamous misogynist Matt Taibbi.

• Douglas Murray - British white supremacist, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. I've mentioned him quite a few times on this blog. Current Affairs writes: "...as earlier critics of his work have noted, he packages white supremacist and xenophobic ideas in a way that makes them more palatable to the mainstream." Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him. Murray has written for Quillette, of course.

• Joe Nocera - token liberal, but maybe he's becoming right-wing now for that easy post-retirement grifter income.

• Vinay Prasad - anti-vax crackpot - "In October 2021, Prasad prompted social media controversy when he published a blog post comparing the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response to the beginnings of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich."

• Olivia Reingold - the Trump-loving Republican Security Council are big fans. Reingold can be seen on Twitter promoting the "Twitter files" lies and defending hiring far-right racist piece of shit political hack Ben Shapiro a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Reingold claimed hiring Shapiro would "legitimize" Politico. To understand what a far-right ghoul Reingold is, it helps to learn more about Shapiro at the always excellent Some More News. 

• Peter Savodnik has written for racist Quillette, taking up the standard right-wing racist political line that systemic racism must not really exist because "we certainly can’t experience systemic racism, not in the way that “experience” is understood by philosophers or, for that matter, judges." I have no doubt that Savodnik is, like Quillette and its founding editor Claire Lehmann, an "hereditarian."

• Abigail Shrier - right-wing ultra-ghoulish trans-phobic political operative. So perfect for the Bari Weiss grift. Quillette author, naturally.

• Rupa Subramanya - right-wing Canadian idiot, big fan of Julian Assange and Elon Musk, "slave to (her) cat." Hates Justin Trudeau, of course.

• Suzy Weiss - sister of Bari Weiss, so unsurprisingly a right-wing grifter, enjoying that sweet nepotism.

• Oliver Wiseman - defender of that weasel Steven Pinker for the far-right Libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education. That says it all.

• Leighton Woodhouse - right-wing ally of far-right nuclear power shill and climate change denier Michael Shellenberger

• Emily Yoffe - odious right-wing grifter who has written for the equally odious "Persuasion" and  prefers to blame drunken women for rape.

So there you have it - all the far-right favorites: racism, neo-Nazism, Trumpism, transphobia, anti-vax crackpottery, misogyny, climate change-denialism, stochastic terrorism and worship of far-right activist billionaire sugar daddies. 

What a toxic brew.

What's that anti-woke fanatic Anna Krylov up to now?

"Western civilization" propaganda from Dorian Abbot and
the rightwing-funded "Minding the Campus"
which, of course, hates the 1619 Project
------------------------------------------------------------------

I've written a few times about Anna Krylov and her boyfriend Jay Tanzman (Jerry Coyne referred to
them as partners and Tanzman as a "freelance statistician") especially Krylov who wrote a screed against renaming science terms, hyperbolically comparing that to being burnt at the stake. Krylov and Tanzman have also written for racist Quillette - of course.

Recently they were seen publicly aligning with a whole bunch of racists like neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, co-authoring a paper which is yet another attempt by the racist right to "move the Overton window" and make race pseudoscience mainstream. I wrote about that here.

I guess that's why they put me on their mailing list. I recently found something in my inbox with the headline "A New Online Collection Documents Censorship in Science."

It says:

Following up on their perspective on scientific censorship published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, co-author Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman have published an online collection of scientific papers, viewpoints, and op-eds documenting the modern rise of censorship in science. The collection, titled Spotlight on Scientific Censorship, can be viewed here.

They mean following up on the aforementioned paper they produced with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard and the other race pseudoscience ghouls.

The collection is the usual right-wing garbage written by the usual racists and associates of the Intellectual Dark Web and its very own Austin University. 

This latest effort by the racist right to move the Overton window in favor of racism is being promoted on the Substack (of course) of Dorian Abbot, associated with Austin University.

Abbot was recently mentioned here on Pinkerite as part of the gang giving evolutionary psychologist Carole Hoover (fan of the hateful, Kiwi Farms-praising Gender Wars playing cards) an award for her support of hereditarianism.

A glance at Abbot's Twitter timeline shows that although he is a professor of geophysical sciences, he is far more interested in promoting right-wing political schemes. I suspect it's because being a right-wing political operative pays better than a geophysical sciences professorship. 

Abbot's Substack, "Heterodox STEM" also publishes... 

• Eric Rasmusen, a rightwing bigot, infamous for his misogyny
• Bo Winegard supporter Luana Maroja
• Ben Slivka, right-wing tech bro obsessed with wokism
• Peter Bonilla, Koch goon
• Randy O. Wayne, opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion
• Alex Small, member of the Heterodox Academy gang
• Julia Shaletzky, member of the Heterodox gang
• Michael Bailey, anti-trans extremist and creep, seen on Bo Winegard's extremist racist Substack Aporia, wants to "open the Overton window"
• William McNally, right-winger, likes all the other right-wingers
• Frank and Louie - "anti-woke" goons
• Mitt Castor, fan of right-wing extremist ghoul Christopher Rufo
• Judy Parrish, climate change denier
• Daniel Nuccio, contributor at the far right, Koch-funded College Fix
• Lee Jussim, contemptible "stereotypes are real!" ghoul - another participant in  Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists

And on and on, the usual collection of right-wing ghouls, goons and grifters.

And of course this latest Krylov/Tanzman effort is being promoted by a fellow participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (Dorian Abbot was there too) their travel buddy Jerry Coyne.

It's Black History Month - the IDW & the GOP hate Black History

It's Black History Month. Let's talk about how much the Right - and its IDW division - hate Black History.

Over in the cesspit known as Twitter, as reported by right-wing garbage heap Fox News, the Right are at each others' throats, while promoting the fiction that Steven Pinker is on the Left. He's about as Left as Jerry Coyne. 

Fox News is displaying attacks against Pinker by Colin Wright and Christopher Rufo. 

Rufo is a hypocrite, naturally, and so in response to Pinker tweeting a link to Cathy Young's criticism of Rufo and his connection to Ron DeSantis and his scheme to erase Black History, Rufo tweeted "Sorry, buddy, we're not going to listen to people who can't even open their comments."

Do I have to mention that Rufo blocked me on Twitter every bit as much as Pinker did?

Cathy Young herself is hardly blameless. I consider her a pioneer of stochastic terrorism.

But the whole thing is odd, because Steven Pinker is a supporter of Rufo's campaign against Critical Race Theory, which is the founding motivation of FAIR FOR ALL. 

Pinker was a member of the FAIR board of advisors when it was first created in March 2021 along with Rufo. And although Rufo is no longer there, Pinker is.

FAIR is a who's who of right-wing political operatives and members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Colin Wright has never been a member of the FAIR board of advisors, but they haven't forgotten him. He's mentioned in December 2021 in the News section: New Video: Doing ‘DEI’ Right with Colin Wright.

Now before getting cozy with Rufo's CRT grift, Colin Wright was best known as a hateful transphobe:

Colin Wright, an anti-trans extremist writer for right-wing site Quillette and founder of Reality’s Last Stand, posted a very heinous tweet harming the safety of LGBTQ+ minors by criticizing suicide prevention outlet The Trevor Project’s “quick exit” feature that allows LGBTQ+ youth to have safe conversations without being snooped on by their non-LGBTQ+-affirming parent(s) or other family members and then subsequently get berated, abused, and/or even disowned, or worse, killed. 

His Twitter account was even suspended for extreme transphobia, before fascist Elon Musk came along to set all the little fashies free from Twitter jail.

But both transphobia and hostility to Black history are hallmarks of the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette. And Wright quickly jumped on board Rufo's anti-CRT campaign, aligning with Trump.

I wonder how Jerry Coyne will react to the attacks on Pinker. On the one hand, Coyne adores Pinker, on the other hand Coyne is a fan of Colin Wright.

It is odd though, this public drama, considering that all the main characters, Pinker, Young, Rufo, and Wright have taken Koch money. And Koch and the Intellectual Dark Web have nurtured Rufo's CRT-panic grift since the beginning.

What Ron DeSantis is doing is the ultimate political expression of the IDW/Quillette campaign against Black history.

Rufo may talk about "Critical Race Theory" but what he's really after is to kill the 1619 Project.

Mr. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law relegates the study of the experiences of Black people to a prohibited category. The canceling of students’ access to accurate, truthful education that reflects their diverse identities and that of their country should chill every American. Not only do these laws offend First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression; to the extent they harm certain groups on the basis of race, gender or other protected status, they also violate principles of equal protection. And they are a chilling precursor to state-sponsored dehumanization of an entire race of people.

This disturbing pattern of silencing Black voices and aggressive attempts to erase Black history is one of the most visible examples of performative white supremacy since the presidency of Donald Trump. In 2019 the Florida legislature undermined Amendment 4, which a supermajority of Floridians supported and would have restored the voting rights of more than a million formerly incarcerated people. In its place, lawmakers put in place a pay-to-vote system that redisenfranchises hundreds of thousands of those citizens, many of them Black. Similarly, Florida’s antiprotest law, H.B. 1, was enacted in 2021 in response to the 2020 protests against police violence, when Black organizations and peaceful demonstrators in Florida — along with their allies — took to the streets with demands for justice...

..Several book bans and other antitruth measures introduced in the past two years target The New York Times’s 1619 Project (and curriculum), which was created by Nikole Hannah-Jones — who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work — and is a linchpin in today’s conversations about the role of systemic racism in America’s history and its enduring impacts. In Wyoming and Texas, lawmakers and school officials have proposed measures mandating that objectively horrific historic events like the Holocaust and the trans-Atlantic slave trade be presented to American children neutrally and without judgment. (The Wyoming measure failed to pass the state’s legislature.) But why would we want our children to look at these atrocities without judgment?

Rufo and his allies hate the 1619 project. From Jerry Coyne to Colin Wright to neo-Nazi James Lindsay. 

You would think that Pinker and Young would be happy that their side is winning.

Could this be an example of unintended consequences? 

Could Young and Pinker have really not considered that their constant harping on "wokeness," along with Pinker echoing infamous racist Amy Wax in an attempt to downplay the power of systemic racism, could have political consequences?

I mean, I did not think they were especially bright people, but even I didn't think they were that clueless.

Or is it all phony? Like Jerry Coyne claiming to be on the Left, while constantly agreeing with the Right. Much like this.

But they always pretend - or maybe they are just that self-deluded - that what they really care about is "free speech." 

Fox News refers to Colin Wright as an "evolutionary biologist" but he is not a practicing one. He is on wingnut welfare, paid to promote the views of right-wing plutocrats. I assume he switched to that career because several of his science papers were retracted.

To be fair, although blocking critics is what members of the IDW/Quillette gang do, Wright did not block my Twitter account. This isn't especially significant now, since I'm never on Twitter, but it was something different from the standard member of the IDW/Quillette gang. I guess he refrained from blocking for "free speech."

But to Wright, free speech means if you disagree with him, he will make unsupported vicious attacks against you. And then run away.

But you can't expect good faith from people who have devoted their lives to promoting hatred on behalf of evil old plutocrats.

About Cathy Young's piece - a perfect illustration of her through-the-lookinglass view of the world in this section:

If DeSantis’s objective had been simply to appoint board members who would counteract excessive “woke” influence at New College, he could have picked plenty of people who weren’t in that mold. For instance, Columbia University professor and author John McWhorter, a self-identified black liberal whose book Woke Racism is scathingly critical of Kendi-style “anti-racism” even as McWhorter has been no less scathing about Trump. Or, say, Christina Hoff Sommers, a former academic who is sufficiently “anti-woke” to have been classed among the earlier-mentioned “intellectual dark web” and to have been targeted for deplatforming at several progressive universities, but has said that she regards Trump as an example of “amoral masculinity” rather than positive masculinity. Or social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, who has strongly criticized academia’s move toward prioritizing “social justice” over truth and who recently resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology over a new rule requiring presenters at the society’s annual conference to submit a statement on equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

McWhorter is not only a long-time employee of Koch-funded organizations and an author at race pseudoscience-loving Quillette, he is also on the board of advisors of the CRT-crazed FAIR.

Sommers, like Young is a pioneer in stochastic terrorism, misogyny division. 

Jonathan Haidt is a long-time supporter of race-pseudoscience, recently seen at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. And another member of the anti-CRT crazed FAIR.

The American Right may not agree about Trump, but they do agree about race pseudoscience and transphobia. And the utility of grifts like anti-CRT and the classic free speech grift.

UPDATE February 9: far from defending Pinker from attacks by Rufo, disgusting right-wing goon Jerry Coyne is celebrating Rufo:

After the bad publicity, Texas Tech, according to a tweet by Christoper Rufo, has suspended this DEI policy.

Pingback for Jerry Coyne ~ I wonder why right-wingers love me so much

I'm sure Jerry Coyne has heard of Occam's Razor.

So let's consider the issue of Jerry Coyne claiming to be on the left:

Each time I see a pingback from one of these conservative sites, then, I am ambivalent. Am I helping or hurting my own cause? Like all people who take my point of view, I have of course been called “alt-right,” “racist”, and even a white supremacist. I brush off those names because they’re just slurs that progressives who lack arguments use to tar their opponents.

It's always fun when Coyne or Pinker claim their critics "lack arguments," when both Coyne and Pinker live in air-tight echo chambers and refuse to talk to their critics. Pinker infamously went on a blocking tear on Twitter (he blocked me long before that) and Coyne will not post or respond to any critics on his blog.

What disgusting lying self-congratulatory weasels they are.

So let's look at the facts.

Jerry Coyne constantly promotes and supports right-wingers and racists. 

He apparently thinks that those who believe Amy Wax or Steve Bannon engage in hate speech are ridiculous:

What is accomplished by convicting this guy and sending him to jail? Will it deter others from making ‘hate videos’? Perhaps, but the concept of “hate speech” is so slippery that such deterrence is unwise. Meechan, after all, was not calling for the Jews to be gassed, expecting to incite Jewish deaths. Remember that many saw, and still see, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad as “hate speech”, as they see the views of Steve Bannon, Christina Hoff Sommers, or Amy Wax as “hate speech”.

Like all the other ghouls he constantly aligns with, he hates the 1619 project. Probably because it teaches actual Black history, which he and the other race pseudoscience ghouls would like to erase so they can claim that Black failure to thrive in the US is due to inferior Black genes.

Jerry Coyne participated in racist anti-democratic Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists, where he demonstrated his alignment with notorious racist Amy Wax. While deliberately misrepresenting left-leaning biologist PZ Myers as just a blogger.

Jerry Coyne believes in racist race pseudoscience. But like his hero Steven Pinker, he's enough of a weasel that he won't come right out and admit it, or explain exactly what he believes about things like race and intelligence, but you'd have to be a moron to miss his sympathy with Noah Carl, one of the most far-right racists in the race pseudoscience business:

In the article above on his website, Noah Carl found one item I missed in the ASHG report. (Yes, I know of Carl’s infamy: he was fired from a position at Cambridge University for working on the connection between human race and intelligence: an ideologically taboo topic that was, in his case, also characterized as “poor scholarship”)

He grumbles about the kids these days and their newfangled words. 

But I think Coyne's position on the political spectrum can best be illustrated by the fact that he attacks critics of Amy Wax and Noah Carl, but he has nothing negative to say about famously racist and famously anti-democratic and famously pro-Trump Peter Thiel. Although he will go so far as to quote his fave right-wing bloggers' commentary about Thiel's support for Trump.

Now from this should we conclude that:

Jerry Coyne is a leftist who just happens to love racists and right-wingers and race pseudoscience and hates other leftists and has nothing bad to say about a lunatic right-wing anti-democratic Trump supporter?

OR

Jerry Coyne is a cranky old right-wing racist who is so delusional that he thinks he's still on the left?

MUST-SEE TV ~ THE 1619 PROJECT ON HULU

NYTIMES:

A little over three years ago, after The 1619 Project was first published, The New York Times began the process of turning it into a television documentary. It was clear, from the initial response to the project, that it introduced readers to an eye-opening perspective on American history, one that pushed them to examine how the contradictions of our founding led to persistent inequalities in contemporary society. In its initial form — a special issue of the magazine, a special broadsheet section and a multi-episode podcast series — it reached millions of people. We knew that putting a version of it on television would help it reach millions more.

Today the result of that effort finally arrives. “The 1619 Project” docuseries is a six-episode program that will air on Hulu over the next three weeks. The first two episodes premiere tonight, Thursday, Jan. 26; the next two arrive a week from today, on Feb. 2, and the series wraps up the week after that, on Feb. 9, with the final two. The show is hosted, of course, by the project’s creator and main voice, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and it features some of the journalists and historians who contributed to the original 1619 Project. But it is also something new, a collaboration among Nikole, the executive producer Oprah Winfrey and a talented team of producers and writers led by the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Roger Ross Williams. Together with the New York Times film and television producers Caitlin Roper, who was an editor on the original project, and Kathleen Lingo, they reimagined The 1619 Project for a new format, creating new story lines, adding new reporting and bringing in a host of new voices, from the civil rights activist MacArthur Cotton to the pop-music pioneer Nile Rodgers.

Steven Pinker and Amy Wax and Persuasion

So Pinker hasn't been promoting Razib Khan, directly, that I could find, since 2021. So what has Pinker been up to?

Publishing his usual bullshit, specifically in the "Persuasion" Substack.

Persuasion, which was founded in June 2020, a few weeks before the Harper's Letter was published, appears to be part of the Harper's Letter scheme, associated with the Intellectual Dark Web and the Quillette gang.

Thirteen signers of the Harper's Letter are associated with Persuasion, including founder and editor in chief Yascha Mounk. The named instigator of the letter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, currently taking money from the Koch-funded AEI, is on the Board of Advisors.

Persuasion also has an About page which lists "People," which includes Mounk and some members of the Board of Advisors, like Pinker, Haidt, Yoffe, McWhorter; various others (including "David"); plus two more Harper's Letter-signers, → Jonathan Rauch and → Ian Buruma.

You can see how much Persuasion is aligned politically with the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette by a glance at the "Most popular" articles on its home page:

• The Neoracists - by Quillette author and Koch employee John McWhorter. The article is about  how bad it is to be anti-racist.

• Keira Bell: My Story - about regretting being transgender - anti-trans is a pillar of the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette, and, because those are funded by the same people who fund conservative politicians, a new pillar of the Republican Party. Quillette talks about Bell a lot. Of course.

• Why I'm Losing Trust in the Institutions - Mounk's attack on the CDC for being excessively woke. You can see Mounk whining about people calling him on his bullshit while he pretends to be "of the left." Classic Koch phony bipartisanship. I found an excellent critique of Persuasion here. 

• A Taxonomy of Fear - Emily Yoffe's "cancel culture" screed. She makes sure to namecheck her favorite reactionaries of the IDW/Quillette industrial complex including race pseudoscience promoter Jonathan Haidt, Koch employee (via FIRE) Greg Lukianoff, contemptible anti-feminist Quillette author Meghan Daum, and of course Thomas Chatterton Williams. They live in an inbred world, these IDW/Quillette people. Which makes it especially fun when Yoffe writes:

Many people ask why any of this should matter in the age of Donald Trump—a president who attacks free speech, stokes bigotry and division, and believes he is above the law. It matters because we have seen what happened when his enablers on the right failed to stand up to the worst impulses of their leader. These enablers are now morally responsible for the tragic consequences of their inaction.

But if Peter Thiel has funded Quillette - and I think the claim is true - then the very people Yoffe admires take money from the same guy who funds Trump. It makes the "left is just as bad" defense incredibly hollow.

• The Warped Vision of "Anti-Racism" by Trump-loving right-wing extremist Batya Ungar-Sargon, who, like Pinker, Haidt, McWhorter and Thomas Chatterton Williams is on the Board of Advisors of the (I believe) Christopher Rufo-founded, right-wing anti-CRT-scam FAIR for all. Ungar-Sargon's is the second "anti-racism is bad" piece in Persuasion's "Most Popular" list which should tell you exactly who is reading Persuasion. Her article spews the usual bullshit about the 1619 Project ("it's postmodern!") you can expect from the Quillette/IDW gang of goons and ghouls. Even if she takes money from Newsweek instead of Quillette.

• The Rittenhouse Verdict Shouldn't Have Been a Surprise - by contemptible infamous transphobe Jesse Singal, also on the Koch payroll.

Pinker has published two articles in Persuasion. The most recent is from this month and continues his current project of presenting himself as the arbiter of Rationality while promoting race pseudoscience as calm, cool reason.

I've long noted that Pinker is a weasel, so it is no surprise that he compares those who disagree with race pseudoscience to members of QAnon:

QAnon might be likened to a live action role-playing game, with fans avidly trading clues and following leads. Its progenitor, Pizzagate (according to which Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizzeria), also had a make-believe quality...

...Many of us are nonplussed by this way of thinking. It’s one thing to believe that Hillary Clinton is a morally compromised person—everyone is entitled to an opinion—but it’s quite another thing, and completely unacceptable, to express that opinion as a fabricated factual assertion.

But it’s our mindset that is exotic and unnatural. For many of us, it’s the dividend of a higher education which has imparted the sense that there is a fact of the matter about states of the world; that even if we don’t know it, there are ways of finding out; and that, as Bertrand Russell put it, “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” Indeed, one could argue that this mindset is the most important dividend of higher education.

Or at least, it used to be. Here's another candidate for a mythology zone: the sacred creeds of academic and intellectual elites. These include the belief that we are born blank slates, that sex is a social construction, that every difference in the social statistics of ethnic groups is caused by racism, that the source of all problems in the developing world is European and American imperialism, and that repressed abuse and trauma are ubiquitous.

In spite of my best efforts, Pinker is not known primarily as a promoter of race pseudoscience, but his belief about race and racism is the same as that of Amy Wax, who is well-known as a racist.

Let's review:

Steve Pinker: 

...another candidate for a mythology zone: the sacred creeds of academic and intellectual elites... that every difference in the social statistics of ethnic groups is caused by racism...

Amy Wax:

The centerpiece of wokeness is that all disparities, all group disparities, are due to racism, racism, racism, racism.

How is what Pinker said any different from what Wax said? I see no difference in content, only a difference in style.

Although Pinker gives an extra little weasel twist by portraying his racism as pure rationality, opposed to those crazy myth-loving "elites."

And note that Pinker's term "sacred creed" is very close to the term "sacred values" used by  Quillette Associate Editor Bo Winegard, a long-time promoter of race pseudoscience and even an advocate of national ethnicity quotas (you know, like the Nazis were.) Pinker is on the record as admiring Bo Winegard and his twin brother Ben.

Steven Pinker is the genteel mask of the hardcore racism that Amy Wax shouts from the rooftops.

And that's why Steven Pinker is more pernicious than Amy Wax and that's why this blog focuses on media-darling/sacred cow celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker and not on the more obviously racist Amy Wax.

Jerry Coyne promoting racist Razib Khan

Steven Pinker stopped publicly promoting the career of professional racist Steven Sailer by 2012, but he was still promoting the career of Razib Khan, whose racist beliefs are virtually identical to Sailer's, in 2021. 

Khan's unhinged racism is clear in his review of racist Charles Murray's latest work of pseudoscience, written for racist rag Quillette. Khan agrees with Charles Murray that Black people are an existential threat to the United States. But then, as I've noted, sociobiologists are often drama queens, certain that those who are not true believers in sociobiology are dooming the world.

I was wondering if Pinker was still promoting Khan, so I was Googling around a little. I didn't find anything about Pinker, but I did find that racist goon Jerry Coyne had jumped in to do his part by promoting Khan in a blog post last month.

Khan's article is titled: 

You can’t take it with you: straight talk about epigenetics and intergenerational trauma
The true story of a powerful molecular process and how pseudoscience co-opted it

I find it incredibly funny that a right-wing political operative like Khan, whose entire racist-plutocrat-funded career is devoted to racist pseudoscience is writing about "pseudoscience."

Khan is a terrible writer, incapable of efficiently organizing and conveying information, which is why his career exists purely thanks to people like racist crackpot Ron Unz and the funders of racist Taki's Mag and racist Quillette and racist VDARE, as well as whoever is funding him, probably secretly, via his Substack. 

Khan's article, according to Coyne, is an "excellent piece... written for the intelligent and scientifically inquisitive layperson." 

But Coyne doesn't care about writing ability any more than the racist plutocrats who fund Khan, I suspect. 

Khan's literary ability is beside the point. I seriously doubt he wrote this article out of a pure love of sharing information. I think he wrote it, like everything else he writes, because racists are paying him to promote racist bullshit. In this piece he only lightly touches on his inevitable motivation, in his reference to a "blank slate" in a sub-heading, but it's there.

I don't think epigenetics is needed to explain Black failure to thrive, the historical record is sufficient, but Khan and his ilk are opposed to any explanation for Black failure to thrive other than the pseudoscientific belief that Blackness makes them stupid and violent.

We know that Khan is also opposed to the historical explanation, when he suggested we "remove all the history."

That's why sociobiologists and racists hate the 1619 Project so much.

I don't have strong feelings about epigenetics and its possible implications, and I don't know enough about it to critique Khan's article on scientific terms. But I do know bad writing when I see it. 

In his article, Khan starts out with an excessively complicated IKEA furniture instruction manual analogy. 

He then goes on to make an unsupported claim:

In the last decade, sweeping mainstream-media claims about epigenetics’ expansive role in shaping our world have become hard to escape.

What "mainstream media" is Khan reading? If you did a survey of a random collection of college-educated people, I guarantee you that a tiny percent of them could define the term "epigenetics." 

Towards the end of the article, he lightly sprinkles five links to sources that discuss possible epigenetic implications and family trauma, and none of them is more recent than 2018. Not exactly "hard to escape."

And since he doesn't have much in the way of support for his claim, he tries to stretch a statement by Justin Trudeau into support for epigenetics because Trudeau used the term "intergenerational trauma." 

In 2021, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released a statement about the controversy around Catholic schools for Aboriginal Canadian children where he stated:

…we must continue to learn about residential schools and the intergenerational trauma they have caused. It is only by facing these truths and righting these wrongs that we, in partnership with Indigenous peoples, can move toward a better future.

What jumped out at me was the casual deployment of the concept of “intergenerational trauma,” which seems out of nowhere to have become ubiquitous. Google Books’ Ngram search feature tells us that the term did not exist before 1985, with its use increasing gradually until 2012 when it hit an inflection point and began to shoot up. 

Khan then includes a definition of "intergenerational trauma" from Wikipedia which says:

The mechanism for transmission of trauma may be socially transmitted (e.g., through learned behaviors), through the effects of stress before birth, or perhaps through stress-induced epigenetic modifications

So "socially transmitted" or stress before birth or PERHAPS epigenetic. 

But Khan is going to keep the Trudeau statement in there anyway, giving the impression that Trudeau meant epigenetics. Because it "jumped out at me." Jesus, Khan is so sleazy it sets my teeth on edge.

Once Khan moves past his bad analogy and unsupported claim about the inescapability of epigenetics, he immediately gets into the weeds with a terrible, endless sentence, with a call-back to his terrible IKEA analogy.

Epigenetics encompasses the molecular mechanisms that determine how relevant sections of DNA’s single universal instruction manual are interpreted and applied uniquely in each specialized cell, as specific pages of the manual are consulted (or not) according to each cell’s role in your body.

It makes you tired just reading it.

The only good thing you can say about Khan's literary output is that it's so bad, it's unlikely to give him a larger audience. 

And thanks to the Substack platform, you can see who liked the piece, along with links to their own social media. It gives you a good sense of how generally far-right and racist Khan's audience is. People like "human biodiversity" promoter Jonny Anomaly and anti-woke hater of the 1619 project Reality Always Wins and anti-vax crackpot "Rotten in Denmark."

Intelligent and scientifically inquisitive people would do much better to read about epigenetics from people who know how to organize information, who can write well, and who are not career-long right-wing racist political operatives. 

They could start with the National Human Genome Research Institute's Epigenomics Fact Sheet.

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.

Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study Finds

This is exactly what hereditarians and race pseudoscience-mongers don't want to hear.

Especially race pseudoscience-mongers, who are closely allied to libertarians, who certainly don't want the government to give cash payments to poor people.

The sociobiology message: "everything is caused by genes" is the greatest aid to the Right ever invented.

From the NYTimes article:

“This is a big scientific finding,” said Martha J. Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted a review of the study for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where it was published on Monday. “It’s proof that just giving the families more money, even a modest amount of more money, leads to better brain development.”

***

Katherine Magnuson, a co-author of the study who directs the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, said she was surprised that only a year’s worth of aid made a difference. “It shows how sensitive the brain is to environments,” she said.

Thanks to being descendants of people, who, only five generations ago, didn't own anything because they themselves were property, and, after Emancipation, were tormented and immiserated by the white majority through means both legal and extra-legal, Black Americans are more likely to be poor than any other ethnic group in the United States.

These facts are the reason why the IDW and its race pseudoscience allies deny Black history and why they hate the 1619 project so much.

Razib Khan and the curious Insitome Institute part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a drama queen:

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

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

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

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

Lehmann joined the comments section of Khan's review.

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

But back to the lies of Razib Khan. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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