Steven Pinker: still undefeated as the world's biggest weasel

"Ferahgo the Assassin," by Steven Pinker's

hereditarian ally Emily Willoughby, an image 

made publicly available by Willoughby 

on Facebook. Willoughby borrowed the 

character's name as a pseudonym while 

writing in support of race pseudoscience. 

It's too perfect that a Pinker ally 

identifies with a humanoid weasel.

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

Although Steven Pinker was originally dubbed the world's most annoying man by someone else, I originated calling him a weasel. But I confess that while reading some of Pinker's latest book "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..." I found the flagrance of his weasellitude so breathtaking I'm amazed I was able to write about it outside of an oxygen tent.

In the chapter "The Instinct to Cancel" Pinker argues that it were better if we not discuss race and intelligence in public.

Fear not, Pinker has not given up on race pseudoscience.

I was alerted to Pinker's position by those who have the greatest self-interest in talking about race and intelligence because they have staked their entire careers and livelihoods on the issue: the neo-Nazis at Aporia Magazine.

In an article in Aporia called 'Pinker is wrong. We should "go there"' neo-Nazi Bo Winegard says:

Few topics inspire bad arguments as reliably as race differences in intelligence. So often have I responded to them that I have plausibly been accused of obsession. But as long as the bad arguments persist, someone must respond. Consider it a public service.

But of course Winegard is not doing anything as a "public service" - this is his full-time job. He works for Emil Kirkegaard's race pseudoscience and Nazi network, so brilliantly exposed by Hope not Hate a year ago:

In recent months, however, Aporia has dropped its pretence of balance, as evidenced by the interview that eventually took place with (Jared) Taylor in May 2024. Taylor’s interlocutor was Bo Winegard, Aporia’s new executive editor, who, on the website, has called upon his readers to “​​embrace” white identity politics and believes racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate.”

That's not to say that Winegard is only doing it for the money. I'm prepared to accept that Winegard is such a dullard he truly believes in race pseudoscience, that collection of pre-20th century European folklores presented as science from Social Darwinism to eugenics to Nazism to sociobiology to evolutionary psychology to behavioral genetics. 

I'm in favor of publicly discussing race and intelligence claims so that people who are not right-wing psychologists can gasp in wonder at how stupid race pseudoscience really is.

In the next paragraph, Winegard states why Pinker is so useful to the cause of race pseudoscience:

The latest comes from Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… It deserves attention precisely because it comes from Pinker, a celebrated academic and an outspoken defender of free speech and open inquiry. This is not some indignant progressive who made a career of castigating “racist pseudoscience”, but a rational centrist who has long argued against the left’s denial of human nature.

Pinker's also been called a "celebrity intellectual" by the New York Times.

In "When Everyone Knows...," Pinker makes the case for race pseudoscience while pretending to weigh the pros and cons of discussing the issue:

The case for not going there, to be sure, has many problems. It’s almost impossible to enforce. It faces the polar bear paradox: telling people not to think about an idea forces them to think about the idea. It may be hard to draw the line around the no-go zone so that it doesn’t swallow up neighboring territories, like the study of intelligence or of continental ancestry. It forecloses the possibility of obtaining decisive evidence that racial differences are wholly environmental and eliminable, with all the social benefits that would bring.

And it may be too late. Our era is obsessed with racial differences, attributing them unquestioningly to racism, which only invites curious people to wonder whether they might be attributed to other causes, intensifying the regime that criminalizes such curiosity. As the writer Coleman Hughes has argued, there are good reasons for even the most open-minded people to want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation. But that tacit agreement should be a part of a larger commitment to color-blind policies in public and private life.

Coleman Hughes is in a tough spot - he's Black but has taken money from race pseudoscience-promoting Quillette -  so it is in his self-interest to "want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation." With Pinker's apparent approval, Hughes offers a deal on behalf of hereditarians along the lines of: "we won't mention that Blacks are genetically inferior if you promise to stop making efforts to ameliorate systemic racism via programs like DEI." 

Pinker hates DEI.

Pinker is so comfortable with race pseudoscience that this year he had a byline in Aporia, then appeared on the Aporia podcast.

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

• when fellow celebrity intellectual Malcolm Gladwell called him out in 2009 for using data from professional racist Steve Sailer; 
• when the British liberal newspaper the Guardian asked him about Sailer in 2021;
• and when the Guardian wrote about his appearance on the Aporia podcast this year. Pinker's most groveling sycophant Jerry Coyne could be seen whining that the Guardian would dare discuss that appearance.

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

In his book, Pinker mentions the ISIR meeting participant Cory Clark with approval a couple of times (including to mention she's co-authored a paper with him) but doesn't mention she has worked for Emil Kirkegaard, and when he notes another paper Clark co-authored, fails to mention Bo Winegard is one of the co-authors.

Because that's just the kind of weasel that Steven Pinker is. 

The book's reference section includes racists, hereditarians, evolutionary psychologists and right-wing reactionaries: Lee Jussim, Nathan Cofnas, Roy Baumeister, David Buss, Richard Dawkins, Alice Dreger, Jonathan Haidt, Carole Hooven, Eric Kaufmann, Greg Lukianoff, Donald Symons, Lawrence Summers, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides and Matt Yglesias.

Pinker talks about journalists muzzling themselves:

Journalists, too, despite their ironclad commitment to freedom of the press, muzzle themselves in particular circumstances. They may, for example, choose not to identify confidential sources, juvenile suspects, the victims of sexual assault, or details surrounding prominent suicides. They may decline to publish the manifestos of rampage shooters, or train a camera on sports fans running onto the field.

But he doesn't seem to appreciate how this has helped his career, how his weasellitude is enabled by most journalists being too chummy with celebrity intellectuals to dare ask anything potentially embarrassing. After all, Pinker might get huffy as he did when the Guardian dared ask:

Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website..

I know exactly how high the bar is for journalists to care about the pro-racism activities of celebrity intellectuals like Pinker. Back when the New Yorker was helping to promote behavioral genetics via a glowing profile of Kathryn Paige Harden, I had a brief exchange of emails with the profile's author Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a frequent New Yorker contributor. He said:

If you have emails between Pinker and Sailer, I will gladly review them. Otherwise, I think I'll hold my own counsel on the stories that I do... 

Now we do know about letters between E. O. Wilson and ultra-racist J. Philippe Rushton, which did seem to convince some people that Wilson was a racist. But the reason the correspondence was significant was that it provided evidence that Wilson used his celebrity intellectual powers to help advance Rushton's career.

But we don't need emails between Pinker and Sailer, there is plenty of evidence that Pinker has helped to promote the career of Sailer and many other racists as I've documented for the past seven years on this blog. And by the way, Pinker could be seen promoting Rushton too, on Boing Boing in 2009.

For journalists like Lewis-Kraus, which is almost all of them, Pinker can promote all the racists and appear on all the neo-Nazis podcasts in the world, he will always be acceptable as long as he doesn't record a precise declaration of his beliefs. The rest of us are forbidden from drawing conclusions based merely on a quarter century of Pinker's activities.

But if Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazis does not faze journalists (except the Guardian), I doubt anything will.

Is Matt Yglesias a more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinker or just a great big racist?

Since we were talking about the racist extremist Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) recently, I couldn't help noticing that "centrist" political pundit Matthew Yglesias was, right in the middle of the NYTimes controversy involving Crémieux, promoting a tweet by Crémieux over at the Bad Place.

I had been aware of Yglesias' alliance with racists before. I wrote about his support for Razib Khan, and his defense of Richard Hanania.

While promoting and defending racist ghouls, Yglesias claims to be concerned about racism and bigotry.

On his Substack (of course) Yglesias ponders:

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions. And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct. It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism.

But in this very same Substack post he includes extremist Curtis Yarvin, calling him "an influential and well-regarded voice on the MAGA right" while failing to mention his racism.

Yglesias appears to be doing all he can to normalize racists while claiming to be opposed to racism.

This has been Steven Pinker's strategy for a quarter of a century. Culminating most recently in aligning himself with and helping to mainstream the neo-Nazi organization run by Emil Kirkegaard.

Behavioral genetics promoter Eric Turkheimer responded to Yglesias:

Coming back to Yglesias’ concern with the manners of discussing group differences, I have a rule: All discussions of black-white differences in athletics are really about cognitive ability. If we accept that it is obvious that the predominance of Black people in the NBA is somehow the result of genetic differences, then it opens the door to having a similar discussion about why Black people have historically scored lower on IQ tests. This, I think, it the ultimate reason why Yglesias is uncomfortable with the topic, and I agree that he should be.

But genetic differences in cognitive ability are even more implausible than genetic differences in spelling or ping pong, for an obvious reason: there are massive environmental effects that compete with a genetic hypothesis. It isn’t especially easy to specify exactly how sports programs in Jamaica might go about producing top sprinters, but only bad-faith racists can deny the history of racism in the United States and around the world, beginning with slavery 500 years ago and proceeding through Jim Crow, segregation, and all of the reverberating cross-generational effects in the modern world. It is not possible to “control for” such massive environmental effects, and without doing so speculation about genetic causes is pointless.

I don’t mean to be too tough on Yglesias here. He is just trying to be reasonable about a very complex subject, and he doesn’t mention cognitive ability, although I think it is implicit in his concerns. There are many more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers, from Yglesias to Andrew Sullivan to Sam Harris to Jon Haidt, who try to establish their heterodox, pro-science, academic freedom bona fides by giving a fair shake to genetic explanations of race differences in behavior.

The last paragraph is the most telling -  "I don't mean to be too tough on Yglesias here..."

The "more or less well intended" Andrew Sullivan, Sam Harris and Jon Haidt have all demonstrated their devotion to race pseudoscience and to what I call the "American hereditarian assumption" which goes like this:

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,[143] segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,[144] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

Andrew Sullivan is clearly a racist, promoting and defending the absolute racist Charles Murray for the past thirty years, but even Ezra Klein refuses to call Sullivan a racist.

Not long ago Sullivan was promoting neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

The bar to being called a racist is very high for hereditarians, especially establishment white male hereditarians who make a living as opinion-havers.

Sam Harris promoted the hard-core racist rag Quillette while defending Charles Murray. The Quillette article he linked to, written by (now) Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard and his equally racist brother Ben, contains an example of the American hereditarian assumption in the wild:

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

This is evidence-free bullshit, but it impresses morons like Sam Harris.

Jonathan Haidt has flown under the radar more than Harris and Sullivan have, but he has demonstrated his race pseudoscience beliefs in talks; he's a defender of the garbage "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper written by a couple of racists although never proven or tested; and in the Jeffrey Epstein-funded Edge, in 2009 Haidt said:

Recent "sweeps" of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates. 

 

The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.) 

 

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

There are reasons to hope that we'll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism.

Like all respectable promoters of race pseudoscience Haidt would never use the N word, so most people will miss what he's getting at - although maybe his mention of "Bell Curve" will be a clue to some. 

But I understand what he's saying after all these years of reading the claims of race pseudoscience promoters: in 2009 Haidt believed that genetics studies would prove that there are fundamental genetic racial differences and that racists had been right all along - that Black people as a group have fewer "virtues" than other groups.

But instead of evidence for Haidt's version of the American hereditarian assumption, what we got from genetics studies was evidence of the utter failure of the claims of genetic behavioralists, as recently discussed by Jay Joseph on his (unfortunately Subtack) blog called The Gene Illusion:

Missing heritability is a term that human genetic researchers invented around 15 years ago to acknowledge unexpected causal gene discovery failure, and to describe the large discrepancy between heritability estimates derived from twin studies versus those derived from DNA-based (molecular genetic) methods such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Importantly, as behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer emphasized in his recent book (see my review here), GWASes of psychiatric conditions and behavioral characteristics such as educational attainment (EA, often seen as an IQ “proxy measure”) identify (potentially spurious) gene-behavior “associations” (correlations), not causes.

Later in the post, Joseph writes: 

Most likely, future commentators will tell a similar story about behavioral polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression. Alexander’s post merely continues (1) the 100-year fallacy of assuming that behavioral twin (and adoption) studies are based on sound assumptions and should be interpreted genetically; (2) the 55-year fallacy of assuming that twin studies are sound, so let’s spend billions of dollars trying to find the genes; and (3) the 15-year fallacy of believing that twin studies are sound while DNA-based methods failed, so “heritability must be missing.” It’s time to abandon behavioral and psychiatric research based on twin studies after a disastrous and harmful 100-year run. 

The "Alexander" mentioned in the paragraph above is Scott Alexander, real name Scott Siskind, yet another self-impressed dumbass who promotes race pseudoscience. His Slate Star Codex is a comfortable place for Steve Sailer to hang out and promote his racist extremism. 

And speaking of Steve Sailer:

Turkheimer may have done some good work, and may be publicly anti-racist, but he's a goddam fool to quickly absolve these pernicious ghouls of their racism.

As a result of Turkheimer's hands-off attitude towards racists, you can see Sailer is all over the comments section of the Turkheimer post about Yglesias. Turkheimer makes no response to Sailer, he just allows Sailer to promote his bullshit.

Also in the comments: "Slowly Reading" provides links to neo-Nazi Aporia and yes, of course to a tweet by Crémieux.

This acceptance, by people who should know better, of race pseudoscience promoters, as "more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers" is why I have to keep doing this blog.

Meet Benjamin Ryan, the NYTimes' pipeline to race pseudoscience and neo-Nazis

Ryan's social media is pure right-wing attacks and propaganda.

I had been aware of Ryan and his connection to Jesse Singal for some time, and I always knew one day Ryan's cozy alliance with the race pseudoscience gang would become an issue.

And now it has. For the New York Times.

It's bizarre to see Ryan whining on Singal's Substack that "they're trying to turn me into the next version of you" when Ryan appears to be doing all he can to become another version of Jesse Singal. 

Like Singal, Ryan has been noted for his anti-trans campaign:

• Ben Ryan Rages at Trans Women on Twitter
• New York Times is Responding to the Full Scale Assault on Trans People by Giving Jesse Signal's #1 Fan Ben Ryan a Space to Discourse about Trans Youth
• Ben Ryan vs transgender people 

But an aspect of Jesse Singal's career that is often overlooked is his very cozy relationship with racists, especially Razib Khan, whose entire career has been devoted to promoting race pseudoscience, since at least when Ron Unz funded his college education.

And we see that Benjamin Ryan is Singal's clone in that respect too. He subscribes to racist Jordan Lasker (aka Crémieux) on X/Twitter.

The New York Times published an article, co-written by Benjamin Ryan, sharing a Columbia University admissions application by Zohran Mamdani, stolen by hackers. 

I see on his LinkedIn that Ryan went to Columbia - I wonder if he still has a log-in to its system.

UPDATE: thank you to Bluesky's Magic Money Tree for sharing this item from Twitter/X - we see that Benjamin Ryan was chatting about Columbia University with professional racist Steve Sailer back in 2021.

The source for Ryan's article is Jordan Lasker, but the NYTimes did not give his real name, instead writing:

The data was shared with The Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X. He provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.

The white-washing is so blatant: "writes often about IQ and race" is a funny way to describe a dedicated racist who has taken money from neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard to publish in Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi Substack Aporia, at least twice.

Lasker has published many papers with Kirkegaard as well as other hard-core racists including Bryan Pesta, John G. R. Fuerst, and Jan te Nijenhuis.

Lasker's connection to Crémieux was public knowledge thanks to an article in the Guardian back in March.

Unfortunately for Lasker and Ryan, by one metric at least, their attempt to hurt Mamdani failed.

But one thing that the team of Benjamin Ryan and Jordan Lasker has accomplished is to damage the New York Times' reputation, at least among those of us opposed to racism.

Thanks to the outcry, the NYTimes had to respond:

It looks like the same pipeline used to destroy trans rights is being turned on Mamdani.

But at least we know that Lasker's sister can't stand him.

UPDATE: 

Anti-woke activist applauds his ‘friends’ at the New York Times for Zohran Mamdani college application ‘scoop’

Another update: Alex Winter weighs in.

UPDATE UPDATE: the Guardian:

Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid?

With their made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani

AND FINALLY... 

Matthew Yglesias promoting the account of racist extremist ghoul Crémeiux/Jordan Lasker on X/Twitter. 

But then I knew Yglesias was part of the race pseudoscience gang long ago.

The continuing non-celebrity career of Razib Khan

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan enjoy the bootlicking together after 

Singal posted a photo of grifter Bari Weiss and her grifter wife Nellie Bowles.

Weiss herself has to lick the boot, which is why she gives interviews to Peter Thiel and lately, fascist Marc Andreessen. It's very likely that both Thiel and Andreessen fund The Free Press, considering that Andreessen already funds Nazi-friendly Substack and Thiel has spent his entire career since college funding right-wing media and has been accused of funding Quillette. Thiel even went so far as to have a meeting with international man of douchebaggery Emil Kirkegaard, as reported in the essential-reading "Race Science Inc." by the organization Hope not Hate.

The Free Press is so devoted to racism it employs and expresses admiration for the white supremacist Douglas Murray.

Khan and Singal have been allies for years and recently Singal appeared on Khan's podcast.

I assume Khan is team-licking with Singal on Bluesky in an attempt to get a gig with the Free Press, which is basically the American Quillette. To be fair, the Free Press is a good fit for Khan, who has made a career of promoting far-right extremism and race pseudoscience, which has been quite lucrative for him.

Holocaust denier Ron Unz paid for Khan's education, per the excellent 2017 Undark article Race, Science, and the Continuing Education of Razib Khan:

Around 2000, (Khan) joined a private email discussion group about human biodiversity organized by Sailer. (More mainstream academics, including Steven Pinker, were also in the group).

Not long after that, Khan helped a geneticist friend start a blog about science. They called it Gene Expression — GNXP, for short. Its writers discussed technical topics, as well as issues with a more political edge, like gender and racial differences.

A few years later, Khan went on the payroll of Ron Unz, a libertarian who ran for governor of California in 1994. Unz, who made a fortune in software development, offered Khan something that Unz describes as “a sort of fellowship or junior fellowship” to further his scientific career. Both Khan and Unz are vague about the reasons for the fellowship, but the gift was contingent on Khan leaving his job in software to focus on a scientific career. It was a big part of why he got on a graduate school track and ended up at UC Davis.

The article is from 2017 and since then, Khan has continued to be a promoter of race pseudoscience, working with Quillette and the Emil Kirkegaard-owned Aporia Magazine. I wrote an overview of Khan's career in 2022.

I haven't been talking about Khan much in the past year but when he teamed up with Jesse Singal to attack me last week he got my attention.

I have to laugh about Singal's calling me an internet microcelebrity. Singal and Razib Khan are allied with the much more famous Steven Pinker, but although Pinker was called a "celebrity intellectual" by the NYTimes, even he is barely known outside of the very online. 

I had lunch with a writer friend not long ago and I told her about this Pinkerite blog. I explained why I selected the name Pinkerite and her response was "who is Steven Pinker?" I went through a list of the names of other IDW-related people I've written about here, and the only name she recognized was Bari Weiss.

Although more often than not when I've mentioned the name Bari Weiss, most people hear Barry White, the music legend who died over twenty years ago.

One of the reasons this blog is so obscure is that except for Thiel, Musk and Trump, virtually all the people I write about on Pinkerite are not well known by the general public nor even by smart people who pay attention to politics and current events. 

So by microcelebrity I assume Singal means that he and his IDW friends have Googled their names and found this blog. And since someone, anyone, is writing about them, they feel like celebrities - which makes me therefore a microcelebrity.

Among Razib Khan's smears on Bluesky is the claim that I'm "scaring even woke journalists."

Which "woke journalists" could Khan possibly mean? Matt Yglesias? Yglesias is another name known among pundit-types and the very online, but almost nobody else. Although an acquaintance mentioned to me that he was a counselor at a camp Yglesias attended as a child.

Razib Khan is not well known by the general public, but that's worked out for him since it means that he gets jobs and support from the clueless now and then. In 2013 even Ta-Nehisi Coates promoted Khan's career.

But then people Google Khan. Like when the NYTimes canned him, or when people changed their mind about signing Khan's petition in defense of racist E. O. Wilson. 

And sometimes when people Google his name they find this blog, which is why Khan is so mad and making unsupported claims about me. 

But I'm not even a microcelebrity. I'm just an American citizen, keeping tabs on people taking money from fascist plutocrats to promote race pseudoscience and other rightwing bullshit.

Substack, the right-wing scam (and Nazi bar)

One facet of the Subscam business model
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Allan Stromfeldt Christensen of Filmers to Farmers writes:

 According to a writer that goes by the name "Cow Girl" and whose publication Life at the Rodeo used to be on Substack but is now on Ghost, when they mentioned on Substack their plans to migrate one of their sites away from the platform "the subscribers started to pour in".

It's hard to prove that this occurrence was due to anything more than coincidence, but what can be more easily proven is the manner by which quite possibly all Substacks have highly inflated subscriber numbers. Because as many Substack writers have described it, their subscriber figures have become wildly inflated upon Substack having removed the option of requiring new signups to confirm their (free) subscription (also known as "double opt-in").

So Substack subscriber figures wildly inflated when Substack stopped making Substack account owners approve free subscribers.

Two years ago I speculated about another possible Substack scheme:

I mean, what do Razib Khan and Matthew Yglesias do for a living, other than express their unoriginal, monotonous, conservative opinions all day long?

The fact that they both have Substacks is one reason why I suspect Substack is an astroturfing scam, similar to the money-laundering scheme that Saul Goodman created for Walter White in "Breaking Bad."

If you saw "Breaking Bad" you know what I'm talking about: Walt's son created a crowdfunding web site savewalterwhite.com and a little later Goodman got a hacker to create thousands of fake accounts to make it look like regular people all over the world were sending money in. But it was coming from one very rich guy.

That the right-wing racist plutocrats who fund Substack are funneling money through fake accounts to their favorite courtier Substackers has never been proven. But I've never seen anything yet to indicate that they could not do that - and if there's a dirty trick available to the Right, I doubt they think twice before using it. As far as I know, paid Substack accounts have never been audited.

But as Christensen makes clear, paid-up subscribers are not the only subscribers of value to Substack authors or the Substack Nazi Bar:

For those unaware of what that term means, double opt-in implies that in one way or another a user must confirm that they did in fact subscribe and/or sign up to whatever it is you're offering. Those confirmation emails asking you to "click here" to confirm your subscription or email address or what have you? That's double opt-in, and that's what Substack jettisoned sometime in late-2022. What that means is that by discarding double opt-in functionality bots are readily able to carry out fake signups, regardless of what the motivation of the creators of those bots may be. Moreover, it's not even too hard to prove.

Because while subscriber numbers is one metric, another metric, which makes the first metric arguably meaningless on its own, is open rates. Open rates, which is self-explanatory enough, is a measurement of the percentage of interactions, which in this case means how many emails were opened. And according to several accounts, those email open rates on Substack have been plummeting.

Although current Substack writers brought to my attention – that had cratering open rates and of which a vast majority of their subscribers driven by Substack were said to be "garbage" – were said to not want to speak publicly about it all (reasoning explained in a moment), one former – and prominent – Substack writer who also didn't want to be named stated that they were getting hundreds of fake signups, often in blocks of 50-100 at a time. Although they couldn't be sure, they estimated that a third of their signups were fake. Regardless, they certainly aren't the only one whose Substack has been receiving hundreds of fake signups.

In regards to why current Substack writers/publications wouldn't want to speak about their deteriorating open rates – and certainly not to cull their subscriber lists of fake accounts – is for the simple reason of optics. Yes, your open rate may be an abysmal 20%. But if you've got 10,000 subscribers (a metric which Substack prominently displays on the splash page one sees upon visiting a Substack for subscribing purposes) and a similarly-oriented publication also has 10,000 subscribers, even though your open rate of 20% may lead you to believe that you could quite safely cull 50% of your email list due to them being bot signups, doing so would drastically reduce your public-facing subscriber numbers to 5,000, half of what your competitor has (who also has 5,000 subscribers they could probably cull but similarly won't due to optics). As a result, everybody involved is incentivised to keep up the charade...

 

...Meanwhile, using the existence of the so-called "Substack ecosystem" to claim ownership over subscriber numbers that may have otherwise eventuated is another easy way of creating that facade. Uri Bram, publisher of The Browser (which doubled Substack's paid subscriber base overnight when it became one of Substack's first publications, which was at one time Substack's second-biggest customer before it moved to Ghost, and which then spent years trying to recoup improperly charged fees after Substack kept charging The Browser – and wouldn't pay it back – after it had left the platform), described one way in which this might work earlier this year...

...So yes, go ahead and sign up to Substack where you can attain subscriber numbers beyond your wildest dreams and where Substack will tell you just how much your success is supposedly due to them, but don't pay any attention to the non-existence of that double opt-in, the possibility that your actual readership is nowhere near as large as you think it is, and that the genuine subscribers you do have aren't so much due to Substack itself as much as they're due to the efforts you've put in yourself. 

I may not have been right about exact (proven) scam tactics of Substack two years ago, but I was right that Substack is, fundamentally, a right-wing scam.

Razib Khan still promoting racist neo-Nazi ghoul Richard Hanania

Because of course he is. 

If Khan's biggest booster, Steven Pinker, isn't ashamed to be associated with the neo-Nazi racist ghoul; and Khan's buddy Matthew Yglesias isn't bothered by Hanania's racism and extremism; you know Razib Khan's not bothered by Hanania's racism and extremism and neo-Nazism.

I think what all this means is that right-wing racist billionaires have increased their funding of ghouls like Hanania so much that courtiers like Pinker, Yglesias and Khan no longer worry about being "cancelled" because not only do they have the option of wingnut welfare - see Carole Hooven and Thomas Chatterton Williams - but their plutocrat patrons have decided to go full steam ahead in the project of mainstreaming race pseudoscience and racism.

And to nobody's surprise, Charles Murray is also promoting the neo-Nazi racist ghoul - but Murray has been promoting exactly that kind of ghoul - Steve Sailer, Emil Kirkegaard, etc. for years. 

Murray doesn't just promote Hanania, he grovels before him. Holy crap is that revolting.

Jerry Coyne was lately seen promoting Hanania too. Of course.

Substack - just as sleazy, racist and right-leaning as I suspected

 I suspected Substack was rotten, over a year ago:

The fact that Lulu Cheng Meservey, the vice president of communications for Substack is a member of Razib Khan's clubhouse as well as a member of the clubhouse of the anti-CRT grifting, IDW-riddled, far-right leaning FAIR, does not help dissuade me from the suspicion that Substack is simply a high-tech Donor's Trust.

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie has a Thiel connection. Thiel was an investor in PandoDaily, which McKenzie worked for.

Another Substack co-founder, Chris Best, appeared on a podcast for the race pseudoscience promoting, Thiel-funded Quillette. According to a description of the interview on Padverb, "Tech entrepreneur Chris Best talks about Substack, his self-publishing platform that is attracting journalists like Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal and Jen Gerson." 

Andrew Sullivan is famous for his promotion of the race pseudoscience of racist Charles Murray.

Jesse Singal is best known for his antagonism against trans people. He's a defender of the race pseudoscience-friendly Steven Pinker. He also has a Quillette connection and a Koch connection.

Jen Gerson has written for Quillette.

The Substack gang apparently has no problem with promoters of race pseudoscience, at the very least.

So I was absolutely not surprised to learn that Substack is promoting racist ghoul Richard Hanania. This is from Jonathan M. Katz's Substack called The Racket:

As Racket readers know, a few weeks ago Substack featured on their flagship podcast, The Active Voice, an openly racist, self-described troll named Richard Hanania. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie gave Hanania wide latitude to launder his “anti-woke” views — which include urging the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (a position McKenzie called “gutsy”) and overt calls for “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people.” McKenzie then sat back as Hanania recommended to Substack listeners at least two white nationalists: VDARE blogger and racist kingpin Steve Sailer (whose recent columns include “Blacks vs. Hispanics, Part 298” and “The Asian Invasion Of California Public Schools”) and the self-described Danish-German ethno-nationalist (and child rape proponent) Emil Kirkegaard. McKenzie uncritically quoted Hanania’s description of Sailer as “intellectually honest.”

In the days that followed, I did some digging into Hanania’s support network, revealing that he is handsomely funded by shadowy donors through a grifty, self-dealing “non-profit” likely based out of his Los Angeles-area home. (Previously unreported tidbit: another beneficiary of Hanania’s nonprofit is a former campus leader of the white nationalist group “Youth for Western Civilization.”) It also turned out that Hanania’s funding was drying up — right as McKenzie & Co. decided to promote his work on their podcast. McKenzie has aggressively avoided making any kind of comment on this episode, in both senses of the word.

Then last night, another episode of The Active Voice dropped. This one featured someone from a very different corner of the discourse: Washington Post internet culture reporter Taylor Lorenz. As I noted a year ago, Lorenz is a lightning rod for the extremely online right. Her investigations of far-right posters, in particular the anti-LGBT blogger Chaya Raichik, better known as the poster behind @LibsOfTikTok, have made her a constant target of right-wing and misogynistic attacks.

My immediate reaction was — 1) good for Taylor and 2) this must be some kind of balancing move in the minds of Substack corporate, one predicated on the assumption that a culture writer at a major newspaper and an openly racist troll who is bankrolled by semi-anonymous internet moguls represent the “two sides” of the culture wars.

Confirming my suspicions was a note pinned at the top of the episode’s comments section from McKenzie. It said:

I know that many people have strong feelings about anything to do with Taylor Lorenz, which is in part the unfortunate result of culture war behavior common on Twitter. We do not intend to moderate this comments section, even though we expect it to be… lively. Say what you will, but know that invective, ad hominen, and personal attacks are unlikely to achieve your ends. At best, this space supports thoughtful critique and respectful argument—so, can we aim for that? By shouting, you might achieve temporary personal release, but you are unlikely to convince anyone that you are the more reasonable one in the room or that your ideas are the better ones. Those behaviors might win on other platforms. They will not win here.

This is the Substack corporate pose: being above internet politics (“culture war behavior common on Twitter”) while gleefully reaping the clicks and attention by jumping into it head first. And indeed, the comment section under McKenzie’s post was exactly what you’d expect from a typical anti-Lorenz Two Minutes Hate. (See also: the supposedly anti-Twitter McKenzie begging Elon Musk to “start thinking of Substack as a friend” last week.)

I was going to let all of this go (I swear), until I logged onto Substack Notes and saw this:

 

For the blissfully uninitiated, here’s what’s going on there: The original poster — an “investigative reporter” whose recent scoops include the incredible find that “there was no pandemic”1 (great news, everyone!) — is complaining that Substack must be irredeemably biased against him because it featured an interview with the reactionary trolls’ bête noire. Then McKenzie — who can’t be bothered to respond to a single question about the Hanania interview from anyone, mind you — jumps in to say: Don’t delete your account! Don’t take your newsletter elsewhere! We’re having on Alex Berenson — the anti-vax, reefer-madness-stoking COVID truther memorably dubbed “the pandemic’s wrongest man.”

===============

The most likely reason for McKenzie's actions is that McKenzie is a stooge of the right-wing racists who fund Substack. And they are likely the same people who fund Hanania, which is why Hanania is getting this special promotional treatment in spite of being a racist piece of filth.

In his first post about Hanania, Katz writes:

OK, so Hanania is a right-wing grifter who tweets racist stuff for fun and profit, and also runs an extremely lucrative “non-profit,” probably out of his house, which launders anonymous donor money in an explicit effort to reverse the most landmark piece of civil rights legislation in American history. So what, who cares if he went on a podcast with the co-founder of Substack?

Well I do, as someone who for better or for worse is associated with this platform — and someone who McKenzie personally invited to start a blog on here over four years ago.

But it’s a bit more than that. McKenzie didn’t just have a reactionary grifter on his show — a reactionary grifter who advertised the interview on his Twitter by saying the accompanying illustration made him look like a “trans joker.”4 He had him on and identified him as a centrist — and an enlightened one at that. This is the ultimate, and perhaps most dangerous, part of the grift: recycling old right-wing viewpoints as “a fascinating new voice in politics media,” and claiming it is the height of a rationalist tradition rooted in rejecting, as McKenzie put it, the “orthodoxies” of the “tribes” of the far right and left.

This is belied in two seconds if you just scan the list of writers that Hanania himself counts as “enlightened centrists,” in the blog post that inspired the interview. You can see him shifting the Overton Window in real time: on the “left” he includes centrists like Jonathan Chait and Matt Yglesias. In the “apolitical” (his term) center he includes people better described as conservatives, like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Haidt. And on the right, he includes neo-eugenicist Razib Khan and Steve Sailer. Sailer, widely regarded as a kingpin of the racist commentariat, is an open antisemite and columnist for the white supremacist blog VDARE. Among other things, he wrote in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that “the plain fact is that [Black Americans] tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and thus “need stricter moral guidance from society.”

And it isn’t like McKenzie didn’t know Sailer’s name was on Hanania’s recommended reading list. He independently brought him up as an example of someone Hanania considers “intellectually honest people!” (At the end of the interview, Hanania recommended a few other Substackers, one of whom positively cited The Bell Curve, and another who wrote a recent post titled “Homosexuality is a Mental Illness.”)

It appears that McKenzie is trying the old phony bipartisanship that Koch loves so well. 

But never count Peter Thiel out when it comes to racism and sleaze. We've seen the Thiel-funded Quillette mentioned in connection with the Overton Window.

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

And in fact, in another post about Hanania, Katz speculated on a connection between Hanania-funding and Peter Thiel:

Who are the donors hiding behind this? Some readers have suggested Ron Unz or Peter Thiel, both of whom I think might be good candidates. But without more insight, it’s impossible to say.

Ron Unz has indisputably funded Steve Sailer and  Razib Khan.

One thing that really interested me was Hanania's connection to Eric Kaufmann

On the podcast, McKenzie introduced Hanania as a “cultural critic.” (I’ve asked McKenzie for comment on the site’s new social platform. Will update if he responds.) Hanania is also a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a lecturer at Bari Weiss’s separate, as-yet-unaccredited, University of Austin. But in the brief course of reporting my Friday post, I realized that Hanania claims a different job as his go-to title: as president of a little-known think tank that calls itself the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

It didn’t take more than a peek behind the innocuous name to see that something a little shady appears to be going on. According to publicly available IRS documents, the so-called “center” seemed to consist entirely of Hanania and two fellow reactionary academic friends, George Hawley of the University of Alabama and Eric Kaufmann of the University of London and Hudson Institute. In 2020, the “center’s” mailing address was a 1,000-square-foot (though million-dollar) two-bedroom house in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley. (Hanania, who studied at UCLA, acknowledged living in that area on his Substack last year.)

Although I was expecting to be appalled by Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists, I was gob-smacked by Eric Kaufmann's bluntly stated wish to turn back the clock on the Civil Rights movement:

During the questions portion of the panel, another speaker at the conference, Eric Kaufmann, asked a question.

KAUFMANN 

So, yeah, just over in the Hoover Institution, Shelby Steele, who wrote a book called White Guilt, which is interesting because it's about the emergence of the racism taboo in the mid 1960s in the US and he argued that essentially moral authorities shifted from, you know, people of color having to defer to white people to then white people and American institutions have having to defer to people of color because they've lost their moral authority. So I'm just wondering to what extent you think those events in the mid 60s which led to the emergence of this anti racism taboo, from which subsequent taboos around sexuality and gender derived in a way, how important do you think that has been and do we need to revisit that taboo that emerged even though we may support, to some degree, what the spirit of of that taboo, I mean is there not an overreach that's resulted from that taboo. Do we need to question these taboos that emerged in the mid 60s in the US.

So the racist Right really does want to turn back the clock and end "the racism taboo (that emerged) in the mid 1960s." The mid-1960s was voting rights for Black people. 

Kaufmann is a Koch man, at the Manhattan Institute. Of course.

I have no doubt that in addition to "long-termism," which Katz talks about in one of his pieces on the glorification of racist Richard Hanania by Substack, another goal of the far-right is turning back the clock on Civil Rights. And the far-right is slowly but surely merging with the Republican Party.

I found it interesting that Katz was invited to join Substack by McKenzie himself:

OK, so Hanania is a right-wing grifter who tweets racist stuff for fun and profit, and also runs an extremely lucrative “non-profit,” probably out of his house, which launders anonymous donor money in an explicit effort to reverse the most landmark piece of civil rights legislation in American history. So what, who cares if he went on a podcast with the co-founder of Substack?

Well I do, as someone who for better or for worse is associated with this platform — and someone who McKenzie personally invited to start a blog on here over four years ago.

My guess is that Katz was invited to join Substack because he had embarrassed the United Nations.

But Katz is too good an investigator to remain in the dark for long about the ultimate funder(s) of Substack. So either Substack is going to find an excuse to get rid of Katz (and you can be sure they won't admit it's because he's embarrassing them) or Katz will quit in disgust. 

So although I signed up to Katz's Substack so I could read all his Hanania content, I doubt I'll stay a subscriber. And it's bad enough I'm helping legitimize that racist garbage heap called Substack.

Crooked Timber has an interesting response, The Correct Way to Argue with Richard Hanania, but I think author Henry Farrell is at least as gullible as he implies that Katz is:

And some of the facts are really not like the others. It might seem weird – if you aren’t read into debates among particular kinds of libertarians – to see that stuff about IQ and heritability in there. What work exactly is this rather jarring set of claims doing for the concept of Enlightened Centrism,? Do identified left-leaning Enlightened Centrists like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias “rely on” these facts, as Hanania seems to suggest they do?

 

Readers – they do not. Hanania seemingly wants to reconstruct policy and intellectual debate around a center in which questions of race and IQ are once more legitimate topics of inquiry and discussion. Back in the 1990s (a time that Hanania is nostalgic for), soi-disant centrists such as Andrew Sullivan could devote entire special issues of the New Republic to the urgent debate over whether black people were, in fact, stupider than white people. Big Scientific Facts Said That It Was So! Now, that brand of intellectual inquiry has fallen into disrepute. Hanania, apparently yearns for it to come back. That, presumably, is why those claims about heritability and IQ are in there, and why Steve Sailer makes the cut. 

 

As it happens, Matt was one of the “CT mates” cited in the 2004 dsquared post that was excerpted right at the beginning of this post. I’ve had disagreements with Matt since, on other stuff, but I am quite sure that both he and Ezra are bitterly opposed to the whole race and IQ project that Hanania wants to relegitimize. I can’t imagine that they welcome being placed on a spectrum of reasonable thought that lumps them together with racist creeps like Steven Sailer. But I can imagine why Hanania wants so to lump them – it provides a patina of legitimacy for opinions that have rightly been delegitimated, but that Hanania wants to bring back into debate.
So to see what Hanania is up to, it’s more useful not to be distracted by the provocative and outrageous. Instead, you want to look very closely at what seems superficially reasonable, seems to be the starting point for debate and ask: is there something wrong with these premises? In this case, the answer, quite emphatically, is yes. 

 

Still, you (for values of ‘you’ that really mean ‘I’) don’t want to get dragged in further unless you absolutely have to. As Noah Smith, another of Hanania’s involuntary inductees into the Enlightened Centrist Hall of Fame said, “”Race and IQ” racism is a DDOS attack” on the time and attention of anti-racists. This naturally provoked Hanania to pop up in replies with a sarcastic rejoinder. When I wrote that Vox article I had to spend weeks dealing with Jordan Peterson acolytes popping up to inform me of the Established Scientific Facts about race and IQ. I really don’t want to be back there again. So take this post as an attack on premises, and a statement of principles, rather than the slightest hint at a desire to get stuck back into discussion on race-IQ and similar. Very possibly (he says after 3,000+ words) the best way of arguing with Richard Hanania is simply not to argue at all.

I think that Farrell should trust Richard Hanania to know better than almost anybody else about who is really on Team Race Pseudoscience. Both Yglesias and Noah Smith have teamed up with Razib Khan - who is described in one of Katz's Hanania pieces (see above) as neo-eugenicist Razib Kahn  (and Katz groups Khan, accurately, with Steve Sailer.) And Smith even had a friendly call-out for Hanania, "a scholar."

Over at his Substack, Razib Khan interviews Richard Hanania, a scholar who studies partisanship and ideology. Hanania still thinks civil war is unlikely in the U.S., echoing the verdict of Paul Staniland, whom I interviewed before the coup went down.

When I tweeted at Noah Smith to ask him about his promotion of Khan and Hanania, he immediately blocked me. Original on Smith's Substack here.

Hanania also seems to have an insider's knowledge of the right-wing sentiments behind Substack, noted by The Racket:

(Hanania has said that “Substack itself was created to explicitly push back against leftist suppression of speech” — another comment I’d like McKenzie to weigh in on.)

At this point it doesn't look like McKenzie is ever going to explain why a far-right racist freak was promoted by Substack - because he doesn't have to, and no other mainstream-cred writers as far as I can see, except Katz, are even asking about it.

Razib Khan was recently seen promoting extreme racist and VDARE and White Supremacist Castle owner Peter Brimelow as an "immigration skeptic."

 UPDATE - Razib Khan asked ChatGPT to write a "Razib Khan style essay" and the results demonstrate that ChatGPT is a much better writer than Razib Khan. 

It's very interesting that Razib Khan thinks he knows what qualifies as good writing. Even his fellow racists think he's a terrible writer.

UPDATE: Hanania interviewing Amy Wax - Wax is so repellent she makes Hanania look reasonable by comparison. And that says a lot because Hanania's "Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology" is an absolute shit-show of race pseudoscience supporters, right-wingers and reactionaries, so of course Steven Pinker is right there.