The international hereditarian network rallies around Nathan Cofnas

Professional racist Nathan Cofnas accused a Cambridge professor, Jason Arday of plagiarism, an Internet mob went after Arday, and the upshot is that Arday killed himself.

It was easy for Cofnas to lead a mob because the mob already existed as an international network of supporters of eugenics and race science: neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's network was the subject of an investigative report by Hope not Hate,  Race Science Inc. But it isn't only that network -  there are mainstream individuals who support race pseudoscience and even align with Kirkegaard, like Steven Pinker. 

So the mob was not only on Elon Musk's X. 

Musk, by the way, supports German neo-Nazis.

Kirkegaard, naturally, is an enthusiastic promoter of Cofnas, as revealed in the Race Science Inc. article:

Describing his meeting with Thiel, Kirkegaard said:

“I went over there. And after that, he was so happy with the meeting, he asked me to suggest a bunch of other people. So I suggested also Noah Carl, Nathan Cofnas. All these people have already gotten the Thiel treatment. And never got any money from Thiel, but certainly we know that he knows about some of the stuff now.”

And considering the Race Science Inc. article mentions there is an "underground research team" that is part of Kirkegaard's network, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Cofnas was on Kirkegaard's payroll. 

Nobody knows the identity of Kirkegaard co-author Seb Jensen - could that be Cofnas?

And in case you don't yet understand how deeply stupid Cofnas is - he is a Trump supporter. Although he cares more about his "Hereditarian Revolution."

Cofnas appeared on the podcast of Kirkegaard's racist magazine Aporia.

Cofnas also allies with Jonathan Anomaly, Richard Hanania and Curtis Yarvin.

I wonder about people like Cofnas and Steven Pinker - do they really believe that if Kirkegaard ever got the tiniest bit of political power, that they would be spared, just because they agree with him about the genetic inferiority of Black people? They should remember the Jews stupid enough to try to make common cause with the Nazi Party.

It's just like with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Tyson welcomed race pseudoscience promoter Michael Shermer onto his program recently. 

Shermer is a longtime ally of Cofnas. 

In the screenshot, Shermer supports his hereditarian beliefs
by linking to a New Yorker article about the work
of Kathryn Paige Harden
---------------------------------------------------

And yes, of course Shermer was defending the Cofnas campaign on X.

Does Tyson really believe that just because racists are polite to him it means they consider him an exception to the race pseudoscience belief that Black people are genetically prone to violence and are intellectually inferior? If Cofnas and Shermer had their way, it seems unlikely that Tyson would keep his job.

It's easy enough to find out who is part of the international racist network by watching who comes out to defend - or even praise - Cofnas. 

First there is Kirkegaard and the professional racist with the marketing background, Steve Sailer. Steven Pinker has a lot to answer for, in his promotion of Sailer's career in the early years of this century.

Two ghouls, famous for their extreme racism
proclaim hardcore racist Nathan Cofnas a "hero"
-------------------------------------

Quillette, allegedly funded by Peter Thiel, demonstrated its support for Cofnas, with at least two articles - one written by white nationalist Arthur Jensen fan-boy Richard Haier and another written by Jensen fan-girl Rosalind Arden.

In the Haier article, he gives a history of the long hereditarian campaign to promote race pseudoscience that leads directly to Cofnas and Kirkegaard:

The marginalisation of intelligence research began more than fifty years ago with a backlash against the hypothesis that average group differences in IQ scores might be influenced by genetics. In 1969, a paper by Arthur Jensen exploring this possibility produced attempts to prevent him from teaching at UC Berkeley and from speaking at academic conferences (including death threats). E.O. Wilson was condemned as a racist after he published Sociobiology in 1975. His Harvard colleague Richard Herrnstein had experienced similar treatment after he published I.Q. in the Meritocracy two years earlier. Undaunted, Herrnstein co-authored The Bell Curve with Charles Murray in 1994, which discussed the important role that intelligence plays in stratifying modern societies...

I wrote an article for Rational Wiki about Charles Murray which was censored: evidence points to the censorship being the work of Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his international racist network. Murray is a big fan of Kirkegaard.

This is the hereditarian-racist network that Nathan Cofnas represents - people who are still angry over the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Jensen's paper appeared five years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His paper argued that Black Americans, during the days of Jim Crow, had lesser educational attainment than non-Blacks, and this therefore proved Blacks were genetically less intelligent than other "races." 

You can't be any more obviously racist - and stupid - than that.

Hereditarians still believe that educational attainment, as tracked by educational institutions, is evidence of genetically-endowed intelligence. One of these hereditarians is British science celebrity Adam Rutherford. 

Although Rutherford could be seen mocking Cofnas as an "IQ-obsessed wienie" on X/Twitter in 2024.

E.O. Wilson has been revealed to be such a devout racist that he promoted the career of racist crackpot  Jean-Philippe Rushton as much as he could without endangering his mainstream celebrity. 

Career-long racist Razib Khan is, predictably, a long-time supporter of Cofnas. Khan has also contributed to Aporia.

Infamous anti-trans campaigner Jesse Singal was given space by the NYTimes to use the Cofnas affair to campaign against universities - although Singal doesn't pretend that Cofnas is not a racist:

Mr. Cofnas was not an ideal messenger, given his interest in the supposed correlation between race and intellect. In a meritocracy, he wrote, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Singal is a good buddy of career-long racist Razib Khan (they even teamed up to come after me) so I can't imagine that Cofnas' racist hereditarianism - by all evidence identical to Razib Khan's racist hereditarianism - would bother Singal at all.

In the article Singal promotes his ally, Benjamin Ryan, another right-wing political activist posing as a journalist:

The journalist Benjamin Ryan, meanwhile, documented the Orwellian efforts some of the institutions affiliated with Mr. Arday made to quietly revise or delete claims they published about him that now seem to be false. 

It was revealed last year that Ryan has a friendly relationship with Kirkegaard's ally - or possibly employee -  racist Jordan Lasker. Ryan was an enthusiastic member of the mob against Arday.

Cofnas expressed his gratitude to Singal, but wasn't entirely pleased by the article.

The allegedly non-racist mainstream media occasionally mentions Kirkegaard and other race pseudoscience promoters, but they rarely connect the dots and don't bother to mention - if they are even aware of - articles like Race Science Inc. I talked about this recently. 

And so the race pseudoscience network slithers along, with occasional publicity like the Cofnas affair, but it's mostly underground, just how they like it. All the better to promote hereditarian causes en mass without it being obvious they are all part of the same network.

The international hereditarian network considers Arday's death a victory. Here is Emil Kirkegaard having some fun over Arday's death.

We know the international hereditarian network is out there. The real question is how complicit is media like The New York Times in aiding their political goals.

UPDATE: of course Steven Pinker supports Cofnas.

Pinker is also an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi-sympathizer Richard Hanania.

I've always said that Steven Pinker is absolutely shameless. 

There is something seriously wrong with Pinker.

UPDATE 2: The infamous grifter Andy "too extreme even for Quillette" Ngo and Cofnas team up on X to attempt to smear a group of people attending a memorial.

News reports about the memorial don't mention anything about threats against Cofnas. But it's not like grifters and members of the international hereditarian network ever need evidence for anything. They just make shit up.

Quillette has published yet another piece about Arday, this time written by the conscience-deficient Jonathan Kay. 

The international hereditarian network seems to believe that the death of one troubled academic will spark the rise of the racist eugenics empire they dream of, so it's likely they'll be dancing on Arday's corpse for weeks to come.

LAST UPDATE: Byline Times has more details about the international hereditarian network that targeted Jason Arday for destruction.

Why is Neil DeGrasse Tyson promoting the career of unapologetic racist Michael Shermer?

Apparently Neil deGrasse Tyson considers Michael Shermer, a devotee of the crankiest possible brand of race pseudoscience, "someone I can claim as a friend for decades."

What is wrong with Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why is he a friend of a right-wing political activist who is not at all shy about his admiration for race pseudoscience? Although, naturally, Shermer doesn't admit to being a racist. But he doesn't have to admit it, he lets the "science" do the talking for him as when he claimed that critics of racist crackpot Jean-Philippe Rushton are the victims of "motivated reasoning."

So there's Shermer, babbling away about "post-modernism" (the far-right is obsessed with post-modernism, I wrote about that here) - on Tyson's StarTalk podcast.

Goddam, I had to watch the whole episode, in what I knew was a vain hope, that they would raise the issue of Shermer's right-wing activities and his support for the most idiotic form of race pseudoscience. Of course they did not mention any of it. It was mostly a chance for Shermer to promote his book and to pose as the voice of sweet reason. It was utterly disgusting.

I mean, Shermer also has repulsive beliefs about trans people, but I would think that Tyson would at least stand up for himself - and one of his co-hosts, Chuck Nice - against the racist idiocy of Shermer's Rushton-based beliefs.

Rushton has his own profile on the Southern Poverty Law Center website, identified as a "white nationalist." The profile, which needs to be updated, since Rushton died in 2012, includes this:

In recent years, Rushton has spoken on the alleged IQ deficiencies of minorities at conferences of the racist American Renaissance magazine and website, and he has published a number of articles in the group’s newsletter. His work is often published on racist websites, including the anti-immigrant hate site, Vdare.com. In 2002, after renting several academic mailing lists, Rushton mailed an abridged version of Race, Evolution and Behavior to 40,000 people — a mailing paid for by the Pioneer Fund, the race science outfit he now heads. Reacting to complaints from scientists who had received the mailing, the book’s original publisher, Transaction, disavowed the smaller booklet and said that the abridged version had been “purged” of any “evidentiary basis.”

And Rushton was a major participant in the International Society of Intelligence Research (ISIR) annual conferences until his timely death.

The reputation of E. O. Wilson took a big hit when, not long after he died, it was publicized in two separate articles that Wilson had a correspondence with Rushton, in which Wilson encouraged Rushton to use the r/K model, developed by Wilson to discuss different reproduction strategies of species and apply it to human "races."

Shermer promoted Rushton's ex-wife on his podcast.

Shermer's love of race pseudoscience isn't limited to his support of Rushton and his wife. Last year he was seen at a conference full of racists -  apparently neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard was there. Shermer was mentioned in a Dutch article about the conference:

Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic 2000, has fallen head over heels for racial biology. Shermer is friends with Elizabeth Weiss, the wife of the late race science quack Philip Rushton (Rushton thought men with long penises had low IQs and got his data from fictional soft porn). “Of course you think Rushton was a racist. I thought so too until I looked at the evidence.” (12). 

Elizabeth Weiss also got a chapter in Lawrence Krauss's book The War On Science. This isn't the only similarity between Krauss and Shermer, both have also been accused of misconduct. 

In fact, Shermer sued biologist P. Z. Myers for discussing accusations of sexual misconduct against Shermer.

I'm not the only person who finds Shermer repulsive.

I've written quite a few times, over the years, on this blog, about Shermer's racism and general ghoulishness. And of course, he's a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, the gang of racist and reactionary dumdums, publicized by the odious Bari Weiss in her 2018 New York Times article, which is what kicked off this website.

And if you aren't convinced that Shermer is a political operative, behold - he is now working for the Trump administration.

Santa Barbara, California, June 15, 2026—Skeptic magazine and The Skeptics Society are pleased to announce that publisher and founder Dr. Michael Shermer has been appointed to the newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council, formed at the request of the White House and in coordination with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI, and other agencies.

Possibly the low point of this whole sorry podcast episode comes at minute 38, when Shermer both-sides the murder of Renee Good, neglecting to mention his "such actions have consequences" tweet.

Shermer is also part of the MAGA McCarthyite mob coming for Fauci.

And like the standard right-wing hypocrite, while promoting the campaign against Fauci on Twitter, Shermer piously says on the StarTalk podcast: "we have to get back to trusting experts, expertise does matter, even if they occasionally get it wrong, that's fine."

Jesus. Fucking. Kee-rist. I knew Shermer had no shame, but the more I learn about him, the more degraded he appears.

Posner was fired from the Daily Beast for plagiarism.

Shermer is the bottom of the barrel. Neil deGrasse Tyson should be ashamed of himself.

I went to the podcast website contact form to ask why they decided to promote Shermer.

If they respond I will post it here, but don't hold your breath. I believe they are cowards who will refuse to discuss Shermer's racism.

The gang at StarTalk apparently believe that - unlike with Renee Good - Shermer's actions shouldn't have any consequences.

Racists, led by Trump's FBI, come for the Southern Poverty Law Center

Pinker hates the SPLC because it 
refuses to accept race pseudoscience
------------------------------------------

I've noticed before that although Steven Pinker claims to dislike Trump, Trump has a habit of making Pinker's anti-woke dreams come true.

Pinker is among many, even on the right, who have doubted the Trump administration's reasons for going after the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Per the NYTimes:

The indictment appears to fit within the Trump administration’s pattern of using the Justice Department to punish its political adversaries. The S.P.L.C. has certainly been adversarial toward the president: In an article last year, Margaret Huang, who was then the president and chief executive of the group, wrote that with President Trump’s second election, hard-right extremism now had “an ally in the highest office in the nation.”

Nevertheless, Steven Pinker can't help but reveal how much he hates SPLC because it refuses to accept Pinker's brand of race pseudoscience.

Pinker doesn't name the "ordinary academic behavioral geneticists" (another name for sociobiologists) he claims have been unfairly targeted in Hate Watch, but I will make some guesses:

• Linda Gottfredson
• Henry Harpending
• Arthur Jensen
• Richard Lynn
• Charles Murray
• Jean-Phillipe Rushton

Every one of them a gutter racist.

Bari Weiss herself identified Pinker as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web and that network of grifters and clowns has hated the SPLC for a long time, as I have documented on this website. For example, in 2019 Quillette founder Claire Lehmann suggested Sam Harris sue SPLC for publishing an article that presented evidence for Harris' being a conduit to the far right.

The "Quillette Editorial Board" was railing against SPLC a few years ago, this time because of SPLC's support of transgender rights.

Other members of the IDW, or member-adjacent who have attacked SPLC include Michael Shermer, Gavin McInnes, Jerry Coyne,  and Christina Hoff Sommers.

The New Republic says:

The Trump administration had already taken steps to break ties with the SPLC even before the indictments, citing its research into far-right traditionalist Catholic groups. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on Twitter last year. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.” He did not specify which, if any, acts of violence the organization’s research had inspired.

That brings us back to Blanche’s claims that the organization was “paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” A cynical observer might suspect that the Trump Justice Department’s goal is to blame the work of white nationalist groups on the civil rights groups that oppose them. There is a long history of Klan denialism in this country that minimizes the actions of violent white supremacists, often by blaming their actions on their victims and opponents.

It is horrifying to see the Justice Department, whose original mission was to fight the Klan, engage in similar denialism. At least some conservative commentators appear to be buying it too. “Given the small and marginal nature of these groups, the obvious conclusion is that the SPLC found that demand for racism outstripped the supply, so it had to spread cash around to keep talking up these fringe groups,” McLaughlin wrote.

In reality, there has been an alarming resurgence in white-supremacist organizations since Trump first captured the presidency in 2016. White-nationalist rhetoric, which was once politically fatal ten years ago, is now regularly espoused by Trump administration officials and even by official government publications. Now the Justice Department is throwing its full weight behind a flimsy prosecution in an effort to destroy one of the Klan’s greatest opponents. There is no subtlety about what is happening here.

Lawyer Joyce Vance weighs in:

Unfortunately Vance's blog is on Substack, funded by techno-fascist Marc Andreessen.

Speaking of whom, Andreessen has been using Grok - aka "MechaHitler" - to promote hatred against SPLC, while at the same time spitting on the grave of Charles M. Shulz by using Charlie Brown as his X avatar.

And Elon Musk, MechaHitler's creator, is a long-time hater of the Southern Poverty Law Center, probably because the organization is pro-democracy and anti-racism, and Elon Musk, a stochastic terrorist, is the exact opposite.

Jamelle Bouie completely understands Elon Musk.

Speaking of techno-fascists, techno-racists and all around techno-nutjobs, there is an excellent New Republic article out now, How the Tech World Turned Evil, about these insanely wealthy freaks. And it does raise the question - has their insane wealth rendered them all insane?

What is the connection between the CBS News-promoted company Herasight and Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard?

And did Kirkegaard talk about putting out a hit on his legal adversary?

The eugenics company Herasight was recently profiled by the Bari Weiss-controlled CBS News. 

This did not surprise me at all since Weiss (a right-wing grifter recently profiled by John Oliver) has long been close to people involved in race pseudoscience from at least when she promoted them as heroes in her Intellectual Dark Web piece in the New York Times. One of those featured is Michael Shermer, a good pal of Steven Pinker, who is so racist he's a big fan of infamous far-right racist charlatan J. Philippe Rushton.

So it's no surprise that CBS News decided to give Herasight thousands of dollars in free advertising.

Well today a former associate of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, (more evidence for how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) Andrew (formerly Erik) Ahrens has come forward to claim that Kirkegaard is behind Herasight:

And this company now Herasight and (Kirkegaard's) not listed there, neither is his friend Nima. But all of these other people, Jonathan Anomaly, Jeremy Li, Tobias Wolfram are listed even on the websites home page on the day that I record this, so they try to keep Emil in the background. That I know, and I can also prove this, that all of this, this whole research network there was kind of cultivated, for example, in this Vienna conference. Then later in 2023, I attended another retreat with Emil and a group of his associates. Jeremy Li was there in Italy and Como...

I've mentioned Ahrens on this blog before. The "Vienna conference" he refers to is the alleged private conference that Emil Kirkegaard hosted in a hotel in Vienna around the same time that the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) held its annual meeting in Vienna in 2022. 

Kirkegaard had been shunned by ISIR in 2022 because Abdel Abdellaoui, an ISIR participant complained about his participation in ISIR meetings. Although ISIR can't quit Kirkegaard (he and ISIR bigwig Emily Willoughby go way back) so Kirkegaard was a participant in the 2024 ISIR annual meeting.

Ahrens, who says he was at that 2022 meeting, shares details about the conference in this latest video and claims the following people, among others, attended Kirkegaard's side-conference:

• Helmut Nyborg
• Rosalind Arden
• James Thomson
• Jonathan Anomaly

Arden could be seen promoting Herasight in ultra-racist Quillette. Jonathan Anomaly has, naturally written for Quillette.

Unfortunately Ahrens does not provide solid documentation for a connection between Kirkegaard and Herasight, but the fact that Ahrens was a close associate of Kirkegaard adds credence to the claim, on top of the already very strange fact that so many of the listed Herasight team members have connections to the far-right and race pseudoscience and even, like Jonathan Anomaly, to Kirkegaard himself. 

As I said back in October:

...Kirkegaard can be seen promoting a company run by some of his associates, Herasight.

I think it's extremely likely Kirkegaard is an investor in this company since its team and advisor lists include: 

• Jonathan Anomaly, who has contributed to Kirkegaard's Aporia podcast;
• Tobias Wolfram, an ally of far-right, neo-Nazi friendly (if not an actual neo-Nazi) Martin Sellner;
• Spencer Moore seen here contributing to a comments section of Aporia;
• Timothy Bates - likely Timothy C. Bates, a one-time president of gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) an organization with a well-documented association with Emil Kirkegaard;
• Alex Strudwick Young who likes to retweet Aporia contributors/notorious racists Razib Khan and Cremieux, both far-right political operatives.

On top of all that, Ahrens says that Kirkegaard talked about putting a hit out on his legal adversary Oliver Smith:

I know that Emil reached a settlement with this English Oliver (Smith) person who he had lost the lawsuit against and they reached an out of court agreement. No, I must say Emil told me in the past when he was drunk, this must have been in 2023. And he said this multiple times that he was going to get someone to or thinking about getting someone to kill this person. So he said that he might set up a crypto bounty on this guy's head and for 50,000 that someone would likely just get rid of him. And um. He, he told me this personally, I know that ultimately he reached an out of court agreement with him, so he didn't enact his threat. Just this is what these people talk about, right? So now that I make this video and I make all of this public, of course, there might also be talk in these circles about basically setting a bounty on my head.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if Kirkegaard said that. People who have devoted their lives to racism and far-right politics are horrible people by definition. I put nothing past them.

Instead of paying to have him killed, Kirkegaard was likely behind the smear campaign against Oliver Smith that included an article in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal attacking Smith as a former neo-Nazi (ironic isn't it?) 

Smith successfully sued City Journal into removing the article. 

That smear campaign against Smith was gleefully promoted by gutter racists Steven Pinker and Charles Murray.

I would love to have more information about any connections between Kirkegaard and Herasight or Bari Weiss and some of the people associated with Herasight.

I had to laugh though when Ahrens tried to defend Kirkegaard against a charge of antisemitism at minute 25:24 in the video, by saying:

"(Kirkegaard) told me that he likes Jews because they are smart and he thinks they are good with money."

The Boot Boys versus Pinkerite ~ is Jerry Coyne deliberately obtuse? Is Steven Pinker really a racist?

One of the "Boot Boys" displays his 
value as an alpha male.
----------------------------------------

Almost a year ago I was called "tenacious" by infamous anti-trans grifter and Kiwi Farms apologist Jesse Singal, although I prefer the word "relentless."

But at the time I admitted that in fact I do a fairly half-assed job with this blog. Especially compared to people who make money from promoting the issues I write about - like race pseudoscience and transphobia. People like Singal and Razib Khan.

And here's another example: Jerry Coyne came after me back in June, and only now am I getting around to discovering it.

In my defense, I do have a Google alert set to "Pinkerite," but apparently Coyne's blog is not notable enough to get flagged.

The amazing part is that last month I even linked to the blog post where he mentions me, but I missed the mention. 

Here it is:

I haven’t heard the podcast, nor do I read Aporia, though I am a bit aware of Noah Carl. But what the Guardian is doing here is really smearing Pinker, trying to make him out to be a racist because of who he’s associated with. The relevant question is this, though: Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist. The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class.

Finally, I still fail to understand why so many people have it in for Pinker, and this was well before the Aporia magazine podcast.

First, Coyne has claimed to "understand why so many people have it in for Pinker." 

In his article about Pinker "The World's Most Annoying Man" Nathan J. Robinson said:

The Chronicle suggested that “by proclaiming the gospel of progress,” Pinker “has made a lot of enemies.” (It cited a cartoon printed in Current Affairs as an example of the “hate” Pinker gets.) Pinker’s friend Jerry Coyne thinks people dislike Pinker because he is famous.

Coyne took to his blog to agree with Robinson:

Well, yes, I do think that some people dislike Pinker because he is famous, for they’re always mentioning his fame and his books (and often, like P.Z. Myers, their own lack thereof).

Coyne's deliberate obtuseness, if it is deliberate, is on display when he writes:

Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist.

So unless Pinker is explicit about it, it doesn't count. The entire past quarter-century of Pinker promoting racists and participating in racist organizations like the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and publications like Quillette and now Aporia - none of that counts.

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. 

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, from Sailer, to Razib Khan, to Linda Gottfredson to Claire Lehmann to Richard Hanania to Bo Winegard, who is a neo-Nazi and works for Aporia, owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

What's perhaps even more breathtaking than Coyne's obtuseness is his shameless hypocrisy. Coyne is obsessed with antisemitism, frequently writing about it and about Holocaust victims on his blog, and has a horror of pro-Palestinian protesters.

So how is Coyne able to be so sanguine about Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his Aporia magazine, (see this post on how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) while being hyper-sensitive to anything that he believes has a hint of antisemitism?

But maybe worst of all, for someone who used to be a scientist, is Coyne's lack of intellectual curiosity. Coyne writes:

The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” 

Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class. 

But if Coyne wasn't so lazy himself he would realize that I have parsed the arguments, which he should know because he mentions Rutherford, so he is aware that I wrote a nine-part series: "What happened to Adam Rutherford" in which I discuss a paper Rutherford co-authored with nine other people and in which I critiqued behavioral genetics. I'm not a scientist, but I can certainly read what scientists and scholars have written about behavioral genetics and draw my own conclusions and then write about them.

The series is now one whole story on Medium.

Shermer's hero Rushton
------------------------------------

Although unsurprisingly, Coyne lies about what I said about Rutherford. I never called Rutherford a racist. I pointed out that he and most of the co-authors of a paper he wrote have racist connections. 

What is it about these hereditarians that makes them incapable of accurately reporting on articles about hereditarians?

I did call Shermer a racist because, among various reasons, one of Shermer's heroes is racist charlatan Jean-Philippe Rushton. E. O. Wilson's encouraging correspondence with Rushton even convinced Wilson's fan club that Wilson was a racist. Shermer and Pinker are best buddies.

I certainly wasn't happy to have to discuss Rutherford's hereditarianism, since it had been so great to have someone so charismatic and famous and explicitly anti-racist on the anti-hereditarian side. Or what I thought was the anti-hereditarian side.

It was so depressing to discover that Rutherford's paper makes its argument in part through the disgraced pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology. 

Biologist P. Z. Myers explains why it's so bad here.

I really just could have saved time and dismissed Rutherford's paper for its use of evolutionary psychology alone, but there were a lot of issues I wanted to talk about, so I spent hours and hours writing about those issues. 

But Coyne doesn't know any of this because he already made up his mind in advance that I hadn't done any work on the issues. 

I'm sure that part of Coyne's refusal to face unpleasant facts about Pinker is because Coyne has a personal relationship with Pinker. 

It's not my place to kink-shame Coyne, but I have the distinct impression that Coyne has Daddy issues with Pinker. I've noted Coyne's obsession with Pinker's cowboy boots before, but recently Coyne bought his own cowboy boots, in what looks to me like an attempt to impress Daddy. 

He likes to call himself and Pinker "the Boot Boys."

As I said, Coyne's blog is apparently not noteworthy enough for Google alerts to flag his mention of "Pinkerite." If you ask Google's AI about "Why evolution is true," it doesn't talk about Coyne's blog, only about Coyne's book by the same name.

HOWEVER, Pinkerite does get a mention by Google's AI.

Although I don't call Pinker a "public intellectual" I call him a "celebrity intellectual" because that's what the New York Times called him. But still, pretty impressive for one of the worst blogs on the internet, huh?

QUICK, ROBIN! To the Boot Mobile!
-------------------------------------------------

Emil Kirkegaard, Steven Pinker, Maarten Boudry and the racist Heterodox Conference

Whee! We're such jolly racists!
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So according to an article in DeWereldMorgen, the "free Belgian Dutch-language alternative media website," Emil Kirkegaard was at the Heterodox Conference organized by Eric Kaufmann, the conference that Steven Pinker attended after being interviewed for neo-Nazi Aporia magazine. 

Pinker aligning with a neo-Nazi organization, owned by the neo-Nazi pedophilia-defending Emil Kirkegaard was an event so notable in the history of Pinker's 20+ year romance with race pseudoscience - always forgiven and forgotten by the legacy media - that the Guardian, a legacy media organization, actually wrote about it.

Fun fact: Kirkegaard sued someone for defamation for referring to him as a supporter of paedophilia, in British court - and Kirkegaard lost the case. He was later ordered to pay the defendant and he has refused to do so for years now. So on top of being a neo-Nazi, racist pedophilia defender he's also a deadbeat scofflaw.

In other words, exactly the kind of loser that the racist ghouls at the Heterodox Conference in Buckingham would align with.

The DeWereldMorgen article by Jotie, which I translated into English via Google Translate, is called Maarten Boudry at a race science meeting. The article begins:

Maarten Boudry attended the Heterodox Conference in Buckingham. The conference ran from 5 to 7 June and was organised by Eric Kaufmann. Kaufmann has his own project at the University of Buckingham, The Centre of Heterodox Social Science, with the approval of Buckingham's vice-chancellor James Tooley (1). In the work of Eric Kaufmann and among the attendees at the conference, a striking number of pseudoscientific racists: Claire Lehman, Nathan Cofnas, Noah Carl, Emil Kirkegaard. Founder Eric Kaufmann is in fact well-disposed towards pseudoscientific racism.

Later in the article:

Noah Karl and Emil Kirkegaard were also present at the Heterodox conference and recorded an episode for the Aporia podcast.

I assume Maarten Boudry refers to "Dutch-speaking Belgian philosopher and skeptic" Maarten Boudry. 

I did not recognize Boudry's name, even though I'd mentioned him on this blog, but after Googling the name a bit realized he was another race pseudoscience loving creep, referring to Steven Pinker in an interview with him as "one of my intellectual heroes."

Boudry also co-authored an article with far-right racist Jerry Coyne in far-right racist magazine Quillette, because that's what race pseudoscience-lovers do.

GODDAM - I just took a peek and Boudry contributes so often to racist monstrosity Quillette, he might as well be on staff.

It seems very likely to me that there is some kind of financial connection between Kirkegaard and his neo-Nazi organization (formerly Human Diversity Foundation, now Polygenic Scores LLC) and Kaufmann, who organized the conference and the University of Buckingham which hosted the conference.

I just wish the article had a photo of Kirkegaard from the conference. 

I do take exception to the last section of the article though:

Two more mainstream figures who were also present were Shermer and Pinker. 

 

Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic 2000, has fallen head over heels for racial biology. Shermer is friends with Elizabeth Weiss, the wife of the late race science quack Philip Rushton (Rushton thought men with long penises had low IQs and got his data from fictional soft porn). “Of course you think Rushton was a racist. I thought so too until I looked at the evidence.” (12). 

 

Elizabeth Weiss also got a chapter in Lawrence Krauss's book The War On Science. This isn't the only similarity between Krauss and Shermer, both have also been accused of misconduct. 

 

Steven Pinker has also long been a proponent of racial biology. In his work such as “The Blank Slate” he offers a more moderate version in which he argues that a completely blank slate model is wrong. In reality he goes very far with the opposite, biological explanation. Steven Pinker has been a member of Steve Sailer’s email group, the “Human Biodiversity Discussion Group,” since the late 1990s. In 2002 he gave an interview to Sailer and in 2004 Pinker nominated a text by Sailer for “The Best Science and Nature Writing 2004.” Steve Sailer argued that because Iraqis often (17%, 40%, 60%) marry cousins, genetics made it impossible to build democracy in Iraq. 

 

Pinker regularly promotes, among other things, the “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence”, a race science paper by Gregory Cochran. Greg received 600,000 dollars from Ron Unz for his work and has not contributed since, much to the annoyance of the race science movement (13). 

 

Greg suspected that Jews were hyperintelligent because the genes that cause genetic abnormalities within the Jewish community, such as Tay–Sachs, would also be responsible for intelligence. This hypothesis, no matter how often Pinker says that it can be tested, has never been tested. Neither by Pinker nor by Greg. 

 

According to geneticist Adam Rutherford, the genes for intelligence and the genes for these abnormalities are unrelated (14). 

 

Despite the value of this paper, it is frequently used by racial biologists, and by Nathan Cofnas and Kevin MacDonald.

The last sentence jumped out at me, although the issue might be the translation rather than the content itself. 

UPDATE: I'm told that Google Translate did not accurately translate the part of the article about NHAI, and the article does not say NHAI has value.

But if the content is represented accurately, I must object to the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) paper referred to as if it has any value at all. It is garbage and I recently celebrated the fact that in the 20 years since it has been published, it has never been proven - nor even tested in spite of the feckless, racist weasel Steven Pinker claiming it would be easy to test.

Also, rather than Kevin MacDonald the white supremacist and anti-Semite using the NHAI paper, MacDonald is cited as a source by the NHAI paper.

And of course Adam Rutherford may object to the NHAI, but as I documented in my 9-part series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" the behavioral genetics garbage that Rutherford was lately seen promoting comes to the same hereditarian conclusions about jobs and genetics that NHAI does.

Quillette founder Claire Lehmann could be seen promoting her racist neo-Nazi grotesquerie on Linked-In.

It's time to say it out loud - Steven Pinker is a racist - a shameless racist

Steven Pinker has been called many things during the years of his fame.

A "celebrity intellectual" by the New York Times.

"The World's Most Annoying Man" by Nathan J. Robinson.

"A weasel" by me.

But it's time for another word to describe Pinker and he's been working towards it for about the last quarter-century, since at least when he was helping to promote the career of professional racist Steve Sailer. 

Pinker and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann at the "Heterodox" conference
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As already established, Steven Pinker is utterly shameless, so it's no surprise to see him following up his appearance on the neo-Nazi Aporia magazine podcast with his participation at the "inaugural Heterodox Conference" which wraps up today.

Just about every single person at this conference has a connection to Aporia, Quillette, the far right, (MAGA Christopher Rufo,) or has become famous for sexual harassment like Lawrence Krauss and Joshua Katz. Plus that idiot Yascha Mounk of the reactionary-infested Persuasion. 

And of course the Intellectual Dark Web, including named member, and complete racist Michael Shermer, good personal friend of Steven Pinker.

The conference was organized by Eric Kaufmann, a member of racist extremist Richard Hanania's think tank. Which makes me think that Hanania funded this conference, but considering how many people at the conference have worked for or with Emil Kirkegaard via Aporia and other outlets of Polygenic Scores (formerly Human Diversity Foundation) Kirkegaard is also a suspect.

And Jonathan Anomaly, eugenics huckster, and SLAPP suit plaintiff, was also there.

The Guardian took notice of Pinker's close alliance with racists today in its article, Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racism, writing:

The Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker appeared on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for a revival of race science and have spoken of seeking “legitimation by association” by platforming more mainstream figures.

I had to laugh at "legitimation by association." Pinker and his sociobiology sympathizers like Abdel Abdellaoui like to cry "guilt by association" whenever their connections to racists are mentioned, so it's great to see Pinker's racist buddies admit they do exactly what I've always accused them of doing - using Steve Pinker, celebrity intellectual, in their campaign to mainstream race pseudoscience.

More from the article:

Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at UK anti-racism non-profit Hope Not Hate, said that Pinker’s “decision to appear on Aporia, a far-right platform for scientific racism, provides an invaluable service to an extremist outlet by legitimising its content and attracting new followers”.
He added: “By lending his Harvard credentials to Aporia, Pinker contributes to the normalisation and spread of dangerous, discredited ideas.”

That was always the plan - to mainstream race pseudoscience. That's why Quillette recruited Pinker to write for them. 

After decades of Steven Pinker promoting race pseudoscience it's time to find Steven Pinker guilty of racism.