The Fourth of July, the American media and the plutocracy

To commemorate the Fourth of July, I enjoy watching two movies back-to-back:  first 2017's "The Post" which recounts the fight over the Washington Post's publication of the Pentagon Papers, and then 1976's  "All the President's Men" which continues the chronological story of the government versus the press in the scandal called Watergate.

It's bittersweet, since these movies are about the glory days of the Post, before the diabolical billionaire Jeff Bezos decided to destroy it. The Wikipedia page on the Post contains a pretty succinct history of the downfall:

After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the Post adopted the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" for its masthead.[163] Communications Director of the Post Shani George said they choose this slogan because it "conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year". He also stated that the slogan was not added in response to Trump's actions.[164]

In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the paper's opinion pages would endorse "personal liberties and free markets" to the exclusion of other views. According to the NPR, the announcement suggested the Post was adopting a libertarian line.[125] In October 2025, columnist Marc Thiessen stated that the paper's opinion section was now conservative.[165]

In April 2026, Nathan J. Robinson said that the paper has shifted from a centre-left economical stance to a hard-right one, opposing taxation of rich individuals, rent control, public transport, social housing and other social services. A significant number of articles in The Washington Post reportedly criticised labor unions and supported construction of new AI data centers.[166]

And on top of that, CBS is being destroyed by Bari Weiss and her diabolical billionaire sponsors. Weiss is the original inspiration for this blog. 

I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post when Bezos refused to allow the paper to endorse Kamala Harris. Again from Wikipedia:

More than 250,000 people (about ten percent of the Post's subscribers) cancelled their subscriptions, and three members of the editorial board left the board, though they remain with the Post in other positions.[180][181][182] An endorsement of Harris was subsequently published by the paper's humorist Alexandra Petri, who explained that "if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement", and that "I only know what's happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there's no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear."[183]

Condemning the Post's decision, several columnists, including Will Bunch, Jonathan Last, Dan Froomkin, Donna Ladd and Sewell Chan, described it as an example of what historian Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience.[184][185][186][187][188]

I also cancelled my account with the Bezos-owned Amazon, which I had had for a quarter century.

And then there's the New York Times. It has been apparent to many that there is a slowly creeping conservative influence there, especially when it comes to transgender rights.

This phenomenon was noted by both the journalist Tom Scocca and the satirical newspaper The Onion as I wrote about in 2023. 

The Onion published an article mocking the NYTimes' apparent anti-trans crusade: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.

Tom Scocca published a blog post THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids? - 

This is pretty obviously—and yet not obviously enough—a plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade. Month after month, story after story, the Times is pouring its attention and resources into the message that there is something seriously concerning about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care. Like the premise that the Clintons had to have been guilty of something serious, or that Saddam Hussein must have had a weapons program worth invading Iraq over, the notion that trans youth present a looming problem is demonstrated to the reader by the sheer volume of coverage. If it’s not a problem, why else would it be in the paper?

I think that the New York Times, every bit as much as the Washington Post, helped get the treasonous, rapist, orange monstrosity back into the White House.

And this latest piece from the Dissident confirms it: Exclusive: How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People notes the change in the NYTimes' editorial tone by 2022.

Over the last several years it has become readily apparent that there has been a shift in the editorial framing and focus of the New York Times when it regards issues relating to transgender people. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to issues of gender affirming care for transgender youth. The Times has contested this accusation of bias or editorial shifting of their priorities and framing, often by pointing to individual stories and claiming that the stories are rigorously fact checked and true. The issue is that any particular article can be argued about in isolation about whether or not the framing is biased against transgender people but when viewed in the aggregate the shift can become much more pronounced and difficult to defend.

While many organizations and activists before me have attempted to categorize and catalog the bias of the New York Times when it comes to transgender issues such as Assigned Media, GLAAD, Media Matters, and others, no one has fully analyzed the entire corpus of transgender coverage by the New York Times since 2014 to see exactly the nuanced changes in editorial focus and framing by the New York Times.[1]

The same paper that once gave a trans writer the page to argue for trans survival later treated that survival as an open question and let her contract lapse during the fight over how it covered her community. This shift in framing and coverage by the New York Times is measurable, and this piece measures it.

...

When the paper of record treats your existence as a debate, the framing does not stay on the page. The New York Times effectively sets the terms of what is considered respectable mainstream liberal opinion. What the Times treats as settled, the country treats as settled. What it frames as an open question shows up in courtrooms, in statehouses, in exam rooms, and in the minds of parents deciding whether to believe their own kids. I'm both a trans person and a lawyer. I have watched how the framing of these stories lands directly on people I know.

It is no wonder that Republican elected officials, Republican-appointed judges and Supreme Court justices, and far-right anti-trans hate groups have all cited the New York Times in their efforts to restrict transgender rights. The harm can be measured in the number of people forced to flee their homes and even their country as a result of these policies. As Howard Zinn once said, you cannot be neutral on a moving train. The New York Times chose to cynically change its framing and coverage around transgender issues in a bid to appeal to conservative voices. They did so knowing that the trans community was too small and politically powerless to effectively push back against the paper. And the organizations that did stand up would quickly be attacked by the Times itself through selective investigative reporting meant to silence criticism.[9]

I was amazed that odious Jesse Singal was not mentioned in the piece, but then by 2022 he had already been at it for several years, since at least 2018, helping to pave the way for anti-trans hostility, supported by racist far-right Quillette.

Fortunately there is still the Guardian - which is not American media.

The Boot Boys ride for Steven Pinker!

Professional gutter racist Steve Sailer testifies to his influence on Steven Pinker
-------------------------------

So several members of Steven Pinker's fan club have rushed to defend their hero's honor against Boston Magazine's relatively mild critique of Pinker.

Jerry Coyne, the hereditarianism-loving grifter and coiner of the term "Boot Boys," comes harrumphing along with his grievance about the article's reference to cowboy boots:

A digression: Cowboy boots:

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch.

Yeah, but he got the idea from me (I don’t wear them because I’m short, though I am.)

Coyne defends Pinker's hereditarianism in the most hereditarian way possible: by claiming Pinker's critics are a bunch of Marxists.

In the end, or so I think, a lot of opposition to Pinker, whatever form it takes, derives from people who buy into blank-slateism. Of course very few people are pure blank-slaters, but there are degrees, and in general “progressives” tend to be on the side of seeing differences between people as due very largely to environmental influences. This derives from a Marxist view of people as generally malleable, so that any genetic effect on differences should be ignored, minimized, or even demonized. 

 

Pinker has spent much of his career emphasizing that a lot of what makes people different is due to their harboring different genes—genes that of course interact with different environments (language is a good example). And so he’s demonized.

Although I do appreciate that Coyne confirms Pinker's devotion to hereditarianism. 

Speaking of Pinker and Marx, a recent story in Current Affairs is titled: Steven Pinker Doesn’t Know Anything About Marxism.

The article is co-authored by Ben Burgis & Matt McManus. They don't mention Pinker's hereditarianism - but since they have both written for Quillette, I expect race pseudoscience is the least of their concerns. Their work for Quillette appears to be a kind of philosophy 101 for the racist masses who read Quillette. More recently McManus has published in Areo Magazine, which is a kind of Quillette lite, and was edited by Iona Italia, who is just as much an hereditarian as Quillette's Claire Lehmann.

In his post, Coyne provides a link to Jesse Singal's defense of Pinker. Coyne is perhaps returning the favor.

Jesse Singal is an infamous anti-trans podcaster who is also an apologist - at best - for the psychopathic Kiwi Farms. And like Coyne, Singal is a long-time defender of Pinker. I first became aware of him in the context of his article in the New York Times after Pinker was caught praising members of the far-right in the defense of race pseudoscience. P. Z Myers had an excellent response to Singal.

Singal's most recent defense of Pinker is mostly behind a pay wall, but I will address one of the paragraphs that is available for free:

I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

Since Singal provides no names for "adherents of sweeping anti-Pinker views" or those who believe that "people are more or less blank slates" it's impossible to independently evaluate his claims about these boogeymen.

But both Singal and Pinker are weasels. When Singal and his professional racist pal Razib Khan came after me on Bluesky there was no chance to address their vicious claims about me directly - they both blocked me. When Singal disparaged trans-person Jude Doyle, it was from the safety of his paywalled podcast. Pinker famously blocked anybody on Twitter who mentioned Jeffrey Epstein. In the Boston Magazine article Pinker defended his warm relationship with Epstein on the grounds that the convicted child molester was giving money to Harvard:

The only one from Pinker himself—to an Epstein assistant in March 2012, four years after the conviction—said he’d be “delighted to meet with him” when Epstein visited Harvard. “I probably shouldn’t have said yes,” Pinker says now, “but I was being polite—he was a donor to Harvard.”

I think that Pinker, Singal and Khan make money, directly or indirectly by saying things right-wing plutocrats want them to say, and so there is no reason why they would actually debate anybody about their positions. It's so much easier to just claim nameless opponents have "done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position." How would Singal know? He exists in gated right-wing spaces, just as Pinker does.

But no defense of Steven Pinker would be complete without Steve Sailer weighing in. Pinker's decade-long support for Sailer is one of those topics that Pinker refuses to address. He always uses his tired "guilt by association" dodge when journalists ask him why he promoted Sailer's career. But there's no advantage to Pinker to talk about Sailer, and so he doesn't and journalists never hold his feet to the fire. 

Sailer's piece,  Is Steven Pinker A Bad Guy Like Charles Murray? is a few sarcastic lines and then he just posts most of the Boston Magazine article.

I should mention that Sailer is a fan of Jesse Singal. And of course has a mutual-admiration society with Charles Murray.

Sailer was much wordier in his defense of Pinker  another time the mainstream press decided to peek under Pinker's racism rug, five years ago, and he made sure to double-down on his own extreme racism - my highlight:

Therefore, it was ironic but hardly surprising that The Guardian last week attempted to cancel Pinker by repeating Malcolm Gladwell’s complaint that Pinker had humiliated him in a 2009 book review in The New York Times by citing data I’d compiled debunking Gladwell’s knuckleheaded assertion that the NFL performance of college quarterback prospects “can’t be predicted.” The Guardian whoops:

…the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people.”

Other beliefs of mine include that Reno is west of Los Angeles, the Holocaust happened, and the sun comes up in the east...

But Sailer should save his time, because his warm feelings for Pinker and his history with Pinker say more about Pinker than any defenses Sailer could write.

As I was saying, John Oliver is a national treasure

John Oliver makes an excellent case for the fecklessness of Elon Musk, but he also mentions Harmeet Dhillon a lawyer who loves Trump and his fascist administration and was once (or still is?) the lawyer of far-right looney-toon grifter Andy Ngo. 

Claire Lehmann's Quillette used to promote his grift all the time.

Because we are living in Bizarro World, thanks to morons voting for a felon/rapist/traitor/psychopath, Dhillon is now "assistant attorney general for civil rights."

The fact that she promoted a bunch of monsters including the equally awful stochastic terrorist account Libs of TikTok tells you how horrible she is.

But the most important aspect of Oliver's piece is how utterly poisonous Twitter is - a force for pure evil. 

Oliver discusses the way that Twitter is apparently fiddling with its algorithm to push right-wing content. I hope those still on Substack - looking at you, Paul Krugman - are aware that Marc Andreessen is just as right-wing extremist and just as capable of tweaking the Substack algorithm.

And speaking of horrible people, Jesse Singal is promoting his anti-trans obsession while promoting his book in the NYTimes. He is an awful person, part of the race pseudoscience gang and an apologist for those other stochastic terrorists, Kiwi Farms.

The New York Times has a lot to answer for, over its campaign against trans-people.

Erin Reed has a response to Singal which is, unfortunately, on Substack.

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!
-------------------------------------------------

Now we are seven ~ happy birthday Pinkerite

In the past year the biggest stories were: Jesse Singal and Razib Khan teaming up to come after me on Bluesky; Steven Pinker going full neo-Nazi, my disappointment with Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics (now as one long article on Medium); and the crazy lawsuits and secret agreements with RationalWiki thanks to people associated with Emily Willoughby and Jonathan Kane.

Last year was the exposé of Emil Kirkegaard and his racist machinations from Hope not Hate, and since then one of Kirkegaard's co-conspirators, Erik Ahrens, has come over to the good guys' side. The exposé's undercover reporter published a book about the experience.

And both Bari "Jerry Maguire moment" Weiss and Peter "I know about the antichrist" Thiel have been discussed and mocked in the mainstream media.

Other topics:

• I discovered physicist Angela Collier - yay -
• - and Zohran Mamdani and enjoyed voting for him, knowing how much billionaires and courtiers of billionaires hate him. AND HE WON! LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!
• CBS goes full fascist and fires Stephen Colbert.
• Charlier Kirk taken down by our insane gun laws.
• I got a copy of the program for the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research although they did not post it on their website. 
• The "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is still an untested and far-fetched paper authored by racists, now 20 years old.
• This blog got a shout-out in Undark.
• The Murderbot TV series, based on the book series, is also gloriously woke.
• I discussed all the people who worked for Emil Kirkegaard's publications, people who knew they were neo-Nazi publications.
• I published an updated version of EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK.

The top most-visited individual posts this year:

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - #1 for the second year in a row. And well deserved - 1.43 K views.

• That gloriously woke Murderbot - first published over two years ago, but undoubtedly benefitting this year from the Apple TV+ show - 1K

• Three more race pseudoscience ghouls SLAPP Rational Wiki - 871

• The great New Yorker article with the bad title ~ "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" - 873 - only recently posted, but hugely popular, which I did not expect.

• The Maxine Margolis interview - 732

• EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK (updated) - 675 

• The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss - 644

• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 630

• New Evidence of E. O. Wilson’s Intimacy with Scientific Racism - 619

• What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1 - 582

The great New Yorker article with the bad title ~ "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?"

The liberal New Yorker's
byline ratio: 5 women to 24 men
way back in 2012

Pinkerite's beat is critiquing the Intellectual Dark Web, Steven Pinker and race pseudoscience, but every so often I go a bit outside those parameters.

Today I will focus on misogyny rather than race pseudoscience, although that certainly doesn't exclude the Intellectual Dark Web or Steven Pinker, both fans of misogyny. 

One of the people photographed skulking around in the dark for the Bari Weiss article about the IDW is Christina Hoff Sommers, whose entire right-wing think tank-funded career is based on being a woman who hates other women. 

Pinker, like all the reactionaries associated with the IDW, has dedicated his life to the belief that women are innately, genetically less capable in STEM pursuits than men. This is a pillar of the political movement - falsely labeled a science - known as evolutionary psychology.

The American right, having hurt trans rights thanks to the Trump administration, aided and abetted by grifting ghouls like Jesse Singal, has now set its sights on trying to force women out of jobs, the better to distribute women as rewards for good behavior to men, and so women will resume their godly roles as domestic servants and breeders of white babies.

The New York Times, of course, quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

The New Yorker has responded to this latest backlash against women with a surprisingly good article. I am surprised because only 13 years ago I was tracking the liberal New Yorker's terrible male:female byline record, which always favored men and often by a lot.

But this recent article by Jessica Winter, "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" is great in spite of the title. Here is the archive if you don't have access to the article on the New Yorker site.

It's especially good because Winter goes after weaselly influencers like Scott Galloway:

The squishier centrist side has no such certainties. Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all.

What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person’s duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital “P.” This person’s opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.

And later...

Reeves frets that fatherless homes will beget more lost boys, more twentysomething men living in their childhood bedrooms, and more fractured families. If we do not update our “obsolete model of the breadwinner father,” he warns, “we will continue to see more and more men being left out of family life.” As for what authority has decreed that these absent fathers should be “left out” of their own families, Reeves never says—the culprit’s identity is shrouded in passive voice. Nor does Reeves explain how women’s attainment of economic independence would cause their husbands to be “stripped” of anything, much less the many non-economic aspects of being a spouse or parent.

The notion that fathers wander away from their families owing to some gnawing sense of existential dislocation—some humiliating certainty of their own uselessness or usurpation—is especially pungent when one takes into account the enormous gender gap in housework and child-rearing in heterosexual marriages. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, mothers who work full time do almost twice as much household labor as fathers. Research by the Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin has suggested that married men’s disinclination toward housework and other “draggy business of family life” may be holding back birth rates, which should pique the interest of Republican pronatalists such as J. D. Vance.

And maybe the best slam-dunk on Galloway:

Reading Galloway, one gets the sense that men last knew who they were about seventy-five years ago. Much as the Trump Administration does when it vows to revive the coal industry, or when it shares fascist-lite iconography that would be at home in a Paul Verhoeven film, Galloway appeals to the reader’s nostalgia for mid-century “Peak Male.” It was young men, he reminds us, who stormed the beaches at Normandy and who won the Battle of the Bulge: “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach, big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory.” Of course, the German soldiers were young men, too. And it isn’t clear which border Galloway thinks the Russians were crossing, or if he realizes which side they were fighting for.

You'd think someone who claims to represent manly men would at least know which side the Russians were fighting on during the Battle of the Bulge.

And Winter does a great job of addressing the claim that women need men for protection, by pointing out that women need protecting from men. And although the Russians were on the side of the Allies during most of World War II - and so technically the good guys, they were "an army of rapists."

Jonathan Kane, Emily Willoughby, Emil Kirkegaard, RationalWiki and censorship

Kirkegaard and Willoughby
working together for a common goal
---------------------------------------------------------

EMILY WILLOUGHBY is a Board member of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). 

Recently, according to her long-time associate Jonathan Kane, she provided information to Kane which he used to make a litigation threat against the Oregon-based RationalMedia Foundation, the parent organization of RationalWiki.

Lawsuits & Secret Parties

This year, lawsuits were filed against the New Mexico-based RationalMedia Foundation (RMF), the former parent organization of RationalWiki. All of the plaintiffs were connected in one way or another to neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and four of them have participated in at least one ISIR annual meeting.

RMF settled the lawsuits by agreeing to remove RationalWiki articles about the plaintiffs, along with all references to or mentions of the plaintiffs.

Then there were threats of lawsuits from secret parties. The New Mexico-based RationalMedia Foundation made agreement(s) with those parties, which resulted in at least 30 articles about individuals and even about the International Society for Intelligence Research and the publication Aporia, (owned by Kirkegaard) being censored. Once again, the censored articles were connected to Emil Kirkegaard.

Among the censored articles was the one I created about Charles Murray. I reposted the article on this blog, months ago, without a peep from Murray or his representatives since.

Censorship forever?

The lawsuits and secret parties agreements occurred at a time when the RationalMedia Foundation was attempting to move from the SLAPP-friendly state of New Mexico to the less SLAPP-friendly state of Oregon by shutting down the New Mexico organization and registering a new organization in Oregon. It completed the change in July-August 2025.

Initially there seemed to be a general understanding that once RationalMedia Foundation was reborn in Oregon, the censorship could be lifted, since the Oregon organization would not be bound by settlements made with the separate and now defunct New Mexico organization. 

The only possible hitch was that Board members from the New Mexico organization would have to resign from the Oregon organization, before the censorship could end, presumably because they would still be bound by the settlements made with the New Mexico organization.

But there seems to be some doubt about this now, which has made the people running the Oregon-based RationalMedia Foundation quick to censor and threaten to ban anybody on RationalWiki who discusses the censored topics, or the lawsuits, or the secret agreements, or even speculating on how things might be handled differently if the censorship was ever lifted.

And so RationalWiki is now at the mercy of a group of people - all or most of whom have connections to Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard - who can yank RMF's chain whenever they are displeased.

Jonathan Kane yanks the chain

And it appears that one way to yank RationalMedia Foundation's chain is via Jonathan Kane. Using his RationalWiki account, "Tetrapteryx" Kane can be seen on this RationalWiki page in September 2025,  speaking for the secret parties. He writes:

The parties to RW's settlements have seriously considered taking further legal action against RW for its hosting of these images, but they appear to have decided against it, because now that their articles are deleted RW isn't causing them a lot of harm anymore. However, if [redacted] gets Jason Wilson to publish an article attacking them over their lawsuits, there is a possibility that situation could change. The people calling for a new round attacks on the plaintiffs don't seem to have an understanding how precarious RationalWiki's situation currently is with respect to this issue, and I think their actions are extremely risky.

The images specified by Kane were a Twitter screen cap of journalist Tom Scocca highlighting Charles Murray's racism (which has been available on this blog since 2021) and another Twitter screen cap of an exchange between Pinkerite and Ben Winegard, brother of Emil Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard. (That image has been on this blog since 2020.) The images were insignificant and no longer connected to any articles, and apparently had not yet been removed only because there was a technical glitch, but Kane made sure to use them as an excuse to yank that chain anyway. 

Jason Wilson appears to be this reporter at the Guardian, while [Redacted] refers to Oliver Smith. We'll talk about him soon. 

But how does Jonathan Kane know what the litigants are considering and deciding, and how does he know "how precarious RationalWiki's situation currently is"? 

Well as Kane tells it, he is getting his information from Emily Willoughby, board member of the ISIR:

I'm pretty sure know I more about what the litigants are up to than any other user here. I know about this because I'm close friends with a person who is involved in ISIR. I think I'm not supposed to name her, but she's a woman, which narrows down who it could be. This is public information; I've mentioned it several other times, and she and I collaborated on an anti-creationism book a few years ago.

Willoughby and Kane collaborated on an anti-creationism book published in 2017.

A RationalMedia Foundation Board member commented on the same page as Kane:

That woman was one of the 28 people who wanted to take legal action against, even though the article about her had been deleted months before...

So the article about Emily Willoughby on RationalWiki had been removed months before the lawsuits began. It's curious then, that she was involved at all in any legal actions against the RationalMedia Foundation.

How we know that Emil Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi

It's clear that Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi. According to the Hope not Hate exposé Race Science Inc:

• The Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation —thought to be essentially defunct — has rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) 

[NOTE: HDF is owned by Kirkegaard and recently renamed "Polygenic Scores LLC."]

• Aporia is part of the HDF’s organisation, as is a scientific racism research team
• Andrew Conru, the multimillionaire entrepreneur who created Adult Friend Finder, has given $1.3 million to HDF. After being contacted prior to this report’s publication, he said he would cut ties with the company
• HDF has connections to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party, and hopes to create a white-only ethnostate
• HDF is working to create a cult of weapons-trained activists inspired by Scientology and the Nazi SS

In addition, the Anti-Defamation League has noted the connections between Alternative für Deutschland and Nazi ideology.

In 2023 a German publication noted the connection between Kirkegaard and AfD supporter Mathilda Huss, who also appears to have a connection to Trump.

Kirkegaard was seen attending the Neo-Nazi Scandza Forum conference in 2023 with Edward Dutton and Helmut Nyborg.

Kirkegaard became the beneficiary of Nazi legacy money when he "inherited the assets of the Pioneer Fund from its former long-time president, the white nationalist Richard Lynn before he died in July 2023." 

Kirkegaard owns the pseudoscientific journal Mankind Quarterly, originally funded by Nazi sympathizer Wickcliffe Draper.

In January of 2025, Kirkegaard endorsed AfD on Twitter.

Emil Kirkegaard's hatred of RationalWiki

Kirkegaard attempts to falsely connect
RationalWiki to "antifa"
------------------------------------------------------

I first became aware of Kirkegaard's hatred of RationalWiki thanks to a City Journal piece written to attack a legal opponent of Kirkegaard, and endorsed by Steven Pinker and Charles Murray, called "The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past."

The "troll" was Oliver Smith, whom Kirkegaard had sued for defamation - and lost. At the time of the article's publication, Kirkegaard owed Smith £35,972 and was in contempt of court for refusing to pay.

The City Journal article appears to be Kirkegaard's - or an ally's - attempt to conflate RationalWiki with Oliver Smith, a former RationalWiki editor.

Prior to the publication of the article in City Journal, blackmail was attempted against Smith by someone who appeared to be associated with the Substack "CancelWatch."

Smith successfully sued the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the parent of City Journal, to have the article removed.

Undaunted, Kirkegaard posted a video on Aporia in 2024, attacking RationalWiki as "Antifa."

Captain Occam, Ferahgo the Assassin and Deleet

Jonathan Kane, Emily Willoughby and Emil Kirkegaard are long-time contributors to wikis.

According to testimony on Twitter, Kane and Willoughby:

"...were pushing race and IQ "science" on Wikipedia for years, both being banned for doing so incessantly and deceptively." 

"I spent literal years trying to counter their wikipedia work when I was in grad school." and 

" That's also where I first met Emil Kierkegaard, he was working with them some of the time." and

"Kirkegaard's username was Deleet. Kane and Willoughby worked a good cop bad cop routine, she more or less followed the rules and stayed civil, he didn't and was banned, and when he was banned he edited from her account, and when it was discovered they shared, she was banned too."

Another Twitter account testified: 

"Like I said before, I remember her advocating that stuff on Livejournal back in the 2000s, but to see she still subscribes to it…yeesh."

Kane used the name "Captain Occam" on Wikipedia and in 2010 the Captain Occam account received a topic ban on Wikipedia over race- and intelligence-related articles and in 2018 the account was indefinitely blocked by Wikipedia.

Willoughby used the name "Ferahgo the Assassin," on Wikipedia, a name taken from one of the characters in the Redwall children's fantasy novels. The character is "an evil weasel who heads up a large band known as the Corpsemakers."

Ferahgo the Assassin can be seen promoting a claim in support of race pseudoscience for an article on race and intelligence in 2009:

After perusing this article, I've got to say that the current version looks fairly unbalanced. If there is a significant body of scientists out there that support a partially genetic basis for racial differences in IQ, then that proportion of scientists should be accurately represented in the article, and the article should not be written under the assumption that this conclusion is false. -[[User:Ferahgo the Assassin|Ferahgo the Assassin]] ([[User talk:Ferahgo the Assassin|talk]]) 04:05, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Ferahgo the Assassin was interaction-banned on Wikipedia over race and intelligence.

Kane and Willoughby are likely authors of an article published in 2020, "The left-wing bias of Wikipedia," for the conservative British magazine "The Critic" under the pseudonyms Shuichi Tezuka and Linda A. Ashtear. 

Tezuka published an article in 2020 in "Journal of Controversial Ideas" called Cognitive Creationism Compared to Young-Earth Creationism. The article mentions both Kane and Willoughby.

In July 2022 Tezuka published an article in Quillette called Cognitive Distortions - How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence which mentions Ferahgo the Assassin. 

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales called the article "silly." 

I documented Shuichi Tezuka promoting the right-wing wiki Justapedia in 2023. The "Tetrapteryx" on Justapedia is likely Jonathan Kane, since he uses "Tetrapteryx" on RationalWiki, which was confirmed by a RationalWiki moderator.

In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Center documented the Wikipedia race pseudoscience wars and Emil Kirkegaard's role in them, writing:

Editors who attempt to insert their ideological bias but maintain the semblance of civility are given the benefit of the doubt until their disruption becomes apparent enough to warrant action by administrators. Civil POV-pushers can disrupt the editing process by engaging other users in tedious and frustrating debates or tie up administrators in endless rounds of mediation.   

Users who fall into this category include racialist academics and members of the human biodiversity, or HBD, blogging community. Often these are single-purpose accounts that exclusively edit on topics like race and intelligence, racial classification and bios of related researchers, like Linda Gottfredson or Helmuth Nyborg. Some have direct ties with racist journals or organizations, like Mankind Quarterly editor Gerhard Meisenberg. Emil Kirkegaard, who edits frequently under the username Deleet, is a research fellow at Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social research and the co-founder of the online pseudojournal OpenPsych.

Kane & Willoughby: "A Troublesome Inheritance"

In May 2014, Willoughby and Kane co-authored a review of Nicholas Wade's race pseudoscience book "A Troublesome Inheritance," a book so bad that not even Jerry Coyne liked it. It was generally trashed by reviewers. 

The first half of the review is full of regret that Wade did not write a better book in support of race pseudoscience and the second half is an attack on one of Wade's critics, using hereditarians' favorite Equalitarian bullshit.

In the review they link to that great intellectual of our time, the pseudonymous racist blogger "HBD Chick" to argue that sure, Nazis were bad, but crimes have been around since before Nazis:

The science blogger HBD Chick@ makes an important point about this idea. Genocide, racism, and xenophobia all predate human history, and it's foolish to think that beliefs about biological differences between races are to blame for these millennia-old practices. The Nazis misused race differences as an excuse for their genocide of Jews, but crimes of similar scale have been committed without any need to invoke this excuse...

And to support the notion of "public health benefits from research about the effects of race differences" they link to a New York Times op-ed, I Am a Racially Profiling Doctor, by Sally Satel. I was just talking about her last month, in the context of her contribution to the embarrassing "The War on Science" book, and her role as a Purdue Pharma shill.

Willoughby shares her thoughts about
Institutional Review Boards
with Emil Kirkegaard on Twitter 
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Emil Kirkegaard's "OpenPsych" hereditarian hypothesis chat

In September 2014 an individual named Emily and another named Tetrapteryx can be seen participating in a discussion about the "hereditarian hypothesis" in an archive of a discussion board on Emil Kirkegaard's OpenPsych. Other participants in the discussion include John Fuerst and Emil Kirkegaard.

This discussion board Emily appears to know Steven Pinker and mentions Steven Pinker's protegé James Lee and in the last paragraph responds to Kirkegaard: 

 

...I admire your idealism, and I think the research that you, Piffer and others are doing is really important. I'd like to try and support it however I can (I would not have sent my genome and IQ scores to just anyone!), and if all I can do for now is send your research along to important people I know, then I will continue to do so.

The Piffer mentioned is likely Davide Piffer, a frequent contributor to OpenPsych, and known for at least one incredibly racist tweet.

Kirkegaard responds to Emily:

Perhaps you can convince Pinker to get others to examine the method and results. After all, they are public. Since he has a lot of influence, perhaps he can set up an academic group of anonymous scholars (so they can be honest) that can examine it.

Kirkegaard's current organization is known to have an "underground research arm" per the Hope not Hate article "Race Science Inc."

Emily Willoughby expressed her admiration for Steven Pinker in this undated Tumblr post. Pinker returned the favor in this 2024 tweet.

In the same discussion, Tetrapteryx thinks Kirkegaard and Piffer are "so idealistic."

...Part of why this bothers me is because I think you and Davide Piffer do have the potential to make a difference in this area, if you weren't so idealistic about your opposition to legacy journals. You care about both that and educating the world about psychometrics, but I don't think it's possible to pursue both goals at once without compromising the second one, and I also think the second one is more important.

Emily Willoughby's "cancellation"

In 2022, a controversy erupted over Willoughby and her connection to race pseudoscience. And around that time it was discovered that she had published an image online of two raptors in Nazi uniforms, playing chess. I have blurred the image on the tweet out of concern for copyright, although the image is available online.

On Twitter, Willoughby addressed the issue of her connection to race pseudoscience, claiming her work is on "cognitive ability and genetics" which has nothing to do with race, and references Kathryn Paige Harden as a "progressive geneticist." Harden has promoted the career of Razib Khan, and the work of Willoughby. 

And the field of behavioral genetics is full of racist connections.

Willoughby tweeted the work of Linda Gottfredson to support her views. Linda Gottfredson is a gutter racist who could be heard ranking races by intelligence with "alleged cult leader" Stefan Molyneux.

Gregory Cochran's Twitter handle is included on Willoughby's Gottfredson tweet. Cochran is a co-author, with white nationalist Henry Harpending, of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence and a recipient of $600,000 dollars from Holocaust denier Ron Unz, although Unz later complained bitterly that Cochran did not respond to the grant by doing the kind of work Unz wanted. 

Willoughby appears to be friendly with Cochran, posting a link to a better image-quality version of a cartoon that Cochran shared on his blog while discussing the article he wrote for Quillette. The cartoon attacks evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin by showing a man with a dog sled team composed of poodles. The caption reads: "Richard Lewontin creates a dog sled team to test his theory that small genetic differences are irrelevant." 

Willoughby was defended by several online individuals including Jerry Coyne and Kiwi Farms apologists Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.

Emil Kirkegaard was not happy about Willoughby's "cancellation." 

The post-"cancellation" career of Emily Willoughby

In May of this year a Dutch website published an article titled What is the relationship between intelligence research and racism? (English version via Google Translate) which includes this passage (my highlight):

In early 2018, Richard Lynn (chairman of Pioneer Fund) and Gerhard Meisenberg (chairman of Mankind Quarterly) were editors of Intelligence. After an article in The Guardian, they left the editorial board (Guardian 2018). Richard Haier, Thomas Coyle, Timothy Bates, Heiner Rindermann, and Woodley of Menie remained (Intelligence 2018). Russel Warne was a staff member for a time. The organization behind the journal, ISIR, also includes Emily Willoughby, Roberto Colom, and Guy Madison (ISIR 2025). All are sympathetic to the ideas of race science. Haier consistently defends Arthur Jensen. Timothy Bates calls ethnicity “the least socially constructed variable in social science.” Colom, Rinderman, Warne, and Madison have published in Mankind Quarterly. Woodley of Menie was expelled from the VUB after his work (“Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications”) was cited in a terrorist manifesto. Willoughby defends Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.

I haven't seen evidence of Willoughby defending Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI), but she is on friendly terms with its co-author Gregory Cochran, and in their review of "A Troublesome Inheritance," she and Jonathan Kane mention Cochran twice and cite his other work (co-authored with Harpending) "The 10,000 Year Explosion."

From all appearances, Emily Willoughby has a thriving career. Since her "cancellation" in 2022:

• Willoughby has been a frequent participant in ISIR annual meetings.

• During her "cancellation" she shared on Jerry Coyne's website that for the annual ISIR meeting in 2022, when Kirkegaard was disinvited: "I WAS on the board that made the decision to redact Emil’s talk from the conference. I had no part in any sort of “private hotel room." Former neo-Nazi/Kirkegaard associate Eric Ahrens discussed that "private hotel room" recently. 

• However, Willoughby was also a Board member in 2024 when Emil Kirkegaard was seen participating in the annual meeting. Although probably not coincidentally, the ISIR did not post its annual meeting program on its website for that year, as it has done every other year since the beginning of the organization in 2000.

• In 2023, along with James Lee, Willoughby received a half a million dollars from the Institute of Mental Chronometry, an organization connected to the ISIR. This is Nazi legacy money, since the Institute of Mental Chronometry received at least $332,000 from the Pioneer Fund under its original name, "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences." (The money was given in the late 1980s, so would be worth about $800,000 today.)

• In 2024 Steven Pinker tweeted that she was a "rising star."

• Her dinosaur art was published by the Science Museum of Virginia in 2025.

• Willoughby has co-authored about twenty papers since 2022 as seen on Google Scholar. A frequent co-author is Alexandros Giannelis, mentioned in the Hope Not Hate investigative report called Superbaby Factory:

...Alexandros Giannelis, a behavioural geneticist at the University of Minnesota, is one of them. He was also described as a “one of our colleagues” by Anomaly in a call with our undercover reporter in November 2023. When the Nazi music website Midgård was hacked that same year, leaked customer data revealed that Giannelis made two purchases from its shop: Invasion, a book by Ian Stuart Donaldson, founder of the white supremacist group Blood and Honour. He also bought four Nazi propaganda posters. In an email to HOPE not hate, Giannelis confirmed that he had been a research consultant at Heliospect, and has since stepped down.

 Giannelis could be seen defending Willoughby on Twitter. 

• She sells dinosaur merch on Zazzle.

Yet in spite of all this, Willoughby managed to find the time to keep up with the secret parties who censored - and continue to censor - RationalWiki, and to share information from them with Jonathan Kane, who used that information to threaten additional litigation against the RationalMedia Foundation.

UPDATE

I posted a link from my RationalWiki user talk page to this Pinkerite blog post and immediately a RationalWiki moderator deleted the link, and then removed most of my user privileges. I asked why and was told because one of the names of a censored individual was in the link name. And then I was blocked from contributing to RationalWiki until January 6, 2026. 

Not that I had any plans to contribute, RationalWiki has been completely de-spined. It's the Gimp in Maynard and Zed's dungeon now.

UPDATE 2

I find that on RationalWiki I've been accused of lying by a RationalMedia Foundation Board member, in response to Jonathan Kane (aka "Tetraptryx.") I have scrupulously documented every single claim in this post, but since I am banned from RationalWiki, I can't respond there to the claim. 

Then someone from CancelWatch came to gloat about my ban. 

UPDATE 3

The claim was retracted, which I very much appreciate. I certainly mean no harm to the editors of RationalWiki - although I do think they need to be honest with themselves about the possibility of running a wiki that can contribute to the public good, while having their chain yanked whenever it looks like they might violate the terms of agreements made with a now-defunct organization. 

And of course I am very annoyed that my Charles Murray article was censored. To be fair other RationalWiki editors contributed so it's not exclusively mine, but in any case I think it's a good piece of work. Murray has been a public figure for decades and the article was carefully sourced and there was nothing tortious or defamatory about it.

The bad guys here are not (most of) the RationalWiki editors and RMF Board members, but the people who twisted the American legal system, via SLAPP lawsuits and threats of lawsuits, into a weapon to censor free speech.

UPDATE 4

When I asked Bongolian, one of the RationalWiki moderators why he revoked my rights, somebody else jumped in to say "you're all pathetic fascist boot-lickers" - and for that, Bongolian, without any evidence, falsely claimed that " Pinkerite has engaged in block evasion."

Of course since I'm already blocked, I have no way to defend myself there, which is just how Bongolian likes it, I suspect.