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.

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.

Juneteenth thoughts on the failures of the degenerate racist Trump administration

One of the best American presidents is Barack Obama, and this fact is what gave us degenerate freak Donald Trump. Because Trump and his loyal supporters are racists, and the reality of a good American president who is also Black - actually only half Black but America still operates on the one-drop rule - is what drives their white supremacist humiliation and thus their political project of revenge

Republicans are opposed to giving Americans public-funded healthcare, and so Obamacare, an impressive accomplishment considering what Obama was up against, is what they consider an example of Obama's inferiority as a president. But even Republicans can't deny that Obama killed bin Laden. The day Obama got bin Laden, I knew for sure he was going to be re-elected.

The Trump administration's degeneracy and racism were on full display this past week with the moronic White House lawn cage-match. 

I don't know if anybody connected to this administration has ever seen the film Idiocracy but those of us who have seen that 20-year old movie understand the connection, including one of the film's writers:

Comparisons have been made between the film and Trump's first presidency.[50][51][52] An article for Collider pointed out the ways in which Trump's positions echoed the political decisions of the characters in the film in areas such as science, business, entertainment, environment, healthcare, law enforcement, and politics.[53] Internet memes have spawned comparisons to Trump and characters in the film.[54][55][56]
The comparisons resurfaced when Trump became president again in 2025,[57] and became referenced again in 2026.[58]

And the rotten racist cherry on top of the cyanide-laced sundae was the moment when one of the wrestlers, on winning his wallow in the mud, yelled "Michelle Obama is a man."

This was the same week that Trump made a deal with Iran - called a capitulation by many - that was entirely to the benefit of Iran. Trump had already sealed his standing as worst US president of all time when he used his mob of morons to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But this week has sealed his future standing as one of the most hated men in American history. 

Trump is physically unwell and in the early-middle stage of dementia. And the degenerate Republican Party will deny that, publicly, as long as it possibly can. The Republican Party needs to be punished, so hard, at the polls, if we can prevent them from destroying our democracy and ending elections entirely.

Yes, I know J. D. Vance is a soulless weasel, perfectly suited to the degeneracy of this administration. But if Trump dies while in office, I will still join the rest of the world - excluding the idiocracy, who will never stop worshipping Trump - in the massive celebration. 

More complaints about Bari Weiss as a tool of the Trump administration

Vanity Fair has an article about the groveling sycophancy of the Bari Weiss-lead CBS.

Weiss' efforts to turn CBS into Fox News are doomed to fail - there is already a Fox News, completely obedient to the Trump administration. Weiss' efforts will only destroy CBS and make everybody hate her - even more.

The article provides examples of Weiss shamelessly sucking up to the Trump administration:

On Monday night of Tony Dokoupil’s first week as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Bari Weiss walked into the newsroom and asked to see the script. This was unusual—the network chief does not typically edit scripts directly—but Weiss was the new boss. After some objections from the show’s producers, she was given access and proceeded to add a few lines to a January 5 segment on the US military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro. Weiss’s edits, according to a former CBS producer, sought to cast President Donald Trump’s operation as a cunning maneuver to box out China, Russia, and Iran.

“Of course she writes it in the wrong place,” recalls the producer. The text was added to the teleprompter twice, leaving her new star anchor flummoxed, stumbling over his words for several excruciating seconds. “First day, big problems here,” he told the millions of viewers who’d tuned in.

“What a disaster,” says one former CBS News anchor. “Honestly, I would’ve fucking killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”

*** 

Hegseth dedicated much of the interview to praising President Donald Trump’s “bold and audacious” leadership. Dokoupil hardly pressed the secretary, at one point noting Hegseth’s earlier boast that Maduro “effed around and found out.”
“I was horrified,” recalls one staffer. “Because it was such a softball interview.” But one person seemed to be happy with the display: Kim Harvey, the executive producer, who seemed intent on impressing Weiss. Weiss had personally booked Hegseth, and Dokoupil was delivering the right blend of major access and deferential tone that she wanted for the new show.

The sucking up is so insane - but Bari Weiss has no shame and no ethics - she does whatever she needs to do to court the powerful. That has been the secret to her success for her entire career, including having a "sugar daddy" in Supreme Court-corrupter Harlan Crow.

The night after the start of the war in Iran, Dokoupil interviewed Douglas Murray, a conservative commentator known for his vigorous defenses of Israel. “We’ve started to see more opinion commentators coming in to talk about what they think about what’s going on versus showing and telling from reporters,” the CBS journalist says. Meanwhile, the daily editorial calls now often feature analysis from Aaron MacLean, a former adviser to Senator Tom Cotton who recently joined CBS News as an analyst. In an October piece for The Free Press, he called for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Douglas Murray is a white supremacist, and named by Weiss herself as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web. The Current Affairs review  of one of his books discusses his awfulness:

...Murray’s work is worth examining not just because it is bad, but because, as earlier critics of his work have noted, he packages white supremacist and xenophobic ideas in a way that makes them more palatable to the mainstream. His work has been called “gentrified xenophobia” because it shows fear and disgust toward immigrants, but tries to make the position seem like common sense and fit for discussion in polite society. Indeed, The War on the West concludes with a full-throated defense of “white culture” and a case that non-white people are in various ways inferior. But Murray’s book is published by HarperCollins, not a neo-Nazi group, and he publishes in mainstream outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Spectator. Despite the laziness of his thinking, Murray insidiously spreads views that should be consigned to the fringes of public discourse.

Which makes him a perfect fit for the Bari Weiss network.

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?

Alex Jones is a creature of Bari Weiss' Intellectual Dark Web

Bari Weiss homage to herself
---------------------------------

The article by Bari Weiss, published when she was still at the New York Times, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, was an introduction to the network of far-right grifters and clowns who have besieged us ever since - aided and abetted by mainstream media like the New York Times.

And Weiss herself has turned out to be the queen of the far-right clowns and grifters of the Intellectual Dark Web, ascending to lead CBS in order to aid and abet the evil that is the Trump administration.

One of the clowns mentioned in that foundational article by Weiss was Alex Jones:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

Pinker may be on the opposite end of the Intellectual Dark Web spectrum from Jones, but it's clear that Weiss considers them all part of the same spectrum.

The spectrum of people who lack a conscience, I would say.

But Jones is particularly evil, and second only to Trump in his ability to lead idiots, psychos and freaks into doing horrible things, most especially to attack the poor grieving parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook.

So it is a wonderful thing that the people who own The Onion have made the evil Jones its target, buying what was left of Jones' Info Wars after Jones was sued almost to oblivion by those same parents he attacked.

It's shocking still, that Jones was able to perpetrate his pure evil for as long as he did, and only defamation lawsuits were able to partially stop him - although it appears that Jones has started up again:

There is an excellent article in the Ringer called The Most Inspiring Media Story of the Year about the Onion take-over of the Jones empire of pure evil:

In December 2012, the 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza murdered 26 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.1 By the following April, Jones was spreading the narrative that this event—which remains the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history—was a hoax, perpetrated by the government to advance a gun-control agenda. Jones pushed the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory for years, milking it for attention and ratings. His listeners, hopped up on his claims that the shootings were staged by actors who were hired by the anti-gun lobby, tormented, stalked, and harassed the bereaved parents of the dead first graders. One conspiracy theorist claimed to have urinated on the grave of a 7-year-old murdered in the attack; parents received letters from people threatening to dig up their children’s coffins to prove they were empty. Meanwhile, Alex Jones funneled money to help fund January 6.

The Sandy Hook parents sued Jones, and finally, in 2022, a court ordered him to pay $1.4 billion in damages for defamation and for the infliction of emotional distress. In 2025, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, forcing the liquidation of Infowars and its assets to help cover Jones’s enormous debts.

And now, with the support of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has agreed to a deal to turn Infowars into a parody website, making fun of precisely the kind of spittle-flecked conspiracy bellowing, interspersed with ad reads for dubious muscle powders, that Jones used to amass his fortune. The deal still has to be approved by a Texas judge, which is admittedly a terrifying sentence; nevertheless, and I’m speaking objectively, this is clearly one of the greatest things that has ever happened in the history of the world. 

The world is finally pushing back against the evil that has been hatched by the Intellectual Dark Web, including the full spectrum, from Steven Pinker to Alex Jones.

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.

It's time for the 25th Amendment and time to vote every Republican out of office

But we won't use the 25th Amendment, because even though it is clear that Trump is a demented, Depends-wearing old psychopathic RACIST the Republican Party will not ever get rid of him because MOST REPUBLICANS ARE RACIST.

The Republican Party has destroyed the legacy of Lincoln. It should be disbanded and if not then every Republican should be VOTED OUT OF OFFICE.

Trump shares video with racist clip depicting Obamas as apes

US President Donald Trump has shared a video on social media which included a racist clip depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. 

 

The clip - set to the song "the Lion Sleeps Tonight" - was at the end of a 62-second video containing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. 

 

Republican Senator Tim Scott - who is black - called for the president to remove the post, describing it as "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House". 

 

The White House defended the clip as an "internet meme video" and told critics to "stop the fake outrage".

Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web, Race Science and the Jeffrey Epstein files

Well that didn't last long. I called Claire Lehmann the voice of reason last month, but now, the woman who won the International Society for Intelligence Research's Constance Holden journalism award is ho-humming her way through one of the biggest stories of the year, if not the decade.

Claire Lehmann has a history of not caring if someone is pro-pedophilia as can be seen in her praise of Camille Paglia, who loves pedophilia so much she bascally declared it one of the pillars of Western Civilization.

Lehmann's circle of ghouls and grifters jumped in to agree with her about the lack of entertainment value from the Epstein files.

So who are these people who find underage rape by famous men so terribly tiresome?

Well there's Cathy Young, who mostly doesn't find underage rape interesting but she found it absolutely fascinating when a creepy guy published his ex-girlfriend's personal information in order to harm her as much as possible. Young seems to have a real fondness for Eron Gjoni, to the point where she appears to be trying to rehabilitate him, even though at the same time she got him to admit that he had no regrets about his grotesque and indefensible invasion of privacy.

I am convinced that Young has a serious case of internalized misogyny, right along with Lehmann, Paglia and Young's based Gamergate comrade, Christina Hoff Sommers, which is why, I believe, Young gets the maximum enjoyment out of seeing women, especially young women, in emotional pain.

She's also chummy with professional racist Razib Khan.

I've also mentioned Damon Linker on this blog. He's a thinktank creature who was mad that Trump was brought to justice, if only temporarily a few years ago. He's written for Lehmann's own gutter racist publication Quillette and signed the Harper's letter with the rest of the grifters and race pseudoscience promoters.

But let's not forget Matt Taibbi, who also finds stories about rape such a chore. Which is surprising, because apparently Taibbi used to find tales of rape hysterically funny and entertaining enough to write about in detail. 

Taibbi is part of Lehmann's far-right racist gang these days, which, considering all the misogyny in this crowd, is a perfect fit.

To most everybody's amazement, Lehmann was yeeted from X of all places, apparently for being bored with underaged-rape. Lehmann can be seen on Linked In complaining about it.

I find it amazing, all the people whose real names and jobs are displayed on Linked In, going public with their awfulness by supporting a gutter racist like Claire Lehmann. 

The suspension did not last long, and Lehmann is back on X now, which is the right-wing safe space, most of the time, and so a perfect home for her.

But what about Steven Pinker and Jeffrey Epstein?

I will be writing about that soon.

Steven Colbert at his best

 His entire monologue on January 26 was devoted to the execution of Alex Pretti by Trump thugs.

But of course it isn't only one demented old rapist who has caused all this misery and death. The entire Republican Party has enabled the Trump monstrosity every single step of the way. 

The Republican Party must be punished for a generation to keep it from doing fascism again any time soon.

Personally I think the Republican Party has disgraced the memory of Abraham Lincoln so badly, it should disband in shame. But they have no shame.

Jimmy Kimmel's monologue was also very good, and I especially liked his reference to the necessity of the 25th Amendment.

Both monologues ran the video of Pretti delivering a eulogy for a recently deceased veteran, praising the vet for making a sacrifice for freedom. "Today we remember that freedom is not free."

We should all memorize that speech.

And then vote every single Republican out of office.