Razib Khan and the curious Insitome Institute part 2

Razib Khan & Spencer Wells.
Observe Wells ignoring Khan's well-known, decades-long
career as a promoter of race pseudo-science.

Continued from part 1

So Razib Khan, in spite of his long-term involvement in race pseudo-science, has found support for his career from the Insitome Institute. 

Khan is their "Director of Scientific Content."

Reminds me of the days when "celebrity intellectual" Steven Pinker supported the career of Razib Khan, going so far as to use Khan to respond to a negative review of The Better Angels of Our Nature in the New Yorker. Which was a seriously unequal match in terms of literary ability alone - Razib Khan vs the New Yorker. 

Pinker also promoted the career of the blatantly racist Steve Sailer, before dropping him, at least in public.

Khan and Sailer are buddies. Here we see Sailer, in the infamously racist VDARE, promoting Khan's review of "Facing Reality".

In 2019, Donor's Trust, a funding vehicle for right-wing plutocrats like Koch and the Mercers, gave over $1.5 million to the VDARE Foundation in 2019, according to tax records obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Razib Khan has been associated with VDARE for at least twenty years, and he is mentioned there often by Steve Sailer and especially too-racist-for National Review John Derbyshire. Derbyshire described Khan as "my old friend" in December 2019 and gives some insight into the Khan-Sailer relationship:

Blog post of the week comes from my old friend Razib Khan at the Gene Expression website. Razib is a close competitor with Steve Sailer for the title Smartest Gink I Know. Indeed, it was at Steve's original HBD listserv twenty years ago that I first got acquainted with Razib.

"HBD" stands for "Human Bio-Diversity" and is a code word for anti-Black racism.

So who are Razib Khan's new friends at the Insitome Institute think tank?

The Team consists of Spencer Wells, Ph.D; Gareth Highnam, Ph.D; and Khan. 

Wells has worked for National Geographic and is on the record saying things like:

WHEN ASKED about the question of race, Wells’s answer was unequivocal. “Racism is not only socially divisive, but also scientifically incorrect. We are all descendants of people who lived in Africa recently,” he says. “We are all Africans under the skin.” The kinds of differences that people notice, such as skin pigmentation, limb length, or other adaptations are “basically surface features that have been selected for in the environment. When you peer beneath the surface at the underlying level of genetic variation, we are all much more similar than we appear to be. There are no clear, sharp delineations.”

So Wells believes the exact opposite of what Razib Khan believes.

Meanwhile Gareth Highnam doesn't have much to say about race in the media, although I did notice him liking a tweet by Amy Harmon, that was critical of hereditarian Nicholas Wade back in 2014. 

Needless to say, Khan is a fan of Wade because of his hereditarian beliefs.

Also, Highnam does give a shit about the World Health Organization, at least in 2018.

So that's the Team. There is also a Board of Directors which consists of Spencer Wells and Carlos D. Bustamante, Ph.D. 

Everybody has a Ph.D except Khan, who has two Bachelors of Science degrees, in Biochemistry and Biology, according to his Wikipedia page, as well as some graduate work. Although Khan is described as a "geneticist" on the Insitome site and many other places, his Wiki page describes him, more accurately as a "writer in population genetics and consumer genomics."

Bustamante is interviewed in Technology Review (my highlight):

Many genetic researchers have long argued that race has no basis in science. But the debate doesn’t seem to go away. 

 

In a global context there is no model of three, or five, or even 10 human races. There is a broad continuum of genetic variation that is structured, and there are pockets of isolated populations. Three, five, or 10 human races is just not an accurate model; it is far more of a continuum model.

Humans are a beautifully diverse species both phenotypically and genetically. This is very classic population genetics. If I walk from Cape Horn all the way to the top of Finland, every village looks like the village next to it, but at the extremes people are different.

But as a population geneticist?

I don’t find race a meaningful way to characterize people.

In 2017 Razib Khan published an article in Skeptic, founded by hereditarian (and creep) Michael Shermer. It's co-written with "biosocial criminologist" and frequent Quillette contributor Brian Boutwell and titled "Is race a useful concept."  It ends this way (my highlight):

Here is perhaps the most important point and one on which we will end. Injecting bluster, rhetoric, and anger around this topic is an entirely pointless exercise. We have the tools necessary to answer this question: Are racial classifications meaningful? The answer is "yes."

So Bustamante believes the exact opposite of what Khan believes. 

And Bustamante knows exactly who Khan is because in February of this year he blocked someone on Twitter for daring to ask about Razib Khan's connections to Ron Unz and Richard Spencer.

Khan, for his part, is happy to use Bustamante's much more impressive attainments to legitimize his work.

So what is going on here? Khan is the only non-Ph.D at the Insitome Institute and his beliefs are the opposite of the others associated with the Institute. He's not really a geneticist, he's a writer, and he's not even a good writer. 

In June of this year Khan made a big discovery, which he announced in the science magazine Nautilus: The Human Family Tree, It Turns Out, Is Complicated.

Adam Rutherford has been talking about this topic for years. And Rutherford is a much better writer than Khan.

Let's start with the last sentence of the Nautilus piece: 

The first 20 years of this century have been the most exciting decades of paleoanthropology since the emergence of the field, in large part due to the rise of paleogenetics. I see no reason to assume that wave has crested. I for one, can’t wait to continue constantly updating my priors on humankind as the 2020’s unfold.

The last sentence is awkward: I for one, can't wait to continue constantly updating my priors on humankind as the 2020s unfold. But even more awkward is that his priors are not mentioned anywhere else in the article - Khan never tells us what his prior beliefs are. I guess we are supposed to assume they aligned with the orthodoxy of all science guys in the year 2000, since for most of the article he uses the first person plural:

Finally, we need to acknowledge that our long-standing and intimate interest in Neanderthals may have misled us when it came to Denisovans. Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, the continent with the longest and most well-funded tradition in archaeology. But it turns out they may not be typical “archaic” humans. The best genetic work indicates that Denisovans were not one homogeneous lineage, as seems to have been the case with Neanderthals, but a diverse group that were strikingly differentiated.17 The Denisovan ancestry in modern populations varies considerably in relatedness to the genome sequences from Denisova Cave. It is clear that the Denisovan ancestry in Papuans is very different from the Siberian Denisovan sequences. The most geographically distant Denisovan groups, those in Siberia and those from on the far edge of Southeast Asia into Wallacea, were likely far more genetically different from each other than Khoisan are from the rest of humanity. Depending on the assumptions you set your “molecular clock” with, the most distant Denisovan lineages probably separated into distinct populations from each other 200,000 to 400,000 years before their extinction.

He seems to be implying that "we" have somehow refused to acknowledge that our "long-standing" interest in Neanderthals has misled us about Denisovans. Denisovans were discovered in 2010 and Neanderthals were identified as such in the mid-1800s. So I don't see how anybody was "misled" - we've just known about Neanderthals a century and a half longer than Denisovans. 

Is there some contingent of scientists who are refusing to acknowledge the significance of Denisovans compared to Neanderthals? (Maybe some dastardly "woke" scientists?)

If there are, Khan doesn't say who they are. And I absolutely cannot figure out what he thinks is the significance of "Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, the continent with the longest and most well-funded tradition in archeology." Nothing in the rest of the paragraph explains why it matters where Neanderthals were discovered.  

The point he appears to be making with the paragraph is that Denisovans had a wider range than Neanderthals, but it's confusing since the fact that Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, and that Europe is the continent with the "most well-funded tradition in archeology" do not contribute to the issue of difference in ranges. 

This article was originally posted on Khan's "Unsupervised Learning" blog. But Khan has a Wikipedia page that describes him as a writer. He presumably gets paid to write. And parts of Unsupervised Learning are behind a paywall. Did Nautilus have any editors look at this when they decided to reprint it? Or did they just figure, well, Khan uses big science-y words and footnotes so that's good enough? I hope they didn't pay him for this rambling mess.

In Khan's review of "Facing Reality", discussed in Part 1, he accuses the "regnant culture" of refusing to "connect the dots" about Black people. But he never says explicitly what it would mean to connect the dots. It's hard to tell if this vagueness is intentional or not. It probably is, but on the other hand, he really is a terrible writer.

So he's not a geneticist; not a Ph.D; he believes the exact opposite of what the other people at the Insitome Institute believe about race; and he's not even a good writer. 

And on top of that he has a career checkered with connections to horrible racists and has an obnoxious right-wing personality on social media and can't even restrain himself from publicly disparaging one of the Institute's partners.

Why would the Insitome Institute want him?

Adam Rutherford, who is only two years older than Khan, is more their kind of guy: an actual geneticist - with a Ph.D in genetics - an opponent of race pseudo-science and a great writer as well as a charismatic and funny presenter. I realize the Insitome Institute probably couldn't afford Adam Rutherford and anyway he's busy with his own projects, but there is surely a range of science writers between Razib Khan and Adam Rutherford, so that the Insitome Institute could have found someone better qualified and less likely to embarrass them.

So why have Khan? I have some theories. Razib Khan must want a career as a legitimate science explainer, not as a sleazy race pseudo-science promoter, aiding and abetting disgusting racists like Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire and Charles Murray. I could be wrong of course. It's possible Khan is such a devoted racist he can't image ever forsaking his career of race-mongering. But I think it's about the money.

I think it's likely that he's been getting paid through the wingnut welfare system for years, like so many people associated with the IDW and Quillette. We know Ron Unz gave Khan a total of $31,000 as a "research fellow." And we've seen how Koch and other right-wing plutocrats will throw big money even at a blatantly racist organization like VDARE - 1.5 million dollars in one year. Who knows how much they might give to Quillette or other right-wing race-mongers who maintain even a thin veneer of respectability? 

Khan has been associated with VDARE, Unz and Taki's magazine - all founded by wealthy racist kooks - for years. It's hard to establish a career as a science writer. It's a competitive field and neither Khan's educational background nor his literary abilities are impressive. Getting a boost from wingnut welfare is likely his only option to have a career as a writer. 

So maybe one of Khan's sugar daddies offered the Insitome Institute money to take him on, to help white-wash Khan's career, in expectation Khan will continue to further the Koch/Mercer/VDARE cause of making "scientific" racism acceptable.

This is purely speculation of course, but it seems far more plausible to me than a scenario in which an organization of Ph.Ds, opposed to race pseudo-science, would freely choose Razib Khan of all people to be their Director of Scientific Content.

Part 3: blocked by Spencer Wells

Razib Khan and the curious Insitome Institute part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a drama queen:

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

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

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

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

Lehmann joined the comments section of Khan's review.

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

But back to the lies of Razib Khan. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Shermer, sleazy lying grifter

Michael Shermer reminds us today how well-aligned he and many other members of the "Intellectual Dark Web" are with the Republican Party. It was already plain enough with Shermer's place on the board of advisors of far right-leaning FAIR.

But he decided to underline the fact by promoting a sleazy lie about the 1619 project. The lie was caught by Nikole Hannah-Jones herself. Note Hannah-Jones' use of the word "grifting" which is the perfect description for Michael Shermer. Well, that and "sleazebag."

Although Shermer has a lower profile than some members of the IDW, he may well be the sleaziest member of the IDW, as I observed over two years ago.

Shermer is willing to viciously attack others on behalf of Steven Pinker, thus allowing Pinker to maintain his facade of being a mild-mannered reasonable liberal good guy. Like the time Shermer called a critic of Pinker, who had a very valid beef with Pinker, a "cockroach."

As if this sleaziness is not enough, Shermer is also a big fan of pedophilia-apologist Camille Paglia.

This gives you some idea of Shermer's values - he and Paglia are seen here promoting right-wing hysteria about Foucault because of "post-structuralism" while ignoring Foucault's defense of pedophilia,  which, as has recently been noted, was not merely academic. 

Paglia is a long-time defender of pedophilia, as discussed recently on Pinkerite.

Shermer is apparently not a big fan of consent himself, according to Buzzfeed. As the late James Randi said, in the same BuzzFeed article:

“Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion — I do know that,” Randi told me. “I have told him that if I get many more complaints from people I have reason to believe, that I am going to have to limit his attendance at the conference.

Speaking of reactionary old white men, I had to laugh at Quillette showing its true colors for potential advertisers which I came across recently:

Quillette Podcast compliments the online magazine with audio interviews and discussions conducted by its staff editors Toby Young (UK) and Jonathan Kay (North America).

Guests have included:
- Sir Roger Scruton
- Tyler Cowen
- Michael Shermer
- Steven Pinker
- Jordan Peterson

Every single person mentioned in this promotional copy including staff editors Young and Kay is a creepy old reactionary white man. That's Quillette for you in a nutshell.

Charles Murray blows it all up

The main argument - possibly the only argument made by promoters of race pseudo-science - against the claim they are racists is this: they can't be racist because although they believe Black people are innately more stupid & criminal as a group, they believe it is wrong to discriminate against individuals. 

Charles Murray just blew it all up. In the screen cap above Murray makes the argument that it's perfectly fine to discriminate against individuals in a job application scenario if they have a Black-sounding name.

Not only is this racist, it's the legal definition of discrimination.

If permissible discrimination on the basis of race is not systemic racism, then nothing is. Which is exactly Murray's goal - to deny the existence of systemic racism.

Denial of systemic racism is of course the leading race pseudo-science tactic: deny the 400-year-long system of immiseration in the United States, perpetrated against enslaved people and their descendants, a system that is still active now.

The goal is to blame the victims by saying their own genetics are at fault, not systemic racism. 

Charles Murray is awful, but it must never be forgotten that his career of denying systemic racism and promoting race pseudo-science has always been propped up by right-wing plutocrats like William H. Hammett and Charles Koch, and promoted by journalistic hacks like Andrew Sullivan.

If Murray and his enablers could succeed in making discrimination on the basis of ethnicity legal again through race pseudo-science, the result would be continuing immiseration and a vicious cycle: Black people have been systematically immiserated for 400 years, and as a result they have failed to thrive. Take that failure to thrive, use it to justify further immiseration by denying Black people equal job opportunities.

And it's not that far-fetched - we've already seen the influence of race pseudo-science in discrimination against Black football players in injury compensation.

The goal of Murray and his enablers: to maintain a permanent underclass on the basis of race. They are thoroughly evil human beings.

Two charts demonstrating how far-right is the board of advisors of FAIR

When Christopher Rufo announced the creation of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, he claimed it was a coalition of liberals, moderates and conservatives and he illustrated this claim with an image of the FAIR board of advisors.

As you might expect from a cynical, right-wing operative who takes money from Charles Koch, this claim was a big fat lie. The board was very right-leaning then, and it's only become more right-leaning ever since.

Having followed the antics of the Intellectual Dark Web for several years now, I recognized at a glance that the board was packed with members of the Intellectual Dark Web, Quillette authors and other promoters of race pseudo-science, and a little research proved that all current members of the board but one have a connection to at least one right-wing cause or organization.

Then recently, the New Yorker published an article that made it clear that Rufo is probably the Kochtopus flunky of the year, thanks to his cynical and successful efforts to build up the previously obscure "critical race theory" into a Republican target of hatred and hysteria.

New York Magazine also ran a critique of Rufo:

Rufo’s role is clear. He takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. “The goal,” he tweeted, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” In an interview with the Post, he said the tweet described an “obvious” approach: “If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign.”

I think it's likely FAIR itself is funded by Koch, considering how many Koch employees are on the board, and also because the one issue that unites the FAIR board of advisors is opposition to critical race theory, as this table demonstrates.

I think it's likely that you don't get on the board of advisors of FAIR unless you vow your undying opposition to critical race theory, but in this table I only included those board members who are on the public record opposing CRT - but I'd be willing to bet that Ajouz, Davis, Hill, Keig and Kors just haven't gotten around to discussing CRT on social media, or I missed their public declarations somehow.

Alexander Lloyd makes clear how important Critical Race Theory hysteria was in his decision to join the FAIR board of advisors.

The closest FAIR has to a liberal is Lisa Feldsher, who is the only board member not in the table. Feldsher does not have much social media presence, but she's not exactly what you would call a flaming progressive. Her political issues are anti-Semitism and the standard right-wing trope, if liberals and Hollywood really cared about social justice they would solve problems even in places where they have no power to make changes while at the same time implying that Islam is the main source of homophobic violence in the world.

I created a second chart, which is less granular than the table. In this pie chart I matched each FAIR board member with one affiliation. Since this web site is devoted to criticizing the IDW, if they are a named member of the IDW, they are counted as IDW even if they have several other affiliations. 

The next tier is a Koch organization affiliation, then a Quillette byline, then a connection to a right-wing organization like The Federalist or they are known for right-wing positions, like Megyn Kelly, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan. 

Finally if they have no other affiliations (that I have discovered yet), they are counted as anti-CRT. Lisa Feldsher is counted as "Other" although I'd bet serious money she also is opposed to CRT.

The data make it inescapably clear, that FAIR is a far-right organization, judging by its board of advisors.

FAIR update ~ a lawsuit, the New Yorker, Megyn Kelly & new members

FAIR has had a fair amount of churn in its board of advisors since the organization was founded in March, so it's no surprise the board of advisors has changed again since we last looked. 

The board started out with a mere 31 members, but now has 39 and it has consistently added right-wingers to the board, in spite of Christopher Rufo's lie that the organization represents all points on the political spectrum.

But before we review the new board there's headline news in FAIR world. 

To the surprise of nobody paying attention to the legalistic ambitions of FAIR, a member of the board of advisors, Maud Maron, has instigated a lawsuit against the Legal Aid Society for calling her a racist. The Society calls the suit "...a frivolous and misguided attempt to use litigation to harass a nonprofit employer and its employees who have spent their careers advancing social justice causes."

The New Yorker did a profile of Christopher Rufo, the Koch-funded Trump supporter, called How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory. From the article:

As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. “We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. “ ‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote.

Absolutely cynical, which is what anybody who knows anything about this pack of grifters, race pseudo-science promoters and Trump supporters would expect.

Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly was in the news recently for attempting to downplay the January 6 insurrection:

Conservative journalist and pundit Megyn Kelly is downplaying the seriousness of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying national media covering the insurrection that day made the incident out to be worse than it actually was.

"A faction turned," Kelly said during a recent episode of her podcast of the people who gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest the congressional certification of President Biden's Electoral College victory. "But there's no question the media represented this as so much worse than it actually was."

Kelly is the perfect representative of the FAIR board of advisors: conservative and full of shit.

So there are four new members of the board, since last check-in and all four are what you'd expect: right-wingers and "critical race theory" grifters: Yiatlin Chu, Angel Eduardo, Zander Keig and Alan Charles Kors. More details about each below.

FAIR seems to be the Intellectual Dark Web 2.0, with an anti-critical race theory agenda in perfect harmony with the Republican Party.

1. Michael Ajouz - Republican, donated to Romney and Ted Cruz.

2. Ayyan Hirsi Ali - right-wing anti-Muslim and on the Koch payroll via the American Enterprise Institute. Named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

3. Peter Boghossian -  recently attacked Pinkerite's founder, has the possible distinction of appearing as a guest more than anybody else on racist Stephan Molyneux's show. Quillette author. Business partner of Christian nationalist right-wing extremist Michael O'Fallon.

4. Liang-Fang Chao - "Computer Scientist" - Critical Race Theory alarmist grifter.

5. Melissa Chen - Quillette supporter.  Writer for conservative The Spectator, Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders, which has, on its board of directors - inevitably - Steven Pinker.

6. Yiatlin Chu [new] - Critical Race Theory alarmist grifter and pal of Maud Maron.

7. Daryl Davis - Trump supporter.  Not a Trump supporter, I was wrong about that. It's disturbing that Davis has lent his legitimately good-guy persona to FAIR which is full of rightwingers and race pseudoscience supporters.

8. Angel Eduardo [new]  - fan of free speech grifters, promoter of "cancel culture" panic, published in Areo, Quillette's twin sister. Anti Critical Race Theory.

9. Lisa Feldsher - runs a PR firm with many corporate clients. Fake liberal.

10. Niall Ferguson -  husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and right-wing creep, who was involved in a controversy in which he targeted a liberal student, as discussed by Krugman in 2018. Employee of Koch through AEI.

11. Kmele Foster - right-wing, anti Black Lives Matter, on the advisory council of the Koch-funded FIRE.

12. Tim van Gelder - "entrepreneur, philosopher" and fan of right-wing, Koch-funded free speech grifter  Andrew Doyle, a former member of the FAIR board of advisors

13. Samantha Harris - contributor at the Federalist Society, Senior Fellow at the Koch-funded FIRE. Connected to Maud Maron somehow. Author at Quillette. Lawyer of Joshua T. Katz, member of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

14. Jason D. Hill - self-declared conservative, Ayn Rand fan and author at the far-right Federalist. Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, founded by right-wing extremist David Horowitz.

15. Nathan Hoffman - Republican operative working against the public school system.

16. Coleman Hughes - Koch employee via City Journal, Quillette author, apologist for race science.

17. Inaya Folarin Iman - Founder and Director of anti-Black Lives Matter The Equiano Project and along with right-wing IDW member Douglas Murray is a director the Free Speech Union, founded by eugenics fan and Quillette editor Toby Young.

18. Zaid Jilani - former left-winger and author at Quillette.

19. Zander Keig [new] - Conservative.

20. Megyn Kelly - known for saying Santa Claus and Jesus were white when she was a star at Fox.

21. Alan Charles Kors [new] - co-founder of the Koch-funded FIRE.

22. Alexander Lloyd - fan of Quillette and members of the IDW, Bitcoin bro.

23. Glenn Loury - right-wing, Quillette author, Koch-funded.

24. Maud Maron -  called a racist by the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, then sued them for it.

25. John McWhorter - author at Quillette, supported by Koch via AEI and City Journal.

26. Douglas Murray - named member of the IDW and according to Wikipedia: His views and ideology have been linked to far-right political ideologies by a number of academic[10]and journalistic[11] sources. He has also been accused of promoting far-right conspiracy theories,[12][13][14] and of being Islamophobic.[15]

27. Steven Pinker. Of course.

28. Robert Pondescio -  author at The Federalist, fan of the work of Charles Murray, senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at right-wing think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Senior fellow of the Koch-funded AEI.

29. Wilfred Reilly - conservative author at far-right Regnery Publishing - founder William H. Regnery died recently.

30. Ian Rowe - Koch employee via AEI.

31. Christopher Rufo - rabidly pro-Trump, Koch employee via City Journal. Rufo does not have a byline in Quillette, but predictably, Quillette adores him.

32. Michael Shermer - named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, doesn't believe systemic racism exists, critical race theory alarmist and creep.

33. Abigail Shrier - Quillette author, rabidly anti-trans.

34. Erec Smith - Quillette author and co-founder of right-wing organization Free Black Thought along with Charles Murray apologist Michael DC Bowen and Jason Littlefield, author at Quillette's twin Areo and opponent of critical race theory. Fun fact: Smith, Littlefield and Zander Keig are all in business together in an organization called Empowered Pathways.

35. Eli Steele - Quillette author, Koch employee via City Journal.

36. Andrew Sullivan - right-winger, promoted The Bell Curve, race science promoter.

37. Bari Weiss - right-winger, promoter of the Intellectual Dark Web and pals with same.

38. Thomas Chatterton Williams - chateau bouncer, Koch employee via AEI

39. Kenny Xu - Development Officer at Young America's Foundation a right-wing youth organization. Author at the Federalist and the Daily Signal. Trump supporter.

Is Eric Weinstein a crackpot?

 Just last month I called Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying crackpots, and now thanks to this Washington Post article I discovered this substack asking if Eric Weinstein is a crackpot.

Is Eric Weinstein—unofficial founder of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” money manager for eccentric billionaire Peter Thiel, and frequent guest on the Joe Rogan show and other power podcasts, where he’s gained a reputation for brilliance—a crackpot?

Times are tough for the Intellectual Dark Web these days.

Timothy Nguyen explains what a puffed-up, grifting clown Eric Weinstein is.

Trump's Reichstag moment - Pinkerite called it in April 2020

According to a book on the Trump presidency called "I Alone Can Fix It" about to be released:

In the days leading up to January 6, Leonnig and Rucker write, (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark) Milley was worried about Trump's call to action. "Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military."

Milley viewed Trump as "the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose," the authors write, and he saw parallels between Adolf Hitler's rhetoric as a victim and savior and Trump's false claims of election fraud.

"This is a Reichstag moment," Milley told aides, according to the book. "The gospel of the Führer."

Ahead of a November pro-Trump "Million MAGA March" to protest the election results, Milley told aides he feared it "could be the modern American equivalent of 'brownshirts in the streets,'" referring to the pro-Nazi militia that fueled Hitler's rise to power. 

Pinkerite was sounding the alarm about Trump's re-election campaign as early as July 2019, especially with the Republican party's connection to grifter and Quillette team member Andy Ngo and his lawyer, Republican committee woman Harmeet K. Dhillon but I didn't use the term "Reichstag fire" in reference to Trump until April 2020.

On his show yesterday, Colbert referred to Trump, flat-out, as a "fascist." Nobody except MAGA freaks miss Trump, but there is nothing quite like Trump to bring out Colbert's comedic genius.

Right-wing race-monger Razib Khan testifies: getting cancelled is no big deal

I had the misfortune of thinking about the race-obsessed, history-denying, right-wing Razib Khan recently because it came to my attention that "The New Liberals" - funding source unknown - had promoted Khan by interviewing him for its podcast. 

The audio clip included with the promotional tweet expresses to perfection what an utter asshole Khan is, especially on the issue of race. 

Khan's voice is as obnoxious as his politics so I have transcribed the audio for you, dear Pinkerite reader, but I won't pretend it wasn't an awful experience:

Ultimately like I know people in Academia who talk about like systemic racism and prejudice and all this stuff, I just say like it's really easy, all you need to do is minorities that you think should have these jobs, you guys just need to like draw straws and one out of five of you resign and free up the positions, hire somebody of color, and we're all good, right, it's a simple thing to do, but they never do it, do they? They don't make the hard decision, I told an acquaintance of mine who wanted to talk to me about racism and I just got sick of it, and I was just like, well what you need to do is give your son's inheritance to a Black family. If you're talking about wealth and equality right now, he needs to be poor, and make his own way, and they need to have money, so just do it. And the person flipped out at me. Cause they just wanted to talk. And I'm just not super interested in talking. I am a non-white person. I don't need to be talked to about racism all the time. It's not interesting to me.

Listening to that clip... I didn't think I could have a lower opinion of Khan, but wow, those supremely obnoxious words plus that obnoxious voice is a powerful combination.

Talking about racism isn't interesting to him, claims Razib Khan, and he denies the very existence of systemic racism, but he has been obsessed with race and genetics, for a long time. 

You have to wonder what possible acquaintance of Khan's, who isn't already a flaming race-obsessed rightwing stooge, would try to talk to Khan about race. 

I checked out Khan's substack to see if he is still obsessed with race, and of course he is. It seems to be the one thing he cares about more than anything else in the world. 

But I found something worthwhile on Khan's blog. I found Khan testifying that getting "cancelled" is absolutely no big deal. 

Of course I also had to endure Khan's prose, which is always awful, as well as his bloated self-regard.

Testify, race-monger:

Six years on, I cannot think of a single person I value or a single place I’ve wanted to be that I no longer have access to because the New York Times deemed me beyond the pale. There are a boatload of fascinating, principled people in America and beyond who don’t care who the 21st-century New York Times thinks is pure enough. I’ve recorded podcasts with dozens of them. Thousands more give me their emails and pay me good money to tell them data-backed stories about the history of the human race on Substack.

I doubt the people who pay Khan good money do it for the alleged "data-backed stories about the history of the human race" but rather, for Khan's right-wing race-mongering. 

While reading, I was also reminded of another facet of Khan's personality, his cowardice, when he refers to Jamelle Bouie without naming him:

Cathy Young is buddies with Khan & a shitty person

It’s a funny commentary on our times that one of the people they say was most rabid behind the scenes about protecting the readership of The New York Times from a dangerous mind like mine, has since joined The New York Times. Does America feel safe now, buddy?

There's a reason the people who hire Khan are generally right-wing extremists like the publishers of the racist Taki's Magazine - they don't care about literary qualities, they care that he's conservative and promotes race pseudo-science. 

But like people on the Koch dole, like the equally obnoxious Cathy Young (Khan's buddy), they imagine they have careers because of their intellectual and literary excellence.

But back to Khan's testimony. I was recently talking about Jamelle Bouie's role in keeping Khan off the NYTimes and my small part it in. So it's good to know that, in spite of the constant whining about cancel culture, in every conceivable media outlet, by Khan's friends like Steven Pinker and Pinker's toady Jerry Coyne, an enterprising right-wing race-monger can still make a good living saying supremely stupid, obnoxious things, even without the imprimatur of the New York Times. As Bari Weiss can surely tell you.

I wish Khan would get the word out to the other members of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex, that getting cancelled is no big deal because Angel Eduardo was just being promoted by The New "Liberals" for whining about it.

It seems that Eduardo is the latest edition to the the right-winger-packed Board of Advisors of FAIR. 

I will have plenty to say about that clown car soon.

American Renaissance still loves Claire Lehmann's Quillette

Which makes perfect sense, as Quillette has always been a promoter of race pseudo-science, very much like American Renaissance, per the Southern Poverty Law Center (my highlight):

Founded by Jared Taylor in 1990, the New Century Foundation is a self-styled think tank that promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites — although in hifalutin language that avoids open racial slurs and attempts to portray itself as serious scholarship. It is best known for its American Renaissance magazine and website, which regularly feature proponents of eugenics and blatant anti-black racists. The foundation also sponsors American Renaissance conferences every other year where racist "intellectuals" rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.

Here we see Steve Salerno gloating along with Claire Lehmann because she wasn't "cancelled" after she made an international ass of herself with her evidence-free attacks on Sha'Carri Richardson and Florence Griffith-Joyner.

American Renaissance liked Salerno's thoughts on race so much it posted excerpts from his Quillette article. 

Is There Room in Diversity for White People?

Steve Salerno, Quillette, May 10, 2018

I wrote about that in March 2019: So exactly how many Quillette articles are republished by white supremacist American Renaissance? 

At that time the number was 7. Since then, the number has risen to 25. 

Of course Lehmann and her followers would claim that Lehmann is "uncancellable" when nobody ever expected her to be cancelled. She's always been known as a sleazy, shameless "journalist" dedicated to promoting racist beliefs.

How could she be cancelled? She founded Quillette and the people who support it do so exactly because it gives them race pseudo-science extreme enough to find favor with American Renaissance, while still managing to claim respectability thanks to its association with mainstream media people like the media's favorite sacred cow and "celebrity intellectual" Steven Pinker. 

Her unapologetic racism likely makes her funders, including right-wing plutocrat Mark Carnegie, love her even more.

If American Renaissance hasn't been "cancelled," why would Claire Lehmann be?

Best title of the year: why Quillette sucks

 At Boing Boing: Why Quillette sucks

Lehmann's clueless vulgarity was such that even right-wingers cringed at her tweets. The New York Times' Jamelle Bouie, certainly not among them, remarked that it'd been a while since he'd seen "Twitter unite against a single person like it has united against the Australian caliper magazine lady."

She did have a defender, though, in the form of commentator Dave Rubin, who (while careful to distance himself from her) suggested that she should sue someone who had called her website, Quillette, a "white supremacist blog". While Rubin's proposal is legally illiterate, it did strike me that the casual invocation of "supremacist" obscures what Quillette's all about, the culture that eats its strategy for breakfast. It's not just the distinction hinted at by Bouie, between the Calipers racists and the Hoods racists, but the peculiar culture of self-serious, middle-class, constantly sneering Britishy media people who think things are just absurd.

I'll note here that Jamelle Bouie was instrumental in preventing Razib Khan, race pseudo-science hawker and friend of Claire Lehmann from getting a gig at the NYTimes by publicizing Khan's race statements - and Bouie linked to my personal blog which had a post from 2013 which presented quotes from the first incarnation of Khan's Gene Expression web site.

I mentioned this later on Twitter, while criticizing racist Bo Winegard and his promotion of race science, and Claire Lehmann had a meltdown, although, as is her habit, she wasn't concerned with accuracy - I never said I got Khan fired.

Which ties into another aspect of the Boing Boing piece:

The "intellectual dark web" of free-speech absolutists, as it was self-defeatingly named, is a regular source of legal threats and covert (if perhaps naive) support of authoritarian personalities and institutions. The "censorship" they complain of often amounts to mere criticism, experienced by their giant egos as injury. But the formal state-backed censorship they threaten to use themselves is all too real. Lehmann herself once threatened to sue someone for "defaming" Quillette because it's "going to be fun".

I wrote about Lehmann's threatened lawsuit, mentioned above, in a two-parter: How conservative and white supremacist is Quillette?

I don't know if I buy the emphasis on a British/Commonwealth point of view the article has. The Intellectual Dark Web, closely tied to Quillette, is mostly Americans.

The most important journalism concerning Quillette has yet to be written, which is the article examining, in depth, who funds Quillette.

Quillette founder Claire Lehmann continues to make a name for herself...

...as a lying, shameless racist.

And since this blog is called Pinkerite, we must remember that Steven Pinker and Claire Lehmann have a warm mutual admiration society.