Amy Wax and her racist rant at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference

Thanks to the last panel of the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference (aka The Peter Thiel CPAC for racists) sponsored by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the true purpose of the SAF Conference was revealed.

The last panel included infamous racist Amy Wax who vomited forth a racist rant in which she acknowledged the giant racist elephant in the room. 

Her racism is so much like Steve Sailer's, I expect Steven Pinker will try to publish her work.

TRANSCRIPT (my highlight) 

AMY WAX 

The goal of the progressive Left today, and we've heard about this on the prior panel, is to destroy and demolish our legal system with its safeguards, procedures and practices, a system that is the envy of the world. Why? That justice system is oppressive and bigoted. A cover for hatred, for racism, for white privilege. Our legal system represents whiteness, and whiteness has to go. It has to be replaced. 

But replaced with what? Well, with some corrupt, unprincipled, arbitrary, unpredictable, fact-free system driven by identity politics, by preferment, by power, by tribalism. The goal is to take our carefully constructed first world legal system and send it back to third world status. And the only upside I can see of this project? Well, it might alleviate our immigration problem. Why would people want to come to us for the same miseries and injustices they have at home? That's the mystery. 

 

Now, there is one more aspect of my cancellation experience that really is important to comment on. Students from Penn and elsewhere repeatedly reach out to me for advice on how to resist the depredations and humiliations of woke conformity, not just in the Academy, but in the elite world that they will eventually occupy. And of course, we have "Woke Inc." we have the woke financial system, the nonprofit system, entertainment. There's no escape. There's absolutely no escape. Now, unfortunately, I don't have very encouraging words to offer. In my pastoral role, and that is the role that I have assumed in my university, I tell them, well, this is a culture war. What about war don't you understand? War has casualties. People get hurt. Can you avoid it? Well. You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Yet I don't encourage or expect them. 

 

(They tell her she's going over her allotted time.)

 

Oh, how many times? How much time do I have? Oh, OK. Then I'm going to finish up. 

 

I don't expect them to stick their neck out because they're vulnerable. But there is one group I'm very disappointed in and that - who are in a position to stick their neck out, and that's other tenured professors like me. And here I am talking about the old, mostly white guys who regularly tell me in private how much they hate wokeness. How stupid it is. How destructive. But do they do anything about it? No. Do they speak up? No. They're just too comfortable. Is it selfishness? Is it cowardice? 

 

Let me just say one thing about the cowardice part, alright? The elephant in the room at this conference, the one subject that has not come up is race. The centerpiece of wokeness is that all disparities, all group disparities, are due to racism, racism, racism, racism. If people on the Right want to embrace meritocracy, and fight wokeness and be colorblind, they have to have an answer to that. 

 

They have to face up to the fact that the meritocracy will produce different outcomes by group. And they can't shrink from that, and I think that is where I see them stumbling.

 

Finally I will, I will leave you with a Latin motto, which is the motto of some of my children's very overpriced, fancy and expensive boarding school. That Latin motto is non sibi. That means not for ourselves. I hope that we here at this conference are not here for ourselves, but rather to preserve, protect and defend the system that has been bequeathed to us by those who have come before, to the next generation. I know that's. I'm here, people say, why don't you leave? Why don't you quit? Why don't you retire? Why do you tolerate these slings and arrows? And my answer to them is non sibi. I am here for them. And that requires a certain degree of sacrifice. So if I leave you with one wish, forlorn hope, I guess, it would be let's see more tenured professors stand up and be counted by opposing what is happening in the university today thank you. 

 

(Audience applauds.)

I thought the last part was especially revealing, because Amy Wax expresses an interest in the continuance of the racism she loves so much. She sees it as something to leave to the next generation.

And it's not only Amy Wax. During the questions portion of the panel, another speaker at the conference, Eric Kaufmann, asked a question.

KAUFMANN 

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

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

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

UPDATE: An interview Kaufman gave to Isaac Chotner called A Political Scientist Defends White Identity Politics,

Later on in the questions period, Wax tries to address Kaufman's question, but the moderator cuts her off and says there isn't enough time. The mind boggles at the possibility of her saying something even more racist. 

Wax will have you know that racism does cause suffering - to poor racists like herself. But it's OK because she has found a nation-wide network of racists to be her friends.

WAX

...you have to have a high tolerance for pain, and you have to expect pain. That you know you will be attacked, you will be labeled, you will be slurred. The media is not your friend. The media is catastrophically dishonest. The mainstream media, I have learned that the hard way. It's really tragic and scary. Frankly, um I I don't approve of talking to the media because I think that you will always lose. Um the other thing is you you get shunned, you get ostracized, you get ghosted, you lose your friends absolutely by by the dozens. But you know, you make new friends, people come out of the woodwork, really wonderful people. I call them the adorable deplorables. All across the country, people contact you, they e-mail you, they send you letters, they send you invitations to their dude ranch or whatever...

I suspected, when I saw that Peter Thiel was the keynote speaker, that this conference would be a coming together of racists, especially the race pseudoscience racists, in order to brainstorm new strategies to defend and promote racism, and that's exactly what it turned out to be.

I don't think they invited Amy Wax in spite of the high likelihood she would say something extremely racist, I think they invited her to signal that Stanford is ready to accept race pseudoscience.

I will admit to agreeing with Amy Wax about one thing. She called this fight over racism a war. That's exactly what I said in January of this year when attacked by two ghouls of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex:

Colin Wright claimed I was a psychopath because that's what Colin Wright always does because I criticize his political views and his employer. Since his views and employer are indefensible, he has no option but to defame me.

Cathy Young had a vicious thing to say about me because that's who Cathy Young is.

But hey - although my conflict with the Quillette/IDW industrial complex is a war of words, it's still a war and war is hell.

That's right, this is war, Amy Wax. Two of my great-great grandfathers fought for the Union and our side kicked your side's ass. We are ready to do it again. 

Bring it on, you ornery racist lowlife.

Is Peter Thiel a babbling lunatic?

This is the keynote speech that Peter Thiel gave today at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference  or as I like to call it, Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists, and I defy you to listen to the full twenty-nine minutes and then tell me how the experience differs from one in which a lunatic in a psychotic fugue state accosts you in a public park, grabs you by the arm and forces you to listen to his theory of Armageddon versus the Antichrist. 

I only have audio, no video, just the still image. The speech begins at minute 3:03, after he's introduced by Russell Berman of Stanford. FYI - you can occasionally hear noises in the background from me, like the microwave oven beeping, etc.

Thiel may be the patron saint - or just patron - of the racist right and the anti-woke crybabies and the Republican Party, but I doubt anybody would ever listen to him for any reason save one: because he has so much money.

At the beginning of this year I called Thiel scary. He's even scarier now. And so are the people who have made him their Mad King Peter.

Here is the transcript, below. He starts out fairly coherent, but once he has vanquished Nobel Peace Prize winner, Guatamalan activist Rigoberta Menchú he starts to go off the rails. 

I found his hatred for Rigoberta Menchu interesting, because he didn't come to hate her after it was discovered that she misrepresented parts of her autobiography. He hated her and thought of her as the embodiment of evil because she had suffered so much. He didn't believe it, or didn't want to believe it and so calls her suffering "the perfect pastiche." The Nobel Prize committee said they based the prize on her actions, not on her testimonial. But Peter Thiel is still going to start off his Academic Freedom keynote speech by taking a victory lap against Rigoberta Menchu.

I also had to laugh at his claim that he doesn't like the Clinton administration's lies, when Thiel funded Trump, who virtually can not say anything without lying.

Thiel starts off making a claim about wanting to "steel-man" his opponents arguments, and when he finally gets around to a point, after many minutes of babble, and presents the issue of the environmental movement of the 1970s, he suggests that the impulse for the movement was the same as the impulse that drove Charles Manson. How's that for steel-manning? I mean, if you're a lunatic, I guess that works.

Also, what the hell does this keynote address have to do with Academic Freedom? Thiel finishes his speech by presenting a match-up between Armageddon and the Antichrist. He even introduced the match-up by citing a Bible verse and clearly he believes his opponents represent the Antichrist. But apparently he believes his side represents Armageddon? Is that supposed to be a reasonable choice?

Wow. And this quasi-religious weirdo is hugely influential, because of all that money.

Although I have added paragraph formatting, there were almost no pauses in this speech, just a constant stream of words at a very rapid clip.

Russell, thank thank you so much. It's always hard to, it's hard to live up to such a flattering introduction. I'm going to try to cover a lot of different, somewhat disjointed ideas today and then try to make it interactive and make it as much of a conversation as possible. But maybe, maybe you know, a question I always like to start and frame is what is the antonym of diversity? 

And the placeholder answer I would give for an antonym for diversity, the antonym of diversity is university (audience chuckles) and um and we should um and you know and in some ways what I what I gather we're trying to come to terms with are all these ways that the university as a place where we search for truth, where there's a certain amount of freedom, civility, uh you know, a certain canon is uh, is, is being threatened by the sort of amorphous thing that somehow the anti university, that is, uh the postmodern Multiversity, that is, maybe you know somehow in some parts nihilistic and some parts relativistic, in some parts totalitarian, and probably would take, you know a more time than I have to unpack all of those paradoxes. But and then of course it's it's the, it's the, it's the problem of the university, in the larger context of the questions of classical liberalism, which you know seems to have be failing and and then in trouble and a lot of different ways and and that one should also think about. 

You know I've I've been involved in these in these campus wars, cultural wars debates for something like 35 years. We started the Stanford Review. And I'll just recount one story from 35 or so years ago by the time we started the Stanford Revue in 1987 the live issue was the debate about Western culture, the freshman core curriculum program, and it was going to be sort of phased out. The 88-89 school year was the first year where um the first of the new experimental culture, ideas and values, the first the program to replace Western culture framed as multicultural and I thought we should do an exposé on on this sort of the first class. And and it was sort of you know a tendentious Marxist professor, was not really about non Western cultures was also these various anti-Western writers one sort or another. And so I went to the Stanford Bookstore and just started reading through the books and of course I was sort of man with the hammer tries to find a nail everywhere and was just trying to find the most tendentious things that were you know, and they all were on on different dimensions.  

Then I finally stumbled on one book that was just the perfect book that encapsulated everything that was preposterous about it is Rigoberta Menchu. And it was a set of interviews with this sort of Guatemalan peasant Indian woman who had been oppressed in every vector of oppression. It was like a, it was like a perfect pastiche, it was, you know, she was oppressed, as poor and as and there's a racial war and there's a war and she was an orphan and um and on and on down the line and and it was, and you know, there could be sort of chapters, you know, Rigoberto renounces marriage and motherhood, Rigoberta makes plans for the Mayday Parade, so it has sort of had a somewhat you know, communist undercurrent. And um and as so many of these debates, these you know the Western culture debate with some very important was on one level about about this freshman course at this at one, you know elite university, Stanford. But then in some sense it was a a debate about our whole culture and so there's sort of kicked up all these bigger things and you know as a sort of 20 year old senior I managed to convinced the editors of Wall Street Journal to to reprint some of these excerpts and did a long long long excerpt on this Europe and the Americas class. When when Dinesh D'Souza wrote his book on a "Illiberal Education" in 1991, the the Stanford chapter was entitled "Travels with Rigoberta." so it got this iconic framing. And then and then fast forward to the fall of 1992. I'm, I'm clerking for a judge in Atlanta, driving to the office in the morning, have the radio on and and it's well, you know, there's, there's a new, someone's been selected for the Nobel Peace Prize. No one's ever heard of this woman. It's Rigoberto Menchu. 

And there's always this legal concept of the difference between proximate causation, which is like I punch you or something versus but-for causation. I was not the proximate cause of her getting the Nobel Peace Prize, but I I was about a but-cause. But for me, she would not have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize. And sort of the scales fell off my eyes at that point, I realized I was, you know, I thought that I was, you know, fighting in some sort of cosmic struggle. And you know the forces of good and evil and actually I I was just like what I really have been doing was I was some two-bit actor in a left wing psychodrama where I completed her victimization. The one group she had not been victimized by were, you know white Republican conservatives in the United States. I completed her victimization and I guaranteed her her Nobel Peace Prize. 

There's a whole postmortem to the story where it's apparently much of the book was too good to be true and was sort of semi-fictionalized uh there was an attempt to get the Nobel Prize rescinded but you know they can never sort of revisit these things and and so it's still uh it's still quite disputed. 

But you know I think so many of these debates have this kind of quality there's there's a way that um you know, you can sort of ,it's like shooting fish in a barrel the arguments are are super powerful on our side, um it is like screaming into hurricane it, it often does not matter, you know we have um we have um and there's sort of is always this worry that we are somehow you know those of us who are conservative libertarian, classical liberals are just somehow fighting the long defeat and uh and uh and that that is that's that's sort of the vibe of what's going on and and and the challenge with, you know classical liberalism broadly.

 And so I wanna so it's rather than sort of go through a whole set of these sort of semi-pornographic stories which I could entertain you with, the whole morning long, I wanted to try a somewhat different approach and and I think it's always important not to sort of straw man our opponents, not to take the most ridiculous um version of it and make fun of it. We should always try to steel man people to try to understand the arguments as as best as they are possible. I wanted to, I wanted to a little bit complicated, but I want to do is I want to give you the best argument, against the best argument, against the best argument, against the best argument against classical liberalism, against um the the classical universities, and uh, so , four steel man arguments. And if you counted, there are four. So if you do, you know a double negative is a positive. A quadruple negative is still a positive. So  uh the four best arguments add up to sort of an argument for classical liberalism. But we're going to let me let me and this is sort of the way I've come to think of, um you know, what what the real nerve of of so many of these debates is and how we should how we should think about it.

Um the, you know, let me, let me start by saying if you um if you talked in the during the Western culture debates in the 1980s, Stanford, if you talked to the university President Donald Kennedy, or, you know, the senior leadership at Stanford, you know, alumni went to complain. Um you know, there there's definitely always some radical crazy people who said crazy things. But the standard answer was something that sort of technocratic. You know, Shakespeare doesn't matter. The humanities aren't that important. We have the sciences. We're making enormous progress in the sciences. We're building a, you know, particle accelerator, slack, etcetera, etcetera. We have, you know, you have all this sort of cutting edge scientific research and that that's sort of fundamentally is what the university is about. That's what shows it's on track. That shows what what it is valuable and and there is sort of some way that we have to always ask this question about you know the the sciences and the technologies how they are, how they are doing. 

And the the version of the question that I have come to ask over the last 15 years um about you know um is the universal question, is about the progress of all these things. How fast are science and technology as a whole progressing? Is the sort of propaganda, the STEM propaganda accurate, that uh we have just sort of exponentiating progress, runaway progress things are getting sort of, you know it's just dizzying how fast things are improving. Or is it Is it perhaps quite the opposite and and so and and so if if one could show that the science and technology areas are actually pretty weak, that the so-called crown jewels of STEM are not actually delivering the goods. This strikes me as a decisive, crushing uh blow. It's it's like a yeah, humanities we all know, are ridiculous. Uh STEM, but if if STEM is ridiculous you know there is just nothing, nothing left at all and, and this is the idea that I've explored, in a variety of formats over the last 15, 15 years. There's, there's sort of a um it's it's very, let me say it is very hard to evaluate this stuff in general, because one of the other problems of the postmodern university is that it's extremely compartmentalized, it's extremely specialized, and you're supposed to only be able to comment on these things after half a lifetime of study. And so we have ever-narrower sets of guardians guarding themselves, to use the sort of corrupt Platonic metaphor. 

So you you have the string theory people telling us how wonderful string theory people are and how everybody else just has bad math genes and can't talk about it. We have the uh the cancer researchers promising us they will cure cancer in five years which they've been doing for the last 50. We have um and on and on in all these sort of hyper hyper specialized areas and um and then the question is, you know how much how much progress is actually happening? 

The um, these sort of indirect intuitions I have on where it seems very very slowed, are things like,  umm, if you if you if you look at things like um, the the economy, the the standards of living among younger people. The younger generation doesn't seem to be doing better than their parents. This this is sort of very odd. In a sort of context of of massive generalized progress, there is, there's sort of a question, how big are the breakthroughs that are really, really happening? Because the definition of technology, say technology is the thing that is changing, and then let's say the 1960s technology meant computers, but also rockets and supersonic aviation and the green revolution agriculture. And underwater cities and new medicines. And it was like a lot of things. And we use technology today. It just means information technology. I think that's kind of a tell, that we have a narrow cone of progress around the world of bits, you know, computers, Internet, mobile Internet. It's generated some great companies, but it's not quite been enough to take our civilization to the next level, you know, the tagline on my my venture capital site. You know, "they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters." Not an anti Twitter argument, not an argument against Twitter as a company can. It can work, as a company it can work. You know, 8000 people I think is going to be about half after Elon's done today. But even even those 4000 people can just, still, just go to the office and smoke pot all day and earn decent paychecks so it works on that level. It doesn't quite work on the level of taking our civilization to the next level. 

When I was, I think that these things were not that obvious in in, in, in in the past when I was at Stanford in 89. In in retrospect, the only subject matter you were supposed to study was computer science. That's what really worked. It wasn't even an engineering field. It was sort of a you know, I always think whenever people say science, I'm in favor of science, but not science in quotes. And when when people use science, it's it's a tell that something isn't a science, like political science or climate science. Computer science is sort of like that. It's for the people who are not very good at electrical engineering and sort of flunked out into computer science. Even that turned out to be the one thing that worked. All the engineering fields did not work. I think electrical engineering sort of worked maybe another decade after this class of 89, certainly mechanical engineering, chemical engineering like my dad did, all these were terrible things. We live in the world. There was nothing you could do in the world of atoms. By the 80s it was already clear you should not go into nuclear engineering, aero-astro engineering, and we are just not allowed to do stuff. And in the world of atoms. It's it is it is massively massively slowed. And I think this is sort of the this is sort of the this is sort of one kind of a a framing I would give. Yeah, but we've had this incredible stagnation for the last 50 years and then we have unbelievable amounts of propaganda. This is not true and that, um I'll do one one other sort of thought experiment on you know why the question of technological progress however, however hard it might be, um can't be avoided, because um and let's, I'll just do one more as a thought experiment. If you, if you want to sort of solve our macroeconomic problems, in the United States, you could solve every problem in our society if you got to 4% GDP growth. You grow, grow your way out of the deficits, um you have enough growth for everybody to do better. 

And how do you get to 4% GDP growth? Well, you could do um you could do something like, um, um one version would be you could change, get rid of all the environmental rules, all the immigration rules. You you could get rid of all these rules where you would never get elected and you probably have too much cancerous growth. But you know there's certain ways you could do it politically completely infeasible. And the other way also do this as a thought experiment would be. Umm, you appoint a Commission on accelerating technological change and it would it would try to measure how fast the technological change has been happening. Um and um you know, you have some, you know, some crazy techno utopian person probably from Silicon Valley. You put them on the Commission and they would come back with the result that, yeah, it looked like we had 2% growth and 2% inflation, but really we have 4% growth and 0% inflation because the qualitative technological improvements are greater than they look. And if you could just lie about technological progress, you could save trillions and trillions of dollars. Uh, I won't go into all the details. This is basically what happened under the Clinton administration in the 1990s with the Bostrom Commission. Un they sort of lied about all these thonic(?) adjustments, and that was a key thing to balancing the budget. As a libertarian I I'm actually quite sympathetic to this because I want the welfare state to be dialed back. And so if you exaggerate technological progress, um this is the way to do it. As an intellectual, I I don't like, I don't like lying. And I think we should try to figure out, we should try to figure out the the truth of these things and, and probably you know, if we say that uh, you know, the flatness of the new iPhone is such a large hedonic adjustment that grandma should be happy to eat cat food. (audience laughs) 

There's probably something about that that's wrong. And I'm and and these sorts of questions cannot be avoided. So the question of generalized technological progress cannot be avoided. I'd go into a lot more detail but ah but it has for a whole set of reasons slowed down. So that's sort of the basic counter argument is, don't look at the humanities, look at the sciences. They're great. The counter-counter argument, um there are, there are, they're maybe as defective or more so than the humanities. Humanities, we can sort of evaluate. You can evaluate Rigoberto Menchu. You can't evaluate string theory and so it's sort of, I dunno, government analogies. It's like you know, do you think the DMV or the CIA are better run, and it's obviously the DMV is better run since people can see what they're doing. (audience laughs)

Um and that's probably the political intuition we should have about the sciences versus uh versus the humanities. The, the, the, the polemical version of it that I, I had once was that you know I I think um I think that uh it's better for undergraduates to meh meh to major in the humanities rather than the sciences. Set computer sciences, aside, as the one thing that sort of works, but everything else. Because um in the humanities you at least know you're not going to get a job, you'll be unemployable, whereas in the sciences you have people who are so deluded as to believe that we'll be taken care of by the natural goodness of the universe. And it's just it is just a Malthusian competition. Nature red in tooth and claw. You know, 10 grad students in chemistry lab fighting each other for Bunsen burners and beakers. And you know, one person says one wrong word, they get thrown off the overcrowded bus and it's a relief and and it's sort of cycle and repeat. 

Now the question people always ask me is why, you know, why did this stagnation, why did the shift happen in in the 70s? I I normally try to avoid the question say I don't like answering why questions they're they're over-determined and you know there's sort of a lot of different kinds of things one can one can point to. Um you know everything from, you know, extra government regulation to um, you know, some of some of the low-hanging fruit is picked. It's gotten harder to find new things, that's sort of the Tyler Cowen argument. Um you know, sort of strange ways the culture has changed. You know the younger people have anxiety attacks and don't want to do anything anymore and they're sort of hiding in their basements. Which is probably, maybe not you know not that compatible with rapid technological progress. But but if I had if I had to sort of give a single again steelman idea. The best argument for why, why this has been so slow for the last 50 years and I think we have to somehow engage with and take take more seriously. Is that there is something about science and technology that has taken you know very dystopian very destructive turn in the um, in the in the 20th century and there are you know it, it is, it is not we're not in the 18th century 19th century you know rationalist enlightenment age, where it seems to be simply making everything better in every way, all the time. You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component. I always like to argue rhetorically in favor of more nuclear power plants. I feel that's like it's like arguing for the gold standard so far outside the Overton window. Uh and I think that the history is that it's hard to avoid the dual use nature of these technologies, you know and the the, the, the, the turning point with nuclear power was not Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. It was 1975 when India got the bomb. We had transferred the nuclear uh technology to India. We believed that it was not dual usable. There is a certain way could be used for only peaceful nuclear power. It easily got weaponized. They got a nuclear bomb. We can't give nuclear power plants to everybody in the world because everybody will have nuclear bombs and that's sort of profoundly unstable and will will blow up the world. And something like this, this dual, you know, this dual nature of technology runs through uh so much of this stuff. It'ss obviously, you know, there's obviously an environmental version on the left that that I would say is, you know, on some level more powerful than people on the right often like to admit. There is, there is, um you know, even even the kinds of breakthroughs that we, we had in recent years, the MRNA vaccines. And again, the sort of the polemical version was why can't we have a ticker tape parade for the scientist who invented the MRNA vaccine. And well you know we don't celebrate individuals,  that's too dangerous in the 21st century so we no longer have ticker tape parades for individuals. But I think the deeper reason is people are really uncomfortable with the MRNA vaccine because it is, you know, it's very adjacent. Um it's one toggle switch away from this thing that was going on at the Wuhan lab called (?) function research which we suspect is sort of an Orwellian word for a bioweapons program. And and then this is and so it's again there are you know there are these things that you know could potentially be big breakthroughs. So many of them are adjacent to something that is that is quite dystopian. I used to love science fiction. It is, um and I think we sort of an interesting survey course that one could do on on, you know, trying to understand why this all so drably dystopian at this point. I mean, there's still, you know, maybe you can do the retro Star Trek stuff from the 60s, but anything's been published in the last 40 years, it just sort of shows this futuristic world where nothing works. And the question you have to ask is, is this a deep law of nature, is a deep truth that if there is more progress, things will just break down. Or is it somehow a reflection of of this, of this very dystopian culture we're in, where we just can't imagine anything, anything getting better?  

Now I think, Umm, I think that I think that this sort of dystopian um limit of of science and technology, where you know it's lost energy because you're just sort of building the machines that will destroy the world, um has even at this point seeped into the, has even seeped into the into the, into the computer uh world where the you know, the futuristic technology on the computer side is AI, AGI, artificial general intelligence. It's it's always I always hate the word because sort of a catch-all word that can mean everything and therefore nothing. But, but I, you know, I was involved peripherally with some of these sort of East Bay rationalist futuristic groups. There's one called the Singularity Institute in the 2000s, and sort of the self understanding was, you know, building an AGI, it's going to be the most important technology in the history of the world, we better make sure it's friendly to human beings. And we're going to work on making sure that it's friendly and you know, the vibe sort of got a little bit stranger. And I think it was around 2015 that I sort of realized that uh that they weren't really, they they didn't seem to be working that hard on the AGI anymore. And they seem to be more pessimistic about where it was going to go. And it was kind of a, it's sort of devolved into sort of a Burning Man um Burning Man camp that was sort of had gone from sort of trans-humanist to Luddite um in 15 years. And um some something has sort of gone wrong my and it was finally confirmed to me by by a post from Miri Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the successor organization in April of this year. And and this again these are the people who are and this is sort of the cutting edge thought leaders of the of the people who are pushing AGI for the last 20 years and, and you know, it was fairly important in the whole Silicon Valley ecosystem. 

Title: "Miri announces New Death with Dignity strategy." And then the summary: "It's obvious at this point that humanity isn't going to solve the alignment problem, i. e. how is AI aligned with humans? Or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight. Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with slightly more dignity." 

And then anyway, it goes on to talk about why it's only slightly more dignity, because people are so pathetic and they've been so lame at dealing with this. And of course you can, you know, there's probably a lot you can say that, you know, this was there somehow, this, this was somehow deeply in the logic of the whole AI program for for decades. That it was, was potentially going to be very dangerous. If you believe in Darwinism or Machiavellianism, there are no purely self-interested actors. And then, you know if you get a superhuman AGI you will never know that it's aligned. So there was something, you know, there was a very deep problem, people had avoided it for 20 years or so. At some point, one day they wake up and the best thing we can do is, is, is just a hand out some Kool-aid, a la People's Temple to everybody or something like this. And um and if we um and then I think uh unless we just dismiss this sort of thing as as just as just the kind of thing that happens in a um in a in a post COVID mental breakdown world... I've I found another article from Nick Bostrom who's sort of Oxford academic and. You know, most of these people are sort of, they're somehow they're interesting because they have nothing to say they're interesting. They're just mouthpieces. There's like a mouth of Sauron. It's it's just sort of complete sort of cogs in the machine. But they are they're useful because they tell us exactly where the zeitgeist is, in some ways and um and and this was from 2019 pre-COVID. The vulnerable world hypothesis and that goes through, you know, whole litany of these different ways where you know, science and technology are creating all these dangers for the world and what do we do about them and this the precautionary principle, whatever that means. But then um you know, he has a four part program for achieving stabilization and I will just read off the four things you need to do, to make our world less vulnerable and achieve stabilization in this sort of, you know, we have this exponentiating technology where maybe some uprising actually, but still progressing quickly enough. There are a lot of dangerous corner cases. 

And when you do these four things to to stabilize the world: Number one, restrict technological development. Number two, ensure that there does not exist a large population of actors representing a wide and recognizably human distribution of motives. So that's a that sounds like a somewhat incompatible with DEI, at least in the in the ideas form of diversity. Number 3, establish extremely effective preventive policing. And Number 4, established effective global governance. Since you can't let you know even if there's like one little island somewhere where this doesn't apply, it's no good. And and so it is basic and this is, you know, this is the zeitgeist on the other side, it is a it is the precautionary principle. It is, you know, we're not going to make it for another century on this planet. And therefore, you know, we need to have, you know, we need to embrace a one-world totalitarian state right now. And and so yeah. So third and 4th counter arguments. The third just to repeat. The first argument, first counter argument is science is great. It's calling you don't even pay attention to the humanities counter argument. No it's not. Third main counter argument. Well, science is too dangerous, we have to slow it down. So it's it's good that it's not so great. We're slowing it down. We slow it down even more and then the the counter-counter argument and and this is where I would return to classical liberalism is that however dangerous however dangerous science and technology. Start it seems, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous and uh and that and uh that, you know, whatever the dangers are in the future, we need to never underestimate the danger of, you know, one world, totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard hard to see what it ends. But, you know, there's always. You know, I there's always sort of the, the frame where. First Thessalonians five, chapter 3. The the political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. And and I think you know what I what I want to suggest is that and and you get it when you have sort of a homogenized one world totalitarian state and and what I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would uh do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon, thank you very much.

Does Jerry Coyne read his own blog?

Well after almost four years of this Pinkerite blog, you'd think I would have learned to never take members of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex at their word. 

When Jerry Coyne claimed on his blog ("Why Evolution is True") on October 21 that he'd never heard of Peter Thiel, the Trump-funding, Quillette-funding anti-democracy sociopathic keynote speaker for the CPAC for racists (aka the Stanford Academic Freedom conference) I should have immediately run a search on his blog, instead of just accepting his claim.

So it finally occurred to me to run the search, and of course Peter Thiel is mentioned several times on Coyne's blog prior to October 21 of this year.

The most recent instance of Peter Thiel showing up on Coyne's blog was just two months before he claimed he never heard of him. Coyne is quoting a right-winger on Bari Weiss's Substack:

Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance managed to win his primary in Ohio with just 32 percent of the vote but rarely goes a week without some sort of gaffe, such as suggesting that women should stay in violent marriages. He now finds himself mired in a surprisingly tight general election against undistinguished Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, whose main strategy is calling Vance, who’s worked for billionaire Peter Thiel, a plutocratic carpetbagger and repeating the word China over and over again to Rust Belt audiences. Then there’s another Thiel-backed political virgin, Arizona’s Blake Masters, who just this week flipped his position on abortion from being “100% pro-life” and supporting a federal personhood law to suggesting he’s only against late-term and partial-birth abortion. These aren’t even rookie mistakes.

I get that sometimes Coyne has other people write his blog posts. But does he ever bother to read them? Is he not capable of retaining information from them? I mean a billionaire is a pretty unusual type of person. You'd think that would be memorable enough.

So in May of this year, Coyne again mentions Thiel, in his post Elon Musk's list of must-read books. 

Now Coyne doesn't say why anybody should care what an asshole like Elon Musk reads. Musk had already threatened to buy Twitter a month before this post (Coyne was in favor of it) but Coyne only mentions that Musk is famous in the must-read books post. 

But clearly Coyne felt it was important to share. But somehow he doesn't remember that one of the books Musk loves was written by sociopath democracy-hating, racist CPAC keynote speaker Peter Thiel:

3.) Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Master. It’s about how to build a business; I haven’t read it.

But back in 2016, so before Coyne was as far down the road of senescence as he is now, he published an entire post about Peter Thiel's efforts to use his wealth to punish anybody who criticizes him, because you know, he loves free speech so much: Open thread: Press freedom, free speech, Gawker and public humiliation. 

Now it was written by someone name Grania Spingles but still, doesn't Coyne read and remember what gets published on his own platform?

Attempted Pelosi assassin is a fan of James Lindsay

Those of us who have memories longer than that of a goldfish remember how people like Bari Weiss, Christopher Rufo, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Andrew Sullivan supported James Lindsay.

Many of us could see what a right-wing extremist loony-toon Lindsay is, but these associates of the Intellectual Dark Web couldn't see it - or refused to admit it. Probably because Lindsay was promoting the right-wing swill that they love and/or get paid by plutocrats to promote.

Meanwhile, Lindsay was so sensitive to criticism he came after a nobody blogger like me.

But eventually it began to dawn on the feckless dummies that James Lindsay might just be a complete asshole, when Lindsay said he was voting for Trump. And later when Lindsay showed up at CPAC. 

Please note this is the original CPAC, not the upcoming CPAC for racists lead by democracy-hating, racist-funding, Trump-loving Peter Thiel.

Finally, even a leading intellectual of the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette network, Claire Lehmann, was calling Lindsay "retarded."

Then Lindsay was kicked off Twitter for being a neo-Nazi. It remains to be seen whether man-baby troll Elon Musk will bring him back or not.

But Lindsay is not only a laughable goon. He has influence of the worst kind as can be seen by the archived version of the web site of David DePape, the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi, who assaulted her husband Paul when he couldn't find the Speaker of the House.

Along with then-Vice President Mike Pence, Pelosi was a main target of Trump's crazed murderous mob on January 6. So of course DePape's list of interests includes "Voter Fraud" as well as the anti-trans hatred promoted by Quillette and the GOP. 

But DePape also includes one name among his interests - "James Lindsey" - I think we can assume he means James Lindsay but misspelled the name, since the links on his James Lindsey page go to New Discourses podcasts, a project of James Lindsay and his Christian nationalist sugar daddy Michael O'Fallon.

Jerry Coyne promoted the New Discourses site on his site as a "resource." 

I will never forget how race pseudoscience promoting stooges Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Andrew Sullivan and the rest of the gang helped promote the grifting insanity of James Lindsay and what the insanity of James Lindsay led to.

And of course Coyne, Pinker, Sullivan and the rest of the gang will never admit how badly they screwed up with Lindsay. But maybe it wasn't an innocent screw-up. Maybe they were just doing what they had been paid to do.

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - the tight-knit circle of Koch employees, Thiel flunkies and race pseudoscience promoters

Last week I did a quick survey of some of the speakers who will be in the upcoming Peter Thiel-led CPAC for racists, otherwise known as the Stanford Academic Freedom conference. 

The conference so dedicated to Academic Freedom that the keynote speaker will be Peter Thiel, who is not involved in academia except, I assume, to donate to it in order to garner influence for his right-wing democracy-hating political agenda.

So for the first round I looked at mostly people I recognized as promoters of race pseudoscience, and/or are on the plutocrat payroll, and I had written about many of them on this blog.

This survey of the remaining speakers, like the first survey, demonstrates what a shameless lie the "College Fix" promoted in its claim that the conference is a bipartisan endeavor. It is overwhelmingly slanted to the right.

Well let's have a look at the others:

Luana Maroja is a sociobiologist and a Koch-funded promoter of Koch's favorite claim, that there's not enough free speech for right-wingers on American campuses. Which probably explains why Breitbart loved her enough to spread what Reza Aslan said was a lie about a panel he did with Jamelle Bouie. Naturally Jerry Coyne and professional racist Steve Sailer are fans of hers.

Mimi St. Johns has a very close tie to Peter Thiel - she is currently the editor-in-chief of the far-right newspaper the Stanford Review, which Thiel founded in 1987. Thiel is still very involved with the Review: "While Thiel also makes financial contributions, he has hosted staff reunions at his home, and meets with the editors quarterly as a way to stay current with campus activities in general."

Dorian Abbot is an author for racist Quillette, funded by Thiel and also wrote an op-ed in Newsweek comparing affirmative action to Nazi Germany. His co-author was Iván Marinovic, one of the three Stanford Graduate School of Business Faculty Organizers. 

Fun fact - two of the speakers, Anna Krylov and Richard Lowery are also members of the conference Organizing Committee. The CPAC for racists is an extremely tight-knit group.

John Hasnas is a far-right winger on the Koch payroll via CATO and a contributor at the far-right Federalist Society.

I haven't found direct connections between  Peter Arcidiacono and race pseudoscience and/or right-wing plutocrats, although he seems to be popular with those types of people, probably because they feel his work can be used to oppose affirmative action. 

Solveig Gold is Joshua Katz's wife and predictably a right-winger. The New York Times ran a Better Homes and Gardens style profile about her last summer. 

Joseph H. Manson is a fan of some of the biggest crackpots and racists from the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette including Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Jonathan Katz (another speaker at the conference) and racist extremist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.

John Schendal Rose is an instructor at Duke University with a Master of Theological Studies. He was scheduled to teach a gender-segregated seminar in June 2020, The Moral Life and the Classical Tradition Seminar, "a week-long program for rising high school juniors and seniors as well as rising college freshmen interested in the ancient philosophical tradition and its influence in the Christian moral life." I hope he gets a chance to witness for Christ to Jerry Coyne, a militant atheist.

Speaker John H. Cochrane one of the three Faculty Organizers of the conference, is a Hoover man, like speaker Niall Ferguson and a member of the Koch network via CATO. He's written for National Review about his loathing of government funded healthcare, like a good right-wing libertarian would.

John M. Ellis works for right-wing plutocrats via the Sarah Scaife Foundation-funded National Association of Scholars, whining about political correctness ruining higher education. Rand-roids love him.

Erik Kaufmann is a Koch man via the Manhattan Institute.

Steven Koonin can be seen giving an interview to Ayn Rand fanatics in order to promote climate change denial.

Bjorn Lomborg is another climate change denier.

Jay Bhattacharya is identified as "a scholar connected to right-wing dark money" at Exposed by CMD and the article also mentions Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration which "recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

John Ioannidis is another Covid genius who "tried to convince President Donald Trump that locking down the country would be the real danger."

Richard Shweder is a right-winger who likes to whine about "identity politics" for the Koch-connected DonorsTrust-funded Heterodox Academy.

Hollis Robbins can be seen on Linked In promoting Koch man Tyler Cowen (also a speaker at the CPAC for racists) and she gave him an interview in 2019 here. She says something interesting in that interview:

"I don’t understand why founders don’t have more operas about them, why we don’t see operas and movies about Steve Jobs, about Peter Thiel, about Jeff Bezos. There’s the David Fincher film of the founding of Facebook, but that’s pretty much it. The founders, entrepreneurs today are titans."

So you can see why Thiel would like her. And she sounds pretty clueless since there have been several movies and documentaries about Steve Jobs. As far as Thiel, well, she may be interested to know that I have written a play which features a Thiel-like character (called Toby Peel) and it will receive its first public reading in a couple of weeks. But I don't think Thiel would like it. 

So what this looks like to me is that the Koch people have been cultivating Robbins, best known for working with Henry Louis Gates, for a few years, and her appearance at this conference is part of sealing the deal. But that's just my best guess.

Scott W. Atlas is a long-time Republican and Trump advisor best-known for spreading Covid-19 misinformation.

Michael W. McConnell is a Bush nominee, a Hoover Institute man and a contributor to the Federalist Society online site.

Eugene Volokh is a conservative/libertarian Koch man via Reason Magazine.

Frances Widdowson is an author at racist Quillette, who also happens to hate Black Lives Matter.

So there you have it. The whole political spectrum from libertarian to Republican to conservative to right-wing to Trump supporter to race pseudoscience supporter to full-on racist. 

And the keynote speaker is a democracy-hating, Trump-funding, racism-funding sociopath.

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - an update

The Peter Thiel-lead conference featuring many speakers who are racists and supporters of race pseudoscience is officially called the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference.

The College Fix, an organization funded by many right-wing plutocrats like Charles Koch, is claiming the conference will unite "big name conservatives and liberals," using this as evidence:

The event does include many thinkers who identify as either Democrat, traditionally liberal, or centrist, including New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Greg Lukianoff. The two co-authored “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

Another panelist is Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Chicago, who maintains the popular blog Why Evolution Is True.

“Be aware that some speakers have been extensively canceled or demonized, but I refused to be tarred by going to the same meeting with them, so please refrain from that,” Coyne wrote on his blog last week.

We know that Charles Koch loves fake bi-partisanship. But in fact the conference is not so bi-partisan, according to Inside Higher Education:

Conference organizers told FIRE that they’d invited numerous progressives to participate, Perrino also said, but over time “more conservatives said yes, and very few of the big-name progressives said yes. The political polarization and tribalism is dispiriting.”

Abbot said that organizers invited several dozen progressives who’d previously expressed a “negative view” of academic freedom, who ultimately declined.

Marinovic said that "we invited many academics who have argued for some kind of restrictions on academic speech to present and debate their views, and all of them declined."

David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford and professor of comparative literature, who’s publicly opposed the conference, said he wasn’t asked to participate, but that a few of his colleagues had been asked and “objected to the lopsidedness of the program. The organizers placed them on panels where it was clear they were there only as tokens.”

Livestreaming the conference doesn’t change much at all, Palumbo-Liu added.

“This in no way solves the problem of the inability of those not present being able to substantially question or interact with speakers. That is, it does not reflect a change of thinking whatsoever, nor does it cover up the original intent of the conference.”

An organization like College Fix, which exists to promote the views of right-wing plutocrats isn't going to mention that Jonathan Haidt is a long-time promoter of race pseudoscience, including most recently defending a highly speculative paper about intelligence written by a pair of right-wing racists. 

Greg Lukianoff is on the right-wing plutocrat payroll via Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (formerly "Education"), founded by Ayn Rand-lovers Charles Kors and Thor Halvorssen, and libertarian Harvey Silverglate who writes for the Thiel-funded racist rag Quillette. 

FIRE is funded by the usual right-wing extremists - just like The College Fix.

Jerry Coyne is a reactionary misogynist who loves Steven Pinker and supports race pseudoscience. He's been a little defensive lately, about his upcoming participation in CPAC for racists:

I predict that the mainstream media and many on social media will deem the entire conference a conclave of bigots, racists, and transphobes because a few people on the schedule have been called those names. Indeed, Steve Pinker himself has been the object of criticism, and has been called a racist; and I (deemed “someone with a solid reputation who speaks his mind and is honest in his arguments”) have also been called a transphobe and a racist. Hardly anybody is immune!

But as my recent piece on CPAC for racists demonstrates, most of the speakers are either racists, supporters of race pseudoscience, or take money from one right-wing racist plutocrat or another, or often more than one.

And it's likely that I will find similar issues with the speakers I haven't yet reviewed, which I will have to do soon.

There are few people on the American political scene at the moment who are worse than Peter Thiel, starting with his support for evil monster Donald Trump who tried to destroy American democracy and still might succeed. 

Steven Pinker appears to dislike Trump. But for some reason that doesn't stop him from participating in a Thiel festival sponsored by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, to which Thiel must certainly donate. And Thiel has funded Quillette, which Steven Pinker loves.

A man's love for race pseudoscience will lead him to accepting some very strange, but very wealthy bedfellows.

The fact that Peter Thiel, an opponent of democracy in general and American democracy in particular is headlining this event tells you everything you need to know about the deliberate right-wing partisanship built right into the "Stanford Academic Freedom Conference." 

LOL ~ seen on Twitter (before Elon Musk ruins it) ~ "Heterodox Thinker" Halloween costume

 The only thing missing is the cowboy boots.

Derrr I think I'll use a famous misogynist quote...

"Derrr... I think I'll use a famous misogynist quote in order to make a point about training cats."





Is there anybody in the science world more obnoxious, with the exception of Steven Pinker, than Jerry "I swoon for Steven Pinker's boots" Coyne?

Jerry Coyne is a good buddy of the biggest fans of race pseudoscience: Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, who are in turn influenced by Jean-Phillippe Rushton. Pinker was a promoter of the careers of both Steve Sailer and Razib Khan twenty years ago when both were singing the praises of Rushton. 

Then I discovered that Coyne claimed to never have heard of Rushton.

Pretty amazing right? There's no way Coyne could be a bigger ignoramus than that, right?

GUESS AGAIN!

Coyne was chortling today about his inclusion in CPAC for racists:

Now, according to the announcement below (click to read), you can livestream it, seeing all the talks (and a panel with PCC[E]) in real time. (They’ll also be archived on YouTube.) Big fun, and the Woke are sharpening their knives and fangs. The site below reprises the schedule and speakers. Be there or be square!

Now Peter Thiel will be the keynote speaker because of course he will, he's likely not only funding this racist roundup, he's likely also paying most of the speakers on a regular basis via one funding vehicle or another, including of course Quillette.

Peter Thiel is famous for his hostility towards democracy and for his funding of Donald Trump and MAGA politicians like J. D. Vance. Most people over the age of 15 who have political opinions have heard of Peter Thiel. 

Well Jerry Coyne is well over 15 and spouts his reactionary political opinions on his blog daily, but as of October 21, 2022 Jerry Coyne claimed to never have heard of Peter Thiel!

Which gives you an idea of how ignorance-based Jerry Coyne's reactionary views are. Absolutely flabbergasting.

But now that he knows that this sociopathic enemy of democracy is running the show do you think Coyne will change his mind about participating? 

But why would he, all his friends will be there, whining about how whenever they start floating their reactionary and/or race pseudoscience views they are criticized.

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists

Peter Thiel was credibly accused of funding right-wing, race pseudoscience-loving Quillette in a book about him, published last year.

Well there's no doubt now that Peter Thiel is a leading promoter of race pseudoscience. This November there will be an "invitation-only" (i. e. safe space) "Academic Freedom Conference" probably funded directly or indirectly by Thiel, at Thiel's alma mater, Stanford University. Thiel will be the keynote speaker.

It is a far-right-leaning and motley collection of some of the biggest supporters of sociobiological racism, not to mention a blatant public racist, Amy Wax.

Considering the speakers line-up and Thiel's status as a Republican donor, this is going to be the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for racists. 

Apparently there was a version in the UK last year: PETER THIEL’S Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge University REVEALED:

The parallels between Peter Thiel’s campaigning in the US and UK are revealing: Thiel’s chief of staff was involved in building up the UK ‘free speech’ network exactly while Thiel himself was ingratiating himself with the Trump administration and its white nationalist supporters.

This appears to suggest that the network’s ‘free speech’ agenda may be little more than a cover for deeper, partisan, anti-liberal political concerns. It is also consistent with Thiel’s broader interests in the US. While the context behind the Thiel connection to the Cambridge network is shrouded in mystery, the US equivalent is not.

Thiel has invested millions of dollars in support of Senate candidates campaigning on a free speech ticket. J D Vance, who reportedly received $10 million from Thiel to support his campaign, recently told a conference of the National Conservative movement that “professors are the enemy”, citing Richard Nixon. Vance has also promoted the racist Great Replacement theory which baselessly posits that white populations are being ‘replaced’ by people of colour due to immigration and integration. Another colleague of Thiel, Blake Masters, is running for the Senate in Arizona with, it is claimed, another $10 million from Thiel. His campaign is premised on the discredited conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 elections.

With Peter Thiel’s surrogates extending their influence in the UK through the fulcrum of Cambridge University, it seems that an alarming agenda is being smuggled in under cover of defending ‘free speech’.

Thiel has a long history of aligning with white supremacists.

My guess is that the general theme of Stanford's Thiel-a-thon will be the academic freedom to be a racist through taking money from Peter Thiel and Charles Koch.

This is not a comprehensive list of all the speakers, just the ones I am already at least somewhat familiar with:

Jonathan Haidt - long-time promoter of race pseudoscience,  including supporting the crackpot NHAI hypothesis, who doesn't understand what the term "heritability" means although he's sure those dastardly leftists are denying it. Like many promoters of race pseudoscience, Haidt likes to make predictions for the Triumph of Racist Claims:

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

Anna Krylov - who first offered a master class in how to invent panic about "cancellation" based on a badly curated collection of anecdotes including from Soviet Russia and the Catholic Church in the 17th century, combined with hysteria over renaming science prizes and existential anguish over the wording in advertisements. She then found her true home - right-wing racist Thiel-funded Quillette - where she admitted she was not cancelled for writing her seriously bullshit article about cancellation.

Jerry Coyne is not only Steven Pinker's #1 fanboy (you can witness him kvelling over Pinker's cowboy boots here if you have a strong stomach) he's an anti-Muslim bigot & misogynist and a huge fan of racists - like E. O. Wilson - and race pseudoscience.

Fun fact: I just discovered today that two of Coyne's anonymous cowardly followers attacked me on his blog, the first informing him of this blog's existence. Of course Coyne knows about this blog - it's critical of Coyne's bigotry and support for race pseudoscience, which is why Coyne won't let me write in the comments section of his blog posts (for example to defend myself) and why he blocks me on Twitter. Like all race pseudoscience promoters, Coyne prefers to remain inside the racist echo-chamber safe space and avoid all contrary opinions while, without any self-awareness or shame, accusing others of cowardice.

The post in question is Coyne's support for racist Emily Willoughby - like Steven Pinker, it seems that Coyne has never met a racist he didn't like. Naturally Coyne doesn't mention, while weeping over the "demonization" of the poor lil "behaviour geneticist," that she is currently on the board of the International Society for Intelligence Research, known for the many hard-core racists associated with it. Although to be fair, even racists have some standards and uninvited "weird paedophilia apologist" Emil O. W. Kirkegaard from this year's racist roundup.

And as if Coyne's odious "science" views aren't bad enough, he has a repulsive cranky-old-man persona on his blog, whining about new-fangled expressions of the kids these days like "tone-deaf" and "gig-workers."

Richard Lowery (not to be confused with right-wing Richard Lowry) can be found speaking to race pseudoscience-promoter Steve Hsu here promoting the GOP's favorite culture war talking points about "critical race theory."

Lee Jussim, Rutgers University psychologist and author at racist Quillette is a long-time hater of Pinkerite. I still can't figure out what the point of Jussim's career is besides being a supporter of race pseudoscience and muttering over and over "stereotypes are real."

Niall Ferguson is living proof that being a major creep will not get you kicked out of the right-wing plutocrat-supported wingnut welfare system. Ferguson is on the Hoover payroll and likes to spend his time plotting to destroy left-leaning college students. He's also married to IDW named member Ayaan Hirsi Ali and a fan of Trump's ratfucker Andy Ngo.

Tyler Cowen is a dedicated Koch-man. But just because he takes money from Koch doesn't mean he can't also take money from Peter Thiel.

Gad Saad is a right-wing clown who does oafish "satire" like this:

“Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing,” he muses on the topic of one of his recent online broadcasts. “By that logic I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate — to stop breathing.”

In case you needed more evidence right-wingers can't do humor.

Douglas Murray, a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, is a white supremacist. In the Current Affairs review of Murray's recent book "The War on the West:"

...there’s something refreshing about the way that Murray cuts away a lot of the bullshit and leans into an understanding of “the West” that just means white people. While different parts of the book occasionally run in the other direction, especially when Murray wants to mute critics of European imperialism by highlighting how many colonial subjects benefited by having their native cultures and practices transformed by European contact, he often can’t seem to help himself when it comes to giving into xenophobia and transparent ethno-chauvinism...

Greg Lukianoff is on the Koch payroll via the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But again, there's no law against double-dipping from two right-wing plutocrats.

Nadine Strossen is another Koch employee, via CATO, and a defender of race pseudoscience.

Ilya Shapiro is also a Koch stooge via CATO and associated, of course, with the far-right Federalist Society.

Joshua Katz, a Quillette cause and known for inappropriate conduct with students at Princeton.

Elizabeth Weiss was probably invited to speak at Racist CPAC as much for her being the third wife of disgraced sociobiology racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton as for her treatment of Native American remains. She's written for racist Quillette - of course. 

Because of her connection to Rushton, she is arguably the spiritual leader of this collection of white supremacists, racists and Trump-lovers. Here she tells sociobiology racist Michael Shermer that Rushton wasn't really a racist. Although he argued that Black people are a separate type of human and spoke at an American Renaissance conference explaining why Black people are a separate type of human.

And of course, Steven Pinker the leading mainstream "celebrity intellectual" defender of race pseudoscience. His long-time support for race pseudoscience was persistently ignored by the mainstream press until last year.

This blog is full of examples of Pinker supporting and promoting racists like Steve Sailer, going so far as to include a piece of dreck written by Sailer in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" of 2004. He continues to promote racist Razib Khan and racist rag Quillette. 

If he had not been invited to Racist CPAC I would have been very surprised.

I discuss the rest of the speakers here.