Jordan Peterson & Andy Ngo - Peterson cries about ANTIFA

Andy Ngo is a horrible rightwing grifter.

Peterson is a crazy grifter.

Good work Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart, whom I once adored, had lately been getting one my nerves, ever since he pushed the Wuhan lab conspiracy. More recently, his defense of Rogan and big fossil.

But this is a good piece of work. Kudos.

Watch Amber Ruffin

I've had a hard time lately focusing on Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Science thanks to Vladimir Putin being an evil murderous dictator and imperialist.

But I wanted to mention how great Amber Ruffin is. I discovered Ruffin recently (what took me so long?) and I especially love her "How Did We Get Here?" series.

Subscribe to her channel here.

John Oliver vs. CRT Panic

Excellent episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" in which he discusses the end-goal of the CRT panic, created out of thin air by Koch employee and Trump supporter Christopher Rufo.

Rufo is a former member of the Koch-connected and race pseudoscience-friendly FAIR board of advisors.

I have to do an update on FAIR soon because I think it's now even further right-wing than ever. They've added nuclear energy shill Michael Shellenberger and yet another Quillette author, Jacob Mchangama.

I think the presence of so many Quillette authors (and Quillette editor Jon Kay) and race pseudoscience promoters Andrew Sullivan, Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer is a signal that the purpose of FAIR and its CRT panic is not only the standard right-wing scheme to force the US government to fund religious schools via "school choice."

Race pseudoscience, which claims Black Americans are innately, genetically inferior - and therefore as stated in a Quillette review by Razib Khan - an existential threat to America - cannot survive if Black American history is well-known. The reason Black Americans have not thrived is due to the legacy of slavery itself, plus Jim Crow, plus redlining, plus terrorism like the Tulsa massacre, etc etc. The attempt to erase Black history is the attempt to declare that Black American failure to thrive is the result of bad genes.

And that's why FAIR is not only against CRT, it is against teaching Black history, period, especially the 1619 project.

Michael Shermer, an official member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" who has been a member of the FAIR board of advisors since the very beginning of the organization, is very much a supporter of race pseudoscience as I discussed in the post Michael Shermer and Equalitarianism and the White Citizens' Councils. He also likes to call critics of Steven Pinker "cockroaches." He's also an admirer of pedophila apologist Camille Paglia.

Here we see FAIR board member Michael Shermer "debunking" the 1619 project with far-right historian Mary Grabar, who supports anti-1619 Project legislation:

Mary Grabar, a fellow at the right-wing Alexander Hamilton Institute, has written an essay praising Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) for introducing the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.” This is the right-wing version of “cancel culture,” except it adds government repression to the mix, making it far worse.

Grabar endorses censorship because she dismisses the idea that teachers are competent professionals who can be trusted to analyze complex concepts: “few teachers have the ability or the time to teach beyond the materials given to them.”

Grabar compares the 1619 Project to Howard Zinn, about whom she wrote a book called Debunking Howard Zinn because “Howard Zinn was bad–a communist, a corrupt teacher, a fraudulent historian, and an anti-American agitator.”

Like the 1619 Project, legislators have tried to ban Zinn from schools. Grabar complains that “When in 2017 Arkansas State representative Kim Hendren, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of Zinn’s book in state-funded classrooms,” the Zinn Education Project “framed the attempt as censorship.” Yes, how shocking, to describe legislation literally banning a book from public school as censorship.

Funny how often "free speech" advocates on the right end up supporting censorship.

I am Catwoman

Eartha Kitt as Catwoman
---------------------------------

Someone gave me a heads-up recently that Emil O W "ow I am in contempt of court" Kirkegaard, also described by comedian Stewart Lee as "weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil" was attacking me again.

There were two good things about that. 

First, it increased the hits to this website, which uses Google ads to garner a small income. 

Google doesn't care whether those who come to this site are hate-reading it or not, it all counts towards hits, which counts towards payment. And thanks to Kirkegaard, my site metrics showed a 50% bump in site visits.

Second, and even better, was that Kirkegaard tweeted to both Claire Lehmann and Charles Murray, letting them know that I write about them on this blog. 

Which gave me a chance to discuss Kirkegaard's relationships with Lehmann and Murray. I've blogged about both of them being friendly with Kirkegaard. 

To be honest I thought for sure that Kirkegaard is closer to Charles Murray than to Claire Lehmann. But that's based on tweets, who knows what's going on at Quillette conferences or on Quillette Zoom calls. 

So I was surprised when Lehmann popped up, before Murray (who didn't show at all,) within the hour of Kirkegaard attacking me as "Catlady."

Unfortunately, although Kirkegaard called on his racist friends for backup, when I began to ask him specific questions about his relationship with Lehmann, he scampered away and then blocked my account.

Now when I started Pinkerite, I knew I was signing up for encounters with bad people. Racists are horrible. You can't put anything past racists. Racists have no problem killing children. 

And I am at war, even if only a war of words with racists. And war is hell.

So I'm surprised that the worst thing Kirkegaard calls me, at least in public, is "Catlady." It's a typically misogynist term, but there are way worse things to be called. And to be honest, although I love cats, I currently do not own any.

Besides, I'd rather be called Catwoman.

Razib Khan & Matt Yglesias, selling out and Substacking

After all this talk of one of Razib Khan's biggest "science" influences, the racist J. Phillippe Rushton, and in view of Khan's public agreement with racist Charles Murray that Black Americans are an existential threat, I had a cynical thought about Razib Khan.

I thought he might suddenly find a way to seem friendly to a Black American in an attempt to deflect from the notice recently given to his two-decade long career of smearing Black Americans as sub-human, based on the racist claims of Rushton and Murray.

Like clockwork, he's posted, an interview with a "black" American on his Substack.

I guess capitalizing the word Black would be a step too woke for whoever is funding Khan now.

Speaking of funding, Khan and his buddy, Matthew Yglesias were recently joking about "selling out."

Yglesias and Khan go back quite a ways, with Yglesias giving Khan - even more obscure at the time than he is now - a boost in 2009, in Think Progress(!), the same year Khan got a nice payday from Ron Unz. 

According to Khan's Unz column in 2013, he's "interacted with Matt Yglesias as early as 2003."

More recently, Yglesias gave an interview to Khan in September, 2020.

Khan, of course, has already made it clear he has no ethics or integrity.

But since it's likely he and Yglesias are both on the plutocrat payroll, what does "selling out" mean in this context? Betraying the interests of the plutocrats?

I mean, what do Razib Khan and Matthew Yglesias do for a living, other than express their unoriginal, monotonous, conservative opinions all day long?

The fact that they both have Substacks is one reason why I suspect Substack is an astroturfing scam, similar to the money-laundering scheme that Saul Goodman created for Walter White in "Breaking Bad." 

If you saw "Breaking Bad" you know what I'm talking about: Walt's son created a crowdfunding web site savewalterwhite.com and a little later Goodman got a hacker to create thousands of fake accounts to make it look like regular people all over the world were sending money in. But it was coming from one very rich guy.

What would stop the people running Substack from doing the same thing? Does anybody audit Substack accounts to make sure they are attached to real human beings? 

We know that some Substack authors got paid money upfront by Substack itself, including Yglesia.

We know that the Right is fond of astroturfing and ratfucking. 

We know it's been credibly alleged that Peter Thiel "secretly" funded race pseudoscience rag Quillette. 

We know the Koch middle-man, Donors Trust, gives money to white supremacist organizations like VDARE and American Renaissance.

Why couldn't Substack be one more method to financially support those who spout right-wing talking points and race pseudoscience? 

Razib Khan claims to have thousands of Substack subscribers. I find that hard to believe. He's not well-known outside of those of us who are very online and he's a terrible writer.

On top of that, he doesn't hype race pseudoscience often, directly, on his Substack, so he doesn't really offer much for his most reliable audience, racists. He seems to reserve his most racist opinions for Quillette.

And some of his content is not at all scientific, but rather political, like interviewing Megan McArdle. 

If you want to know the opinions of "Koch-trained conservative activist", Ayn Rand fan, and Washington Post op-ed columnist Meghan McArdle, you don't have to pay a race pseudoscience-monger to hear them - McArdle's opinions are everywhere either for free, or with a subscription to something with actual worthwhile content like the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, for people who want actual science, rather than Khan's occasionally science-adjacent ramblings, there is biologist P. Z. Myers, who offers science content, the same offered in a university, for free.

To get some perspective on the cost of subscribing to Khan's Substack, consider that the Washington Post is offering a first-time subscription of $25 a year. After that it bumps up to $100 a year. Now $100 a year is more than $79 a year, but subscribing to Khan's Substack is like getting a tiny portion of the Washington Post, the equivalent of only Meghan McArdle's column plus some badly-written science pieces, all resting on a race pseudoscience belief-system that occasionally erupts, as when Khan defended racist E. O. Wilson. 

So who are these people willing to pay a minimum of $79 a year for content from Razib Khan when they could get much better content at a better rate or even for free, all over the Internet?

Yglesias' Substack, named with refreshing honesty, Slow Boring, is a minimum of $80 a year. In contrast to Khan's more generous way with free content, almost all of Slow Boring is behind a paywall. And half the content is posted by someone identified as "incumbent intern" and "incoming freshman at Yale," Milan Singh.

So for a mere 80% of the cost of a subscription to the Washington Post, you can get Matt Yglesias' center-right opinions (also available for free on Twitter or with a Post subscription) plus chatter from Yglesias' subscribers, posted by someone who just graduated from high school.

The best part of the possible Substack scheme would be that the favored Substackers wouldn't even have to know that most of their subscriber accounts are fake. Like Walter White, Jr. they might think their site (and their views) suddenly achieved grassroots popularity for no apparent reason.

The fact that Lulu Cheng Meservey, the vice president of communications for Substack is a member of Razib Khan's clubhouse as well as a member of the clubhouse of the anti-CRT grifting, IDW-riddled, far-right leaning FAIR, does not help dissuade me from the suspicion that Substack is simply a high-tech Donor's Trust.

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie has a Thiel connection. Thiel was an investor in PandoDaily, which McKenzie worked for.

Another Substack co-founder, Chris Best, appeared on a podcast for the race pseudoscience promoting, Thiel-funded Quillette. According to a description of the interview on Padverb, "Tech entrepreneur Chris Best talks about Substack, his self-publishing platform that is attracting journalists like Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal and Jen Gerson." 

• Andrew Sullivan is famous for his promotion of the race pseudoscience of racist Charles Murray.
• Jesse Singal is best known for his antagonism against trans people. He's a defender of the race pseudoscience-friendly Steven Pinker. He also has a Quillette connection and a Koch connection.
• Jen Gerson has written for Quillette.

The Substack gang apparently has no problem with promoters of race pseudoscience, at the very least.

UPDATE: My suspicions about the right-leaning racism-friendly orientation of the Substack founders and funders received a boost from Jonathan M. Katz.

Jerry Coyne learns who J. Phillippe Rushton was, Kathryn Paige Harden denies being an hereditarian, E. O. Wilson was a racist

Jerry Coyne, Steve Pinker's #1 fanboy and a firm supporter of racist Razib Khan should have some idea of the history of race pseudoscience. I recently demonstrated how much Khan's views on race - which continue to this day -  are influenced by J. Phillippe Rushton. 

Coyne got around to responding to the Farina/Gibbons article on Wilson's support for the career of Rushton, which I mentioned recently. In his blog post Coyne reveals the astounding depths of his ignorance.

Coyne:

But this new article... has substantial documentation, based largely on Wilson’s association with and promotion of the work of J. Phillippe Rushton, a Canadian psychologist and author who apparently spent much of his life trying to show that there were racial hierarchies based on IQ, with, of course, black people below white. It would not be too strong to call the man an obsessive racist. I had never heard of the guy before the two authors found evidence of Wilson’s association with Rushton, but since then I’ve read more about it and also heard from two people who knew Rushton.

Imagine aligning with Razib Khan and yet somehow remaining so ignorant of his history.

But there will always be people like Greg Mayer, whose addendum Coyne includes in his post. Mayer attempts to minimize Wilson's racism by portraying him as just a poor martyr, the way race pseudoscience proponents like to portray themselves:

But the key context for Wilson’s support of Rushton is Wilson’s own experience with attempts to silence him and brand him a racist dating back to the publication of Sociobiology in 1975. Science for the People– the publisher of F&G’s piece– was a prominent antagonist of Wilson at that time and, evidently, to this very day. Wilson, as quoted by F&G, saw this as a matter of academic freedom. 

It's clear that the reason Wilson was such a supporter of Rushton was because he agreed with him. 

And it should be no surprise. Sociobiology is the attempt to justify current human hierarchies as the result of nature. So there is no non-racist sociobiology.

The New York Review of Books just published another article on Wilson's connection to Rushton, Ideology as Biology by Mark Borrello and David Sepkoski. And it makes clear that racism is absolutely baked into sociobiology. My highlight.

In 1975, Wilson published a lengthy treatise on the evolution of social behavior in animals titled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. While Wilson’s primary focus in the book was on nonhuman animals, in its final chapter he extended sociobiological analysis to humans. Here he suggested, among other things, an evolutionary and genetic basis for “the behavioral qualities that underlie the variations between cultures,” as well as for “marked racial differences in locomotion, posture, muscular tone, and emotional response that cannot be reasonably explained as the result of training or even conditioning within the womb.”

Of course I loved this section of the article. My highlight:

While authors like Herrnstein and Murray have been shunned for the fairly openly racist social policies they promoted, Wilson has remained a safe authority for such contemporary hereditarian participants in this debate as Steven Pinker, Robert Plomin, and Kathryn Paige Harden. Rather than taking Wilson’s death as an opportunity to interrogate that authority, many of his fellow scientists have chosen a kind of sainthood for him instead of a frank examination.

Harden had some problems with that passage.

I don't know about her citing Wilson, but it's pretty clear that Kathryn Paige Harden is an hereditarian. 

Her area of study, "behavioral genetics," is standard sociobiology, and Harden believes in hereditarianism so fervently that in her recent book she compared skeptics of her scheme to apply "genetic differences" to social policy with bank robbers:

The tacit collusion in some areas of the social sciences to ignore genetic differences…is wrong. It is wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong. It is stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that go no where. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations. Failing to take genetics seriously is a scientific practice that pervasively undermines our stated goal of understanding society so that we can improve it. (p. 186)

I don't think it's an accident she is grouped with uber-evolutionary psychology promoter David Buss on their university web site.

And who would promote the career of Rushton-influenced race pseudoscience promoter Razib Khan (who recently called Harden his friend) but another hereditarian?

I find it hard to believe that when Harden posted this tweet she was ignorant of Khan's reputation as a race pseudoscience-monger, since she tweeted her support for him not long after the controversy over Khan's being rejected by the NYTimes due to his racist history.

Speaking of Razib Khan, he will probably be happy he was name-checked in the piece.

In their hurry to defend Wilson, the signatories of the letter may not have realized the past involvement of its author, science blogger Razib Khan, with alt-right and white nationalist publications like The Unz Review and the Internet forum VDARE. When some learned of Khan’s background and withdrew their names, it brought a fresh round of outrage on social media and in popular science blogs.

The article highlights exactly why E. O. Wilson can be called, without reservation, a racist:

Rushton was arguing that “r/K selection theory” applies to different human races. This model was developed in the 1960s by Wilson and the population biologist Robert MacArthur to characterize distinct evolutionary reproductive strategies among different species of animals. It distinguishes species that produce large numbers of offspring (or those that are “r-selected”) with little subsequent parental investment (for example, many insects) from those that produce few offspring (or are “K-selected”) with greater parental investment (elephants, humans). Rushton’s intent was rather to demonstrate that “behavioral genetics seems to suggest that r/K relationships are heritable” among humans, and that, furthermore, different human “races” have different strategies: specifically, that Black people are r-selected, while whites are K-selected. Moreover, he carefully explained to Wilson that this model accounted for racial disparities in IQ, postulating that Black people are not selected for high intelligence because their selection strategy favors, essentially, quantity over quality.

As an author of the r/K model, one would have expected Wilson to have been outraged at Rushton’s proposal, which implied, as many nineteenth-century scientists did, that human “races” constituted different species—a view no reputable biologist, including Wilson, would have publicly defended. But Wilson immediately dashed off a letter to Rushton applauding his application of the r/K model as “one of the most original and interesting [ideas] I’ve ever encountered in psychology,” adding that the work was “courageous.” “In this country the whole issue would be clouded by personal charges of racism to the point that rational discussion would be almost impossible,” he wrote, urging Rushton to “press ahead!”

As the article notes:

...one is bound to ask what, precisely, Wilson found so “important” or “brilliant” about an argument that, in essence, Black people have evolved to breed more and be less intelligent than white? Rushton, unabashed by public criticism, was unafraid to promote ideas that Wilson would not. But Wilson’s desire to see those ideas advanced is repeatedly made clear in his support for his colleague, to the extent that he even overlooked an obvious misapplication of his own theory.

E. O. Wilson was a racist.

Case closed. 

Razib Khan's Twitter followers have some thoughts about Coyne's post.

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

I knew that if someone did a little digging they would find plenty of evidence of E. O. Wilson's support for race pseudoscience and racist Jean-Phillipe Rushton. And fortunately someone did some digging.

In the just-published article New Evidence of E. O. Wilson's Intimacy with Scientific Racism, authors Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons write:

At the request of the Library of Congress, Wilson donated much of the contents of his office—letters, reprints, conference proceedings, etc.—to the national archive. The Wilson Papers comprises hundreds of boxes of documents and numerous digital recordings. We started exploring these holdings in September 2021, out of our broad interest in the Sociobiology debate. We did not intend to investigate scientific racism. However, the four folders labeled “Rushton, John Philippe” caught our attention. And in light of the controversy initiated by the Scientific American op-ed, we hope to share them and provide additional context for understanding Wilson’s legacy and the broader legacy of scientific racism.

The Farina/Gibbons article is full of new information based directly on Wilson's own correspondence:

Wilson’s aforementioned July 1990 letter to Professor Vanderwolf, while ultimately inconsequential, calls attention to a message of support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars through their publication Academic Questions. What Wilson does not mention is that Wilson himself solicited support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars in a letter to its founder Stephen Balch on November 6, 1989 (box 143 folder 10). On December 5, 1989, Wilson writes to Rushton, copying Balch, with the following message: “I am very heartened by the response of the National Association of Scholars (Academic Questions) to your case… Much as they like, your [Rushton’s] critics simply will not be able to convict you of racism, and there will come a day when the more honest among them will rue the day they joined this leftward revival of McCarthyism.”

Demonstrating that those who promote sociobiology and all other forms of biological reductionism: race pseudoscience, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, biosocial criminology, etc have always responded to criticism of their race speculations with phrases like "leftward revival of McCarthyism."

While reading the article, I was often reminded of the relationship between Steven Pinker and Razib Khan:

Despite Wilson’s self-perceived vulnerability, he stuck his neck out for Rushton on many occasions. He behaved in many ways like a mentor. The relationship between the two men is almost heartwarming, until you start reading Rushton’s overtly racist work.

And they even mentioned Steven Pinker's favorite defense against his long-time support of race pseudoscience promoters, "guilt by association:"

Wilson and Rushton’s relationship is not a story of “guilt by association” or of honest mistakes and unfortunate missteps. It is a story about how racist ideas are woven into the scientific record with the support of powerful allies who operate in secret. While this story is extraordinary, it is not unusual.

I wrote a multi-part series criticizing Steven Pinker's inclusion of a very bad piece of work written by Steve Sailer, into the "Best of Science and Nature Writing" of 2004. Clear evidence that Pinker isn't simply associated with Steve Sailer, he promoted his career, much like E. O. Wilson promoted the career of J. P. Rushton.

Before the Farina/Gibbons article was published, I had searched for a connection between Wilson and race pseudoscience. I found an archived copy of a book published in 1991, A mirror to nature, reflections of science, scientists and society by Peter Knudtsen that contained this passage:

It would also be naive to ignore the fact that there exists a measure of scientific sympathy — for the most part publicly silent — for Rushton’s evolutionary thinking on race. Charles Lumsden sweepingly referred to this group as an “invisible collection of Rushton’s reluctant supporters.” Although it may come as a painful surprise to some in the scientific community, one of them happens to be none other than E. O. Wilson (although, to my knowledge, this significant fact has, at this writing, yet to be reported in the Canadian media). “I think Phil is an honest and capable researcher,” Wilson told me in a cautiously worded statement. “The basic reasoning by Rushton is solid evolutionary reasoning; that is, it is logically sound. If he had seen some apparent geographic variation for a non-human species — a species of sparrow or sparrow hawk, for example — no one would have batted an eye.”

This made it pretty clear that Wilson fully supported Rushton's race science and on top of that, the Canadian media decided to ignore Wilson's complicity. Much like the media today, with rare exceptions, ignores "celebrity intellectual" Steven Pinker's ongoing support of Razib Khan, and his former support of Steve Sailer. 

That's why I started this blog. Because we can't count on the lazy, feckless media to do follow-through on race pseudoscience and its supporters.

Wilson's support for Rushton also underlines the fact that there is no such thing as good sociobiology. Rushton, and Wilson on the sly, simply followed the leading premise of sociobiology to its logical conclusion. The leading premise being: the current human social hierarchy is not the result of a series of historical events and economic conditions, but rather the direct expression of evolution, written in our genes.

Wilson was responsible for the revival of sociobiology. His support for Rushton tells you all you need to know about sociobiology and other forms of biological reductionism.

As Marvin Harris observed about sociobiology in his superb Cultural Materialism, the Struggle for a Science of Culture (available here), in the chapter "Sociobiology and Biological Reductionism":

Each instance of a genuine cultural performance by a macaque or a chimpanzee is worth a journal article. But all the journals in all the libraries of the world would not suffice to render a running account of human cultural activities. 

Cultural evolution is thus responsible for creating an amount of intra-specific behavioral variation in the human species that does not exist in any other species. Moreover, this immense quantity of variation involves functional specialties whose analogues are associated with great phylogenetic distances in the evolu­tion of other bio-forms. The contrast between a paleo-technic foraging band and an industrial superpower is surely not inferior to the contrast between whole phyla - if not kingdoms - in the Linnaean taxonomy. 

It took billions of years for natural selection to create specialized adap­tations for fishing, hunting, agriculture; for aquatic, terrestrial, and aerial locomotion; and for predatory and defensive weaponry, such as teeth, claws, and armor. Equivalent specialties were developed by cul­tural evolution in less than ten thousand years. 

The main focus of human sociobiology ought therefore to be the explanation of why other species have such minuscule and insignificant cultural repertories and why humans alone have such gigantic and important ones. But sociobi­ologists conceive their task to be something else - namely, the identifi­cation of the genetic components in human cultural traits. This repre­sents a fundamental misdirection for human social science and a diversion of resources from the more urgent task of explaining the vast majority of cultural traits that do not have a definite genetic compo­nent.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for Jerry Coyne or Nicholas Christakis to admit they were wrong to defend Wilson against charges of racism.

PZ Myers' free college course

Biologist and college professor P. Z. Myers has been posting videos from his college course, Biology 4312 online. 

This is a very great thing.

In addition to being a stalwart defender of liberal causes and a harsh critic of race pseudoscience, Myers is a talented science communicator. I consider his video on evolutionary psychology to be an absolute masterpiece: it is a mini-course in evolutionary theory plus what is wrong with evolutionary psychology and all in under thirty minutes. This is the Internet at its best.

So check out his YouTube channel. And his long-running blog, Pharyngula.

Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study Finds

This is exactly what hereditarians and race pseudoscience-mongers don't want to hear.

Especially race pseudoscience-mongers, who are closely allied to libertarians, who certainly don't want the government to give cash payments to poor people.

The sociobiology message: "everything is caused by genes" is the greatest aid to the Right ever invented.

From the NYTimes article:

“This is a big scientific finding,” said Martha J. Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted a review of the study for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where it was published on Monday. “It’s proof that just giving the families more money, even a modest amount of more money, leads to better brain development.”

***

Katherine Magnuson, a co-author of the study who directs the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, said she was surprised that only a year’s worth of aid made a difference. “It shows how sensitive the brain is to environments,” she said.

Thanks to being descendants of people, who, only five generations ago, didn't own anything because they themselves were property, and, after Emancipation, were tormented and immiserated by the white majority through means both legal and extra-legal, Black Americans are more likely to be poor than any other ethnic group in the United States.

These facts are the reason why the IDW and its race pseudoscience allies deny Black history and why they hate the 1619 project so much.

Razib Khan for sale

I am extremely sick of talking about and thinking about race pseudoscience promoter Razib Khan. 

The past week has been such a tiresome trek through racism and utter shamelessness. Not only because of Khan himself but all his horrific defenders. Although Steve Pinker was strangely missing in action, there was still his biggest fanboy Jerry Coyne, plus Nicholas Christakis and, as always, Claire Lehmann who paid Khan to agree with Charles Murray that Black Americans are an existential threat.

Like Khan, Lehmann doesn't care about scientific rigor, all she cares about is getting paid to promote racism masquerading as science. 

After this post I'll have to take a break for a little bit from being eyeball deep in their ethics-free bullshit.

Thanks to reading the transcript from Khan's October 2021 interview, which I talked about in my previous post, Razib Khan blackmail strategy revealed, I found further confirmation that Razib Khan is a race pseudoscience promoter for the money. 

As I said in the post The appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan:

My theory is that over the past 20 years he has become addicted to the easy money of being a right-wing political operative. I suspect biochemistry is much harder than writing (badly) his Substack articles or a letter of protest to Scientific American. 

And as long as the feckless - or worse - like Steven Pinker, Nicholas Christakis and others keep defending and promoting him,  while Ron Unz (and/or whoever else) keep paying him, what incentive is there for Razib Khan to get a career that is not appalling? 

Khan will likely spend his entire career, like Charles Murray, on wingnut welfare.

About minute 73 of the video, Khan says this: 

KHAN

...I mean everyone has a price, like I'll go woke for like uh for Elon type money, I mean there's there's a price you know what I'm saying? Like if you show me the cash like, I will I'll say whatever you want me to say. But at this point um, no one's like offering me money to conform so I'm not gonna conform, you know, like I'm just gonna say what I think is true...

There's plenty of reason to doubt Khan's incessant babbling about his non-woke positions is purely from his love of the truth, although I'm certainly willing to believe he's dull enough to believe the race pseudoscience garbage he professes. 

But we have evidence that Khan has gotten money directly or indirectly from the following right-wing racist extremists: Ron Unz, Peter Thiel, Charles Koch, Taki Theodoracopulos and Mark Carnegie. Certainly Thiel and Koch, at least, are capable of paying Khan "Elon type money."

And now we see Khan freely admitting, to a friendly audience, that he has zero ethics when it comes to his political positions. 

I'm sure I could find many more embarrassing statements from Khan if I combed through his many online platforms: there's his Twitter account, his Brown Pundits site, his Substack, his articles for Quillette and City Journal, podcast interviews and YouTube videos and - it seems endless. All he seems to do all day is express his poorly-organized and unoriginal right-wing views.

Because he's not a scientist, he is a political operative.

Those opposed to race pseudoscience don't need to pay someone like Khan. We have working scientists like PZ Myers and Adam Rutherford. 

As I wrote back in August:

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.

But as Krugman noted, the Right has a wingnut welfare system to pay for tame intellectuals - and yes, as unimpressive as he is, Khan is what passes for an intellectual on the Right:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

Lucky for the right, the world is full of the morally bankrupt like Razib Khan, happy to take money to make the world a worser place.

Razib Khan blackmail strategy revealed

 Currently available on Twitter here.

Sometimes having a 20+ year long career as a race pseudoscience-promoting political operative requires harsh methods.

Transcript

                                                        KHAN 

...I mean, so, I keep a lot of ah you know, I keep a lot of that to myself partly because if someone who's an academic decides to denounce me, and I know things about them, I'll just divulge what I know. So ah to be entirely frank, I've been open about that as a pre-emptive strike. Ah please, I know you have a reputation, a bigger reputation than me, and I've heard things about you, and I will just divulge it to my 35,000 followers if you decided to come at me. So um, keep the information, keep all your texts, keep all your DMs, and use it against people. Now if you're a normal person, you're a normie, you don't have to deal with this. 

I did a podcast with my friend Colin Wright, he is an "arch-binarist" I don't know if you know Colin, he's managing editor at Quillette and he is a proponent of this controversial concept called "the sex binary" and so ah he has friends who ah were making fun of - academic friends who were making fun of what he called "gender ideology"  - I don't know too much about it so I'll use Colin's terms. I'm not saying I really know much about what this means. And now they're denouncing them and all these things and he has records of what they thought...

Followers of Pinkerite will recognize the name of Colin Wright. Both Khan and Wright are sad cases, both went to college to study science and both have ended up not with real science careers, but rather, becoming political operatives for rightwing causes, specializing in anti-trans hatred for Wright and race pseudoscience racism for Khan.

The interview is from Alex Kaschuta's Substack from back in October 2021. It can be found on YouTube here. The transcripted section begins around minute 16 in the video.

Kaschuta's most recent interview is with Emil Kirkegaard, even more hardcore blatantly into racism than Razib Khan.

I've always suspected that Steve Sailer uses the blackmail strategy to keep Steven Pinker - who quietly dropped Sailer in 2011 - from publicly denouncing him. 

Maybe Khan got the idea from Sailer, who has been a bit like a race pseudoscience mentor for Khan ever since Khan completed his first undergraduate degree, twenty-two years ago.

The political operative was seen plying his trade on Twitter recently. 

It's certainly curious that someone of the "old liberal world" has spent 20+ years taking money from racists and Holocaust deniers. 

Razib Khan, like all right-wingers, likes to denounce identity politics, but he engages in it himself whenever it is useful for him. 

He even has a blog called "Brown Pundits" and on its about page it says: "We have a number of editors and contributors, who all share a connection with, or interest in, the Indian subcontinent and its far-flung diaspora."

What better place to denounce identity politics than on a political operative's blog dedicated to bringing together individuals of the same ethnic identity?

I sometimes wonder if rightwing promoters of race pseudoscience, like Razib Khan are simply incapable of maintaining coherent thought for any length of time, and that's why they have to take wingnut welfare to get by. Maybe Razib Khan is just as bad at science as he is at writing.

Maybe people like Khan are such hypocrites because they don't even understand what hypocrisy means.

More identity politics from Razib Khan.

The appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan

Razib Khan, an atheist, compares
the belief in systemic racism to religion 

---------------------------------------------------------------

The purpose of this site is to get the word out about all the people in the media, in science and in academia
who promote race pseudoscience - which often bleeds into racism, and especially, in the United States, into anti-Black racism.

Although I am occasionally contacted for background info by professional journalists - as with the Undark article about Razib Khan by Michael Shulson and the Quillette article by Donna Minkowitz, sometimes it feels like I am not making any progress getting the word out about the individuals and organizations promoting race pseudoscience. 

Which is why it was nice that Razib Khan put together a political campaign attacking a Scientific American article about E. O. Wilson: not only did the letter help to show who people like Nicholas Christakis are, it created a controversy, which led to more people learning about the appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan. Probably way more, in one swoop, than I reach in a year.

Fun fact - Stephen Jay Gould, the great Satan of race pseudoscience promoters, was attacked by Khan in a way characterized by biochemist Larry Moran as "childish" - but you didn't see Moran writing a protest letter about it and getting all his friends to sign it. Maybe because Moran is an actual scientist while Khan is a political operative.

The SciAm letter controversy revealed many people in science and academia were utterly clueless about Khan's career as a pseudoscience-monger, and there's really no excuse. In addition to the Undark piece, there was the controversy in 2015 when the New York Times hired then dumped Khan when journalists pointed out Khan's history of race pseudoscience claims. I had a small part in that, because Jamelle Bouie had linked to my personal blog, among other sources, to reveal Khan's race obsession.

Although according to Khan's own testimony, "getting cancelled" was no big deal for him.

I became aware of Khan and his race pseudoscience blog, Gene Expression around 2005. I had basically dismissed him as yet another racist crank, until I realized in 2006 that Steven Pinker was helping to promote his career. Something I later discovered Pinker had done for racist Steve Sailer in 2004.

I've written about Khan on my personal blog and on Pinkerite several times, including:

• His relationship with the Insitome Institute

• The ongoing relationship with Steven Pinker.

• Khan's desire to erase American history in favor of genetics

• His Quillette authorship, including with "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell

His latest Quillette piece, December 2021, is entitled "The Aristocracy of Talent" and if we are talking the aristocracy of literary talent, Khan ranks as a peasant. He's such a bad writer even his fellow racists recognize it. 

• The financial support he's gotten (along with Steve Sailer and crank Gregory Cochran) from rightwing, anti-immigration Holocaust denying Ron Unz, publisher of The Unz Review

And what should be the best known thing about Razib Khan, his 2021 review of Charles Murray's "Facing Reality" in which Khan says in so many words, in agreement with "his friend" Murray that American society must do something about the fact that Black Americans are innately, genetically pre-disposed to being stupid and criminal and if America does not do something about those genetically-degraded Blacks we "face disaster."

Only in America - someone born in Bangladesh moves to this country and makes himself a lucrative career dehumanizing a group of Americans whose roots in North America and the United States go back centuries. 

That's nothing against Bangladesh: European immigrants have been rising in the social pecking order on the backs of Black Americans for a long time, although admittedly, not all Europeans all at once. The Irish have about the palest skin around but it took them awhile, as most of them were impoverished and fleeing famine, to become respectable enough to be truly white. As this caricature from 1876 makes clear.

Razib Khan is a pioneer in that respect, pushing the boundaries so that all you have to do to get a leg up in the American nativist hierarchy these days is to portray Black Americans as subhuman and deny the existence of systemic racism. You don't even have to have European ethnicity anymore. 

Khan's family must be so proud of him.

We can see this new system in action from the very beginning of Razib Khan's appalling career. The anti-immigration, white supremacist hate organization VDARE gave immigrant, non-white Razib Khan his start on the road to race pseudoscience fame and fortune.

In May 2000, right around the time he received his BS in biochemistry from the University of Oregon, Khan can be seen sharing his thoughts on race and intelligence with racist Steve Sailer on the VDARE web site (the link goes to the archived version of the page.)

If by "intelligence" one means analytic reasoning skills, it seems that the Northeast Asians —Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans — are somewhat more intelligent than the white norm. (I believe the I.Q. difference is generally listed as somewhere between 2-8 points, depending on the study). Most of the evidence also seems to point to New World Indians' scoring slightly below whites.  Thus, Mestizos (white-Indian mixes) would have slightly lower IQs than whites, while Eurasians (white-East Asian crosses) would have slightly higher IQs.  The correlation between the increasing blondeness of high I.Q. Eurasians would be somewhat mitigated if the less intelligent Eurasian men happened to import intelligent East Asian women to make up for their competitive disadvantage on the marriage market, while the more intelligent Eurasians would marry less intelligent blondes (i.e., European derived females).  The key is how much more intelligent the high status Eurasian males are, and how much more intelligent Asian females are vs. European females

In addition, the most intelligent Eurasian men might also be the most "nerdish" as Mr. Sailer would say. [See Steve Sailer's essay "Nerdishness: The Great Unexplored Topic" at http://www.iSteve.com/nerds.htm ]. This would make it rather more difficult for them to attract high status "blondes."  What I am saying is that there is a difference between the macho Mestizo and black men, who attain high status in most likely extroverted fields (say entertainment, sports, law, politics, and business) while highly intelligent Eurasians might be funneling into scientific fields, making their values, and their possible mates, a bit different.  Melinda French Gates for instance, to use the classic example of a nerd-wife, is attractive, but not blonde.

Sailer must have been impressed. By March 2002 he was praising Khan and referring to him as a geneticist. Although if Khan's Wikipedia page is to be believed, his only credential at that point was for biochemistry.

Khan then got a column at Unz Review and started his own website, Gene Expression, which has archives available here. 

June 2002, the first month archived, is full of racist gems:

Khan discusses Steve Sailer's views on race and asks when Sailer will write a book on the topic. In a different post he refers to the "race realist project" and "politically correct scientists like Cavalli-Sforza who deny the reality of race." Khan recommends the work of J. Phillipe Rushton, infamous racist and crappy scientist: "read Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective and you get the same data interpreted in a rather different manner."

The June 30 post again acknowledges his debt to Rushton and he uses the term "human biodiversity" coined by Sailer.

...here is something that I want to look at from the prism of human biodiversity: 21% of Asian-Americans, 11% of Hispanic Americans, 10% of white Americans and 6% of black Americans describe themselves as "Secular." This tends to map onto Rushton's Rule rather well (blacks at one end-Asians at the other).

The "Rushton's Rule" link goes to Steve Sailer's website.

In a post from June 27, Khan writes:

How much more social science data do we really need to convince people about race differences? We've had decades of a consistent 15 point gap between blacks and whites-spanning Jim Crow, desegregation and the rise of the black middle class. And yet the dominant position still remains that the gap is an artifice of social discrimination and oppression. What will really convince the opposition-what they'll have a harder time dismissing-are genuine structural differences (neurological) between races on average in the neocortex itself. 

Khan's view here in 2002 is identical to the one expressed in his positive review of Charles Murray's book in 2021. 

And Khan's view of race isn't merely "scientific":

Now, it is true that I believe that races are different. I also believe that private organizations-individuals or corporations-should be able to take race into account in their everyday decisions.

Another view Khan shares with his friend Charles Murray.

Clearly Razib Khan's two decades-long job of smearing Black Americans has been extremely easy. He simply repeats the same J. Phillippe Rushton/Charles Murray talking points year after year, with some slight changes to the wording. But the message is always the same: "Black" people are portrayed as completely separate from the rest of humanity, and claimed to be genetically inferior both intellectually and morally. 

And he's been paid well to promote this message, by Unz, Quillette, Taki's Magazine, and who knows what or who else. We know that Charles Koch along with other rightwing racist plutocrats give millions via Donors Trust to white nationalist organizations like American Renaissance and Khan's original mentor, VDARE. It wouldn't be surprising if they gave money directly to Khan. And Khan has already written for the Koch-funded City Journal

But Khan hasn't written exclusively for racist organizations. For a time Khan was even pushing race pseudoscience via Discover magazine.

But it's not all fun, Khan will have you know. Sometimes he has to venture outside the race pseudoscience bubble and answer questions about his race beliefs and he finds it just so tiresome, as he told one of these (likely astro-turfed ) pro-IDW organizations the "New Liberals":

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.

Not interesting to him. But interesting enough to monologue about race in the most flippant, offensive way possible. "give your son's inheritance to a Black family." See, systemic racism solved. Why didn't those stupid Old Liberals think of that?

Recently he was bemoaning his job along with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, another Quillette author.

So why doesn't Khan get a real science job, doing what he has credentials for: biochemistry and biology? 

Kathyrn Paige Harden promoted 
Razib Khan's career in 2017. 
In 2021 Khan testified she was his friend

My theory is that over the past 20 years he has become addicted to the easy money of being a right-wing political operative. I suspect biochemistry is much harder than writing (badly) his Substack articles or a letter of protest to Scientific American. 

And as long as the feckless - or worse - like Steven Pinker, Nicholas Christakis and others keep defending and promoting him,  while Ron Unz (and/or whoever else) keep paying him, what incentive is there for Razib Khan to get a career that is not appalling? 

Khan will likely spend his entire career, like Charles Murray, on wingnut welfare.

James Baldwin spins in his grave as Nicholas Christakis uses his name to defend racist Razib Khan

I will get around to addressing the Scientific American article written in response to the death of EO Wilson, and the protest letter that Razib Khan wrote against it, signed by a bunch of academics including race pseudoscience-monger and #1 Pinker fanboy Jerry Coyne.

I only skimmed the Scientific American piece when it was first published and nothing jumped out at me, but if Khan is using an attack on it to promote his race pseudoscience career, it must be better than I realized.

I will say one thing though - it's curious that a handful of scientists and academics consider Khan their leader, when he is primarily a right-wing political operative and he signed his own letter, not as a "geneticist" which is how he currently identifies on his Twitter account, but just as "Razib Khan, Unsupervised Learning, Substack." The only signer not associated with a science-related institution, he identifies as a guy with a Substack.

I was glad to see that two signers of Khan's letter removed their signatures when they found out who Razib Khan is. 

Which caused Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University Nicholas Christakis to jump in and defend Khan. 

And he did it in the name of James Baldwin.

Somehow I think Baldwin wouldn't appreciate being used to defend Khan, who recently wrote a rave review of Charles Murray's latest book for race pseudoscience-promoting rag Quillette. Khan agreed with Murray that we must "connect the dots" about Black Americans or "face disaster."

 But then, Christakis has no problem with race science trash rag Quillette - he has published in it.

And since he has a connection to race pseudoscience trash rag Quillette, it's unlikely Christakis can plead ignorance of who Khan is.

But many people don't know about Khan's racist career. It's depressing. I mean, I'm doing my best here to get the word out about all promoters of race pseudoscience. Sure I don't talk about Khan all the time on this site but I have talked about him plenty. And still so many people don't know about his 20+ year, well-remunerated career as a rightwing political operative and promoter of race pseudoscience.

Sigh.

Another curious aspect of this letter incident - I see lots of people defending E. O. Wilson against the charge of racism. I hadn't researched Wilson much, but it didn't take long to find him praising extreme racist J. Phillippe Rushton for his claims about race. I will have to look into this further.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias jumps in to defend Razib Khan from criticism. 

How dare anybody have second thoughts about supporting a cause of a gigantic racist like Razib Khan!

UPDATE 2 - Nicholas Christakis, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University incorrectly attributed the quote to Baldwin, when it was another member of the Civil Rights generation, Bayard Rustin. And Christakis got the quote wrong too.

Note that Christakis was corrected by Angel Eduardo, a member of the advisory board of far-right leaning, Republican-connected, race pseudoscience friendly anti-CRT grift organization FAIR. 

I hadn't really taken notice of Christakis on this site before, I didn't realize how deep in he is with race pseudoscience and far-right positions. I will pay more attention going forward.