Did Christina Hoff Sommers suddenly forget all about James Damore?

Back in 2017 Google engineer James Damore published a memo on a Google company discussion board claiming, among other things, that women were intellectually inferior to men at STEM subjects. 

The memo has its own Wiki page which includes (my highlight):

The company fired Damore for violation of the company's code of conduct.[2] Damore filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, but later withdrew this complaint. A lawyer with the NLRB found his firing to be proper;[3][4][5] however, such a decision is not legally binding.[6] After withdrawing this complaint, Damore filed a class action lawsuit, retaining the services of attorney Harmeet Dhillon,[7][8] alleging that Google was discriminating against conservatives, whites, Asians, and men.[9][10] Damore dismissed his claims in the lawsuit to pursue arbitration against Google.[11]

Harmeet Dhillon - where have we heard that name before? Of course, Harmeet Dhillon is also Andy Ngo's lawyer.

It appears that Harmeet K. Dhillon, Republican National Committeewoman, is the lawyer of choice for the Intellectual Dark Web whenever they have a controversial issue.

Anybody who has read the memo can see Damore indisputably claimed that men had better tech abilities than women, biologically:

I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

Christina Hoff Sommers jumped to Damore's defense, many times as can easily be demonstrated by this Google search.

So imagine my surprise when my inbox had this retweet by Christina Hoff Sommers the other day.

I keep forgetting to unfollow Sommers on one of my Twitter accounts that she hasn't blocked. Getting a tweet almost every morning from professional misogynist Christina Hoff Sommers is sapping my will to live.

Meghan Daum, who appears to be a second-string member of the Intellectual Dark Web, apparently has not heard of Larry Summers, Steven Pinker, or James Damore, who all do believe that women have inferior math abilities compared to men, biologically.

But of course we know that Christina Hoff Sommers has heard of them, and has written in defense of both Larry Summers and James Damore.

So why does Sommers seem to agree with Daum's ignorance-based claim that "no serious person has ever said it's about ability"?

1. Is this a sign that the Intellectual Dark Web has decided that it's no longer about "ability" and instead plans to emphasize female "preferences" which are both factors attributed by James Damore to women's lesser STEM achievements?

2. Maybe Sommers, at age 69 is starting to show signs of losing it, intellectually, like other senior members of the Intellectual Dark Web and forgot why she considered James Damore a "truth-teller"?

3. Is this an example of "weak pinkerism" as I described in the previous blog post - when it suits the IDW, they pretend they don't believe the extreme hereditarian things they claim to believe when they think they have a friendly audience?

4. Or is it about the grift?

One of my all-time favorite articles about the Intellectual Dark Web is - although it was published before Bari Weiss popularized the term in May 2018 - The Free Speech Grifters by Mari Uyehara in March 2018. The piece includes a perfect description of the grift-loving soul of Christina Hoff Sommers:

At Lewis & Clark Law School, Sommers found what seems to be her favorite kind of audience: a disruptive one. Prior to the speech, activists handed out flyers labeling her "a fascist," among other hyperbolic charges familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. When she attempted to give her talk, a handful of students, led by a blonde ringleader in a black "Stay Woke" jacket, disrupted it with chanting about comrades while holding up a cardboard sign that read "No Platform for Fascists." It was a Ben Shapiro wet dream. As the ringleader yelled, "Black lives matter," Sommers turned to the camera euphorically grinning from ear to ear. Here it was: the money shot.

Could it be that Sommers supported James Damore not because she has bothered to pay attention to what he actually said in the memo, but because it's her job as part of the wingnut welfare ecosystem that pays her to hate women, and also because she loves the grift so much?

It could be a combination of several.

But it's clear that Christina Hoff Sommers is not overly-concerned about intellectual integrity. Which is likely why she makes a living taking money from Koch and other plutocrats to be a shitty third-rate intellectual.

The misogynist Christina Hoff Sommers

I've pointed out before that IDW women don't just hate feminists - they are full-on misogynists.

Christina Hoff Sommers demonstrated that again recently with this tweet telling women to STFU about menstruation because men never talk about bodily secretions.

Then she promoted a tweet where someone compared menstruation - a healthy normal process - to jock itch, a fungal infection.

There is nothing especially feminist about wanting to talk about menstruation. And nobody is making Christina Hoff Sommers listen to people talking about it. I think she just doesn't like the idea of women talking about their lives and their icky gross bodies.

To a certain extent this is probably an example of rightwing empathy deficiency. Sommers, at age 68, has probably not had to deal with menstruation for well over a decade. And if it's of no interest to her, Christina Hoff Sommers, why should anybody else be talking about it?

The best part of the responses to her tweet was all the people asking her if she's ever known any men.

For example:

Cathy Young publishes a steaming pile of non-apology for GamerGate

Cathy Young, alerting her Twitter followers to her
friendly interview with Eron Gjoni
"for the 2nd anniversary of #GamerGate"

As I noted on this blog last month, Cathy Young celebrated the second anniversary of "the Zoe post" by giving a friendly interview to Eron Gjoni.

Three years later she's had a chance, as a sober-minded public intellectual of late-middle-age to reflect on GamerGate and possibly reassess her support for it.

Perhaps consider apologizing for her role as a GamerGate cheerleader.

No, of course not.

Instead she's doubling-down publishing (another) defense of GamerGate in Arc Digital.

And she's still defending Eron Gjoni. Young is a contributing editor for right-wing/libertarian Reason Magazine, and I thought libertarians were in favor of privacy rights.

But Cathy Young thinks it's perfectly OK for Eron Gjoni to tell the entire world about his relationship with his ex-girlfriend.

For instance: The ex who started it all, programmer Eron Gjoni, was a pro-social justice leftist who ostensibly intended his post on August 16, 2014 as a “call-out” about psychological abuse (as recently noted on Twitter by strongly anti-GamerGate video game journalist Ana Valens). He also published it with support from female, and feminist, friends. Gjoni accused Quinn, a prominent progressive activist in the video game community, of multiple infidelities and deceptions — with chat screenshots as corroboration — and charged that this conduct violated Quinn’s own professed ethical standards, under which a truly consensual relationship requires absolute honesty.

WHY is it Cathy Young's business what Zoe Quinn does in her personal life?

Young doesn't appear to think that what Gjoni did was unethical in the least, instead preferring to constantly harp on Quinn's ethics. This tweet is from less than a year ago, September 25, 2018.

If the genders were reversed it's unlikely that Cathy Young would be so cavalier about Gjoni's obscene invasion of privacy. It's truly instructive to compare Cathy Young's defense of Eron Gjoni, who did something clearly unethical and vicious, with Cathy Young's hatred of Kristen Roupenian because Roupenian committed the crime of writing a short story in which a fictional man is portrayed unflatteringly.

Is there any doubt that if a woman posted a screed against her ex-boyfriend, causing the ex-boyfriend to be the target of constant death threats, Young and the rest of the GameGate apologists would never stop using the phrase "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"? The rules are different for men.

This obvious double standard reveals the toxic, festering, internalized misogyny of Cathy Young, which is what Reason pays her for.

Imagine how much Cathy Young would hate Kristen Roupenian
if she had violated the privacy of a non-fictional person,
causing that person to receive death threats.

Cathy Young has already written many, many articles in defense of GamerGate, but I suppose her shamelessness would not rest until she did it again, in response to the NYTimes series on the topic. And Arc Digital apparently has nothing less done-to-death to publish.

The worst thing about the article is Young's shameless dishonesty in omitting the role she played, personally, in the promotion of GamerGate, neglecting to mention she was referred to by fans of GamerGate as "based auntie" (in contrast to their honorific for Christina Hoff Sommers of "based mom.")

Young mentions Milo Yiannopoulos in this latest GamerGate apologia:

There is strong evidence that as the alt-right began to gather steam in late 2015, Yiannopoulos tried to channel GamerGate — which he often tried to treat as his private army — in its direction. In January 2016, someone leaked chat logs in which pro-GamerGate blogger Ethan Ralph, who was close to Yiannopoulos, and several of his friends from /ggrevolt/ trashed GamerGate, agreed that the culture war needed to move on to the alt-right, and discussed plans to “reappropriate” GamerGate for the alt-right by purging liberals, who were mocked as “SJW-lite.” 

But Young doesn't mention that she appeared on a panel about Gamergate with Yianopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers in 2015. Nor does she mention that in an article she wrote for Arc Digital in 2017 she said:

This is not to rehash GamerGate but to say that I still think Milo was basically on the right side of it.

I was alerted to Young's most recent defense of GamerGate by Matt Jameson on Twitter. He makes an interesting point about Young and Sommers being non-gamers and much older than the median gamer.

So why exactly did Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers get involved in GamerGate?

My theory starts with Young's description of Yiannopoulos in this latest Arc Digital piece:

...some conservatives and critics of the social justice left were sympathetic. Breitbart, in particular, made GamerGate its pet cause, starting with a September 1, 2014 article by the soon-to-be-infamous Milo Yiannopoulos titled “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Yiannopoulos also championed GamerGate on Twitter; with his flashy bad-boy persona, he quickly became a hero to many in the movement, even those who otherwise had no affection for Breitbart’s politics.

It was catnip to catty persons. After all, hating women in general, and feminists in particular is why the Kochs and other right-wingers support the careers of women like Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers. GamerGate was a chance for them to level their careers of hating feminists up to notoriety, glamour and relevance thanks to Yiannopoulos and his "flashy bad-boy persona."

To get a sense of what GamerGate and Eron Gjoni are really about, you can't depend on the self-interested, dishonest portrayal by Cathy Young in an op-ed rag like Arc Digital. I recommend Boston Magazine's Game of Fear - the Story Behind GamerGate by Zachary Jason - a better publication than Arc Digital and a better writer than Cathy Young. An excerpt:

Gjoni, a software engineer, had set out to construct a machine to destroy his ex. Every written word Quinn had ever entrusted with him—all of her flirtations, anxieties, professional grudges, and confessions about her family and sex life—would serve as his iron and ore. He scoured their entire text and email history, archiving and organizing Quinn’s private information on his laptop and cell phone. Then he typed it all in black and white—minus, of course, the tones in their voices, their laughter and tears, and any context whatsoever. 

Of course, Gjoni could have just deleted the document, along with Quinn’s phone number and email address, and tried to woo one of the millions of other women on OkCupid or joined any of the roughly 5,000 other dating sites. He could have posted his thoughts on a blog and omitted her name. After several days, though, Gjoni decided to go through with it—after all, he was protected by the First Amendment, right? Gjoni has sometimes claimed that he simply wanted to warn people about his ex-girlfriend. But over the course of several months, he described to me how he painstakingly crafted “The Zoe Post,” a post that detonated with ruthless force and efficiency, for maximum pain and harm. 

From the start, it seems, Gjoni wanted to make certain that his blog about Quinn would connect with a large base of people in the gaming community, some of whom he already knew were passionately predisposed to attacking women in the industry. 

As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.” 

One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent. 

As he wrote, Gjoni kept pressing Quinn for information. About a week after their final breakup in San Francisco, Quinn finally stopped responding to Gjoni’s barrage of texts, Facebook messages, emails, and calls. He interpreted this not as a surrender or a retreat from his unwanted advances but instead, paradoxically, as a kind of attack. As he wrote at the time and later posted online, “GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. SHE’S AVOIDED ME EVER SINCE THIS CONVERSATION BECAUSE SHE IS PARANOID I MIGHT GO PUBLIC.” From this circular reasoning emerged a twisted justification: By withholding information, Quinn was somehow forcing Gjoni to “go public.” Eventually, Gjoni would come to see himself as the victim. “I was panicking at the thought of not publishing [‘The Zoe Post’],” he told me. “I didn’t care what the outcome was for Zoe.”

Cathy Young, who still seems to admire Eron Gjoni for what he did, in a rare act of legitimate journalism, and after the Boston Magazine article was published, got Gjoni to admit he would do it again:

Cathy Young: Let’s say that tomorrow someone comes to you with a time machine and you can go back to August 2014 and decide whether or not to do it all over again. Would you do it, and would you do anything differently? 

Eron Gjoni: It would be harder to do it. I would still do it, but it’s like—oh, this is going to suck. (Laughs) I suppose I’d take out the “burgers and fries” joke. I wasn’t sure about it, but people who were looking it over at the time said it was too funny to take out [and] like, “All right, I’ll trust you on it.”

I just hope that Gjoni never publishes a work of short fiction which presents a non-existent man in an unflattering light. Cathy Young might call it quits after that.

The IDW hates the Southern Poverty Law Center, Part 2

As noted on this blog previously, the Intellectual Dark Web, from Steven Pinker (cited as one of the most respectable of the IDW by Bari Weiss) on down hate the Southern Poverty Law Center because some members of the IDW are mentioned in unflattering ways due to their various hate-group associations.

The latest instance is Sam Harris retweeting an article in the Wall Street Journal attacking the SPLC written by someone from the Alliance Defense Fund.

When enough people pointed out the extreme hatred the ADF has for gays, as when the filed an amicus brief in a case defending the criminalization of gay sex, he backed off and admitted he was wrong.

Although of course he can never leave it at that.

However, Mehdi Hasan has some questions for Harris.

What Harris means by the statement that the SPLC "smears anyone in sight" is that they truthfully reported what members of the alt-right told them about Harris's influence on their decision to become alt-right along with Gavin McInnes and Stefan Molyneux.

Not long ago Christina Hoff Sommers was found to have appeared on a white supremacist radio program Radio 3Fourteen. As the web site Angry White Men notes:

Radio 3Fourteen (a program that is part of the larger Red Ice Radio network) has hosted notorious Holocaust-deniers, Neo-Nazis, and other fringe figures in the past, and the show’s host is no stranger to making racist and homophobic remarks.

Yet Fiamengo isn’t the only men’s rights leader to appear on the program. In fact, between 2013 and the present, four prominent MRAs have been guests on Radio 3Fourteen: Paul Elam, Warren Farrell, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Suzanne Venker...

...On January 12, 2016, prominent anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers appeared on Radio 3Fourteen in an episode titled “Feminism & Its Impact on Society.” In some ways her appearance on the program isn’t surprising. She’s written books like 2000’s The War Against Boys and defended the anti-woman harassment campaign known as Gamergate. On the other hand, Sommers is Jewish and Radio 3Fourteen is often openly hostile to Jews.

Sommers was very displeased when SPLC mentioned her unflatteringly in passing. 

Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young and the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi

Cathy Young was such a big
booster of Gamergate, she
became a Gamergate meme

 I discussed the influence that James Lindsay had on the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi.

Well today the NYTimes reports that the would-be assassin was also influenced by Gamergate - and Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young were the two biggest cheerleaders of Gamergate:

According to his blog posts, the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate, which began in 2014 as a backlash against female critics of the gaming industry and included misogynistic attacks and death threats, became a catalyst of his growing interest in right-wing conspiracy theories and the many rants against women that he posted on his blog.

“How did I get into all this,” he wrote in one passage. “Gamer Gate it was gamer gate.” He described Gamergate as a “consumer led revolt against communism,” and railed against “wokism” and feminism — complaints that appeared to be precursors to his later embrace of the most virulent and bigoted of online conspiracy theories. It all came in an era in which such theories have spread among wider groups of Americans and have been promoted by far-right leaders.

Sommers and Young are paid by right-wing plutocrats, especially Charles Koch, to promote misogyny and Gamergate was a misogyny goldmine:

Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist cultural critic, has for months received death and rape threats from opponents of her recent work challenging the stereotypes of women in video games. Bomb threats for her public talks are now routine. One detractor created a game in which players can click their mouse to punch an image of her face.

Not until Tuesday, though, did Ms. Sarkeesian feel compelled to cancel a speech, planned at Utah State University. The day before, members of the university administration received an email warning that a shooting massacre would be carried out at the event. And under Utah law, she was told, the campus police could not prevent people with weapons from entering her talk.

Cathy Young had an obsessive hatred for Anita Sarkeesian, because Young did not agree with Sarkeesian's commentary shared online via the Youtube channel Feminist Frequency.

Not only did Young hate young feminists like Sarkeesian, she did her best to lionize stalker sociopath Eron Gjoni, celebrating the anniversary of his public letter attacking Zoe Quinn, which kicked off Gamergate.

Young was still attacking Quinn in 2019, in this case using the right-wing extremist garbage rag The Post Millennial (currently edited by Trump's ratfucker Andy Ngo) as her source.

Christina Hoff Sommers did her part in promoting the misogynist shitstorm that was Gamergate. Here she can be seen in 2016, via her employer, the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute, defending Gamergate along with Camille Paglia, a defender of pedophilia.

Let me be clear - although I think Young and Sommers are prominent supporters of hate campaigns like Gamergate because they are paid by the likes of Koch to do so, I also think they enjoy their work because both of them - along with Paglia and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann are, by character, deeply misogynist.

These are horrible people. It should be no surprise that their hate campaign inspired nut jobs like the would-be assassin.

Chat GPT spills the tea about Peter Thiel and the Intellectual Dark Web

Since ChatGPT told me that Bari Weiss received a quarter of a million dollars from Peter Thiel in 2017, it occurred to me that perhaps her 2018 article for the New York Times about the splendors of her fellow travellers, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, was a public announcement of who had agreed to be on the Peter Thiel payroll. In addition to all those associated with Quillette.

In the article there were twenty-five individuals named by Weiss as connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, including Steven Pinker, Kanye West, Milo Yiannapoulos, Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones. 

But the most significant of the IDW bunch are those who were photographed for the article, standing in the dark in the bushes. 

I guess the photographer wanted to make a point by posing these Intellectuals in the Dark, but drew the line at literally portraying them in a Web and so had to stick them in some bushes instead.

The eight bush skulkers include Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, Dave Rubin and Eric and Bret Weinstein.

So what does ChatGPT have to say about them?

NOTE:  this must be investigated further, since ChatGPT is known to be factually unreliable.

        Has Peter Thiel ever funded Sam Harris?

Yes, Peter Thiel has provided funding to Sam Harris in the past. In fact, Thiel was one of the early supporters of Harris' podcast and helped fund the creation of the Waking Up app, which was later renamed to the Sam Harris app. Thiel and Harris have also engaged in public conversations and have expressed mutual respect for each other's work in various fields.

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

Supposedly Harris says he's done with the Intellectual Dark Web.

I came up empty on a Thiel funding source for Michael Shermer, but ChatGPT did have this info, which is not even available at SourceWatch.

Has the Skeptic magazine received funding from Donors Trust?

Yes, according to public records, Skeptic magazine has received funding from Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that provides support to a variety of conservative and libertarian organizations. Specifically, tax filings from Donors Trust show that they provided funding to the Skeptics Society, the organization that publishes Skeptic magazine, in both 2014 and 2015. It's worth noting that Donors Trust supports a wide range of organizations across the political spectrum, and the fact that an organization receives funding from Donors Trust does not necessarily imply any particular political alignment or agenda. 

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

Donor's Trust is the infamous right-wing funding vehicle that also gives millions to racist monsters VDARE.

ChatGPT had nothing about Thiel or Donors Trust funding for Christina Hoff Sommers, but it's not a secret that she's taken money from Koch-funded organizations for decades. ChatGPT agreed:

Christina Hoff Sommers, a conservative writer and critic of contemporary feminism, has received funding from a number of conservative and libertarian organizations over the years, particularly those focused on policy, education, and advocacy. Some of the organizations that have provided support to Sommers     include:

• The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank that promotes free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)
• The Bradley Foundation, a conservative foundation that supports a range of causes, including education, civic engagement, and free markets.
• The Charles Koch Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds research and education programs on a variety of topics, including economics, political science, and civil liberties.
• The Independent Women's Forum (IWF), a conservative organization that advocates for policies and initiatives that promote economic freedom, limited government, and individual responsibility. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)
• The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that focuses on policy research in areas such as urban policy, energy, and education. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)

Here's what ChatGPT had to say about Heather Heying:

Heather Heying has received funding from a number of conservative and libertarian organizations over the years, particularly those focused on science, education, and policy. Some of the organizations that have provided support to Heying include:

• The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank that promotes free speech and intellectual diversity on college campuses.
• The John William Pope Foundation, a conservative foundation that supports a range of causes, including education, healthcare, and public policy.
• The Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds research on science, spirituality, and human purpose.
• The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank that promotes intelligent design theory and critiques of evolutionary biology.
• The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that focuses on political philosophy, constitutionalism, and American exceptionalism.

I'm curious what The Discovery Institute hopes to get from Heying for its money, since it promotes intelligent design and critiques of evolutionary biology.

We do know that Heying and her husband Bret Weinstein have promoted junk science during the Covid pandemic. But that's Game Theory.

When I asked ChatGPT about Dave Rubin it said:

Rubin has expressed support for many conservative and libertarian ideas and causes, and he has collaborated with a number of individuals and organizations in these spheres. Some of the individuals and organizations that have expressed support for Rubin or his ideas include:

• Peter Thiel: As mentioned earlier, Thiel has expressed support for Rubin and his work, but there is no clear evidence that he has provided direct financial support to Rubin.
• PragerU: Rubin has collaborated with PragerU, a conservative educational organization that produces videos promoting conservative and libertarian ideas.
• Turning Point USA: Rubin has also worked with Turning Point USA, a conservative student organization that promotes conservative and libertarian ideas on college campuses.
• The Federalist Society: Rubin has expressed support for the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that promotes originalist interpretations of the US Constitution.
• Republican politicians: Rubin has expressed support for several Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul.

Eric Weinstein of course works for Thiel Capital, but I did not know he and Bret had been Thiel Fellows:

Bret and Eric Weinstein were both fellows at the Thiel Foundation, which provides funding to young entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. The Weinsteins have also been associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a loose network of public intellectuals who are known for challenging mainstream narratives on a range of topics. While the IDW is not a formal organization and does not receive direct funding, many of its members are supported by conservative and libertarian donors who share their views.

Curiously ChatGPT wouldn't say that Bret Weinstein was funded by the same organizations who fund his wife, Heather Heying, which makes no sense. It did say about Weinstein:

Weinstein has also been critical of what he calls "woke ideology" and the progressive movement, and has spoken out in support of free speech and academic freedom. These views have earned him support from some conservative and libertarian organizations and donors. For example, he has appeared as a guest speaker at events hosted by the National Review Institute, a conservative think tank, and has been praised by conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro was another person named in Weiss's NYTimes article as IDW.

I came up with bupkis for Joe Rogan.

So according to ChatGPT,  Sam Harris has taken money from Thiel, and Eric and Bret Weinstein were fellows at the Thiel Foundation, and all the others, except Joe Rogan have connections to lots of other far-right funders.

And since Thiel has funded Quillette we can infer these people have received Thielbucks due to Quillette authorship (my annotations in parentheses):

Quillette is an online magazine that publishes articles on a wide range of topics, including politics, culture, science, and technology. Some of the individuals who have written articles for Quillette include:

• Jordan Peterson: Canadian psychologist and author (IDW member per Weiss article)
• Claire Lehmann: Australian psychologist and founder of Quillette (Quillette is the primary publication of the IDW per the Weiss article)
• Sam Harris: American philosopher and author (see above)
• Christina Hoff Sommers: American philosopher and cultural critic (see above)
• Jonathan Haidt: American social psychologist and author 
• Heather Mac Donald: American political commentator and author
• Gad Saad: Canadian evolutionary psychologist and author
• Bret Weinstein: American biologist and evolutionary theorist (see above)
• Douglas Murray: British author and political commentator (named member of IDW)
• Andrew Doyle: British comedian and writer (or "comedian")
• Cathy Young: Russian-American journalist and author
• Debra Soh: Canadian sex researcher and science writer (named member of IDW)
• Conor Friedersdorf: American journalist and writer
• Peter Boghossian: American philosopher and professor
• Toby Young: British journalist and author (also was Quillette associate editor)
• Maajid Nawaz: British activist and writer
• Meghan Daum: American author and columnist
• Yascha Mounk: German-American political scientist and writer
• Helen Pluckrose: English author and editor of Areo Magazine
• James Lindsay: American author and mathematician
• Bruce Gilley: American political scientist and professor
• Claire Fox: British author and commentator
• Jamie Palmer: British writer and commentator (Quillette editor)
• Heather Heying: American evolutionary biologist and writer (see above)
• Ed Husain: British writer and commentator
• Coleman Hughes: American writer and podcaster
• Frances Widdowson: Canadian academic and writer

This is not an exhaustive list, as many other individuals have also written articles for Quillette.

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

It's important to note that Peter Thiel is a democracy-hating far-right funder of monsters like Donald Trump, and has been called both a psychopath and a sociopath. And he's a babbling, Bible-quoting crackpot, with billions to spend on his far-right agenda. 

And those people have taken his money.

Or as David Bertoli, one of the admirers of the Anna Krylov/Jerry Coyne grift might say:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” 

The "cockroach" strikes back at the shamelessness of Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer and friends

When members of the IDW aren't patting themselves
on the back for their civility, they are insulting people.

Phil Torres made some very well-justified criticisms of the work of Steven Pinker, noting Pinker misrepresented the work of others, and as a result, Pinker and his buddies Jerry Coyne and Michael Shermer insulted him for it and then claimed misrepresentation was no big deal.

This all went down back in January. I wrote at the time:

Even though I've recognized for many years that Steven Pinker is a weasel, I was astounded. "so what?" I was going to write my own response but found this piece by Olle Häggström via Phil Torres' Twitter feed. I admit I was relieved to find it. Pinker's dismissal of Torres' valid point was so shameless I wondered if I misunderstood somehow.
But no, Pinker really is that brazen.

And now Torres has a piece in Salon telling the story himself: Steven Pinker, Sam Harris and the epidemic of annoying white male intellectuals

Torres writes:

Shermer’s (cockroach) tweet is notable for a couple of reasons. First, not only does it contain a personal attack, but the personal attack is overtly uncivil. That’s a bit humorous given that Shermer, as well as Pinker, are famous for accusing progressives, especially those who care about women and people of color, of “incivility.” For example, in May of this year, Pinker tweeted:

Are you concerned about the growing illiberalism, incivility, intellectual conformity, and repression of debate in today's universities? Join us at the meeting of the society set up to encourage viewpoint diversity and constructive debate on campuses. I’ll be giving the keynote.

But Pinker did nothing to call out Shermer for his patently crude, puerile behavior, which has also included calling people he disagrees with (seriously) “namby-pamby bedwetters” and (seriously) “losers.”

But of course Steven Pinker is a hypocrite, supporting the careers of actual right-wing operatives (and race science promoters) Steve Sailer and Razib Khan while claiming that Stephen Jay Gould's scientific opinions about sociobiology and evolutionary psychology should be discounted because Gould held left-wing opinions.

Meanwhile Shermer published an article recently in his Skeptic magazine Shedding Light on the Intellectual Dark Web which of course Steven Pinker promoted in a tweet.

It should be no surprise to anybody who has tracked the carelessness of the IDW, Shermer gets things wrong. He states:

The Guardian sardonically pronounced (in its headline) the IDW to be the “supposed thinking wing of the alt-right,” featuring a photograph of Alex Jones, mentioned by absolutely no one as being part of the IDW.4

Yet Shermer makes clear in the same article, before this passage that he is aware of the importance of Bari Weiss's naming of IDW individuals in her article:

In the May 8, 2018 issue of The New York Times the editor and writer Bari Weiss introduced the world to the “Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” which she described as “an alliance of heretics” who are “making an end run around the mainstream conversation.”1 These heretics, she noted, are “iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities” who were “purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought.” In response, their sweep around what Weiss described as “legacy media” included podcasting, blogs, social media, YouTube channels, and public speaking. 

Included in this initial cohort were the mathematician Eric Weinstein (who coined the IDW label), the podcaster Joe Rogan, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the talk show host Dave Rubin, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, the psychologist Jordan Peterson, the conservative commentators and authors Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray, the anti-extremist activist Maajid Nawaz, the feminist activists and authors Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers, the magazine publisher Claire Lehmann, the neuroscientist and sex researcher Debra Soh, and I (Michael Shermer). As the conversation continued past Weiss’ New York Times feature, other intellectuals were added to the assemblage, including Steven Pinker...

The Weiss article does mention all those names that Shermer does, and which I bolded. But the article also explicitly mentions Pinker, in spite of Shermer's incorrect claim that Pinker was added to the IDW after the Weiss article. Weiss also mentions Charlie Kirk, Abby Martin, Candace Owens, Charles Murray and Kanye West.

Now is Shermer just careless or did he deliberately leave Pinker out because Pinker is counted as IDW in the exact same passage as Alex Jones? (My bold emphases):

“There are a few people in this network who have gone without saying anything critical about Trump, a person who has assaulted truth more than anyone in human history,” Mr. (Sam) Harris said. “If you care about the truth, that is quite strange.” 

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

It is crystal clear that Weiss is including Molyneux, Yiannopoulos, Cernovich, Jones and Steven Pinker under the umbrella of "Intellectual Dark Web." She may be using Pinker as the respectable exemplar in contrast to the motley crew - but she is indisputably including all of them as members of the IDW.

Shermer co-authored the piece with Anondah Saide and Kevin McCaffree. Maybe each thought one of the other two was going to handle the fact checking.

As if that isn't bad enough, the Shermer article counts vicious, toxic, professional misogynist Christina Hoff Sommers as a "feminist activist."

Christina Hoff Sommers, a member of those champions of civility the IDW,
and a "feminist activist" per Shermer, joins with professional misogynist
and NAMBLA fan Camille Paglia to insult and dehumanize Lena Dunham

Even worse the article fails to mention that what ties this allegedly "diverse" group together is their agreement with hereditarianism, specifically evolutionary psychology and race science.

It's just like Phil "the cockroach" Torres writes in his latest Salon piece:

...the entire IDW movement is annoying. It’s really, really annoying — its champions misrepresent positions without their (mostly white male) audience knowing, and then proceed to “embarrass” the opposition. They embrace unsupported claims when it suits their narrative. They facilely dismiss good critiques as “hit jobs” and level ad hominem attacks to undercut criticism. And they refuse — they will always refuse, it’s what overconfident white men do — to admit making mistakes when they’re obviously wrong. I am annoyed, like Robinson, mostly because I expected so much better from the most popular “intellectuals” of our time.

Jerry Coyne and the "generally left-wing" articles in Quillette

Jerry Coyne is not named as a member of the IDW by Bari Weiss, but is nevertheless what I like to think of as a second string member of the IDW.

So I was really surprised to see Coyne criticizing an article in Quillette. The IDW tend to watch each others backs, even the possibly least-popular IDW, Candace Owens.

Coyne: The worst article ever to appear in Quillette...

The author, John Staddon, is identified as “James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Duke University”. His answer to the title question, by the way, is “yes”.
This may in fact be the worst piece that Quillette has ever published...

However, Coyne begins the article like this:

In general I like the articles in Quillette: they’re generally left-wing but also critical of the Left’s excesses—a theme that has led some misguided ideologues to call the site “alt-right.”

How is it possible that anyone could claim that Quillette articles are "generally left-wing"? Is this part of the standard right-wing through-the-looking glass, like the way they claim that professional misogynists Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers are feminists? I thought Mari Uyehara, in her immortal article for GQ, The Free Speech Grifters, perfectly captured this right-wing mind-fuckery:

Weiss's column titled "We're All Fascists Now" highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a "self-identified" feminist and a "registered" Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers's more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza among its past fellows.

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a "factual" one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn't know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she's been silent on harassment of women in techand finance. And she's been outspoken about the due-process rights of men accused of rape on college campuses, but apparently has no interest in addressing the complexity of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.

In fact, I think Quillette articles have begun leaning further right lately. I haven't done a systematic analysis of all Quillette articles, which I suppose I will be obliged to do someday *siiiigh*. So far I've only done occasional spot checks of its bylines - spoiler alert, Quillette authorship skews very heavily male, in spite of the fact, as Quillette's fans will endlessly tell you, it was founded by Claire Lehmann, actual woman.

Quillette has, since the beginning, reflected many of the values of Lehmann's former boss, rightwing extremist Rebel Media's Ezra Levant, in that it is anti-trans, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist, anti-left, anti-socialist, pro evolutionary psychology and pro race science. Although at least Quillette hasn't replicated Levant's obsession with Justin Trudeau, probably because Lehmann is Australian, not Canadian.

Fun side-note - in spite of the fact that Claire Lehmann's boss was Levant, Jonathan Kay's boss is now Claire Lehmann but there has been some antagonism between Kay and Levant, per the National Post:

Levant has long focused enormous attention on the Trudeau family. He called Pierre Trudeau a “slut” and Margaret Trudeau “(not) much better,” in 2014. Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, “is everything Ezra hates,” said Jonathan Kay, who worked with Levant at the National Post.
(Levant denies any fixation with Trudeau. He also believes Kay, who ghostwrote Justin Trudeau’s memoirs, holds a grudge against him for publicizing that fact.)

Lately I've noticed additional rightwing party platforms on Quillette: anti-immigration and pro-nuclear/anti-green energy. I think this is likely the result of an increasing Koch influence, either indirectly through Quillette authors supported by the Kochs (Cathy Young, Charles Murray, Pamela Paresky, probably others - I will definitely be doing an article on the IDW-Koch connections ASAP) or directly through Koch Foundation money - but I haven't found evidence for the latter... yet.

The breath-taking double standards of Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers

I was just writing about Cathy Young's toxic misogyny and blatant double-standards - her hatred of Kristen Roupenian for portraying a fictional man unflatteringly, contrasted with her admiration for Eron Gjoni, the evil freak who kicked off GamerGate by violating the privacy of his ex-girlfriend in retaliation for her breaking up with him.

But even I was absolutely thunderstruck by the incredibly shameless double-standard, publicly displayed by Sommers and Young in response to this tweet.

A woman spilled the dirt on the personal life of Aziz Ansari - she's bad.

A man spilled the dirt on the personal life of Zoe Quinn - he's good.

And the only factor that switches the hatred of Sommers and Young to admiration is gender. Plain and simple.

Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young have to be the sleaziest, the stupidest and because of their obvious internalized misogyny, the most pathetic examples of public intellectuals I have ever seen this side of the loathsome Camille Paglia. I said, several months ago about them and Quillette's Claire Lehmann:

So although I think the Catty Persons' motivation is primarily financial I also think there is something about the characters of all three women - something twisted and damaged - that makes them so well-suited to their professional careers of incessantly attacking women and women's aspirations.

And wow, they seem to be determined to prove how right I was.

Good article: "The 'Intellectual Dark Web' is Nothing New"

I wasn't aware of the LA Review of Books article entitled The "Intellectual Dark Web" is Nothing New by Jacob Hamburger until recently. I'm sorry it took so long to find it, it has a lot of good stuff.

Favorite bits:

...What exactly are the ideas that have made people like Weinstein, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Christina Hoff Sommers into what a recent New York Times profile described as intellectual “renegades”? According to the Times writer Bari Weiss, most emphasize the biological differences between men and women, a feeling that free speech is “under siege,” and a fear that “identity politics” is a threat to the United States’s social fabric. 

A listener of Harris’s podcast might add to the list a vociferous defense of the validity of genetic explanations for IQ differences between racial groups, a follower of Peterson’s videos might insist on the nefarious influence of “postmodern neo-Marxism” on college campuses, and a fan of Ben Shapiro might contribute a skepticism toward the reality of “transgenderism..."

Right on the money. These two paragraphs list several of Quillette's political positions: pro-race science, pro-evolutionary psychology, anti-trans, anti-left.

Though opposed to political “tribalism,” as one writer put it in the online magazine Quillette — the closest thing there is to a party organ of the dark web — the movement does tend to think of liberals, progressives, and leftists as its primary adversaries. But not only do these thinkers oppose themself to “the left,” broadly speaking, they recycle the neoconservative indictment of “postmodernism” in order to explain why this left has been taken in by political correctness.

Check check - the pretense that Quillette is centrist while it is obsessed with attacking the left-of-center.

I was surprised though, that Hamburger doesn't seem to be aware that in addition to Decter and Himmelfarb, Sommers herself is associated with the AEI.

...Despite some of the novelty attributed to the dark web intellectuals, perhaps the signs of their belonging to the right have always been there. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show and Harris’s podcast, for example, have featured a number of mainstays of the old PC debates, including D’Souza and Charles Murray. And though Christina Hoff Sommers may appear to break with neoconservative opponents of the women’s movement such as Midge Decter and Gertrude Himmelfarb by calling her video blog “The Factual Feminist,” one should not fail to notice that the channel is hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank where both elder women were once affiliates.

He's absolutely right that the Intellectual Dark Web is just a variation on traditional conservatism. And Sommers is old enough to have been part of that tradition, long before Claire Lehmann rolled onto the public stage. I think the only thing that is different between the older and the newer conservatives is that conservatives were once very anti-gay, as Mother Jones remembers in its article Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome? This new iteration of the Right has accepted gay rights.

Unlike every other article on the IDW I've found in mainstream sources, Hamburger recognizes the political potential of the IDW:

...this intellectual right in waiting has amassed an incredibly large audience through its various social media platforms. Much of this audience is composed of young men for whom these entertaining take-downs of political correctness is their first exposure to “intellectual” discussions of politics and culture. When this dark web finally does come out of the shadows, it may prove a formidable weapon for the next iteration of the conservative movement.

And he didn't even mention the Koch connections or the fact that Claire Lehmann was working for Ezra Levant right up until the connections between Rebel Media and the Charlottesville atrocity became well-known.

And there is little doubt that many of these young - and I suspect mostly white - men being cultivated by the IDW are happy to learn via race science and evolutionary psychology that white men are naturally more intelligent (among other virtues) than people who are not white and not men.

The soul of the Intellectual Dark Web

In March 2018 the magazine GQ published an article on one of the activities of the "intellectual dark web": free speech grifting.

The article doesn't use the term "Intellectual Dark Web" but then it was published two months before the Bari Weiss piece popularized the term. But it is full of those "renegades" mentioned in the Weiss article: Milo Yiannapoulos, David Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and especially Christina Hoff Sommers.

The article points out that these self-styled free speech defender are strangely silent about free speech threats from the right:

Serwer theorizes that fixation on liberal college students persists because it involves the environs of scholarly elites, gives elders the opportunity to "sneer at a younger generation," and is politically expedient for conservatives. According to FIRE, an individual-rights organization with ties to the Koch brothers, from 2000 to 2017, there were anywhere from six to 35 self-reported disinvitation attempts annually and 40 percent of them came from the right, while Heterodox Academy, an organization devoted to increasing viewpoint diversity, finds that the majority of successful disinvites came from the right, not the left. Still, libertarian website Quillette summarized these outbursts as "the psychology of progressive hostility." Pundits like to characterize online outrage and an aversion to idea diversity as a phenomenon unique to the left, largely ignoring the death threats directed at the teen Parkland survivors for speaking out against a powerful gun lobby or the conservative dictates of Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News. Given the myopic focus on liberals, it would seem that Free Speech Grifters are not actually interested in the free exchange of ideas, per se; they are interested in liberal caricature for clicks, social-media followings, and monetization.

The most chilling part of the article is this snapshot of the compromised & corrupt soul of Christina Hoff Sommers:

At Lewis & Clark Law School, Sommers found what seems to be her favorite kind of audience: a disruptive one. Prior to the speech, activists handed out flyers labeling her "a fascist," among other hyperbolic charges familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. When she attempted to give her talk, a handful of students, led by a blonde ringleader in a black "Stay Woke" jacket, disrupted it with chanting about comrades while holding up a cardboard sign that read "No Platform for Fascists." It was a Ben Shapiro wet dream. As the ringleader yelled, "Black lives matter," Sommers turned to the camera euphorically grinning from ear to ear. Here it was: the money shot.

Support the Southern Poverty Law Center

You can tell how effective the Southern Poverty Law Center is at opposing "race science" by how hostile members of the "Intellectual Dark Web" are towards it.

Here is Claire Lehmann urging Sam Harris to sue the SPLC for a straight-up piece of factual reportage.

The IDW is a collection of the most fragile snowflakes - as the SPLC observed Christina Hoff Sommers can't take a single line of criticism

Sommers, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar, took to Twitter and claimed that the SPLC “denounced” her as an “enabler of male supremacy.” She told the Weekly Standard that the SPLC was “blacklisting in place of engaging with arguments. They blacklist you, rather than try to refute you.” An email to Sommers’ assistant asking for clarification went unanswered.

And if Christina Hoff Sommers believes a thing you know her Reason Magazine and Gamergate comrade, the toxic Cathy Young, won't be far behind.

Michael Shermer, recently seen celebrating the crushing by Steven Pinker of the "cockroach" Phil Torres is naturally in with the Quillette gang in opposition to SPLC.

Steven Pinker, of course, is also on the record in opposition to the SLPC.  It should be noted that not only is Ayaan Hirsi Ali (named as a member of the IDW in the Bari Weiss article) famously hostile to Islam, she's married to Niall Ferguson who in 2018 created a controversy pulling a fairly typical IDW "free speech grifter" stunt:

In Spring of 2018, Professor Ferguson was involved with College Republican leaders at Stanford to oppose a Left-leaning student take over of the Cardinal Conversations initiative. In leaked emails, he was quoted as asking for opposition research on the student involved. He later apologized and resigned from the said initiative when emails were leaked revealing his involvement in the events. "I very much regret the publication of these emails. I also regret having written them," Ferguson wrote in a statement to The Daily.[118]

Maajid Nawaz managed to get a few million dollars out of the SPLC for expressing an opinion that Nawaz didn't agree with. Opinions are of course protected under the First Amendment, but Nawaz isn't American and the SPLC no doubt settled because no matter the ruling, had it gone to trial, it would have been more expensive than settling. 

I expect that this encouraged Gavin McInnes to try his luck suing SPLC.

McInnes’s complaint against the SPLC – posted online by his lawyer G Baron Coleman – says that that McInnes was “successfully targeted for personal and professional destruction by a self-appointed enforcer of [political] orthodoxy”.
Later, the complaint alleges that the SPLC is responsible for “the termination of Mr. McInnes’s employment, an almost complete deplatforming and defunding and subjecting him to employment discrimination based on his lawful non-employment recreational activities”. 

In a statement Monday, the SPLC president, Richard Cohen, said: “To paraphrase FDR, judge us by the enemies we’ve made”, continuing: “The fact that he’s upset with SPLC tells us that we’re doing our job exposing hate and extremism. His case is meritless.”
It’s not the first time McInnes has criticized the SPLC. Last June, he told the Guardian at a New York City rally supporting Tommy Robinson, the far-right founder of the English Defence League, that the SPLC was a “pernicious group that preys on old Jewish people … (with) cultural PTSD because of what happened in world war II”.

The FBI has characterized McInnes "Proud Boys" as an extremist group:

The FBI now classifies the far-right Proud Boys as an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism”, according to a document produced by Washington state law enforcement.
The FBI’s 2018 designation of the self-confessed “western chauvinist group” as extremist has not been previously made public.
The Proud Boys was founded by the Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes. McInnes has insisted that his group is not white nationalist or “alt-right” but the Proud Boys have a history of misogyny and glorifying violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists them as a hate group.

Does McInnes plan to sue the FBI too? 

McInnes was predictably welcomed back in to the far-right Canadian fold - rejoining Rebel Media, founded by scary Trudeau obsessive Ezra Levant.

And so as first reported by Mediaite, McInnes is now back at The Rebel, where he is presumably free to resume sharing his wide-ranging theories about Jews, this time as his “SJW” alter-ego “Miles.” 

I wonder if Claire Lehmann will be reuniting with Rebel Media. Here she is doing an episode with McInnes back when she was a Rebel Media regular. The Intellectual Dark Web is nothing if not extremely tight-knit. And I've no doubt other members of their little group will be tangling with SPLC in the future.

And that's why it's so important to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center. I send them money every month.