What does Manhattan Institute pay Colin Wright for?

Apparently Colin Wright's job is to post this emoticon all day on his Bluesky account. He's posted it at least a dozen times.

😘

It reminds me of Wright's buddy James Lindsay, who thought it very clever indeed to respond to people on Xitter with some variation of "your mom."

Wright, former managing editor of racist Quillette, testified on Xitter what a big influence the oafish anti-Semite Lindsay was on his own political views.

Colin Wright and James Lindsay count as intellectuals in right-wing circles. Which is why, I assume, the Manhattan Institute made Wright one of its fellows. Colin Wright is officially on wingnut welfare.

The Manhattan Institute is right-wing trash, and it publishes garbage rag City Journal. I was just talking about City Journal and its connection to Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald a week or so ago.

As readers of Pinkerite may recall, City Journal was sued last year for publishing a defamatory article against a guy who was - and still is - owed money by neo-Nazi kook Emil Kirkegaard. 

City Journal retracted the article.

It seems very likely that either Kirkegaard wrote the article himself, or it was written at his request. 

Now it must have been pushed for publication by an important Manhattan Institute donor (Kirkegaard himself?) because I don't think even the ghouls who edit City Journal are really interested in Emil Kirkegaard's personal finances. 

But City Journal does have alleged editors:

• Brian C. Anderson Editor, City Journal
• Steven Malanga Senior Fellow | Senior Editor
• Paul Beston Managing Editor
• John Hirschauer Associate Editor
• Daniel Kennelly Associate Editor
• Theodore Kupfer Associate Editor
• Jordan McGillis Economics Editor, City Journal

One of Colin Wright's biggest thrills was from his stickman cartoon, which was re-tweeted by Elon Musk. 

Wright immediately tried to monetize it.

I assume that like the oafish Lindsay, Wright thinks he's very clever. But in fact, his cartoon is simply an illustration of what life has always been like for people who are conservative by nature. 

The illustration shows Colin Wright - I assume that's who "me" is. In 2008 he was left of center. But those "woke progressives" ran farther away from the center, somehow causing the hapless Wright to slide to right of center.

Now in this example, this slide happened due to "woke" beliefs - the beliefs that Black Lives Matter and that trans lives matter. 

But I'm sure many "left of center" people throughout human history have gone on the same "political journey" as Wright as they've gotten older.

Take the issue of slavery. Those on the right were whole-heartedly in favor of slavery. But those slightly left of center believed that slaves should be set free some day, maybe when slavery died out all by itself. And once they were free they should move to Haiti.  

Meanwhile the left was saying that slaves had the right to be free, immediately, and live in the United States.

Then one day John Brown came along and tried to start a slave insurrection. Many on the left thought that it was a great idea. That was when the left stretched farther to the left, as in Wright's stick figure graphic - thanks to the hardcore abolitionists of 1859.

They were considered so radical they were even called "Radical Republicans" back in the day long before the Republican Party became the party of fascism. 

But conservatives who thought they were pretty liberal - center left - for believing that slavery should end some day thought the Radicals were crazy, and suspected them of being open to personal, even sexual relationships with Black people, a thought that horrified the "center left."

And so it goes, from one progressive cause to the next - women's suffrage, the labor movement, gay rights, etc. etc. All causes that were once considered radical.

When he was young, Colin Wright approved of things that had been radical twenty years before. But as he got older and was confronted with new progressive causes that he did not grow up with - trans rights and diversity, equity and inclusion - he decided that change should stop.

So Colin Wright's political journey is nothing new. It's the same old same old.

It's just a matter of time before Wright is telling those kids to get off his lawn, like his ideological ally Jerry Coyne.

Compare people like Colin Wright to Abraham Lincoln. Like Wright, when he was younger, Abe Lincoln was center-left - he wanted slaves to be free, and he believed that slaves would eventually be free, maybe in about a hundred years. And he was in favor of "colonization" the term for sending free Black people to Haiti or elsewhere.

When the Civil War came, probably influenced by Frederick Douglass and others, Abraham Lincoln moved towards the left until, at the very end of the war, he gave a speech in favor of Black voting rights, an extremely radical position at the time.

That's the primary reason John Wilkes Booth shot him, according to historian Michael Burlingame. 

I think it's a safe bet that Colin Wright will never die for a noble cause.

I'm reminded of this excellent comic.

It's Black History Month - the IDW & the GOP hate Black History

It's Black History Month. Let's talk about how much the Right - and its IDW division - hate Black History.

Over in the cesspit known as Twitter, as reported by right-wing garbage heap Fox News, the Right are at each others' throats, while promoting the fiction that Steven Pinker is on the Left. He's about as Left as Jerry Coyne. 

Fox News is displaying attacks against Pinker by Colin Wright and Christopher Rufo. 

Rufo is a hypocrite, naturally, and so in response to Pinker tweeting a link to Cathy Young's criticism of Rufo and his connection to Ron DeSantis and his scheme to erase Black History, Rufo tweeted "Sorry, buddy, we're not going to listen to people who can't even open their comments."

Do I have to mention that Rufo blocked me on Twitter every bit as much as Pinker did?

Cathy Young herself is hardly blameless. I consider her a pioneer of stochastic terrorism.

But the whole thing is odd, because Steven Pinker is a supporter of Rufo's campaign against Critical Race Theory, which is the founding motivation of FAIR FOR ALL. 

Pinker was a member of the FAIR board of advisors when it was first created in March 2021 along with Rufo. And although Rufo is no longer there, Pinker is.

FAIR is a who's who of right-wing political operatives and members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Colin Wright has never been a member of the FAIR board of advisors, but they haven't forgotten him. He's mentioned in December 2021 in the News section: New Video: Doing ‘DEI’ Right with Colin Wright.

Now before getting cozy with Rufo's CRT grift, Colin Wright was best known as a hateful transphobe:

Colin Wright, an anti-trans extremist writer for right-wing site Quillette and founder of Reality’s Last Stand, posted a very heinous tweet harming the safety of LGBTQ+ minors by criticizing suicide prevention outlet The Trevor Project’s “quick exit” feature that allows LGBTQ+ youth to have safe conversations without being snooped on by their non-LGBTQ+-affirming parent(s) or other family members and then subsequently get berated, abused, and/or even disowned, or worse, killed. 

His Twitter account was even suspended for extreme transphobia, before fascist Elon Musk came along to set all the little fashies free from Twitter jail.

But both transphobia and hostility to Black history are hallmarks of the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette. And Wright quickly jumped on board Rufo's anti-CRT campaign, aligning with Trump.

I wonder how Jerry Coyne will react to the attacks on Pinker. On the one hand, Coyne adores Pinker, on the other hand Coyne is a fan of Colin Wright.

It is odd though, this public drama, considering that all the main characters, Pinker, Young, Rufo, and Wright have taken Koch money. And Koch and the Intellectual Dark Web have nurtured Rufo's CRT-panic grift since the beginning.

What Ron DeSantis is doing is the ultimate political expression of the IDW/Quillette campaign against Black history.

Rufo may talk about "Critical Race Theory" but what he's really after is to kill the 1619 Project.

Mr. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law relegates the study of the experiences of Black people to a prohibited category. The canceling of students’ access to accurate, truthful education that reflects their diverse identities and that of their country should chill every American. Not only do these laws offend First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression; to the extent they harm certain groups on the basis of race, gender or other protected status, they also violate principles of equal protection. And they are a chilling precursor to state-sponsored dehumanization of an entire race of people.

This disturbing pattern of silencing Black voices and aggressive attempts to erase Black history is one of the most visible examples of performative white supremacy since the presidency of Donald Trump. In 2019 the Florida legislature undermined Amendment 4, which a supermajority of Floridians supported and would have restored the voting rights of more than a million formerly incarcerated people. In its place, lawmakers put in place a pay-to-vote system that redisenfranchises hundreds of thousands of those citizens, many of them Black. Similarly, Florida’s antiprotest law, H.B. 1, was enacted in 2021 in response to the 2020 protests against police violence, when Black organizations and peaceful demonstrators in Florida — along with their allies — took to the streets with demands for justice...

..Several book bans and other antitruth measures introduced in the past two years target The New York Times’s 1619 Project (and curriculum), which was created by Nikole Hannah-Jones — who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work — and is a linchpin in today’s conversations about the role of systemic racism in America’s history and its enduring impacts. In Wyoming and Texas, lawmakers and school officials have proposed measures mandating that objectively horrific historic events like the Holocaust and the trans-Atlantic slave trade be presented to American children neutrally and without judgment. (The Wyoming measure failed to pass the state’s legislature.) But why would we want our children to look at these atrocities without judgment?

Rufo and his allies hate the 1619 project. From Jerry Coyne to Colin Wright to neo-Nazi James Lindsay. 

You would think that Pinker and Young would be happy that their side is winning.

Could this be an example of unintended consequences? 

Could Young and Pinker have really not considered that their constant harping on "wokeness," along with Pinker echoing infamous racist Amy Wax in an attempt to downplay the power of systemic racism, could have political consequences?

I mean, I did not think they were especially bright people, but even I didn't think they were that clueless.

Or is it all phony? Like Jerry Coyne claiming to be on the Left, while constantly agreeing with the Right. Much like this.

But they always pretend - or maybe they are just that self-deluded - that what they really care about is "free speech." 

Fox News refers to Colin Wright as an "evolutionary biologist" but he is not a practicing one. He is on wingnut welfare, paid to promote the views of right-wing plutocrats. I assume he switched to that career because several of his science papers were retracted.

To be fair, although blocking critics is what members of the IDW/Quillette gang do, Wright did not block my Twitter account. This isn't especially significant now, since I'm never on Twitter, but it was something different from the standard member of the IDW/Quillette gang. I guess he refrained from blocking for "free speech."

But to Wright, free speech means if you disagree with him, he will make unsupported vicious attacks against you. And then run away.

But you can't expect good faith from people who have devoted their lives to promoting hatred on behalf of evil old plutocrats.

About Cathy Young's piece - a perfect illustration of her through-the-lookinglass view of the world in this section:

If DeSantis’s objective had been simply to appoint board members who would counteract excessive “woke” influence at New College, he could have picked plenty of people who weren’t in that mold. For instance, Columbia University professor and author John McWhorter, a self-identified black liberal whose book Woke Racism is scathingly critical of Kendi-style “anti-racism” even as McWhorter has been no less scathing about Trump. Or, say, Christina Hoff Sommers, a former academic who is sufficiently “anti-woke” to have been classed among the earlier-mentioned “intellectual dark web” and to have been targeted for deplatforming at several progressive universities, but has said that she regards Trump as an example of “amoral masculinity” rather than positive masculinity. Or social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, who has strongly criticized academia’s move toward prioritizing “social justice” over truth and who recently resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology over a new rule requiring presenters at the society’s annual conference to submit a statement on equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

McWhorter is not only a long-time employee of Koch-funded organizations and an author at race pseudoscience-loving Quillette, he is also on the board of advisors of the CRT-crazed FAIR.

Sommers, like Young is a pioneer in stochastic terrorism, misogyny division. 

Jonathan Haidt is a long-time supporter of race-pseudoscience, recently seen at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. And another member of the anti-CRT crazed FAIR.

The American Right may not agree about Trump, but they do agree about race pseudoscience and transphobia. And the utility of grifts like anti-CRT and the classic free speech grift.

UPDATE February 9: far from defending Pinker from attacks by Rufo, disgusting right-wing goon Jerry Coyne is celebrating Rufo:

After the bad publicity, Texas Tech, according to a tweet by Christoper Rufo, has suspended this DEI policy.

Gretchen Mullen, Colin Wright and Vladimir Putin

The IDW branch of race pseudo-science is so frequently triggered by information presented in graphic format that I have an ongoing series about it here at Pinkerite.

First it was The graphophobia present in Steven Pinker's fan base

Next, Pinkerite graphophobia: meet Colin Wright and Lee Jussim

Then More weirdness from Pinkerites

Next The IDW v Big Data

Then Bret Weinstein targets Rebecca Lewis

A few months ago Steven Pinker and his fan boys.

Steven Pinker's supporters on Twitter, who in my experience are mostly right-wingers, hate my infographic (and accompanying text) entitled Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections with an atavistic hysteria.

And now this latest incident. 

Recently I happened to stumble on a Twitter account called Skeptic Review, who, about a week earlier, expressed derision for my Pinker infographic, seconded by Quillette's managing editor Colin Wright - the second time he's been noted here as a graph-o-phobe. 

You can see Wright's Linked-In profile here. His boss, Quillette founding editor Claire Lehmann also has a Linked-In profile and I was fascinated to see that while she's been founding and running Quillette she's simultaneously been a public relations consultant for Vendorable.

But back to the graph-o-phobia. No matter how many times I've asked Pinker defenders to tell me which part of my diagram is inaccurate, the only thing I can get out of them is insults. 

Colin Wright's comment about my work was predictably stupid and in bad faith. He complains that I didn't explicitly make a line between twin brothers of race science, Quillette's own staff member and blatant racist Bo Winegard, and his brother Ben. 

Besides the fact that they are obviously related - Winegard is not a very common name - and they are right on top of each other and there's not really any room to put a line without it looking weird, I explained at the bottom of the diagram: 

Please note: in an effort to keep the diagram readable I sacrificed completeness. For example: Richard Lynn has also appeared in a Stefan Molyneux video.

I didn't know much about Skeptic Review (the account sometimes goes by the name of Gretchen Mullen) so I checked out its web site and there I found something even weirder than Gretchen Mullen's and Colin Wright's phobia about infographics: Skeptic Review has on several occasions posted North Korean and Russian propaganda, sans comment. 

There doesn't seem to be any connection to skepticism in these posts. Gretchen Mullen, or whoever, apparently just decided to randomly share the propaganda of dictatorships. 

The best one is probably this glorification of Putin as a manly and deeply religious man. 

Apparently "skeptic" means something different in Gretchen Mullen's world.

Predictably, when I asked Mullen and Wright to explain why a self-proclaimed "all things skeptic" site would publish such things, they hurled insults.

Once again the issue wasn't that I had said something inaccurate - I shared links to the Skeptic Review, which was irrefutable evidence. It seems that Wright is appalled and outraged that someone would point out inconvenient facts.

I've made a big deal about what an absolutely shameless hypocrite James Lindsay is, piously mooing about civility and difficult conversations while being a gigantic asshole on Twitter.

And also what a huge shameless hypocrite Steven Pinker is. 

It's not a coincidence: lecturing others about civility and reason while demonstrating the exact opposite, without any apparent awareness or shame, is absolutely on-brand for the IDW/Quillette gang.

Or as IDW stooge Ayaan Hirsi Ali proclaimed of the recently-published Quillette self-congratulation fest:

These authors are living, breathing examples of how to fight for Enlightenment values and how to do it with dignity and civility. --Ayaan Hirsi Ali

And before I forget to mention it - although Colin Wright claims to be a liberal and others claim he's a Trump critic, when it comes to race, Wright and Trump are on the exact same page.

 

Pinkerite graphophobia: meet Colin Wright and Lee Jussim

I've observed previously how many fans of Steven Pinker are appalled by the concept of representing information in graphic form.

Steve Sailer's fans don't much like it either.

Here we see Quillette author Colin Wright, who clearly hasn't read the diagram's accompanying text, claiming there's no validity to the diagram.

And also that it's insane and truly kooky.

According to his Quillette bio Wright has a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara. Considering that UC Santa Barbara is a center for evolutionary psychology and the professional home of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Napoleon Chagnon it's maybe not so surprising that Wright seems more interested in evolutionary psychology than evolutionary biology. Which would make him very useful to Quillette, which is devoted to promoting evolutionary psychology. I will be looking at some of its articles on EP soon.

It's odd though, that the IDW and its allies didn't seem at all perturbed by the Bari Weiss  NYTimes article in May 2018 "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" linking together some of the same people that I did - and the Weiss article provides even less explanation than my diagram and text.

Weiss links Steven Pinker to four extremists, ever so casually, in a single paragraph, like this:

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).

I only linked Pinker to two of those four extremists. And I explained who they were and why I was linking them.

And Wright wasn't the only one to have such an extreme response to my diagram. I received dozens of hostile tweets claiming it was evidence I was crazy, and also, "nutso" per Rutgers professor and Quillette author Lee Jussim.

(Jussim is Nate Honeycutt's PhD advisor. Honeycutt was the 2014 honoree for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) Student Spotlight. FIRE, as discussed yesterday, is funded by the Kochs and other right-wing plutocrats.)

So why the almost primitive aversion to graphics from Wright and Jussim? Why the need to claim that factually accurate information is "truly kooky" simply because it's presented as an image?

One theory I have is that many IDW people are not big readers and had not seen the Weiss article.  So instead of learning of the Pinker to Molyneux connection for the first time from someone who admires and lionizes the IDW, they received the information from a critic who thinks there might be something disturbing about the fact that, for good reasons, Steven Pinker is counted as part of the same group as Stefan Molyneux.

The fact that Steven Pinker has promoted the career of a flat-out racist like Steve Sailer, and in such a well documented way must be unpleasant to some of Pinker's admirers, but rather than reassessing their hero-worship of Pinker, they prefer to declare whoever (except Bari Weiss) mentions this unpleasant fact to be craaaaaazy.


Speaking of Steve Sailer, after arguing with IDWs on Twitter about the diagram, it occurred to me that it might be time to revise it. It would be more appropriate to link David Duke to Richard Spencer rather than Molyneux. I found a tweet from Molyneux denouncing Duke.

Richard Spencer however can be seen in this video in a car with David Duke and it seems they coordinated during the Charlottesville disaster.

David Duke is a fan of Steve Sailer too, but I'm not sure exactly what Steve Sailer's opinion is of Duke, although I have never found him criticizing him. I asked Sailer directly on Twitter, but so far no response.

I didn't know much about Lee Jussim before tangling with him and Pamela Paresky and their friends on Twitter the other day over Jesse Singal's hypocrisy. Jussim is apparently in deep with the IDW, but I didn't think he was a hardcore proponent of race science. So I was really surprised to find him retweeting John Paul Wright in a contentious exchange between Jussim and some people I follow on Twitter.

John Paul Wright is the most blatantly racist of the academic promoters of race science.

Wright mentioned on his Conservative Criminology blog that he admired Jussim and said he looked forward to meeting him. I assume they have met since then, offline. They certainly seem to have "met" on Twitter.

John Paul Wright has his own connection to Stefan Molyneux, appearing on his Youtube channel to share thoughts on race and crime and to rant against the left.

This is why it's important to model the IDW - you document the interconnections, some more significant than others, among plutocrats like the Kochs, conservative scientists with political axes to grind and right-wing extremists.

And although I have nothing against information presented as text, people can absorb information from pictures at a glance. It's a principle I use in my work as a technical writer. Graphics are a good method to convey complex information as painlessly as possible.

Fortunately I've never worked with any developers on my tech writing jobs who have had meltdowns over graphic information. Then again, developers often use graphic models themselves to convey connections among components in a system.

I imagine if Colin Wright and Lee Jussim saw one of these they would freak right the hell out.

The bigots of racist rag Quillette attack Southern Poverty Law Center

 But look! Quillette has a big mob of right-wing idiots on its side!!! (my emphases)

Colin Wright is a widely published writer (including at Quillette) with a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara. (The SPLC’s claim that he is in a relationship with journalist Christina Buttons, who also writes about gender issues, is completely true. But the fact that the group saw fit to report this fact as if it were evidence of sinister machinations says far more about the report’s authors than it does about either Wright or Buttons.) FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, is a classically liberal group led by a Harvard Law School graduate named Monica Harris. Do any of these people or groups sound like extremists?

YES.

Colin Wright has published in racist, trans-hating Quillette and pals around with Republican fascist ghoul Christopher Rufo - Quillette uses a New Yorker piece from several years ago to attack SPLC - but get a look at what the New Yorker says about Quillette ally Christopher Rufo!

Any organization like Quillette which has taken money from racist, pro-apartheid fascist nut job Peter Thiel has zero moral authority.

And the reason Quillette knows the name Colin Wright is not because Wright has a PhD in evolutionary biology, it's because he's apparently decided to make a career as a right-wing political operative - possibly because his career as an evolutionary biologist was a failure.

And now I know the name Christina Buttons, another awful trans-hating obsessive undoubtedly on the payroll of one horrible right-wing plutocrat fascist or another. Pretending she's a liberal, as one does when one is trying to move the Overton window. That's an old Koch trick from way back.

And FAIR is a nest of right-wingers and wing nut welfare recipients and bigots of every stripe, supported by Bari Weiss's sugar daddy, Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow.

And Monica Harris? She's a darling of Fox News - and an anti-trans ghoul in league with Colin Wright. She's just as awful as all the rest of the FAIR and Quillette gang of wing nut welfare recipients and sugar babies.

I do appreciate Quillette bringing this dandy SPLC article to my attention - I really need to keep up with the SPLC better. The fact that the article has the racist and trans-hating ghouls at Quillette in a raging froth reminds me why I give money to SPLC every month. Now I'm thinking of increasing my monthly donation amount.

Thank you Southern Poverty Law Center!

Twitter versus professional rightwing hate-monger Colin M. Wright

There's been a lot of talk about Twitter lately and creepo Elon Musk's desire to devour it whole. 

If right-wing plutocrat Musk takes over Twitter, we will remember fondly the days when Twitter occasionally dinged hate-mongers like Quillette contributing editor Colin M. Wright.

I don't remember which of Colin Wright's almost infinite number of transphobic tweets I reported. It has to be over a month ago since I did, I've hardly been doing any Pinkerite-related things in the past month.

Although Wright's focus is primarily demonizing a tiny minority of human beings he sometimes dabbles in the CRT grift invented by slimeball Chrisopher Rufo. That got Trump to retweet him.

As I said a few months ago, Colin M.Wright, like Razib Khan, is a sad case - a background in science, but he makes a living as right-wing political operative.

But I just found out that Colin M. Wright has four entries in the Retraction Watch Database.

So maybe that's why he chose to make a career out of being a Trumpist hate-monger - maybe he was just no damn good as a scientist.

The Lockwood Saga

---------------------------------------------------------------
What to do when your stupid Twitter argument 
is winding down but you want to keep it going
---------------------------------------------------------------

I think the new book by Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power is very good, although very concerning, considering Thiel is, like Charles Koch, a right-wing extremist billionaire who is happy to throw his money behind horrible people and evil causes. 

As I demonstrated in the previous post, long before me, people were calling Peter Thiel a psychopath or a sociopath. 

It isn't only because of his political positions, as repellent as they are, but because of the ways he expresses himself,  and because of his priorities, which seem to be exclusively wealth and power. 

But recently I got into a stupid argument on Twitter with an individual named Dr. Patrick Lockwood, because Lockwood didn't like my use of the term "psychopath" to describe Thiel.

Now without stupid Twitter arguments, Twitter itself would scarcely exist, and I wouldn't usually mention the argument on Pinkerite.com. But it turned out that Patrick Lockwood, who I initially assumed was some garden-variety false-certainty Twitter rando, is part of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex. Oh lucky me.

A pretty strong hint about the Quillette/IDW connection was when, after the stupid argument was winding down, and without my knowledge, Lockwood posted one of my tweets and asked for opinions about me. Lo and behold, Quillette managing editor Colin Wright and Quillette author, Gamergate cheerleader and Koch money recipient Cathy Young popped up.

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

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

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

I did a little Googling and discovered Lockwood has had a profile for almost a year in a little club called "Reality's Last Stand" along with a bunch of people associated with Quillette and race pseudoscience, including Claire Lehmann, Jonathan Haidt, Razib Khan and Wright.

Eventually I discovered that Lockwood had recorded a very cordial interview with Quillette author and racist Bo Winegard. 

I'm not calling Winegard a racist because of his race pseudoscience beliefs, as idiotic as they are - I'm calling him a racist because of his neo-Nazi policy dream of national race quotas. 

But, you see, he doesn't think it's racist to want to "preserve a country's demographic composition." The boldness of Bo Winegard's stupidity is un-freaking-believable. 

Now of course unlike the Nazis, Winegard doesn't specify which racial groups he has in mind and how exactly the "demographic composition" would be apportioned, and how exactly he would achieve his ideal composition.

But then, the Nazis took quite a while to figure out a final solution to their racial demographics apportionment quandary, long after they had a racial demographics concept in mind.

Many people were annoyed with Sam Harris because he gave a very friendly interview to Charles Murray - another indisputable racist - without pushback against Murray's race pseudoscience beliefs. Ezra Klein debated Harris about it, and the late Michael Brooks did a smart and funny episode on his show about it. 

In this video, Lockwood and Winegard are a second-string Harris and Murray. They even mention the Harris/Murray controversy early on in the conversation. Warning: the video is 90 minutes of self-serving race pseudoscience justification and appeasement.

I will be discussing the lowlights below the video. 

LOWLIGHTS

At around minute 3, Winegard expounds on his "sacred values" theory, the transparently self-serving claim that anybody who has issues with his race pseudoscience is simply reacting out of taboo aversion rather than reacting to the clownishness of his "science."

Lockwood responds: 

Interesting so this would probably partially I think explain maybe one of the reasons why people are so just flabbergasted by the concept of a race and IQ when it shows up online or in a Sam Harris talk or whatever, like people lose their minds over this concept because it seems to be reinforcing racism and bias and prejudice in a way that, you know, we shouldn't be using science to do that, I guess it's the attitude because of the sacred values.

Lockwood's turn of phrase doesn't indicate that critics of race pseudoscience might have rational reasons for their criticism, but rather Lockwood, a clinical psychologist, describes the critics of race pseudoscience as people who "lose their minds" over the concept.

I'm not gonna lie -  it was painful to listen to these two dummies affirm Bo Winegard's idiotic belief-system, with Winegard moaning about his role as martyr for The Pure Scientific Truth while Lockwood smiles and nods. 

Adding to the pain of listening is Winegard's extreme vocal fry. He sounds like a 14-year-old goth girl. Also his speech patterns occasionally reminded me of Forrest Gump, which is awful because I love Tom Hanks and there's no comparison between him and a grubby neo-Nazi like Bo Winegard.

At minute 11:55 Lockwood mentions Helen Pluckrose as if she's the voice of sweet reason. Pluckrose is an infamous grifter, only slightly less repellent than James "your mom" Lindsay and bitter Peter Boghossian with whom she perpetrated her big grift. Haaratz did an excellent piece on the scam they ran to get themselves noticed by the gullible of this world:

According to their own account, the writers took parts of the chapter and inserted feminist "buzzwords"; they "significantly changed" the "original wording and intent” of the text to make the paper "publishable and about feminism." An observant reader might ask: what could possibly remain of any Nazi content after that? But no one in the media, apparently, did.

Indeed, in public, the trio constantly downplayed the amount of re-writing they did to the original text. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in October 2018, Lindsay described how they'd "modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly," and in another interview explained that this was to "get past plagiarism." 

Chapter 12, he noted, included sentences like: "This is why we need the Nazi Party, and [this is] what is expected of people who are going to be part of it." What did they change? "We took that out [the Nazi party reference] and replaced it with ‘intersectional feminism.’" What's left is an entirely anodyne sentence, stripped of any identifiable Nazi vestiges. Hardly "owning the grievance warriors."

So what did the text in the article accepted by Affilia actually look like? Was it, as Fox News claimed, a "feminist Mein Kampf", suggesting men should be treated the same way as Hitler victimized Jews?

It is surprising, to say the least, that none of the journalists reporting on the controversy actually bothered to compare the two texts. If they'd done so, they would have found that the Affilia article didn't contain anything that could be recognized as "Mein Kampf" even by a Hitler expert, let alone a lay person

After a positive reference to an ethics-free grifter, and after having suggested critics of race pseudoscience lost their minds, Lockwood shifts into appeasement mode:

LOCKWOOD

I was just chatting with Helen Pluckrose about this a little bit. It seems like there's a spirit or an intention that people are missing out on, and how do we arrive at this intention or spirit of, kind of a charitable or favorable attitude towards our quote-unquote opponents and -

WINEGARD

- Yeah 

LOCKWOOD

- and from from my take just as a clinical psychologist not a research psychologist, it seems like most of what I observe online with incendiary characters and topics is, people start off with, it seems like people start off with the intention to prove someone wrong. And that might end of itself be the place to start with a respectful disagreement - is as opposed to having this intention to prove someone wrong, what if we had the intention to understand. And that's why I like kind of the Buddhist concepts of beginner's mind and whatnot. Because if you have the idea in your head that you know nothing then generally speaking you're more apt to learn something and respectfully disagree like I'm walking into this chat with you knowing almost nothing about your research, kind of on purpose because I could easily kind of creep on you online to figure out what you've written. I'm not going to do that because I actually want to kind of learn for the first time from you what you believe. And without any bias or preconceived notions on my part, you know what I mean?

Yeah because why would you want to prove that racist bullshit, presented as science, is factually incorrect? How rude.

And of course Lockwood knows exactly what Winegard's "research" is about, that's why they talk about the Sam Harris/Charles Murray controversy right at the beginning of the interview. That's what prompted Lockwood to say "people lose their minds."

Throw in Lockwood's reference to Buddhist beginner's mind ("and whatnot") and that paragraph is a recipe for vomit stew. If you did not feel like puking after reading that paragraph (and hearing it spoken is ten times worse) you have a stronger stomach than I do, my friend.

I'm calling it now - Patrick Lockwood is the Neville Chamberlain of race pseudoscience.

But there's only so much I can take of this double-barrel bullshit in one sitting. I will discuss more lowlights in the future. 

After my gorge lowers back the hell down.

Part 2 of the Lockwood Saga: the influence of Jordan Peterson

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.

How conservative and white supremacist is Quillette? Part 2

As we discussed in Part 1, Claire Lehmann threatened via tweet to sue an Australian writer for opining that the publication she founded, Quillette, is a conservative website happy to publish authors known for promoting theories of white supremacy.

It was quick work to demonstrate that Quillette is widely considered to be a conservative website.

The white supremacy issue is a little more complicated.

The Anti-Defamation League has two similar but contrasting definitions of white supremacy.

One is white supremacy:

White supremacy is a term used to characterize various belief systems central to which are one or more of the following key tenets: 1) whites should have dominance over people of other backgrounds, especially where they may co- exist; 2) whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society; 3) white people have their own "culture" that is superior to other cultures; 4) white people are genetically superior to other people. As a full-fledged ideology, white supremacy is far more encompassing than simple racism or bigotry. Most white supremacists today further believe that the white race is in danger of extinction due to a rising “flood” of non-whites, who are controlled and manipulated by Jews, and that imminent action is need to “save” the white race.

The other is "traditional white supremacists"

Traditional white supremacists are one of the major segments of the white supremacist movement in the United States, as well as the oldest. The term is used to refer to a variety of groups and individuals whose white supremacy centers around or originated from the struggle to deny equal rights to African-Americans. Ku Klux Klan groups are the most common type of traditional white supremacist, but the movement also includes other groups, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, the League of the South, and others.

Quillette is devoted to race science, and the main focus of race science is the claim that black people are intellectually inferior to all other "races." Race science also believes Ashkenazi Jews are the most intelligent "race," a belief expressed in the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis published in 2005, which has been promoted by Steven Pinker.

The intellectual inferiority of blacks and the intellectual superiority of Jews are also white supremacist beliefs as demonstrated in segregationist Henry E. Garrett's article "The Equalitarian Dogma" published in Mankind Quarterly in 1961.

However, race science promoters can defend themselves against the charge of white supremacy by pointing out that they either consider Jews to be separate from whites, and consider Jews the most intelligent "race" or, in the case of the race science intelligence rankings that don't separate Jews from whites, East Asians are claimed to be genetically most intelligent. And so they don't, theoretically, believe whites are supreme.

But because they share many core beliefs, it is easy to mistake race science promoters for white supremacists, and there are certainly cases where race science promoters are also white supremacists, as in the case of one of the co-authors of the NHAI paper, the late Henry Harpending.*

So it is correct to say Quillette is happy to publish those who promote white supremacist theories.

To get an idea of how strongly race science promoters believe in the genetic intellectual inferiority of blacks, here are two examples, both by Quillette authors.

The first is a couple of selections from John Paul Wright, professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati College of Education Criminal Justice and Human Services, as well as its director of the graduate program in criminal justice. I've referenced these selections a lot on this blog because they are the plainest demonstration of the beliefs of race science.

In Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research edited by Anthony Walsh and Kevin M. Beaver (Quillette author) Wright said:

Page 149:
...Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially. 

Page 150:
From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality. 

The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.

It's important to note that Wright is a "biosocial criminologist" so not only does he believe blacks are intellectually inferior, he believes they are more inclined, genetically, to criminal behavior than other "races."

On his blog, Conservative Criminality, Wright expressed his antipathy for Black Lives Matter:

So, I’m inclined to see BLM as movement that is largely immoral even if it contains individuals who are moral. I’m inclined to view their general claims as largely hollow even if the occasional case supports their view. And I see more and more how their rhetoric and their actions are brining (sic) harm to people.

The second example is by Bo Winegard, former assistant professor at Marietta college and currently on staff at Quillette and his twin brother Ben who is currently Assistant Professor of Psychology at Carroll College. Bo and Ben Winegard wrote a defense of The Bell Curve in Quillette called "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" in which they agree with John Paul Wright, in so many words that "No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths" about the failure of African Americans to thrive, post-Emancipation:

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

Bo Winegard can be seen promoting the work of John Paul Wright here.

Quillette has published many supporters of race science, several of whom have been previously mentioned on this blog. 

1. Johnny Anomaly
2. Rosalind Arden (author, staff member & sometime co-author with Linda Gottfredson)
3. Kevin Beaver
4. Brian Boutwell
5. Noah Carl
6. Cory Clark
7. Gregory Cochran
8. Nathan Cofnas
9. James Damore
10. David C. Geary
11. Richard Haier
12. David M. Haskell
13. Lee Jussim
14. Razib Khan
15. Geoffrey Miller
16. Kathrine Jebsen Moore
17. Adam Perkins
18. Steven Pinker
19. Robert Plomin
20. Jason Richwine
21. Todd "T.K." Shackleford
22. Michael Shermer
23. Ben Winegard
24. Bo Winegard (author and staff member)   
25. Colin Wright (author and staff member)
26. John Paul Wright
27. Toby Young (also Quillette's London editor)

There are probably others. I will add them as I find them.

For those who are wondering why Andy Ngo, who is currently listed in Quillette as Sub-editor, Contributing Writer, didn't make the list, it's because although he is a grifter and a Trump flunky, I have not found anything written by him about race science or associated theories. On the other hand, Emil O. Kirkegaard, while very much a proponent of race science, and who would seem to be a natural fit for Quillette, hasn't had a Quillette byline.

Several on the list have appeared on the video channel of Stefan Molyneux, who is described as a white supremacist by Vice, and Media Matters: Beaver, Boutwell, Haier, Haskell, John Paul Wright, Shermer, Richwine, Perkins and Damore.

I will look at more white supremacist-race science connections in a future post.

---

* In a blog called West Hunter, which Harpending shared with Gregory Cochran and in which Cochran still writes as of June 2020, Harpending published a post in 2012 called My friend the witch doctor in which he shared a colleague's thoughts, with apparent approval:

A colleague pointed out a few weeks ago, after hearing this story, that if (the belief in witchcraft) is nearly pan-African then perhaps some of it came to the New World. Prominent and not so prominent talkers from the American Black population come out with similar theories of vague and invisible forces that are oppressing people, like “institutional racism” and “white privilege”. 

O my prophetic soul

So a couple of weeks ago, when Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter was still only a strong possibility, I speculated that once Musk took over, people like professional transphobe, Quillette contributing editor Colin Wright would be free to say hateful things without occasionally being called out for it. 

So yesterday Elon Musk retweeted a graphic created by... Colin Wright. 

Clearly Musk is a friend of the right-wing IDW Quillette ideology.