James Lindsay and his allies - more shameless IDW hypocrisy

Pinkerite noted the connection between James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and right-wing Christian fanatic and Soros conspiracy-monger Michael O'Fallon back in March, and lately the issue has erupted on Twitter.



The connection between Lindsay and O'Fallon is in the public record as discussed in an article The unholy alliance between atheists and evangelicals:

...The conference, organized by Sovereign Nations and titled ‘Speaking Truth to Social Justice,’ featured the masterminds behind the so-called ‘Sokal Squared’ scandal: Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James A. Lindsay. Its name is a nod to an earlier hoax, which parodied the extreme postmodernist criticism of science, perpetuated by physicist Alan Sokal, who graced the occasion with his presence. Last year, the three current and former academics, who are prominent speakers in atheist and humanist circles...

They found in Michael O’Fallon, the evangelical Christian founder and editor-in-chief of Sovereign Nations, an ally who is likewise deeply concerned about our postmodern era in which ‘grand narratives that have guided our discourse are collapsing.’ What he fears is the encroachment of the secular theoretical perspectives that undergird social justice upon the gospel and the church, weaponizing identity to upend the Christian interpretation of doctrine. 

And so an unholy alliance between a bunch of atheists and evangelical Christians was born...

O'Fallon is obsessed with Soros conspiracy theories, but it should be noted that Lindsay has his own bizarre conspiracy theories.

On his twitter profile, Lindsay claims to be "Founder of New Discourses" (as well as "apolitical.")





But it's a fact that New Discourses is registered as an LLC in Florida to Directors/Officers Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Michael O'Fallon, with O'Fallon acting as "agent."

According to the web site LLC University:

A Registered Agent in Florida is a person or company who agrees to accept legal mail on behalf of your LLC in case your business gets sued. 

In Florida, your Registered Agent can also serve as a general point of contact for receiving business and tax notices, payment reminders, and other documents.

Now Lindsay is claiming O'Fallon works for him.

We know that James Lindsay received funding for the 'Sokal Squared' grift because he admitted it on Twitter, but refused to say who was paying.




So clearly Lindsay is open to work-for-hire.

Meanwhile, Michael O'Fallon is "CEO of Sovereign Nations and owner of Sovereign Cruises and Events LLC, which runs vacation excursions for religious and political groups, alike."

It seems unlikely O'Fallon would work for Lindsay rather than vice-versa.

Here we see the Sovereign Nations Twitter account approving the alliance between Christopher F. Rufo and James Lindsay.

Rufo is a contributing editor at the Koch-funded City Journal, as well as a research fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for on Wealth, Poverty & Morality, which promotes "intelligent design."

Another ally of James Lindsay is Bari Weiss.



In this tweet Weiss also mentions chateau bouncer Thomas Chatterton Williams and Eric Weinstein, founder of the Intellectual Dark Web and employee of Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

So although Lindsay was not mentioned in Weiss's 2018 article it would appear that Lindsay is in deep with the IDW.

I've noted often the utter hypocrisy of the IDW, and hypocrisy is a notable trait of Steven Pinker, but it doesn't hurt to mention the pure shamelessness again.

 In her 2018 article Weiss wrote:

The core members (of the IDW) have little in common politically. Bret and Eric Weinstein and Ms. Heying were Bernie Sanders supporters. Mr. Harris was an outspoken Hillary voter. Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trump conservative.
But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. 

There are many examples of IDWs being extremely uncivil, but James Lindsay's incivility is especially shameless in light of his book "How to Have Impossible Conversations." Hilariously, according to its publisher Hachette:

Boghossian and Lindsay teach the subtle art of instilling doubts and opening minds. They cover everything from learning the fundamentals for good conversations to achieving expert-level techniques to deal with hardliners and extremists. This book is the manual everyone needs to foster a climate of civility, connection, and empathy.

When presented with undeniable evidence of his connection to a right-wing Christian extremist conspiracy-monger, here are some of James Lindsay's responses:

It appears that "How to Have Impossible Conversations" is yet another grift by James Lindsay and anybody who bought the book should ask for their money back.

Attempted Pelosi assassin is a fan of James Lindsay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bari Weiss and her allies

Although James Lindsay, Christian nationalist ally/business partner and Trump-lover and shameless hypocrite, was not mentioned in Bari Weiss' article about the Intellectual Dark Web, I was not kidding when I said that he is what passes for an intellectual in the IDW world.

Today we see Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, who then retweeted her retweet.

 

The "liberals aren't liberal, right-wingers are the new liberals" line that Weiss is promoting in this tweet is a leading strategy for those associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a strategy which Claire Lehmann admitted in her reference to the "Overton Window."

A stooge like James Lindsay, who claims to be a leftist while voting for Trump is a prime example of that IDW rat-fucking strategy.

Currently Bari Weiss' pinned Tweet is promoting a variation on the same IDW strategy, suggesting that American liberalism is a dangerous ideology now.

She's worried about the Jews, but she doesn't seem to be at all worried about the fact that leading IDW intellectual James Lindsay has a business partnership with a Christian nationalist kook like Michael O'Fallon, nor that he is cozy with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

It's striking how supportive these IDW-connected people are of each other, refusing to criticize each other for anything. It's almost as if they are all working for the same bosses and the bosses wouldn't like to see signs of disharmony among the employees. 

The possibility that the IDW gang are getting paid by a group of rightwing plutocrats would go a long way towards explaining the disconnect between what they say they care about and what they actually care about, well-illustrated by this Twitter thread.

As Jamison Foser points out, the people who signed onto the Harpers letter seem far more concerned about the well-known and well-paid being criticized for their right-wing opinions than the Trump administration's abuses of power. Bari Weiss seems perfectly comfortable that her pal James Lindsay is an outspoken Trump supporter.

It seems that anything goes in the IDW world as long as someone hates the 1619 project and "critical race theory" as James Lindsay does. 

Here he is demonstrating once again how to have difficult conversations through civility.

The IDW gang, although dominated by white conservatives, does have Black associates, whose primary focus is to attack the work of other Black people. Coleman Hughes, Quillette author who also works for the Koch-funded City Journal is a leading example. 

Here is a City Journal piece from yesterday, promoting Charles Koch's thoughts on "solving America's social problems."

Fourteen percent of the people who signed the Harpers letter had Koch connections and the initiator of the Harpers letter, Bari Weiss' friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, (the "self-expelled guy,") was given a job at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute some months after the Harpers letter was published.

Thanks to Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, I discovered another Black Quillette author,  Chloe Valdry, being promoted by Weiss as providing an alternative antiracism to DiAngeloism.

I'm a long-time critic of Robin DiAngelo & White Fragility, but I doubt that an antiracism campaign created by someone aligned with the race science-promoting Quillette is a significantly better alternative. Valdary's IDW connections indicate she is unlikely to have any problems with "racial essentialism" - or at least not enough to cut her connections to the IDW & Quillette.

Valdary runs a project called Theory of Enchantment and there is no information on its site as to where Valdary gets her funding. I have a few theories about that.

So why doesn't Bari Weiss criticize James Lindsay for supporting Trump, or for being friendly with Richard Spencer or for going into business with Michael O'Fallon? Why are Coleman Hughes and Chloe S. Valdary unconcerned that Quillette and the IDW promote race science? 

The answer as always is likely wingnut welfare. As Krugman said:

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

The plutocrats who fund wingnut welfare are keenly interested in swaying pubic opinion, as we see with Charles Koch sharing his thoughts on "solving America's social problems." And they have access to incredible amounts of money. Why wouldn't they use it to buy people to support their right-wing causes? And they don't even care if the people they buy are smart - James Lindsay is a manifestly stupid oaf. But he had a success in the conservative world with his laughable hoax grift - for which he was paid although he refuses to say who paid him. Plutocrats don't care if Lindsay is a fool - he is willing to spend hours online promoting their interests which are then retweeted by the higher-profile Bari Weiss or praised by Steven Pinker.

And if we look at the things James Lindsay says online, when he isn't insulting those who question him or disagree with him, it's clear that one of the things his bosses care about most is erasing Black history in order to promote the notion that Black people are innately less intelligent and their failure to thrive, post-Emancipation is the fault of their own bad genes.

Bari Weiss' pal Andrew Sullivan is well-known for that very thing, from promoting the Bell Curve to his attacks on the 1619 project.

James Lindsay and Your Mom

UPDATE: thanks to James Lindsay for sending all his followers my way. 

This isn't the first time I've written about what a grifting, hypocritical oaf Lindsay is. Enjoy.

Ever since Bari Weiss introduced her pals the Intellectual Dark Web to the world in May, 2018, the IDW like to congratulate each other for how civil they all are.

But far from being exemplars of reason and civility, the IDW and their friends are often not just uncivil, but outright vicious on social media, as when Claire Lehmann, Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers attacked a writer for fiction they felt was too disrespectful of a male character, or when  Christina Hoff Sommers retweeted Camille Paglia calling Lena Dunham a "pile of pudding" or the time Michael Shermer called a critic of Steven Pinker a "cockroach" or recently when Quillette's managing editor Colin Wright claimed I was "demonstrably insane" for presenting evidence for facts he didn't want to know about.

But the most shameless, most blatant hypocrite in the crowded field of IDW shamelessness is James Lindsay, author of a book, with Peter Boghossian called "How to Have Impossible Conversations a Very Practical Guide" which stresses the importance of civility in public discourse.

So how does James Lindsay, in his public persona on social media, demonstrate the lessons he presumes to teach others? With oafish and extreme incivility.

One of his favorite responses to critics is to mindlessly repeat some variation on "your mom."

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In case you have't guessed by his witty repartee, James Lindsay is a leading "intellectual" of the Intellectual Dark Web, praised by IDW race science promoters like Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Andrew Sullivan.

James Lindsay, banned from Twitter for being a neo-Nazi

A tweet by James Lindsay,
darling of the Intellectual Dark Web
and a neo-Nazi

Anybody could see that James Lindsay was a right-wing extremist kook.

I first mentioned his extremism back in 2019. I mentioned him a few times since then, the most prominent was when he came for me, which gave a nice little boost to this blog, and a good chance to talk about his insane "your mom" hypocrisy.

(His partner in grift, Peter Boghossian, also came for me.)

So I'm not surprised Lindsay rode the right-wing extremist grifter gravy train to its logical conclusion: anti-Semitism, as reported in The Daily Beast. 

I mean, he was already teaming up with Richard Spencer in 2020. 

Finally, Twitter gave him the boot for hateful conduct.

But this blog could not call itself Pinkerite with any self-respect without spending a moment to mention how much Steven Pinker loved and supported James Lindsay. Along with Andrew Sullivan and Jerry Coyne.

Ending, one hopes, at least by the time Lindsay went full neo-Nazi.

Pinker praising Lindsay's book Cynical Theories.