Meet techno-fascist Marc Andreessen

Techno-fascist Marc Andreessen and his Substack stooge Razib Khan
Like Thiel and Musk, Andreessen can easily afford thousands
of courtiers like Khan, ready to say whatever their liege desires 
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I have ignored Marc Andreessen on this blog for far too long. 

Mostly because the connections between Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the Intellectual Dark Web and race pseudoscience have been much more obvious for much longer. 

Thiel especially, has been a player in right-wing politics since he was in college. And it has been credibly claimed he "secretly" funded the admittedly hereditarian, racist rag Quillette. 

Steven Pinker is a big fan of Quillette, even writing for Quillette, which completes the third component of the race pseudoscience - Intellectual Dark Web - Steven Pinker Dark Triad.

So I've made a big deal about possible connections between Peter Thiel and Substack while ignoring the indisputable connection between Andreessen and Substack. 

And now, here from last week is Andreessen promoting a tweet by racist Razib Khan, whose career has been promoted by Steven Pinker for decades.

And like Peter Thiel, the indisputable fascist, Andreessen has a friendly relationship with infamous white supremacist Richard Hanania.

Andreessen is a libertarian megalomaniac, which has been public knowledge for at least the last decade, but recently that's been made more obvious by his famously unhinged rant, which the Washington Post called "a self-serving cry for help." And:

The venture capitalist’s grievances are many, as are his out-there pronouncements. Universal basic income “would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.” Global population “easily” could grow to 50 billion (from about 8 billion today)— “and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.” And he has a Fox News-ish fear of a grab-bag of hobgoblins: “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”

Vice points out the connection between Andreessen's beliefs and fascist beliefs:

Andreessen also calls out Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as one of his patron saints. Marinetti is not only the author of the technology- and destruction-worshipping Futurist Manifesto from 1909, but also one of the architects of Italian fascism. Marinetti co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and founded a futurist political party that merged with Mussolini's fascists. Other futurist thinkers and artists exist. To call Marinetti in particular a "saint" is a choice. 

You can't be more obviously in love with fascism than that - to call a Mussolini-era fascist a "saint." To those of you unfamiliar with history, Mussolini was an ally of Hitler.

So should we really be surprised that Substack, a platform that Andreessen has heavily invested in, is not only platforming Nazis and profiting from Nazis, but unashamedly promoting Nazis?

A software developer on Github compared Andreessen to Karl Marx and Ted Kazinsky (the "Unabomber") - 

In the vein of Ted Kazinsky, Karl Marx, and others before him, Marc Andreessen has proudly penned a manifesto, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto . Or more properly, “a rant.”

I chose the word “rant” with care. He’s ranting against something, but it’s a terrible essay riddled with citations from racist writers (whom he admires), straw men, false dilemmas, and reads like a high school sophomore barely squeaked out a passing grade in a macroeconomics course.

Lucas Roper in Gizmodo, in an article entitled Marc Andreessen Is Wrong About Everything writes:

Here’s the bottom line: The techno-optimist tribe gives off the distinct impression of people who have been so ridiculously rich for so long that they’ve just completely lost the plot about how the real world works. To be fair, this is an apt description of most of Silicon Valley. These days, if you’re not vampirically using your teenage son’s blood to regenerate your own aging body, or torturing monkeys to death in the hopes of creating the Matrix, or trying to get a belligerent reality TV star elected president, you’re just not winning. The tech industry is fueled by people with bad ideas, and Jezos, Andreessen, and company are just some among many. What makes this crowd somewhat different (and a little more dangerous) is that they’re now writing Unabomber-style manifestos that give some pretense of intellectual legitimacy to their terrible ideas. They’re then using that legitimacy to push for a totally unregulated tech industry that stands to “disrupt” (i.e., potentially destabilize) large parts of society.

This makes it all the more ironic that Andreessen names as one of his so-called “enemies” those who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Frankly, there’s no better description of the “techno-optimist” crowd—a gaggle of out-of-touch tech bros who think their wealth gives them license to chart a future nobody else wants.

It should be obvious to all by now that the United States - and the world - has a deadly-serious billionaire techno-fascist problem.

Now I want to take a moment to mention the epic post about Substack shenanigans by Allan Stromfeldt Christensen of the curiously named "Filmers to Farmers" website. This is the first time I've seen someone else discuss some of the issues about Substack that I have raised in the past couple of years. I will have more to say about this epic post soon, but for now I just want to quote this bit:

Because yes, the notion of Substack's "hands-off ... moderation stance" ostensibly being part of a 10-15 year Andreessen-aligned covert plan can be a bit too conspiratorial to swallow, but it nonetheless turns out that there's nothing covert at all about Substack's extremist machinations, and it's getting harder and harder to not admit that Substack is increasingly turning into something rather similar to what Musk has transformed his Twitter/X platform into.

As I said back in July:

With all the racists it is platforming (Hanania, Kirkegaard, Bo Winegard, Razib Khan, Indian Bronson - undoubtedly many more, those are just off the top of my head) and now promoting, it sure looks like Substack is going the way of Twitter - and if it's less obvious than with Twitter, that's probably because Peter Thiel is stealthier than Elon Musk.

Of course I should have said Marc Andreessen - but don't count Thiel out yet - he does indeed like to do things secretly.

Substack, the Nazi Bar

...what Substack is doing is not merely allowing Nazis to sit at their bar - they are giving them free drinks and telling other bar patrons that Nazis are "up-and-comers."

Back in February 2022 I noted the connection between Substack spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Merservey and the race pseudoscience gang:

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

Jonathan Katz provides additional info about Meservey in his November 29, 2023 The Racket post:

The arrival of the new right-wing Substackers was accompanied by an influx of new staff from Andreessen Horowitz. The combined company also hired its first full-time spokeswoman: Lulu Cheng Merservey, a noted fan of one of Substack's leading eugenics bloggers and the wife of a Heritage Foundation wonk.

I hadn't realized the Heritage Foundation connection in February 2022. 

But the line "a noted fan of one of Substack's leading eugenics blogger" links to an article from 2015 about Razib Khan being dropped from the New York Times, although Katz doesn't mention Khan by name in the text of his post. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one who has explicitly noted Meservey's fandom of Razib Khan, but maybe Katz has other sources who are not picked up by Google search.

Meservey's Heritage Foundation wonk husband is Joshua Meservey, although the Heritage website says he is no longer on staff. He's now at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. Which receives money via Donors Trust.

As the Hudson Institute's website says:

With rare and very few exceptions for gifts whose donors prefer to remain anonymous, Hudson Institute publicly identifies the sources and levels of all outside revenue received each calendar year in its annual reports.

But of course we have to trust the Institute that the anonymous donors are rare and very few.

Meservey apparently left Substack for Activision and in October 2022 was profiled as a union buster and accused of pushing right-wing talking points:

Lulu Cheng Meservey has been on the job for less than a month and the Activision executive has already antagonized employees at the center of a long-overdue unionization push within the games industry. After over a dozen Blizzard quality assurance testers won the right to hold a union vote in November, Meservey warned staff via Slack that organizing could lead to lower raises and tough clashes with management. A screengrab of the comment reached Twitter, someone accused Meservey of pushing right-wing talking points, and she’s been posting through it ever since.

So yeah, Meservey is the kind of person you'd expect to be hired by a company with far-right leanings - like Substack.

Meservey is apparently leaving Activision now. 

It's important to note that Substack isn't merely allowing Nazis and other varieties of racists to exist on its platform, and allowing Nazis to monetize content on its platform, Substack has actively promoted Nazis and racists, as Katz notes in his Atlantic article:

In June, McKenzie hosted the Substack writer Richard Hanania on the platform’s flagship podcast, The Active Voice. On Twitter the previous month, Hanania, a political scientist with a law degree from the University of Chicago, had described Black people as “animals” who should be subject to “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance.”

Soon after Hanania’s appearance on the podcast, HuffPost outed him as having written under a pen name in the early 2010s for several white-nationalist outlets, including Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com. In some of his older posts, Hanania called for the forced sterilization of those with “low IQ”—a group that he argued included most Black and Latino people. Hanania responded to the exposé with a Substack post in which he disavowed his past views, but in terms that raised significant doubts about his sincerity. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort,” he declared in the post, “is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.” 

 

Nevertheless, Chris Best, who is also Substack’s CEO, hailed Hanania’s non-apology as “an honest post on a difficult subject.” Within weeks, Substack was promoting Hanania yet again, trumpeting in one of its newsletters that his new book, The Origins of Woke—in which he calls for gutting the Civil Rights Act—“is in hot demand from reviewers,” and providing a link to preorder it. (One of those reviewers, writing for The Atlantic, observed: “Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one.”) 

 

In McKenzie’s recent post about “leaning into politics,” the Substack co-founder enthusiastically and prominently recommended a lesser-known Substacker, Darryl Cooper, as among the “up-and-comers” in political writing. Cooper’s podcast featured a complimentary interview with the white-nationalist magazine editor Greg Johnson—who, incidentally, published some of Hanania’s pseudonymous, more explicitly racist writings. Cooper has also used his personal Twitter account to claim that “FDR chose the wrong side in WW2.” (That tweet and the interview with Johnson were subsequently deleted.)

There's no reason to promote racists and Nazis unless you have no problem with racist and Nazi ideology. 

This is what Substack is, and what it was always intended to be, or as Katz quoted Hanania: "Substack itself was created to explicitly push back against leftist suppression of speech"

I'm glad to see that Allan Stromfeldt Christensen of "Filmers to Farmers"  has the same basic analysis:

...while Katz himself stated on Substack that "I, for the moment, am staying", and that "I was here before the Nazis, and I think they should leave, not me", who was there first ultimately matters less than what the platform's co-founders and investors (originally?) had in store for the platform.

Because yes, the notion of Substack's "hands-off ... moderation stance" ostensibly being part of a 10-15 year Andreessen-aligned covert plan can be a bit too conspiratorial to swallow, but it nonetheless turns out that there's nothing covert at all about Substack's extremist machinations, and it's getting harder and harder to not admit that Substack is increasingly turning into something rather similar to what Musk has transformed his Twitter/X platform into.

And boy howdy is Twitter a shit show now - I just went there and I was hit with a solid wall of right-wing pro-Trump sludge - it's just relentless.

In his epic post, Christensen makes the connection between Twitter, Substack and Nazi bars by quoting a tweet thread, originally posted here.

The thread's point is that if you let one polite Nazi frequent your bar, they will bring their friends and they'll scare away non-Nazis and eventually you will have a Nazi bar.

Except what Substack is doing is not merely allowing Nazis to sit at their bar - they are giving them free drinks and telling other bar patrons that Nazis are "up-and-comers."

If you do that, you are, objectively, pro-Nazi.

Christensen has information about Substack's bot-driven membership inflation scheme, which I'll talk about soon.

Krugman nails it

I just wish Krugman would find a different platform besides Substack for his "Krugman Wonks Out" blog - he makes excellent observations about Marc Andreessen - but Andreessen funds Substack:

Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires.

To the extent that there’s a valid reason for accumulating a very large fortune, I’d say that it involves freedom, the ability to live your life more or less however you want. Indeed, one definition of true wealth is having “fuck you money” — enough money to walk away from unpleasant situations or distasteful individuals without suffering a big decline in your living standards. And some very wealthy men — most obviously Mark Cuban, but I’d at least tentatively include Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — do seem to exhibit the kind of independence wealth gives you if you choose to exercise it.

The likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, however, surely have that kind of money, yet they’re prostrating themselves before Trump. They aren’t stupid; they have to know what kind of person Trump is and understand — whether or not they admit it to themselves — the humiliating nature of their behavior. So why do they do it?

The answer, I believe, is that many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”

So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration. Read Ross Douthat’s interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the tech bro explains why he has turned hard right. Andreessen says that it’s not about the money, and I believe him. What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.

I had to laugh at this part of the interview:

Andreessen: Of course, that’s true. You could say over the last 200 years, the left, over time, has won most of the fights or even all the fights. 

It's thanks to the left winning that we no longer have slavery. Thanks to the left we don't have children  working in factories. Thanks to the left, Black people can vote, women can vote. Thanks to the left, you can't discriminate against Jews. Thanks to the left there's a separation between church and state.  Thanks to the left you can't arrest gay people for being gay. Etc. Etc. Etc.

I once argued with socialists about their belief that nobody should be allowed to be a billionaire, that there should be a government cap on personal wealth. But thanks to these fascists with souls made of black holes, I am all in favor of limiting the damage they can do to the rest of us by taxing billionaires into extinction.

No disrespect to Krugman, but the movie "Chinatown" (yes I know it was directed by a child rapist) asked and answered the question of what motivates the obscenely wealthy, over 50 years ago:

Jake Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?

Noah Cross: (like Polanski, a child rapist): Oh my yes.

Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?

Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!

UPDATE: Wonkette had an equally critical, if more spicy response to Andreessen:

Andreessen gave interviews this week to both Bari Weissand Ross Douthat about his expectations for governance in the Age of Broligarchs, his thoughts on government funding and waste, all the ways in which non-billionaires have been very mean and unfair to the geniuses of Silicon Valley like Marc Andreessen, how elite schools such as Harvard turn kids into full-blown communists demanding the implementation of all sorts of Stalinist dogma like diversity in the workplace, what he imagines average, everyday taxpayers really think and want, the awesome and wide-ranging genius of Elon Musk, and whatever other topics are rattling around in that entitled and quite oblong head of his. 

 

To put it yet another way, if by the end of an interview even such a cloistered and obtuse mediocrity like Ross Douthat has become incredulous at your absence of anything resembling empathy towards voters or understanding of all the ways they rely on a functioning federal government in their day-to-day lives, well, you really need to step back and re-evaluate all of your assumptions.

Techno-fascist Marc Andreessen's woman problem

I was struck by how much techno-fascist Marc Andreessen's manifesto sounds like it was taken from a speech from one of Ayn Rand's characters. Or, as Vice said: "like the ramblings of a college student who just finished his first reading of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. "

For example, from the "Enemies" section of Andreessen's rant:

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Curiously, Andreessen never uses "human" or "people," he always uses "man" to indicate human beings. For someone who is so devoted to the future, that is an odd choice - an antiquated usage, a preference from before the last quarter of the 20th century. But maybe that tells you something about Andreessen's plans for women in his techno-fascist utopia.

Like so many "futurists," who are almost all white men, Andreessen ignores the impact that technological innovation - reliable birth control, jobs that don't depend on muscular strength - has had on women's lives, especially choices concerning child-bearing.

I think the reason for that is because these men carry an unexamined belief that childbearing decisions are a "woman's issue" and therefore not interesting and certainly not worth the consideration of the Important Thinkers they believe themselves to be. Women and their lives are the painted, dimly-lit background flats before which these Important Thinkers strut about in the spotlight, expounding their Deep Thoughts.

It's obvious in this passage from the Andreessen manifesto:

We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods.

We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.

The fact that investment in women's well-being results in women having fewer children has completely escaped Andreessen's notice. 

But once Andreessen does notice it, what will be his response?

It seems likely to be enforced child-bearing. Crackpot Jordan Peterson advocated "enforced monogamy." Enforced child-bearing would seem to be the next step in putting women back into their pre-last quarter of the twentieth century place.

Marc Andreessen is apparently impressed by Jordan Peterson.

He recommended Peterson's "12 Rules for Life."

UPDATE - I just had to add this to demonstrate how stupid you have to be to be impressed by gullible dumbass Jordan Peterson. Good old Cody. Full-length video about the wackiness of Jordan Peterson.

But I shouldn't deny Andreessen credit for his own crackpottery - he believes that women having fewer children is caused by TikTok.

Women being steered wrong by technology is a problem for techno-fascists - unless you exclude women from the "progress of man."

It should be noted that Mr. and Mrs. Andreessen only have one offspring. His wife, in her early 50s, is unlikely to have more without a surrogate

Peter Thiel, another libertarian, said that giving women the vote was a problem for libertarianism, and as a recent Atlantic article noted, "He elaborated, after some backlash, that he did not literally oppose women’s suffrage, but neither did he affirm his support for it."

And speaking of crackpots, back to Ayn Rand. In Andreessen's infamous list of techno-fascist saints he includes the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, but doesn't mention Ayn Rand.

Instead he includes Ayn Rand's hero, the horribly long-winded John Galt. 

Rand would not have had a problem with misogyny being the solution to the techno-fascist ideologues' woman problem - Rand was a misogynist herself.

And her creation, John Galt, was a terrorist - as Rational Wiki notes in its entry on "Going Galt" -

...the "hero" John Galt of Ayn Rand's Objectivist doorstopper, Atlas Shrugged, who destroys civilization to avoid paying taxes.[3] (Going Galters) apparently think this is a good idea, and hope to follow in his footsteps.

In the novel, John Galt declared his opposition to collectivism by starting a community called Galt's Gulch.[note 1][note 2] He expressed his opposition to organized labor by organizing (what else?) a strike; the original working title of the book, incredibly enough, was The Strike.

As Paul Krugman said:

For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.

Naturally Randroids and libertarians hate Krugman and compare him to Rand's villains. Andreessen also appears to hate Krugman.

John Galt's origin story is absurd - after Galt invents a magical perpetual motion machine, he becomes a terrorist when his bosses at the Twentieth Century Motor Company collectivize their own business. 

You know, because that's such a plausible scenario in the real world.

One of the self-collectivizing owners, Ivy Starns is a psycho-sadist, a typical two-dimensional Rand villain. Rand uses Starns to explain the motivation of Communism:

...if you ever want to see pure evil you should see the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who'd talked back to her once... And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

This is what passes for political insight among libertarians: Communism is caused by sadism.

More importantly, Andresseen likely believes that such a goofy cartoon villain is real:

Although it's an odd thing for Andreessen to quote with approval, that Rand's heroes are fake, since Rand's heroes are real enough to Andreessen for him to include one of them - and not its actual human (albeit woman) creator - as one of his "saints" of techno-fascism.

Here's how Ayn Rand treated her preposterous villains: she blows them up, along with their wives and children. 

As Kevin Baker wrote in Harper's back in 2014: (My bolded emphasis)

Trains were more than just a magnificent obsession for Rand. They also served as a sort of avenging angel. By Atlas Shrugged’s seventh chapter, “The Moratorium on Brains” (no stickler for subtlety, was our Ms. Rand), so many of the great men have opted out of society that a working diesel engine cannot be found to run a revolutionary express train, the Comet, through an eight-mile tunnel in the Rockies. Nevertheless, one of the “looter” politicians ruining the world insists that the Comet — clearly modeled on the 20th Century, and probably one of the gorgeous new Zephyr trains of the time — make the trip anyway, so that he can make a campaign appearance in California. The spineless, government-appointed bureaucrats now running the railroad attach a coal-burning engine instead, even though they know it might asphyxiate everyone on board.

“It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them,” writes Rand, who then begs to differ, spending the next two pages ranting about sixteen unnamed individuals who will die aboard the Comet — and a good thing, too, as they embody all the sorts she most despises.

The doomed include everyone from a lawyer who feels he can “get along under any political system,” to “an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards” because they believed in the will of the majority; to “a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays” that insulted businessmen, and finally a doting mother of two who would not denounce her husband because of his weaselly government job.

“These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas,” she concludes with relish, presumably including in her condemnation the young tots the doting mother had just tucked into their bunks with visions of collectivism inculcated deep in their heads. To them, Rand adds a group of soldiers aboard a munitions train that runs into the Comet after it stalls in the tunnel, killing everyone in a spectacular explosion.

Rand later writes a scene in which, as the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling during what she terms a “strike” by the prime movers, a rail bridge falls apart and a Taggart Transcontinental train tumbles into the Mississippi River — one more vehicle crowded with thinkers of philosophically impure thoughts. And in yet another scene, Eddie Willers, the loyal aide to the book’s heroine, is aboard a train when it breaks down out in the Arizona desert. The other passengers and crew manage to be rescued by a passing wagon train(!), but Eddie refuses and pleads, “Don’t let it go!” while looking up helplessly at the locomotive. The others abandon the train and Eddie, almost certainly to his death.

It was such passages that led Whittaker Chambers, in his 1957 National Review takedown of Rand and her just-released book, to famously write, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, ‘To the gas chambers — go!’ ” By then Rand had lingered so long on her screed that trains, the cutting edge of American technology and design when she began, were about to be all but eliminated by the prime movers.

But reading of her love for trains’ capacity to kill at least allows one to understand her appeal to the modern Republican right. Her extended descriptions of those who will die and why they deserve to die resemble nothing so much as the climactic passages of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series, in which, after another set of righteous people have been raptured out of harm’s way, the authors dwell in loving detail on the torments to be inflicted by the returning deity of the Apocalypse — in this case, not Jesus Christ, but John Galt. Different god, same gas chamber.

Marc Andreessen making saints of a Fascist Manifesto co-author and one of Ayn Rand's characters tells you everything you need to know about Marc Andreessen. 

That and the fact that he's funding Nazi-promoting Substack.

Ted Gioia is not a moral authority on anything

I had to laugh when I saw Substack stooge Hamish McKenzie citing Ted Gioia as some kind of moral authority in his response to the very valid concerns of Substack authors that Substack has become a Nazi bar. 

Via Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

Eventually, the Substack founders had to respond. They couldn’t stare off into the distance like Best did during the Nilay Patel interview in April. So another founder, Hamish McKenzie, finally published a Note saying “yes, we allow Nazis and we’re not going to stop.” Of course, as is too often the case on these things, he tried to couch it as a principled stance:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts. As @Ted Gioia has noted, history shows that censorship is most potently used by the powerful to silence the powerless. (Ted’s note: substack.com/profile/4937458-ted-gioia/…) 

Ted Gioia was published in racist Quillette; by the intensely evil and right-wing Koch-funded City Journal; and by the queen of the right-wing grifters Bari Weiss.

Either Ted Gioia agrees with the racism of Quillette and the right-wing extremist positions of City Journal and the grifting sugar baby views of Bari Weiss, or he's such a feckless stooge he doesn't care if he publishes in evil media as long as they pay.

Either way Ted Gioia is not a moral authority on anything. 

But I guess he's the best that the Nazi-promoting freaks at Substack have.

The Masnick piece is very good - it ends like this:

Substack has every right to make the choices it has made, but it shouldn’t pretend that it’s standing up for civil rights or freedoms, because it’s not. It’s making value judgments that everyone can see, and its value judgment is “Nazis are welcome, sex workers aren’t.”

Your reputation is what you allow. Substack has hung out its shingle saying “Nazis welcome.”

Everyone else who uses the platform now gets to decide whether or not they wish to support the site that facilitates the funding of Nazis. Some will. Some will find the tradeoffs acceptable. But others won’t. I’ve already seen a few prominent Substack writers announce that they have moved or that they’re intending to do so.

These are all free speech decisions as well. Substack has made its decision. Substack has declared what its reputation is going to be. I support the company’s free speech rights to make that choice. But that does not mean I need to support the platform personally.

Your reputation is what you allow and Substack has chosen to support Nazis.

I think Masnick is missing something of the bigger picture though - although he focuses on feckless stooges Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best, they are not calling the shots, it's their funders like techno-fascist Marc Andreessen who are. 

The continuing non-celebrity career of Razib Khan

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan enjoy the bootlicking together after 

Singal posted a photo of grifter Bari Weiss and her grifter wife Nellie Bowles.

Weiss herself has to lick the boot, which is why she gives interviews to Peter Thiel and lately, fascist Marc Andreessen. It's very likely that both Thiel and Andreessen fund The Free Press, considering that Andreessen already funds Nazi-friendly Substack and Thiel has spent his entire career since college funding right-wing media and has been accused of funding Quillette. Thiel even went so far as to have a meeting with international man of douchebaggery Emil Kirkegaard, as reported in the essential-reading "Race Science Inc." by the organization Hope not Hate.

The Free Press is so devoted to racism it employs and expresses admiration for the white supremacist Douglas Murray.

Khan and Singal have been allies for years and recently Singal appeared on Khan's podcast.

I assume Khan is team-licking with Singal on Bluesky in an attempt to get a gig with the Free Press, which is basically the American Quillette. To be fair, the Free Press is a good fit for Khan, who has made a career of promoting far-right extremism and race pseudoscience, which has been quite lucrative for him.

Holocaust denier Ron Unz paid for Khan's education, per the excellent 2017 Undark article Race, Science, and the Continuing Education of Razib Khan:

Around 2000, (Khan) joined a private email discussion group about human biodiversity organized by Sailer. (More mainstream academics, including Steven Pinker, were also in the group).

Not long after that, Khan helped a geneticist friend start a blog about science. They called it Gene Expression — GNXP, for short. Its writers discussed technical topics, as well as issues with a more political edge, like gender and racial differences.

A few years later, Khan went on the payroll of Ron Unz, a libertarian who ran for governor of California in 1994. Unz, who made a fortune in software development, offered Khan something that Unz describes as “a sort of fellowship or junior fellowship” to further his scientific career. Both Khan and Unz are vague about the reasons for the fellowship, but the gift was contingent on Khan leaving his job in software to focus on a scientific career. It was a big part of why he got on a graduate school track and ended up at UC Davis.

The article is from 2017 and since then, Khan has continued to be a promoter of race pseudoscience, working with Quillette and the Emil Kirkegaard-owned Aporia Magazine. I wrote an overview of Khan's career in 2022.

I haven't been talking about Khan much in the past year but when he teamed up with Jesse Singal to attack me last week he got my attention.

I have to laugh about Singal's calling me an internet microcelebrity. Singal and Razib Khan are allied with the much more famous Steven Pinker, but although Pinker was called a "celebrity intellectual" by the NYTimes, even he is barely known outside of the very online. 

I had lunch with a writer friend not long ago and I told her about this Pinkerite blog. I explained why I selected the name Pinkerite and her response was "who is Steven Pinker?" I went through a list of the names of other IDW-related people I've written about here, and the only name she recognized was Bari Weiss.

Although more often than not when I've mentioned the name Bari Weiss, most people hear Barry White, the music legend who died over twenty years ago.

One of the reasons this blog is so obscure is that except for Thiel, Musk and Trump, virtually all the people I write about on Pinkerite are not well known by the general public nor even by smart people who pay attention to politics and current events. 

So by microcelebrity I assume Singal means that he and his IDW friends have Googled their names and found this blog. And since someone, anyone, is writing about them, they feel like celebrities - which makes me therefore a microcelebrity.

Among Razib Khan's smears on Bluesky is the claim that I'm "scaring even woke journalists."

Which "woke journalists" could Khan possibly mean? Matt Yglesias? Yglesias is another name known among pundit-types and the very online, but almost nobody else. Although an acquaintance mentioned to me that he was a counselor at a camp Yglesias attended as a child.

Razib Khan is not well known by the general public, but that's worked out for him since it means that he gets jobs and support from the clueless now and then. In 2013 even Ta-Nehisi Coates promoted Khan's career.

But then people Google Khan. Like when the NYTimes canned him, or when people changed their mind about signing Khan's petition in defense of racist E. O. Wilson. 

And sometimes when people Google his name they find this blog, which is why Khan is so mad and making unsupported claims about me. 

But I'm not even a microcelebrity. I'm just an American citizen, keeping tabs on people taking money from fascist plutocrats to promote race pseudoscience and other rightwing bullshit.

Racist Substack Aporia whines about Rational Wiki

A who's who of professional racists in two tweets.
______________________________________________

Aporia, the nest of extremist rightwing racists, harbored at techno-fascist Marc Andreessen-funded Substack has lately been whining about Rational Wiki. 

The whining was even more unintentionally funny and ironic because it occurred in an unsigned editorial:

...the mostly pseudonymous team running the RatWiki organization, the organization that owns and runs the website. It works on the standard Wikipedia format, where they let anyone edit, at least in theory. This community-sourced material status gives them a kind of legal liability cop-out for the material they host, in the same way that YouTube isn't responsible for the comments people post.

Meanwhile, the Substack toadies who work for Andreessen claim they can't be responsible for the racism spewed by Aporia and other hate-accounts on Substack.

How Kirkegaard spends his 
time on the shit-hole site Twitter/X
You can see why those serious scholars 
at Aporia would want to align
themselves with him.

It seems that those very serious scholars at Aporia are in league, big time, with that freak Emil Kirkegaard, and have taken his personal grievances on as one of their causes, along with the usual causes of racism and Neo-Nazism. 

They decided to financially support Kirkegaard: This short film is possible thanks to our paid Substack supporters.

The "film" in question, which Aporia is promoting on Twitter/X under the banner "ANTIFA WATCH," is four minutes of Kirkegaard walking along a beach whining about how true facts about him are known thanks to Rational Wiki. 

Somehow Kirkegaard connects Rational Wiki to the guy he owes money to, even though that guy is no longer affiliated with Rational Wiki. And Kirkegaard knows this because it said so in the pro-Kirkegaard article published pseudonymously a year ago by the ghouls at City Journal /Manhattan Institute which was later retracted when the target of the article (really, a smear campaign) - the same guy Kirkegaard owes money to - sued. 

Kirkegaard is very much devoted to avoiding paying his court-ordered debt, so much so he was apparently being sheltered by German Neo-Nazis - the very worst kind of Neo-Nazis - at Das Landhaus Adlon. Lately it turns out that Kirkegaard is doing business in Wyoming.

So on behalf of Emil Kirkegaard's personal grievances, those geniuses at Aporia are falsely promoting Rational Wiki as some kind of "Antifa" organization, which makes me suspect that some of the ghouls at Aporia are working for the Trump campaign - promotion of Antifa as some powerful organized operation was one of the tactics of the Trump campaign in 2020, aided by Andy Ngo, who would likely know at least one Aporia ghoul, Bo Winegard, since both worked for Quillette around the same time. Last August, Ngo lost his own lawsuit against "Antifa."

It's absurd that Kirkegaard believes the only way anybody would form a bad opinion of him is through Rational Wiki. A couple of years ago he was in the news when he embarrassed the respectable racists at the International Society for Intelligence Research when Abdel Abdellaoui very publicly refused to attend its 2022 racist rodeo if Kirkegaard was going to speak there - as Kirkegaard had done other years. Speaking of the racist rodeo, I will be writing about ISIR's upcoming 2024 conference soon.

And Stewart Lee, much better known than Kirkegaard or the guy Kirkegaard owes money to, referred to Kirkegaard in the British press as "a weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil."

And by raging against Rational Wiki, Kirkegaard and his gang at Aporia are only helping to raise its ranking in Google results. Rational Wiki already has a response to the Kirkegaard video.

As you can see in the screen image posted above, professional racist Steve Sailer - who was once heavily promoted by Steven Pinker - jumped on the Aporia tweet to join in the whining about Rational Wiki. It's no wonder Sailer is bitter, the Rational Wiki profile of Steve Sailer includes one of the most perfect observations about Sailer I have ever seen:

Think of him as a dead cat under the floorboards of the internet: worthless, repulsive and raising an unholy stench. But, sadly, also very difficult to get rid of.

The same could be said for Kirkegaard, Winegard and all the grifters, goons and ghouls who administer, edit, write for, financially support and platform Aporia.

The Free Press - the right-wing racist Bari Weiss grift

Bari Weiss calling her media outlet "The Free Press" is about as accurate as Donald Trump calling his media outlet "Truth Social." But many people are stupid and willing believers of right-wing grifters and fascist traitors.

I recently predicted in a comment on Threads that NPR's former editor Uri Berliner will soon reappear as either an employee of Weiss; running a right-wing plutocrat-funded Substack; or as a member of a right-wing think tank. So far my comment has received 223 likes. People are finally beginning to recognize the right-wing grift that was practiced by Weiss herself.

Weiss threw a fit and quit the New York Times, claiming it was too liberal and Uri Berliner quit NPR for the same reason. Weiss quit not long after she had a chance to promote her good buddies as "The Intellectual Dark Web." 

In 2020 I discovered Quillette's former editor Toby Young (recently seen on the racist Substack Aporia) complaining that the big article Weiss was planning about him and other far-right racists - no doubt another excuse to complain about liberals and the left - was not going to be published since Weiss had quit.

I suspect that the NYTimes refused to run a second "Glory of the IDW & friends" article and that is one of the reasons Weiss quit. 

Weiss has done very well for herself since then - financially, if not reputationally - by making friends with a bunch of right-wing activist billionaires, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and most notoriously, that corrupter of Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court, Harlan Crow, Weiss's "Sugar Daddy." 

"The Free Press" has a soft spot for filthy, treasonous, would-be dictator Trump, as discussed in this New York Magazine article.

Berliner hasn't yet revealed his new career as a right-wing grifter, but I'm keeping a look out. I took a look at "The Free Press" writers list to see if he is there yet, but did not see him. But as you might have guessed, the list is full of right-wing ghouls, grifters and racists, many of whom have written for far-right racist Quillette:

• Francesca Block - right-winger who claims on Twitter that her working for right-wing propaganda outlet "The Free Press" means journalism is not dead. I assume she was hired on the basis of her work for the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, writing articles like "Meet the American millionaire Marxists funding anti-Israel rallies."

• Nellie Bowles - wife of Bari Weiss. She's a big fan of stochastic terrorism-promoting psychopathic LibsofTikTok. 

• Katherine Boyle is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is a leader of techno-fascism. So I should add Marc Andreessen to the list of Bari Weiss's right-wing billionaire pals.

• Margi Conklin - hyper-natalist Nazi-sympathizer Elon Musk better not find out about Conklin's refusal to have children. Conklin is managing editor of "The Free Press" and doesn't appear to have written anything for it yet. Unfortunately for Margi, her husband Christopher Yates has nice things to say about NPR - the current target of the Uri Berliner-lead attempt to defund public radio. Margi's bosses better not find out!

• Matti Friedman - appears to write exclusively about Israel, and was accused by the Associated Press of lying when Friedman claimed the AP was biased against Israel. Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him for this round of Israel-Gaza hostilities. Attacking critics of Israel is Bari Weiss's oldest and possibly favorite public cause.

• Martin Gurri - right-wing ghoul, works for the Koch-funded and -controlled think tank the Mercatus Center, author at the disgraceful, sued-for-libel City Journal and denier of systemic racism (of course.)

• Rob Henderson - right-wing racist ghoul who loves Peter Thiel oh so much, has written for Quillette. Pals around with neo-Nazi Richard Hanania.

• Coleman Hughes - a reliable source of attacks on all Black-related issues such as reparations and the 1619 Project and is a defender of race pseudoscience in Quillette. 

• Eli Lake - claims to be anti-Trump but often defends Trump and others on the far right. Promotes Quillette on Twitter.

• Walter Kirn - business partner of disgraced journalist  and infamous misogynist Matt Taibbi.

• Douglas Murray - British white supremacist, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. I've mentioned him quite a few times on this blog. Current Affairs writes: "...as earlier critics of his work have noted, he packages white supremacist and xenophobic ideas in a way that makes them more palatable to the mainstream." Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him. Murray has written for Quillette, of course.

• Joe Nocera - token liberal, but maybe he's becoming right-wing now for that easy post-retirement grifter income.

• Vinay Prasad - anti-vax crackpot - "In October 2021, Prasad prompted social media controversy when he published a blog post comparing the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response to the beginnings of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich."

• Olivia Reingold - the Trump-loving Republican Security Council are big fans. Reingold can be seen on Twitter promoting the "Twitter files" lies and defending hiring far-right racist piece of shit political hack Ben Shapiro a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Reingold claimed hiring Shapiro would "legitimize" Politico. To understand what a far-right ghoul Reingold is, it helps to learn more about Shapiro at the always excellent Some More News. 

• Peter Savodnik has written for racist Quillette, taking up the standard right-wing racist political line that systemic racism must not really exist because "we certainly can’t experience systemic racism, not in the way that “experience” is understood by philosophers or, for that matter, judges." I have no doubt that Savodnik is, like Quillette and its founding editor Claire Lehmann, an "hereditarian."

• Abigail Shrier - right-wing ultra-ghoulish trans-phobic political operative. So perfect for the Bari Weiss grift. Quillette author, naturally.

• Rupa Subramanya - right-wing Canadian idiot, big fan of Julian Assange and Elon Musk, "slave to (her) cat." Hates Justin Trudeau, of course.

• Suzy Weiss - sister of Bari Weiss, so unsurprisingly a right-wing grifter, enjoying that sweet nepotism.

• Oliver Wiseman - defender of that weasel Steven Pinker for the far-right Libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education. That says it all.

• Leighton Woodhouse - right-wing ally of far-right nuclear power shill and climate change denier Michael Shellenberger

• Emily Yoffe - odious right-wing grifter who has written for the equally odious "Persuasion" and  prefers to blame drunken women for rape.

So there you have it - all the far-right favorites: racism, neo-Nazism, Trumpism, transphobia, anti-vax crackpottery, misogyny, climate change-denialism, stochastic terrorism and worship of far-right activist billionaire sugar daddies. 

What a toxic brew.

Can Adam Rutherford and Kathryn Paige Harden have it both ways?

Bluesky screen cap of interest because it demonstrates that
(a) Rutherford was recently hanging out with Harden, (b)
Harden blocked my Bluesky account and (c) and the article
that Rutherford links to that discusses evolutionary psychology.

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

My nine-part series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" was prompted by a paper Rutherford published with nine co-authors, called Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford also promoted a cartoon based on the paper, which made its genetic determinism obvious.

Rutherford added a postscript to the Substack (ugh) post that displays the cartoon:

Post script: My involvement, apart from simply because this stuff is important, is also because it relates to my core interests, which include evolution, genetics, the history and unwelcome return of scientific racism and eugenics. 

Genomic data are often susceptible to misinterpretation, mis­understanding and misrepresentation. Galton was the first hereditarian, and his disciples today are a vocal crop of terminally online commentators, science cosplayers and activists who seek to amplify the role of genes over that of the social environment for many personality traits. Abdel and I have had many run-ins with them, and just this week, some are detailed in an article here.

 

Now Rutherford is not a fan of mine, as I documented in the first part of my nine-part series, so I'm pleased that he links to an article that includes a reference to this blog - this page to be exact. 

Rutherford continues:

As with their Führer idol, their focus tends to be in relation to race and intelli­gence, Galton’s lifelong obsessions. Some of them exist on and draw their salaries from Substacks which I won’t link to, but I will highlight their recently exposed secret plans, in stunning undercover work by Harry Shukman et al. and Hope Not Hate. (I’m in conversation with Harry at the Hay Festival, 28th May).

I’ve secretly witnessed their group meetings, which would be comical if they weren’t so ideologically driven. They often lean heavily on misunderstood, weak or even fraudulent data (such as the global IQ datasets, curated by the now dead doyen of scientific racists Richard Lynn). One of the things the Hope Not Hate investigation revealed were their political motivations: they are not truth seekers but aggrieved ideologues. In the new paper, we are striving to advance knowledge because that is what scientists do. As we say in the final paragraphs, we are not calling ‘…for genetic intervention, but rather a call for a deeper understanding and awareness that our social structures are part of an evolving environment that, over time, shapes both social and genetic outcomes.’

Rutherford criticizes dead Richard Lynn, but doesn't mention that a big focus of Harry Shukman's undercover work was documenting the racist network maintained by yet-living neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, who inherited Pioneer Fund money from Lynn.

Perhaps Rutherford does not mention Kirkegaard by name because there is a connection between Kirkegaard and Rutherford by way of racist Razib Khan, who has written for Kirkegaard's Aporia.  

Both Rutherford and his ally, Kathryn Page Harden, have thanked Khan in their books: "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" and "The Genetic Lottery" respectively. Khan testified that Harden was a friend of his. Harden promoted work by Emily Willoughby, a long-time ally of Kirkegaard. She received networking assistance from the International Society for Intelligence Research, an organization founded to promote and defend the race pseudoscience beliefs of white nationalists Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

Rutherford mentions Abdel Abdellaoui in his postscript. Abdellaoui is one of the Rutherford paper co-authors and he is also a friend of Razib Khan - Abdellaoui and Khan teamed up on X to defame me, lie about me and launch personal attacks against me while I was writing the series about Rutherford's paper. Racists and right-wing political operatives jumped in to support Abdellaoui and Khan, including Cremieux (Jordan Lasker) and Anatoly Karlin.

And although Rutherford criticizes Richard Lynn, another one of the co-authors of his paper, Michael Muthukrishna, cited Lynn three times in a recent paper, and several other racists were cited.

Now, do I expect Adam Rutherford to vet all his co-authors for racist connections? Well, to be fair, it would be a huge undertaking because the field of behavioral genetics is full of racists, and it might be hard to exclude anybody who has worked with racists, given interviews to racists, or signed petitions written by racists in defense of racists and still have a career in behavioral genetics. 

This refusal to discuss the existence of the racist spiderweb onto which Rutherford and Harden have plopped themselves is at best fecklessness, and at worst a deliberate effort to launder racist beliefs held by some promoters of behavioral genetics.

The article that Rutherford links to in the image at the top of this page is How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science by Sarah Jones. It's an interesting article for many reasons, including its criticism of the awful book, The War on Science, written by right-wing cranks, racists (Amy Wax!) and friends of Jeffrey Epstein, which I've written about here, several times, including quoting from the Jones article.

But what especially caught my eye in the article this time was its discussion of evolutionary psychology:

Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore "real" in this world; that's how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. "would be better off with fewer Asians" while calling herself a "race realist." The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There's something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry's one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, "disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital S Science, and maybe even rationality itself"

Now is my chance, yet again, to share this superb discussion of the scientific problems with evolutionary psychology in a video made by biologist P. Z. Myers. There is also a link at the top of this blog.

Meanwhile, Rutherford's article for the New Humanist, "A twisted breed" says:

In the early 2000s, Epstein did succeed in meeting Robert Trivers, who had a profound and positive influence as a young scientist on the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology. Trivers’ early work included exploration of a gene-centric view of human behaviours such as altruism, parental investment and adultery. He befriended Epstein and publicly supported him long after the 2008 conviction.

Trivers, who died while I was writing this article, was the type of scientist who did truly brilliant work for a time, but was often described in euphemistic terms like “eccentric”, in part due to later choices that were at best odd. He said of a research trip, “I took one look at the women [in Jamaica] and thought, if I have to study lizards to pay for frequent trips to this island, I’ll do it...”

It's interesting to note what Rutherford leaves out. Trivers didn't only decide to move to Jamaica for the women, he defended Epstein's crimes directly using a form of sociobiology logic:

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers is also mentioned in the new tranche of emails. In 2015, he told Reuters that Mr. Epstein had given him about $40,000 for his research. And he defended Mr. Epstein, saying girls mature sooner than they used to. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.

Rutherford also misrepresents Pinker's connection to Epstein.

Rutherford continues:

Evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories – attempts to explain complex human behaviours, especially about sex and power, with simplistic biological explanations. Epstein’s interest in eugenics, and his desire to propagate his own DNA, reflects another area in which proponents argue that nature trumps nurture. I am generally cautious about the use of this once popular, now toxic term in relation to contemporary practices. But the deliberate manipulation of human reproduction to spread the genes of people deemed superior is pretty much the definition.

Yes, evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories - but this did not stop Rutherford and co-authors from using an evolutionary psychology just so story to support their behavioral genetics argument. As I noted in my nine-part series:

On page 7 of the Rutherford paper there is a reference to an evolutionary psychologist - you might say the king of evolutionary psychology - David Buss and two references to a racist, Gregory Clark:

A collection of about 15,000 English men’s wills from the sixteenth to the twentieth century showed a positive relationship between men’s income and net fertility in England, with the wealthiest individuals leaving nearly twice as many offspring as the poorest individuals (97, 98.) This was probably influenced by higher child mortality rates in lower-SES groups (98,99) and greater mating opportunities for higher-SES male individuals, as women tend to prefer men with more resources across cultures with different mating systems, different levels of gender equality and different religions (100.)

Reference 100 is to David Buss. It's important to know that the claim that "women tend to prefer men with more resources" comes from the evolutionary psychology belief that women are adapted by evolution to be more sexually aroused by men with 'more resources.'

Harden, who is also cited in the paper, has an online CV from 2021 that reveals that she's done "Advising and Student-related Service" for three students in "Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology," David Buss is Area Head of Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology.

It appears to me that Rutherford and Harden want to have it both ways: ally with racists and promote  evolutionary psychology when it is convenient, then denounce racism and evolutionary psychology when it is not. This is a failure of intellectual integrity that I, and several critics, have also noticed in Steven Pinker.

It was never going to work, for a behavioral geneticist to distance themselves from evolutionary psychology, because behavioral genetics is nothing more than an attempt to use genetics studies to support the genetic determinism at the heart of all forms of sociobiology. Which is why leading evolutionary psychology promoter David Buss is such a fan of behavioral genetics.

And the goal of all sociobiology, from Galton to the present, is to claim that the current socio-economic order exists because those at the top have the best genes. 

It's not surprising that the British are so comfortable with this concept, so much so that the British government funds the work of leading hereditarian Robert Plomin (cited in the Rutherford paper.) The United Kingdom still maintains an hereditary monarchy, which a majority of its citizens still support.

They even knighted Robert Plomin, so how's that for the monarchy stamp of approval?

But anybody can see how extremely average, at best are the members of the royal family. They are living arguments against the behavioral genetics claim that the most intelligent and industrious rise to the top through their superior genes.

But Rutherford, Harden, Pinker and Abdellaoui are so certain that SES - socio-economic status - is determined by genes that they cannot tolerate any questions about their belief, which is why they either insult or block critics of behavioral genetics.

Recently two prominent critics of behavioral genetics, Steve Pitttelli and Jay Joseph, joined me on Bluesky to point out that I'm not the only one that Kathryn Paige Harden, illegal drug user, has blocked.

I mentioned Steve Pittelli, MD in part nine of my series. He's made some excellent points on his Substack called Unwashed Genes, about the problems with behavioral genetics, including his excellent review of Harden's current book, Original Sin. He makes an argument that I don't think Harden nor Rutherford have ever addressed:

As noted, she devotes little time to making a scientific case for a genetic underpinning for vice, only briefly indirectly referencing a few studies. At one point she summarizes the results of a study as follows:

“We can say whether, based on your DNA, you are in a high-risk group, whose probability of being arrested for a crime is twice as high as that of people in the low-risk group.”

I found myself smiling at this for a whole number of reasons related to what a paltry finding it is, but feel the need to address it for those who are perhaps not as familiar with the subject. For starters, Harden herself admits in the book that she had LSD illegally sent to her and then illegally used it and even acknowledges that others might be at greater risk of arrest than her for doing something like this. This speaks to what is called population stratification, wherein someone who comes from a (white), more privileged background and geographic location, would no doubt be far less likely to be arrested for the same actions as someone non-white in a poorer neighborhood. Such population stratification is a (perhaps fatal) weakness of behavioral genetics, wherein, instead of saying that Black people and poor people are more likely to be arrested for ostensibly the same crime, one could pedantically say that people with certain genes are more likely to be arrested in the same way that we can say that people with certain genetics are more likely to eat with chopsticks. In that case, the genes in question are little more than the kinds of genetic variation that is flagged by 23 and Me to identify Asian heritage. To claim that “vice” has a genetic component, one would need to get past these benign genetic markers or we could just make all sorts of claims, like people with Italian genes are more likely to enjoy spaghetti, or people in the Southern United States are more likely to eat grits, since in both cases, due to genetic drift and other issues, one could correlate these preferences to specific genetic markers that likely have nothing to do with taste buds. The fact of the matter is that there is no reason other than ideology to believe that the genetic markers used to identify “vice” or the likelihood of being arrested have any actual function. You can’t just call anything you can conjure from a questionnaire a phenotype by identifying genetic correlations.

But the behavioral genetics gang feel they don't need to address arguments - they just mute and block, mute and block, assuming their critics will remain unknown and unheard. After all, sociobiology is supported not only by the British government but by obscenely wealthy right-wing racist plutocrats, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, a funder of Substack.

Really, it's not surprising when someone of wealth and status supports the behavioral genetics view that people with wealth and status are genetically superior, just as wealthy, high-status Christians believed their wealth and status were evidence of God's favor, a connection noted by John Basile in his review of Original Sin.

You would think that Pittelli's being a doctor would count for something. After all, you need a considerable educational attainment (EA) to be a doctor, and behavioral genetics promoters equate EA with IQ. But they have no respect for Pittelli, nor for Jay Joseph, a clinical psychologist who has written books on genetics.

I referenced Joseph in my series on Rutherford's paper. Joseph has important things to say about twin studies, and can be seen on his Substack critiquing a study by Cremieux - in case you thought Cremieux was only a right-wing racist political operative who tried to hurt the mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani. Cremieux has co-authored many papers with Emil Kirkegaard, and is on friendly terms, as I discussed above, with Abdel Abdellaoui and Razib Khan.

Well, if Steve Pittelli and Jay Joseph can't get any respect from Rutherford and Harden, what hope do I have? I didn't even finish college, and it was art college at that. My SES is unimpressive and my EA is worse - so from the point of view of a behavioral geneticist, I am no better than the drug-addicted prostitute that Harden contrasts herself with in Original Sin; I am like the morons with bad genes who stayed in their old coal towns, as discussed in Rutherford's paper, and described by Gregory Cochran (co-author of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence):

Abdel Abdellaoui and colleagues recent put out a paper on genetics and social stratification in Great Britain. Among other things, they found that polygenic scores of educational attainment were lower in seriously economically depressed areas, such as coal mining towns – and that this depression has increased with time. The smarter people are going where the better paying jobs are.

But at least Rutherford has posted not one, but two articles that have links to this website, which can only help my project of critiquing race pseudoscience and those who aid and abet race pseudoscience. And that is what Rutherford and Harden are doing, so long as they don't acknowledge the contemporary network of race pseudoscience promoters so fully embedded in the world of behavioral genetics, as I have demonstrated in my series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?"

Most recently Rutherford reposted an article on Bluesky by Catherine Townsend, Epstein's Gifted Scientists. I've known Townsend - not personally but online - for quite a few years thanks to us both opposing race pseudoscience.

I was clued into this article when a Pinkerite post from 2019 suddenly started trending. Townsend writes:

(Pinker) has also boosted the profiles of ideologues who peddle in scientific racism and eugenics. For example, he has promoted the work of far-right blogger Steve Sailer, who mainly writes about supposed racial differences in intelligence. He re-published a Sailer essay titled ‘Cousin Marriage Conundrum’, originally published in The American Conservative, in an edited 2004 volume of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. The article by Sailer argued that Arab societies are too inbred for the type of democratic reform that was a stated goal of Western politicians in the 2003 ‘regime change’ war on Iraq.

It's too bad she didn't also link to my series on Pinker's editorship of The Best Science and Nature Writing, where I go into detail about why the Sailer article is so bad. But I'm glad she did link to my post, The Racist Logic of Steve Sailer, and I'm grateful to Adam Rutherford for doing his part to help promote this blog, maintained by the lowly art school drop-out that I am.