Andrew Sullivan and Race Science

One of the reasons this blog is called Pinkerite is because Bari Weiss portrayed Steven Pinker as the most respectable of those associated with the Intellectual Dark Web. But now I'm wondering if that honor might have to go to Andrew Sullivan. Will I have to change this blog's name to Sullivanite?

I had no idea how enthusiastic Sullivan is about race science until this year, as indicated in this blog post. 

Although I was aware of Sullivan's love of evolutionary psychology via a tweet by Slate author Tom Scocca.

But Sullivan has been promoting race science for a long time and might be even more responsible for mainstreaming it than Steven Pinker.

Back in 2011 in a Gawker article A Reader's Guide to Andrew Sullivan's Defense of Race Science:

A million years ago, when the internet was just a gleam in Tina Brown's eye, Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic, which was a Serious Magazine that had no time for your Liberal P.C. Dogma, such as "Race Is an Arbitrary and Unscientific Concept" or "Intelligence Is a Difficult Thing to Define, Let Alone Measure." As such, Sullivan gave a cover story to The Bell Curve, a horrendous piece of shoddy sociology about how blacks are not as smart as whites, and neither are as smart as The Chinaman; besides the general philosophical problems with writing a book-length study of the intersection between two variable, difficult-to-define, and scientifically problematic concepts, it was methodologically unsound and its data cherry-picked from a variety of unsavory sources.

This 2011 article is referring to a 1994 article in the New Republic which even predates Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate and his promotion of the career of racist Steve Sailer in 2004.

Steve Sailer expressed his admiration for Andrew Sullivan in 2011.

The New Republic expressed its regrets about Sullivan and The Bell Curve in 2015 in an article called The New Republic's Legacy on Race : 

The magazine’s myopia on racial issues was never more apparent than in Peretz’s and editor Andrew Sullivan’s decision in 1994 to excerpt The Bell Curve, a foray into scientific racism in which the authors, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, asserted that differences in IQ among blacks and whites were largely genetic and almost impossible to significantly change. The book had not been peer-reviewed, nor were galleys sent to the relevant scientific journals. As The Wall Street Journal reported, The Bell Curve was “swept forward by a strategy that provided book galleys to likely supporters while withholding them from likely critics.”

Predictably Sullivan has a problem with the 1619 project, since race science promoters hate anything to do with honest history of African Americans.

UPDATE: No surprise that Jerry Coyne, himself a promoter of race science, is a fan of Andrew Sullivan.

Jon Stewart vs. Andrew Sullivan and Laura Ingraham

I expressed admiration last week for a recent Jon Stewart piece on racism. Then I found out a little later about his confrontation with Andrew "Bell Curve" Sullivan, possibly on the same episode:

This is a beautiful piece of work. My only quibble is that Stewart let Sullivan off without getting him to admit what he really believes. 

Stewart did push back on Sullivan's standard right-wing talking point, that the reason Black people are worse-off economically, as a group, is because of "black culture." 

But although Sullivan has been stepping back a little from his long-time support for Charles Murray and The Bell Curve, I think it's very likely Sullivan still thinks the ultimate problem with "black culture" is inferior black genetics. 

Sullivan must have been as shocked as Steven Pinker was, when someone from the Guardian asked Pinker about his friendly relationship with racist extremist Steve Sailer. It would be great if Stewart could get Pinker on his show, but if Pinker saw the firm, if relatively gentle way Stewart handled Sullivan, Pinker might decide against it. Pinker is even more accustomed to deference from the media than Andrew Sullivan.

But since Sullivan is not normally confronted on his race beliefs, on video yet, he was extremely aggrieved by this conversation, and whined about it like a whiny biznatch.

According to The Wrap:

Jon Stewart is firing back at conservative political commentator Andrew Sullivan’s claims that he was “ambushed” by the comedian on Apple TV+’s “The Problem with Jon Stewart” last week.

In a lengthy Substack post on Friday, Sullivan accused Stewart and the other guests on the show of “unprofessionally” making him appear racist during their conversation, which he chalked up to them pushing “woke” narratives.

However, Stewart wasn’t having it. He swiftly issued a response on Twitter, writing: “Nonsense ⁦@sullydish⁩. Our booker handled this last minute ask impeccably. Mr Sullivan was told, texted and emailed a detailed account of who was on the program, the content and intent of the discussion.”

Bari Weiss, or to be more exact, her girlfriend Nellie Bowles, defended Sullivan.

The National Review didn't like Stewart's treatment of Sullivan one bit.

And now Laura Ingraham has decided to go to bat for Sullivan.

Stewart had a few words for her too, which gave me a chance to provide a link to the video. At this rate even the usually clueless mainstream media will eventually become fully aware of Sullivan's support for race pseudoscience.

But will Sullivan's other pals, like members of the IDW or his fellow members of the board of advisors of FAIR (which includes former Fox News star Megyn Kelly) come to Sullivan's defense? 

Stay tuned!

Andrew Sullivan cries defamation because someone said he supports race science, then doubles-down on race science

When we last saw Andrew Sullivan here on Pinkerite, he was praising the Bari Weiss-promoted Brearley dad letter that said there has been no systemic racism since the 1960s. 

Well the Brearley dad controversy has yielded dividends. On one of the threads about the dad letter, Andrew Sullivan cried defamation because someone pointed out that he supports race science, a pseudo-science that claims that Black underachievement proves the Black "race" is evolutionarily less intelligent than other "races."

Sullivan then followed up by doubling-down on race science.

I was not surprised to see him retweeting Bo Winegard, professional racist.

Tom Scocca noted the absurdity.

Jamelle Bouie weighs in.

Now we may all have fun laughing at the logic fail of Andrew Sullivan but it's important to note that  Andrew Sullivan is now an Advisor for an organization, FAIR, which believes in the biological reality of race so strongly that it coined a term "Neo-racism" which includes only those who believe race is a social construct in this new definition of racism. And this organization is devoted to litigation.

I wonder if Bari Weiss, also a FAIR Advisor, tweeted the Brearley letter for the consideration of the FAIR legal experts as a possible legal action. 

Yes people like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan are stupid and laughable, but it's likely they are backed by right-wing plutocrat money, like their pal Conor Friedersdorf.

Sure it's fun to laugh at dummies like Weiss and Sullivan, but it's quite possible for dummies, backed by a lot of money, to do a lot of harm on behalf of right-wing extremists.

Steven Pinker, Andrew Sullivan and the mainstream media gentlemen's agreement

Steven Pinker is even more ubiquitous in 2020 than he was last year, because this year he has a mission to portray himself as a free speech martyr.

And in all the interviews he has given since the Linguist Society open letter, the interviewers have abided by the long-standing gentlemen's agreement in the media to refrain from asking Steve Pinker about his support for Steve Sailer and race science.

The only time I've seen any prominent media person mention Pinker's support for Sailer was when Malcolm Gladwell caught Pinker in the act, and mentioned it in a letter to the NYTimes and on his personal blog:

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. 

The only media outlet that picked up on this story was Business Insider - Gladwell: Steven Pinker got his data from a racist. And this was 2009. Not a peep since then even though Pinker was declared by the NYTimes to be a "celebrity intellectual."

If you Google Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer the top hits are from Steve Sailer and me.

And even though the major impetus to Pinker's free speech martyr media tour is a petition against Pinker which mentions Pinker's race science connection, the boys of the media still cannot find a single reason to ask Pinker about his support for the career of professional racist Steve Sailer nor his ongoing support for various race science crackpot theories like the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.

Sailer himself is not shy about mentioning the connection.

Pinker is not asked about race science nor Sailer by these media outlets:

• Unherd, July 8, 2020
• The Sunday Times, July 9, 2020
• The New Statesman July 22, 2020
• Freakonomics Steven Levitt, August 21, 2020
• Spear's August 24, 2020
• Reason Magazine, September 6, 2020

But this kid-gloves treatment is only for Pinker. The media is not afraid to ask Andrew Sullivan about his support for race science.

In a New York Times interview with Sullivan from August 30, 2020:

I tried out my most charitable interpretation of his view on race and I.Q. (though I question the underpinnings of the whole intellectual project): that he is most frustrated by the notion that you can’t talk about the influence of biology and genetics on humanity. But that he’s not actually saying he thinks Black people as a group are less intelligent. He’d be equally open to the view, I suggested, that data exploring genetics and its connection to intelligence would find that Black people are on average smarter than other groups. 

“It could be, although the evidence is not trending in that direction as far as I pay attention to it. But I don’t much,” he said. (He later told me he’s “open-minded” on the issue and thinks it’s “premature” to weigh the data.)
“I barely write about this,” he went on. “It’s not something I’m obsessed with.” 

But he also can’t quite stop himself, even as I sat there wishing he would. “Let’s say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I’m just saying — there’s something there, I think. And I’m not sure what it is, but I’m just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over.” 

I’ve been reading Mr. Sullivan too long to write him off. I’ve been influenced deeply by him on marriage, torture and other big questions; and I’m aware of how deeply he shaped how we all write for the web. When I nodded along with much of Jamelle Bouie’s criticism of Mr. Sullivan in 2017, I also recognized in Mr. Bouie’s piece the style of fisking that Mr. Sullivan helped popularize almost two decades ago.
I wish Mr. Sullivan would accept that the project of trying to link the biological fiction of race with the science of genetics ought, in fact, to be over. 

When I said some of this to Mr. Sullivan, he noted that he had been born and raised in England, and he hasn’t always had perfect footing on American questions of race — though he has seemingly absorbed and mastered so much about American politics. 

But his exit out of big media is a very American story. His career, with all its sweep and innovation, can’t ever quite escape that 1994 magazine cover.

Sullivan's career can't ever quite escape one magazine cover, meanwhile Steven Pinker's career is untouched by his support, for about a decade, of the career of a toxic professional racist, Steve Sailer; and few in the media are interested in Pinker's continuing support for crackpot race theories.

Sullivan alludes to the "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" (NHAI) hypothesis when he says:

“Let’s say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I’m just saying — there’s something there, I think. And I’m not sure what it is, but I’m just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over.” 

Instead of being criticized in establishment media, like Andrew Sullivan, Pinker and friends used a letter from a bunch of linguists complaining about Pinker's race issues to portray Pinker as Free Speech Martyr, and his beliefs - the same that Sullivan holds about race - are systematically ignored.

The gentlemen's agreement in action.

Andrew Sullivan, race science monger

Rightwing pundit Andrew Sullivan has long been known as a fan of evolutionary psychology, pointed out so perfectly by Slate's Tom Scocca in this tweet.

To understand Scocca's point you have to know that proponents of evolutionary psychology are strict adaptationists - they believe almost all current human behavior is based on sexual selection, the sexual choices made by pre-historic people. This is why the existence of homosexuality is such a problem for evolutionary psychology.

More on the drawn and quartered conception of evolution that evo-psychos subscribe to and why it's wrong from P. Z. Myers. 

June 19 was Juneteenth and Sullivan decided to observe it by misrepresenting a piece in the NYTimes by Jamelle Bouie about the participation of the enslaved in fighting for freedom, including in the Civil War.





Now we see Sullivan joining in with the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette gang to mourn the loss of statues to white supremacists and slavers. It seems there are few things that get IDW types madder than the loss of their beloved public statuary to scumbags who never should have been honored in the first place. 

And he isn't content to retweet a Christina Hoff Sommers - he has to go even lower than that - writer and journalist Donna Minkowitz who wrote an excellent piece about Quillette for The Nation caught Sullivan retweeting race science monger "HBD Chick" - HBD stands for human biodiversity, a term invented by professional racist Steve Sailer, and a code word for the race science belief in black genetic inferiority. 

Can Andrew Sullivan sink any lower?

A lawyer representing Bill Watterson really has to
put a stop to HBD Chick associating her grotesque racism
with his character Hobbes.

Meanwhile, good news about Ron Unz's pal Stephen Hsu:

Michigan State University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. announced Friday that Stephen Hsu is resigning as Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, returning to a tenured faculty position, effective July 1.

John Jackson of Fardels Bear has more.

Adam Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams

I've been watching a lot of Adam Rutherford videos lately, focusing on those related to his most recently published book, "How to Argue with a Racist" and the other day I came across a video conversation between Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams recorded August 18, 2020.

The transcript is available here.

I was surprised by the video for several reasons, starting with the very low number of views - only 233 when I watched it. It was sponsored by a Florida bookshop, Books and Books as a promotion for the shop and for Rutherford's book.

I was especially surprised that Williams was so agreeable to Rutherford's message, which is that race is a social but not a biological phenomenon.

One of Williams' best pals is Bari Weiss, who promotes the race science-friendly "Intellectual Dark Web," and the claim that systemic racism has not existed since the 1960s. 

One of Weiss' best friends is Andrew Sullivan, who is, along with Steven Pinker, the foremost media normalizer of race science, and race science says that race is a biological phenomenon.

Recently Thomas Chatterton Williams has become a member of the heavily right-leaning Board of Advisors of FAIR, which includes Pinker, Sullivan and Michael Shermer, another promoter of race science. 

FAIR is so thoroughly controlled by the pro-race science position that there is, on the FAIR web site, a new FAIR-invented word for racism that deliberately excludes those who believe race is a biological phenomenon: "Neo-racism."

The FAIR Board of Advisors: race pseudo-science promoters,
Quillette authors and Koch beneficiaries

Then there are nine board members who are Quillette authors, in addition to Pinker. While those authors may not have come out in direct support of race science (although I consider Coleman Hughes a race science apologist), Quillette's pro-race science position does not concern them enough that they refuse to write for it.

Many beneficiaries of Charles Koch are FAIR board members - and that's just the ones that are obviously getting Koch money. I personally would wager that Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss have some kind of Koch dark money conduit, since at least the time when both stormed off their big establishment media gigs simultaneously.

But it's indisputable fact that the following FAIR board members take money from Koch-supported organizations: Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Kmele Foster; Samantha Harris; Coleman Hughes; Glenn Loury; John McWhorter; Ian Rowe; Christopher Rufo; Eli Steele, and Thomas Chatterton Williams himself.

Charles Murray, who is not on the FAIR board, is also a recipient of Koch money. Koch money and race pseudo-science seem to go together. 

Speaking of Sullivan and Murray, they were just promoting race pseudo-science together today.

Williams "spearheaded" the Harpers letter published in July, 2020. I noted that many of the signers had Koch organization connections. Then in December 2020 it was announced that Williams would be on the Koch payroll. 

But in August 2020, in between the Harpers letter and coming out of the wingnut welfare closet, Thomas Chatterton Williams seemed to agree with Adam Rutherford that race is not a biological phenomenon.

There was one moment in the discussion early on, at minute 11:45, when Williams mentioned the Robin DiAngelo-influenced content at the Museum of African American History, but Rutherford said he hadn't heard of it and then they moved on, before Williams got a chance to point out that the museum content, which made essentialist claims about race, came from "woke" opponents of racism.

I'm a long-time critic of Robin DiAngelo because of her race essentialism, but it is absurd for Williams to criticize her for her essentialist beliefs when he publicly aligns himself with Andrew Sullivan, who has had a much longer career than Robin DiAngelo of promoting race essentialism.

I'm not entirely convinced Rutherford was unaware of the museum controversy. He's usually on top of the latest controversies, judging by his videos and Twitter feed, and he is good at handling people, to the point where I believe if he ever stopped being a science communicator he could have a job as a diplomat. He's professional and even charming in his public appearances. This comes, I suppose, from years of being a frequent presenter of sometimes controversial subjects. His diplomacy, along with his scientific expertise, makes him one of the best possible opponents of race science. 

Before speaking to Rutherford, Williams got quite exercised about the Museum, as can be seen by these tweets.

But in conversation with Rutherford, Williams drops the hot potato at the slightest push-back and then spends the rest of the interview agreeing with everything Rutherford said.

This seeming lack of intellectual integrity makes me wonder if Williams has modeled his career on that of Steven Pinker. More in the next post. 

Andrew Sullivan, still promoting racist pseudoscience

Andrew Sullivan is well-known for promoting the racist nonsense of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.

More recently, when confronted by a New York Times reporter, Sullivan stepped back just a tiny bit from race pseudoscience.

I tried out my most charitable interpretation of his view on race and I.Q. (though I question the underpinnings of the whole intellectual project): that he is most frustrated by the notion that you can’t talk about the influence of biology and genetics on humanity. But that he’s not actually saying he thinks Black people as a group are less intelligent. He’d be equally open to the view, I suggested, that data exploring genetics and its connection to intelligence would find that Black people are on average smarter than other groups.

“It could be, although the evidence is not trending in that direction as far as I pay attention to it. But I don’t much,” he said. (He later told me he’s “open-minded” on the issue and thinks it’s “premature” to weigh the data.)

“I barely write about this,” he went on. “It’s not something I’m obsessed with.”

But he also can’t quite stop himself, even as I sat there wishing he would. “Let’s say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I’m just saying — there’s something there, I think. And I’m not sure what it is, but I’m just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over.”

It was obvious that Sullivan was still committed to race essentialism and pseudoscience by his mentioning Jews and the Nobel Prize - he's referencing the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis, created by racists, with the goal, I believe, of inventing a "scientific" justification for a long-standing racist belief about Jews. 

In the past week, Sullivan not only recommitted himself to race pseudoscience, he did it via an even less-reputable individual, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, best known as being described by comedian Stewart Lee as "weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil."

Emil Kirkegaard has such a bad reputation that even Abdel Abdellaoui refused to participate in a conference unless Emil O. W. Kirkegaard was disinvited from the Racist Roundup.

I think it's likely that Abdellaoui is just as committed to sociobiological (hereditarian) explanations of human hierarchies, given that he is an ally of anti-Black racist Razib Khan, as Kirkegaard. I think the issue is about status - Kirkegaard doesn't have the academic credentials that most people associated with the International Society for Intelligence Research, aka "the Racist Roundup" have.

UPDATE - SULLIVAN RETRACTED

However, I doubt this indicates that Sullivan is no longer a believer in race pseudoscience.

Then Kirkegaard jumped on the thread to defend white supremacy.

Is Matt Yglesias a more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinker or just a great big racist?

Since we were talking about the racist extremist Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) recently, I couldn't help noticing that "centrist" political pundit Matthew Yglesias was, right in the middle of the NYTimes controversy involving Crémieux, promoting a tweet by Crémieux over at the Bad Place.

I had been aware of Yglesias' alliance with racists before. I wrote about his support for Razib Khan, and his defense of Richard Hanania.

While promoting and defending racist ghouls, Yglesias claims to be concerned about racism and bigotry.

On his Substack (of course) Yglesias ponders:

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions. And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct. It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism.

But in this very same Substack post he includes extremist Curtis Yarvin, calling him "an influential and well-regarded voice on the MAGA right" while failing to mention his racism.

Yglesias appears to be doing all he can to normalize racists while claiming to be opposed to racism.

This has been Steven Pinker's strategy for a quarter of a century. Culminating most recently in aligning himself with and helping to mainstream the neo-Nazi organization run by Emil Kirkegaard.

Behavioral genetics promoter Eric Turkheimer responded to Yglesias:

Coming back to Yglesias’ concern with the manners of discussing group differences, I have a rule: All discussions of black-white differences in athletics are really about cognitive ability. If we accept that it is obvious that the predominance of Black people in the NBA is somehow the result of genetic differences, then it opens the door to having a similar discussion about why Black people have historically scored lower on IQ tests. This, I think, it the ultimate reason why Yglesias is uncomfortable with the topic, and I agree that he should be.

But genetic differences in cognitive ability are even more implausible than genetic differences in spelling or ping pong, for an obvious reason: there are massive environmental effects that compete with a genetic hypothesis. It isn’t especially easy to specify exactly how sports programs in Jamaica might go about producing top sprinters, but only bad-faith racists can deny the history of racism in the United States and around the world, beginning with slavery 500 years ago and proceeding through Jim Crow, segregation, and all of the reverberating cross-generational effects in the modern world. It is not possible to “control for” such massive environmental effects, and without doing so speculation about genetic causes is pointless.

I don’t mean to be too tough on Yglesias here. He is just trying to be reasonable about a very complex subject, and he doesn’t mention cognitive ability, although I think it is implicit in his concerns. There are many more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers, from Yglesias to Andrew Sullivan to Sam Harris to Jon Haidt, who try to establish their heterodox, pro-science, academic freedom bona fides by giving a fair shake to genetic explanations of race differences in behavior.

The last paragraph is the most telling -  "I don't mean to be too tough on Yglesias here..."

The "more or less well intended" Andrew Sullivan, Sam Harris and Jon Haidt have all demonstrated their devotion to race pseudoscience and to what I call the "American hereditarian assumption" which goes like this:

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,[143] segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,[144] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

Andrew Sullivan is clearly a racist, promoting and defending the absolute racist Charles Murray for the past thirty years, but even Ezra Klein refuses to call Sullivan a racist.

Not long ago Sullivan was promoting neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

The bar to being called a racist is very high for hereditarians, especially establishment white male hereditarians who make a living as opinion-havers.

Sam Harris promoted the hard-core racist rag Quillette while defending Charles Murray. The Quillette article he linked to, written by (now) Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard and his equally racist brother Ben, contains an example of the American hereditarian assumption in the wild:

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.

This is evidence-free bullshit, but it impresses morons like Sam Harris.

Jonathan Haidt has flown under the radar more than Harris and Sullivan have, but he has demonstrated his race pseudoscience beliefs in talks; he's a defender of the garbage "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper written by a couple of racists although never proven or tested; and in the Jeffrey Epstein-funded Edge, in 2009 Haidt said:

Recent "sweeps" of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates. 

 

The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.) 

 

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

There are reasons to hope that we'll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism.

Like all respectable promoters of race pseudoscience Haidt would never use the N word, so most people will miss what he's getting at - although maybe his mention of "Bell Curve" will be a clue to some. 

But I understand what he's saying after all these years of reading the claims of race pseudoscience promoters: in 2009 Haidt believed that genetics studies would prove that there are fundamental genetic racial differences and that racists had been right all along - that Black people as a group have fewer "virtues" than other groups.

But instead of evidence for Haidt's version of the American hereditarian assumption, what we got from genetics studies was evidence of the utter failure of the claims of genetic behavioralists, as recently discussed by Jay Joseph on his (unfortunately Subtack) blog called The Gene Illusion:

Missing heritability is a term that human genetic researchers invented around 15 years ago to acknowledge unexpected causal gene discovery failure, and to describe the large discrepancy between heritability estimates derived from twin studies versus those derived from DNA-based (molecular genetic) methods such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Importantly, as behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer emphasized in his recent book (see my review here), GWASes of psychiatric conditions and behavioral characteristics such as educational attainment (EA, often seen as an IQ “proxy measure”) identify (potentially spurious) gene-behavior “associations” (correlations), not causes.

Later in the post, Joseph writes: 

Most likely, future commentators will tell a similar story about behavioral polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression. Alexander’s post merely continues (1) the 100-year fallacy of assuming that behavioral twin (and adoption) studies are based on sound assumptions and should be interpreted genetically; (2) the 55-year fallacy of assuming that twin studies are sound, so let’s spend billions of dollars trying to find the genes; and (3) the 15-year fallacy of believing that twin studies are sound while DNA-based methods failed, so “heritability must be missing.” It’s time to abandon behavioral and psychiatric research based on twin studies after a disastrous and harmful 100-year run. 

The "Alexander" mentioned in the paragraph above is Scott Alexander, real name Scott Siskind, yet another self-impressed dumbass who promotes race pseudoscience. His Slate Star Codex is a comfortable place for Steve Sailer to hang out and promote his racist extremism. 

And speaking of Steve Sailer:

Turkheimer may have done some good work, and may be publicly anti-racist, but he's a goddam fool to quickly absolve these pernicious ghouls of their racism.

As a result of Turkheimer's hands-off attitude towards racists, you can see Sailer is all over the comments section of the Turkheimer post about Yglesias. Turkheimer makes no response to Sailer, he just allows Sailer to promote his bullshit.

Also in the comments: "Slowly Reading" provides links to neo-Nazi Aporia and yes, of course to a tweet by Crémieux.

This acceptance, by people who should know better, of race pseudoscience promoters, as "more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers" is why I have to keep doing this blog.

The Koch-connected and transphobic Letter participants

According to SourceWatch:

As of February 2020, Charles Koch Institute listed the Reason Foundation as a "participating organization" on its website.

The Reason Foundation publishes Reason Magazine which recently bragged that 14% of the signers of the Harper's Letter are Reason contributors, with another six recently promoted by Reason.

There are also a whole lot of Reason contributors here, including Deirdre McCloskey, Cathy Young, Jonathan Rauch, Jonathan Haidt, Emily Yoffe, Jesse Singal, Kmele Foster, Katie Herzog, John McWhorter, Kat Rosenfield, Nadine Strossen, Laura Kipnis, Wendy Kaminer, Francis Fukuyama, and Malcolm Gladwell. (On it, too, are recent Reason interview subjects Meghan Daum, Coleman Hughes, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Steven Pinker, Bari Weiss, and Garry Kasparov.)

Professional racist Steve Sailer is very pleased with Williams and the Letter:

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a sensible young part-black man of letters, has organized an open letter in Harper’s by old-fashioned center-left liberals against cancel culture.

I think the Letter is likely a project Williams dreamed up together with someone representing Koch interests, which has been for quite some time trying to influence the media and academia through free speech grifts.

The author of the Reason piece, Matt Welch, is described talking to Andrew Sullivan about the naughty Left in The Ringer.

Last week, Kmele Foster, Matt Welch, and Michael Moynihan interviewed the conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan for their podcast, The Fifth Column. The hosts and their guest spent much of the hourlong interview discussing the bellicose state of political discourse and left-wing activists who refuse to debate their opponents and even their allies, including Sullivan. “The only right that gay people had, for the longest time, was the the First Amendment right,” Sullivan said. 

I'm surprised Sullivan wasn't asked to sign the Letter, especially since like many funded by Koch (including Letter signers Pinker and Haidt,) he's a fan of race science and appears to be tight with "HBD Chick" a pal of Steve Sailer.

It's funny to see Welch trying to deflect from Koch race science support in the article:

No, I don't want to hang out professionally or personally with Nazis and/or race/IQ obsessives...

You do, Matt Welch. You already do.

Welch tries to use the "but Lefties signed the Letter" tactic:

The vast majority of public-facing writers and intellectuals I see scoffing at "cancel culture" and dismissing as a single tiresome monolith a grouping that includes Katha Pollitt, Martin Amis, Shadi Hamid, Margaret Atwood, Greil Marcus, George Packer, Michelle Goldberg, Randi Weingarten, and Zaid Jilani, are at some point just telling on themselves. You do not want to hear left-of-center thinkers bemoaning the free speech "illiberalism" on the left, and you are not curious whether at least a handful of people you have previously respected might have a legitimate concern or two about an issue you claim to hold dear. Noted.

I think those Lefties were invited to sign the Letter - a Letter that on the surface sounds high-minded and craftily avoided naming names or specifics about the cases they were complaining about - exactly so that its devisers could claim bi-partisan support.

And two of those Lefties are known as transphobes. And Jilani is a fan of Quillette an author at Quillette.

Racist or racemonger?

Pinker believes "race"
classifications are biological,
not "social constructions."

Although both racists and racemongers share a (scientifically invalid) belief in biological "races," there are some differences between a racemonger and a racist. 

I classify all promoters of race pseudoscience as racemongers. That includes many Quillette authors including Steve Pinker and members of the Intellectual Dark Web like Sam Harris.

They either claim outright that there is something different and inferior or superior about one or more "biological" races, or, in cases like Pinker, they support the careers of those who do, while making race pseudoscience-friendly statements.

Steve Sailer, Quillette author Bo Winegard and Charles Murray are also racemongers. Sailer and Murray have built their careers on racemongering. Bo Winegard seems headed in that direction. 

But Winegard, Murray and Sailer are also racists. 

Racemongers generally defend their race beliefs on the grounds that those beliefs are based on science. 

Now the fact that their "science" is garbage, based on various combinations of careless categorizations, badly-done studies (some funded by hardcore racists) and 18th century beliefs doesn't matter. They cling to the claim that theirs is a science-based opinion.

But every now and then they slip up.

In his defense of The Bell Curve, for the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray wrote:

I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites. Here are three crucial points to keep in mind as we go along:

The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.

That was in 2005. More recently, Murray contradicted that statement in a tweet, suggesting that it is appropriate - "economically rational" - to judge an individual's potential based on the individual's race.

Charles Murray is a racist, and probably has been ever since he was a cross-burning teenager. 

Now in Bo Winegard's case, after years of promoting "human biodiversity," the mask slipped in his support for a Third Reich-style attitude towards racial demographics. Although he prefers the term "ethnoculturally conservative" and honesty about "group differences."

Steve Sailer has been revealing himself as a racist for decades. One of the more recent, blatant examples is when he implied that the exonerated "Central Park Five" accused of a crime that occurred in 1989, were guilty by comparing them to a non-white teenager accused of murder in Central Park in 2019. The two assaults occurred 30 years apart. Sailer's "logic" is classic racism: all those people are the same. If one of them commits murder it proves that they are all murderers.

But since Charles Murray is also a racist, the racism of Steve Sailer bothers him not at all.

Murray is such a racist now that even Andrew Sullivan backed away from him, in the recent 60 Minutes interview, although Sullivan was promoting Murray as recently as May 2021.

 As Variety's Daniel D'Addario notes, Sullivan was treated deferentially on the issue. And I would add, almost as deferentially as Steven Pinker is treated by the establishment media (with rare exceptions.)

Sullivan’s musings, by contrast, lack a clear reason to be broadcast at this particular moment and deserve to be placed within context — something Pelley seems fundamentally uninterested in doing.

To wit: Pelley comes close to asking a tough question about Sullivan’s tin ear (at best) on race, noting the incident when, as then-editor of The New Republic, Sullivan published an excerpt of a book asserting genetic deficits in IQ among Black people. Pelley notes, though, that Sullivan published rebuttals, “but he’s criticized for airing the debate at all.”

Well, yes: Lending the institutional voice of a prestigious publication to a racist crackpot theory and then letting others write in to contest it is worthy of criticism. With an interviewer like Pelley, though, Sullivan barely needs defenders: Sullivan’s eventual admission that the “harm outweighs the good” of the “Bell Curve” publication “doesn’t mean he’s giving up on debate,” Pelley tells us. He then recites Sullivan’s claims that newsrooms “pander to the left and right and are intimidated by political correctness.”

I think it's likely that Sullivan is a racist. I haven't seen anything as clear-cut as in the cases of Winegard, Murray and Sailer, but until this 60 Minutes interview he has been a dedicated racemonger.

I've been debating with myself for awhile whether or not Razib Khan is a racist rather than just a racemonger. He's certainly built his career on racemongering, and lately I've been leaning towards putting him in the racist category, since he agreed with racist Charles Murray that we need to "connect the dots" about Black Americans or "face disaster." It's apparent that Khan wants to promote the notion that Black Americans as a group are a serious threat and something needs to be done about that - unless you know, you're OK with disaster. 

That's about as racist as you can get.

James Lindsay and his allies part 2: as cynical as they come

James Lindsay is as cynical as they come, publishing a book promoting "civil" discussions while being a complete asshole on Twitter, as I discussed here.

One of his allies is Christopher Rufo, promoter of "intelligent design" and a big Trump supporter.

And far from criticizing Lindsay and his reactionary, anti-science grift these alleged champions of science and atheism are supporting this clown.

Pinker and Sullivan are leading mainstream supporters of race science, Jerry Coyne is Pinker's leading flunky and also a supporter of race science. Peter Boghossian is one of Lindsay and Pluckrose's fellow free-speech grifters who appeared several times on white supremacist Stefan Molyneux's channel, and Andrew Doyle is a Koch toady.

I didn't realize Alan Sokal was a major-league idiot, but apparently he is.

TESTIMONIALS

Steven Pinker

Johnstone Professor Of Psychology, Harvard University, And Author Of Enlightenment Now

"Many people are nonplussed by the surge of wokery, social justice warfare, intersectionality, and identity politics that has spilled out of academia and inundated other spheres of life. Where did it come from? What ideas are behind it? This book exposes the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movements that appear to be engulfing our culture."

Andrew Doyle

Comedian, Playwright, Journalist, Political Satirist, And Creator Of Titania McGrath

"Cynical Theories is a brilliant book, offering an incisive and much needed critique of the cult of social justice. The authors painstakingly trace its origins in postmodernism and, in doing so, expose the ways in which a once fashionable coterie of theorists infiltrated the mainstream with catastrophic consequences for liberalism, equality, and free speech."

Alan Sokal

Professor Of Mathematics, University College London, And Coauthor Of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse Of Science

"In this important and timely book, Pluckrose and Lindsay trace the intellectual origins of today's Social Justice crusaders. With clear prose and a fair-minded spirit, they argue forcefully that struggles for social justice are strongest when they are founded on respect for evidence, reason, and free and open debate. They deplore the harm that closed-minded Social Justice ideologues are doing to the cause of social justice (lower-case), and they offer practical strategies for doing better."

Jerry Coyne

Biologist And Author

I’ve now finished Pluckrose’s and Lindsay’s new book, and can recommend it to readers. ... It’s more academic than I imagined and less of a screed against Social Justice (which they capitalize to indicate the woke version against classical “liberal” social justice), but I found that emphasis refreshing. ... This book will help you recognize Theory when you see it, and then you’ll start seeing it everywhere: in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, in the petulant acts of cancel culture, and on most every college campus in America."
Full review.

Peter Boghossian

Author, Philosopher, And University Professor

"This is the most important book in the last quarter century. It's the unified field theory for economic, social, and political developments in Western civilization."

Andrew Sullivan

British-Born American Author, Editor, Blogger, And Political Commentator

The rhetorical trap of critical theory is that it has coopted the cause of inclusion and forced liberals onto the defensive. But liberals have nothing to be defensive about. What’s so encouraging about this book is that it has confidence in its own arguments, and is as dedicated to actual social justice, achieved through liberal means, as it is scornful of the postmodern ideologues who have coopted and corrupted otherwise noble causes.
This is very good news—even better to see it as the Number 1 Amazon best-seller in philosophy long before its publication date later in August. The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest. Let’s do this.
Full review.