The logical fallacy of non-tenure track assistant professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian

Poor bitter Peter Boghossian

I haven't paid much attention to Peter Boghossian, one third of the Sokal Grift, mainly because James "your mom" Lindsay is such an attention hog. 

I've mentioned Boghossian a few times on Pinkerite but never as the main subject. I wrote about him in his connection to Lindsay; his business connection (along with Lindsay) with Christian nationalist / Soros conspiracy obsessive Michael O'Fallon; and when I noted that he appeared on alt-right racist Stefan Molyneux's show at least four times.

So imagine my surprise when I found Boghossian attacking me on Twitter for daring to criticize Steven Pinker when only one of my three papers on Google Scholar got any citations - only 2  (the article about the intellectual property lawsuit I was involved in)  compared to "celebrity intellectual" Steven Pinker's more than 100K citations.

I'm not sure what his point about verified accounts is - to be verified on Google Scholar you basically have to have an email address.

Now Boghossian is a professor of philosophy, albeit a non-tenure track assistant one, so he must be acquainted with the logical fallacy known as "appeal to accomplishment" described on the web site Logically Fallacious as :

When the argument being made is sheltered from criticism based on the level of accomplishment of the one making the argument. A form of this fallacy also occurs when arguments are evaluated on the accomplishments, or success, of the person making the argument, rather than on the merits of the argument itself.

Several people I follow on Twitter immediately pointed out the problem of Boghossian in particular using this approach, since Boghossian criticizes others who are far more prominent and more often-cited than Boghossian.

Boghossian holds his ideological opponents to much higher standards than he holds himself, exactly as James Lindsay, co-author with Boghossian of the book "How to Have Impossible Conversations" urges civility while being consistently uncivil on social media.

I'm not the only person who has noted what utter hypocrites James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian are. In this review of Impossible Conversations, Oliver Traldi writes: 

Imagine if Donald Trump wrote a book advising you on how to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Or if Antonio Brown wrote a book advising you on how to keep your job as a professional athlete. You might feel an initial rush of puzzlement — you might even feel a little resentment at their gall, their presumptuousness. You might ask yourself: “What do they take us for? Don’t they know that we know who they are?” These are the sorts of thoughts that might cross your mind.

And there is this issue: if Boghossian's point is that I am an under-accomplished nobody, who should dare not criticize a prominent and accomplished celebrity intellectual, why is he talking about me at all? What possible interest could my "relentlessly publishing hit pieces" have for anybody?

And as if Peter Boghossian making a fool of himself on my behalf wasn't enough, Evan Marc Katz jumped into Boghossian's thread.

Evan Marc Katz makes a living telling women in the 21st century to be passive:

Men win you over by giving to you. We ask you out. We call you. We pay for dates. We initiate sex. We ask for commitment. We propose marriage. We give. You receive. Reverse this order by asking him out, initiating sex, asking for commitment, or proposing marriage, and a masculine guy will feel, well, emasculated. Thus, if you want a masculine guy, your greatest move is to embrace your passive feminine side.

Katz has clearly been harboring bitter resentment towards me for years, because although he uses present-tense "writes about me" as if this is an ongoing thing, in fact the last time I wrote about Evan Marc Katz was in 2017 in a post on my personal blog which is entitled, with obvious justification: Evan Marc Katz is a right-wing snowflake who can't tolerate criticism. So although in Internet time my criticizing Katz is ancient history, he is unable to let it go and fails to take his own advice: "all you can do is ignore."

Apparently all it takes for Evan Marc Katz to label a woman a "loon" is for that woman to criticize a man. Maybe Katz should write his own book lecturing others on how to be civil in public discourse.

This latest Katz incident has convinced me that not only was I right all along about Katz being a right-wing misogynist asshole, I may have underestimated how misogynist he is. What a freaking creep.

Meet the IDW's rightwing Christian extremist sugar daddy Michael O'Fallon

O'Fallon, Lindsay and Boghossian
made a video together

We already know that the 3 Stooges of the IDW, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian got paid to run their hoax grift because James Lindsay admitted as much - and refused to reveal who paid them.

Their latest clown college project is a web site called New Discourses, promoted by Steven Pinker's #1 fanboy Jerry Coyne who writes:

It’s useful to know about this resource. The articles will change, and I haven’t yet had time to peruse them, but the Wokish Dictionary is already a good resource when trying to decipher the argot. There are also videos.

Coyne was once a worthwhile thinker but he's turned into a bigot and a right-wing stooge over the past ten years or so. And he's such a groveling fanboy of Steven Pinker he can be seen on his web site mooning over Steven Pinker's cowboy boots. Featuring a full-body shot of Pinker modeling his boots, which I assume Coyne printed out and taped to his bedroom wall.

The devolution of Jerry Coyne is a sad and sorry spectacle.

It's a hallmark of race science proponents that they are astoundingly lazy and clearly Jerry Coyne couldn't be bothered trying to learn anything about New Discourses before promoting it. But I made an effort and boy howdy are they in deep with Christian fanaticism.

Meet the funder behind New Discourses, Michael O'Fallon. His various activities are listed at Right Wing Watch.

According to the web site Religion News Service:

There aren't many cruise "experience" directors who spend their days defending what is described as America's Judeo-Christian heritage and promoting "nation-ism" — a version of nationalism that champions "the right of self governance and the right of people to be self-governed.” 

But Michael O'Fallon does, and he argues both are under attack by the Open Society Foundation, founded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros. He often says as much on his website, Sovereignnations.com, as well as through conferences with speakers who range from controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson to a slate of evangelical Christians of the Calvinist variety. 

And when he has some spare time, he goes on a cruise — like a recent journey to the Galapagos Islands, which O'Fallon recently highlighted on his personal Facebook page.

It's hard to overstate how obsessed Michael O'Fallon is with George Soros conspiracy theories. They are plastered all over his web site.

O'Fallon is mentioned nowhere on the New Discourses web site. 

I first made the connection between O'Fallon and New Discourses by Googling the address given on the New Discourses web site and found it is the same address used by O'Fallon's Christian cruise business. I took a screen shot of the two side-by-side.

And once I found Sovereign Cruises, I found two other O'Fallon web sites, Sovereign Productions and Events and then finally Sovereign Nations.

Although as someone on Twitter pointed out, I could have made the connection more quickly if I just Googled New Discourses LLC.

NEW DISCOURSES LLC

Company Number

L19000234287

Status

Active

Incorporation Date

17 September 2019 (6 months ago)

Company Type

Florida Limited Liability

Jurisdiction

Florida (US)

Agent Name

O'FALLON W MICHAEL

Agent Address

118 WOODLAND CT, SAFETY HARBOR, FL 34695

Directors / Officers

• LINDSAY S JAMES
• O'FALLON W MICHAEL, agent
• PETER G BOGHOSSIAN

New Discourses doesn't have a single mention of O'Fallon, but he sure has no problem connecting himself to Linsday, Boghossian and Pluckrose on Sovereign Nations.

And there's a video series: GRIEVANCE SCHOLARS EXPOSE THE TROJAN HORSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE IN FAITH & ACADEMICS which is a discussion with O'Fallon, Lindsay and Boghossian. 

Note the word "faith" in the title. As a fanatical Christian, faith is a huge deal with O'Fallon. As the article with the video says:

This isn’t merely a problem within the secular university system, however. As many will be aware, it has gone forth from our halls of higher education and taken root in education, law, the corporate world, society at large, and even public policy. Not only that, it has also been making significant inroads into the Christian faith, even conservative Evangelical Protestant faith. In June of 2019, the largest Protestant denomination in the world, the Southern Baptist Convention, passed a resolution stating that Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality could effectively be used by Christians as “analytical tools” alongside but subordinate to Scripture. This is what Lindsay describes as “a very fine wooden horse sitting outside your gates.”  

And since O'Fallon is a right-wing Christian extremist and a supporter of hereditarianism and the IDW, it was extremely likely he would turn out to be a Trump supporter. Which he is, as can be seen by the relentlessly positive mentions of Trump and defenses of Trump in Sovereign Nations.

O'Fallon is not pleased with homosexuality as noted in the Religious News Service article:

Speakers at Sovereign Nations' 2019 conference were united in their opposition to certain claims of “social justice” among progressives — including progressive people of faith. In December 2018, Ascol, O’Fallon and White were all listed as initial signers on a “Statement on Social Justice & the Gospel.”

The document rejected “the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory,” calling them inconsistent with biblical teaching.
“We are deeply concerned that values borrowed from secular culture are currently undermining Scripture in the areas of race and ethnicity, manhood and womanhood, and human sexuality,” read the statement’s introduction. “The Bible’s teaching on each of these subjects is being challenged under the broad and somewhat nebulous rubric of concern for ‘social justice.’” 

The statement also rejected “‘gay Christian' as a legitimate biblical category." 

The 2019 Founders Ministries conference was sponsored in part by Sovereign Alliance (an umbrella organization that includes Sovereign Cruises) as well as Ligonier Ministries, a group created by Presbyterian Church in America theologian R.C. Sproul. (O’Fallon and his wife worked for Sproul’s ministry for 10 years.) 

But O’Fallon pushed back on the idea that his movement is restricted to Calvinist Baptists.
He noted that the 2017 Sovereign Nations’ conference, which was convened in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., included a talk by controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson on “Identity Politics & the Marxist Lie of White Privilege.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and former White House Senior Advisor Stephen Bannon were also invited to speak but did not appear to attend. 

Brad Vermurlen, a scholar who has a forthcoming book on the New Calvinist movement entitled “Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism,” said the invitation of Jordan Peterson points to an often unspoken overlap between his audience and that of the Calvinist leaders highlighted at Sovereign Nations events.

New Discourses' strategy is straight out of the Quillette playbook: pretend to be non-political or centrist while relentlessly promoting right-wing positions and taking rightwing money.

According to the New Discourses About page.

New Discourses is, by design, meant to be apolitical in the usual sense. That means it is not interested in conservative, progressive, left, right, center, or any other particular political stances. It is, in this regard, only broadly liberal in the philosophical and ethical stance. In that case, whether you’re a progressive left-liberal or a conservative right-liberal, traditional or classical in any case, you’re likely to find what we’re doing refreshing. (And if you don’t, we can talk about it! That’s the point!

In their alignment with a far-right Christian fanatic like O'Fallon, this is obviously bullshit.

Some of the most prominent IDWs are outspoken atheists, and Jerry Coyne certainly is. Does the IDW and friends hate feminists, Muslims, trans-people, socialists, the left and critics of race science so much that they are willing to align with a religious extremist?

A peek inside techno-fascist clown college - The New Inquiry profiles the University of Austin

I laughed and laughed at the pretentious yet oafish, resentment-driven nitwits at the university funded by fascists and techno-fascists, described in the New Inquiry's article An American Education: Notes from UATX.

But at least it contains confirmation that the "Intellectual Dark Web" has always been about techno-fascism and a "natural aristocracy." Techno-fascists Joe Lonsdale and Marc Andreessen are featured:

For all of UATX’s supposed concern about “the culture,” the soul, the ethic of America, what at last constituted its core was this limitless faith in the goodness of the free market and entrepreneurship, of accumulating capital by endlessly making new products. Integral to this faith was a conviction about who merited such wealth and the political power that accompanied it. This who came into focus toward the close of the entrepreneurs’ talk. “There’s something very scary in our society—where this idea of a natural aristocracy,” Lonsdale said at the end, “has like really fallen out of favor.” Here it was, for a flash unconcealed by euphemism: “a natural aristocracy.”

At some level, Lonsdale—who displays the verbal intelligence of an 18-year old fratboy and who, moments later, would declare that when founding a company “you want whatever unfair advantages you can get”—doesn’t care about “natural” ability. What the author of tweets claiming “average black culture” is “broken” cares about is justifying existing economic and racial inequality and those, like himself and Andreessen, who reap massive rewards from it.

By the way, Andreessen and Lonsdale are not unlikely to reap some financial rewards from their very participation in UATX. Consider it. Andreessen and Lonsdale champion AI at UATX. Two weeks later, Bari Weiss publishes an article by Andreessen in The Free Press, “AI Will Save the World.” Wait another week or so. UATX then uploads a video recording of the Andreessen-Lonsdale talk, titling it, “Will AI Save the World?” Lonsdale posts the same video to his YouTube channel, where it gets almost 45k views, and tweets a clip from it, which gets over 700k. The upshot: a billionaire and a millionaire whose VC firms have a tremendous financial stake in AI get to widely broadcast the value of their securities. In the grand scheme of business strategy, this chain of events may be minor, but it represents just one of the many channels through which UATX’s founders and friends reinforce their wealth and influence.

But Peter Boghossian was there to provide laughs:

It happened to be Father’s Day, so when Peter (Boghossian), in between lauding UATX’s rigorous admission standards, mentioned a son, I wished him a happy one.

“Oh thanks,” he said. “I got jack and shit.” Muzak dribbled out of the hotel sound system.

“Shuttle’s here!” Loren Rotner, Assistant Chief Academic Officer, soon said, looking up from his phone. We all stood.

Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?”

I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful.

“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.

It should be noted that Boghossian is pushing 60. What an absolutely pathetic loser he-man wanna-be. 

Boghossian shows up a little later...

Pano Kanelos, president, stood up. It was time for the opening remarks. Our chatter lulled, and he began to speak in gentle, benevolent tones. He told us that we weren’t starting a university; we were a university. This is what a university looks like: people coming together for conversations, much like the ones we’d been having over our complimentary chicken dinners. “Dia-logue,” he said. “From the Greek, logos.” Two rational beings, engaged in rational discourse. He smiled. We smiled. And with little further ado, he introduced Peter, whom the other students had not yet had the good fortune of meeting. Peter, Pano told us, was “kicking butt in the righteous name of freedom.”

Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”

What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.

He turns his back to the audience, hunches slightly and strides, stroking his chin. He is Rodin’s thinker set in manic motion; he is a relentless logician in his study at midnight; he is a frantically philosophical gremlin … —BAM! He wheels around and stalks forward and slings his index finger out toward a student, demands of him whether climate change is real?! and how certain is he?! and why?!—BOP! He points at another student, asks whether gender is a social construct, whether trans women are women?! He cites Socrates and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He staggers and weaves: as a boxer dances, so Peter lectures. He is the professor you never had; he is a squall of raw intellect; he is Robin Williams in the Dead Poets Society, but ripped. He is putting a gun to the head of your most precious assumptions.

Oh man, if you created a character like that in a play, nobody would buy it.

Seth Dillon, the sociopath who funds the psychopath Chaya Raichik of LibsofTikTok was perfectly described:

Up next, Mr. Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, or “the Onion for evangelicals,” as New Yorker writer Kalefa Sanneh has nicely put it. (They have headlines like, “Man Caught Drinking Bud Light Insists He’s Not Gay.”) Dillon spoke about “Canceling Comedy” the evening of the second day. Scoffing at opposition to “punching down” in comedy, he raised his eyebrows and leered and smirked. He demonstrated an impressive command of alliteration: “Nothing,” he said, “undercuts lunacy and lies like laughter.” He licked Mr. Elon Musk’s boots, exclaiming that “the world’s richest man took matters into his own hands,” bought Twitter, “and declared comedy legal again.” In his beard and suit, he was a spectacular manchild.

It's so hard to decide who is more repulsive, Dillon or Boghossian. But wait, here comes Rob Henderson and Richard Hanania!

Unlike most of the previous speakers, he was not alone on stage but sat facing UATX professor Rob Henderson. This gave some unsuspecting students the impression that the two might argue. Perhaps Henderson and Hanania disagreed about something. Perhaps the “constructive debate” advertised by UATX’s website was imminent. As if conscious of this expectation, Henderson put on a funny little voice and asked Hanania if he could define the word “woke,” cleverly saying, “I think being woke just means you’re a good person.…” Hanania obliged Henderson, providing his personal genealogy of the term, before launching into a frantic invective against Affirmative Action and DEI. Following some warped line of thought whose only logic was that of racism, Hanania burst out that he’d “rather punish people for something they have no control over—the color of their skin” than because “their parents run around smoking crack!”

Other obnoxious freaks who get shout-outs include Katie Roiphe, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Jordan Peterson, Dorian "I hate feminism!" Abbot, and the queen bee of sleazy, sugar-daddy-handout hypocrisy herself, Bari Weiss.

Oh and does "liberal" Steven Pinker still subscribe to Richard Hanania on Twitter/X?

You bet he does.

James Lindsay and his allies - more shameless IDW hypocrisy

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



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

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

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

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

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

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





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

According to the web site LLC University:

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

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

Now Lindsay is claiming O'Fallon works for him.

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




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

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

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

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

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

Another ally of James Lindsay is Bari Weiss.



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

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

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

 In her 2018 article Weiss wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

Judd Legum vs. the Bari-verse

Like virtually everybody in the media, Judd Legum (in his Popular Info column entitled "The Real Cancel Culture") gives Bari Weiss too much respect, treating her as a good-faith journalist who just happens to end up on the same side of every issue as far-right extremist Republican political operative Christopher Rufo and far-right media like The Free Beacon:

NPR didn't follow the script. Rufo and The Free Press were both involved in the successful effort to oust various Ivy League presidents. Those efforts included allegations that they were captive to the far-left, insufficiently concerned about anti-semitism, and engaged in various "scandals" exposed by Rufo and others. When Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard's president based mostly on the allegations published in another right-wing outlet, The Free Beacon, Weiss said she was "green with envy." 

But instead of capitulating to The Free Press and Rufo's pressure campaign, NPR defended its CEO and its journalism and moved on. 

That's when Rufo escalated his attacks on Maher.

I think there's reason to believe that the entire "NPR is too woke" brouhaha is a coordinated attack, dreamed up - or "workshopped" - and deployed by Bari Weiss and her long-time IDW allies like the extreme loser Peter Boghossian. I think the NPR attack plan is a more-successfully funded version of the far-right media campaign attempt described in the New Yorker exposé of the right-wing grift organization FAIR: 

Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

Boghossian and Weiss have been allies since at least 2018.

I have a Google alert set for "Uri Berliner" so I'm aware that even though his charges against NPR are no longer headline news in most of the media, it's still a big story in the right-wing media network. And the underlying goal is, and has always been, ever since it was likely "workshopped" by Peter Boghossian or some similar far-right grifting ghoul, to defund public radio.

And again, I don't believe that there are as many paying subscribers as claimed for Weiss's The Free Press (which is staffed almost entirely by far-rightwingers and kooks) nor as many for far-right Substacks as claimed, because it would be far too easy to fake paying subscribers through the subscription infrastructures of the Free Press and Substack, so they could launder the money possibly coming in from far-right plutocrat monsters like Harlan "sugar daddy" Crow, Charles Koch, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. 

All to make it look like their far-right views are more popular than they actually are.

And since they could do it, I firmly believe they would do it.

There should be audits of all media outlets funded by far-right plutocrats.

Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian: shameless weasels

3 stooges of right-wing griftery

There have been other debunkings of the Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian hoax grift, but new debunkings are appreciated, and the latest one published by Haaretz is a welcome addition to the genre.

Mikael Nilsson's piece 'Mein Kampf' and the 'Feminazis': What the Hitler Hoax Really Reveals About 'Woke' Academia – and Its Critics says...

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

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

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

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

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

The article makes the case even more strongly after that, you should read it. The piece also notes how much the 3 stooges were loved by the Intellectual Dark Web:

What is clear is that the hoax and its controversy propelled Boghossian and his co-writers into the media limelight, big time, with multiple article in the mainstream press and a particularly warm welcome from right-leaning platforms: Dave Rubin’s show The Rubin Report and Peterson’s own YouTube channel, but also from more centrist outlets like Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Boghossian deepened his longstanding allyship with right-wing provocateur, Andy Ngo, and won a phalanx of new fans from Richard Dawkins to Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan to Megyn Kelly.

Please note Weiss, Sullivan and Megyn Kelly are also Advisors of FAIR. As is, of course, Steven Pinker.

One more point - Nilsson says: 

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

It's no surprise that the right-wing media didn't compare the two texts - they certainly weren't going to look a grift horse in the mouth. 

The real shanda was the mainstream press that promoted the grift without question. But this is the same media that refuses to ask Steven Pinker about his decade-long support for professional racist Steve Sailer. Pinker no longer talks about Sailer, but Sailer still has Charles Murray proudly in his corner.

A third citation for Pinkerite

Still a nobody, but I guess it's something.
----------------------------------------------------------

A few years ago right-wing ghoul Peter Boghossian, one of Harlan Crow's sugar babies, complained that I, a nobody with only two citations, had the audacity to write blog posts criticizing celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker.

I just discovered my article Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections has been cited by a paper called Intellectual dark web, alt-lite and alt-right: Are they really that different? a multi-perspective analysis of the textual content produced by contrarians - just published this month.

I'm sure it's not enough for Boghossian, but then again Peter Boghossian is a right-wing political operative funded by one of the men who corrupted Clarence Thomas, so does anybody care what he thinks?

I really have to update that Steven Pinker paper though. I've found out so much more about Pinker and the race pseudoscience network in the almost five years since I published in 2019, plus there are a few typos, including worst of all, in J. Philippe Rushton's name. 

Rushton is one of the founding fathers, along with E. O. Wilson, of contemporary race pseudoscience.

Pinkerite's 3rd anniversary

It's November 17, Pinkerite's third anniversary, and quite a few things have happened since the second anniversary, in the world of Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Science.

And coincidentally tomorrow, November 18 is the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the great Satan of the Intellectual Dark Web. Pinkerite has referenced the SPLC on many occasions. Consider donating to this worthy organization. Pinkerite donates automatically each month out of gratitude for all the information SPLC provides about racists and racemongers.

If the IDW hates SPLC, they must be doing something right!

Some noteworthy items from the past year:

• For Pinkerite, the biggest deal of the past year is that for the first time since Malcolm Gladwell criticized Pinker in 2009, someone in the establishment media asked Pinker about his connection to racist Steve Sailer

• Quillette author and infamous grifter Andy Ngo's ratfucking campaign, to demonize the amorphous, anonymous Antifa was so successful that when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6 to stop election certification and destroy American democracy, Trump attempted to blame it on Antifa.

• My suspicion that Proud Boys were engaging in ratfucking by disgusing themselves as Antifa turned out to be true. 

• And Andy Ngo was caught posing as a BLM supporter

• At that point, many in the group became suspicious of a fellow protester, who was wearing tinted oversized ski goggles, a mask that obscured his face, black clothing and a Black Lives Matter flag worn as a cloak. Protesters said the man was attending the demonstration alone and did not respond to questions.

• Ngo went after an opponent who has negatively impacted Ngo's Post Millennial advertising.

• Charles Murray blew up the traditional pretense, used by race pseudoscience promoters, that race pseudoscience cannot be used to harm individual Black people.

• Andrew Sullivan disavowed Charles Murray - sort of.

• Grifter James Lindsay sent his online followers after me because I criticized his hypocrisy, resulting in a huge and lucrative spike in traffic for this site

• I was attacked by grifter Peter Boghossian for criticizing Pinker, which Boghossian apparently believes is inappropriate because Pinker is far more becited than me.
• And then out of the blue, traditional gender roles entrepreneur Evan Marc Katz, who I last criticized way back in 2017 on my personal blog, jumped on board the Boghossian thread to attack me.

• Quillette managing editor Colin Wright called me insane, twice - because that's what men do to women who disagree with them

• Juneteenth finally became a national holiday

• Quillette founder Claire Lehmann became an international laughing stock

• Steven Pinker was a laughing stock thanks to the NYTimes review of his latest book

• The University of Austin - associated by some with the Intellectual Dark Web was announced. Steven Pinker was initially part of the project but then quickly dropped out.

• Sociobiologist Kathryn Paige Harden published a book that racemongers proceeded to use to claim victory for race pseudoscience. The New Yorker ran a profile of Harden related to the book's publication. I am still waiting for a direct response to the racemongers from Harden's fans Eric Turkheimer and Adam Rutherford.

• FAIR - the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism was founded, basically to carry on the Christopher Rufo-lead Republican campaign against discussing racism in classrooms, which they are cynically calling CRT. No surprise its board of advisors is full of Trump supporters, Koch employees and race science promoters. But you're wondering, "is Steven Pinker a member of that board of advisors?" 
• Of course he is.

Top posts for year 3:

• James Lindsay and Your Mom - 5.95K

• Meet FAIR - the organization full of Trump supporters, Koch employees and race science promoters - 1.05 K

• The Brian Ferguson Interview - 971

• I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and the "biological reality of race" - 534

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 472

• The Left, the hereditarian Right and the New Yorker - 454

• Yes, Kevin Drum, Quillette is defending phrenology - 418

• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 1: Race essentialism - 409

• American Renaissance still loves Claire Lehmann's Quillette - 350

• You and Your Racist Friend - 325

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.

"An antiwoke organization implodes" - buh-bye FAIR!

“You have a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”

I was going to write about Jerry Coyne whining about the criticism of his little IDW grift perpetrated in cahoots with Quillette author and crackpot Anna Krylov. Best part, Coyne uses the phrase "Lee Jussim is an antiwoke social psychologist at Rutgers." Pinkerite has often noted the right-wing reactionary, vicious, race pseudoscience-loving loserosity of Lee Jussim. 

The second best part was when Coyne unironically describes race pseudoscience-promoting reactionaries Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt and Koch employee and reactionary Quillette author John McWhorter as "of the left."

Jerry Coyne and his right-wing allies live in a hermetically-sealed bubble.

Coyne was especially mad at P. Z. Myers, because Myers had this excellent response to the Krylov/Coyne grift. One of the best parts: "screw you McWhorter."

UPDATE: Myers responds to Coyne's complaints. Will Coyne ever stop embarrassing himself with his pathetic right-wing stoogery?

But there is much MUCH bigger news, which I found by looking at Coyne's website - the far-right reactionary FAIR grift "implodes!"

I had already noted how many members of the FAIR board of advisors were right-wingers, Trump supporters and Republicans.

The news comes from the New Yorker:

Professionally, Bartning had never worked on issues related to race or civil rights; he was an entrepreneur and investor who had helped American Express launch its online travel business and later helped lead the personal-care company E.O.S. One of his most recent ventures was a failed startup that sought to connect local farms with chefs. But he resolved to do something about what he was seeing at Riverdale—maybe even start an organization to counter it. He read an article in the Jewish magazine Tablet, about the rise of a new ideology on the left—a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality”—and another parent offered to connect him with Tablet’s editor and with the author of the article, Bari Weiss.

I had always assumed that Christopher Rufo was the real founder of FAIR, although Bartning had been given the credit, as I noted in September 2021. 

But as with so many horrible right-wing reactionary projects, this one is the work of Peter Thiel's leading courtier, Bari Weiss.

The New Yorker article demonstrates what professional journalists should be doing: getting past the lies. Although the article's description of right-wing extremist Peter Boghossian was unfortunately extremely flattering.

The article, written by Emma Green, mentions so many people I've discussed on this site for their connection to race pseudoscience and/or the Intellectual Dark Web: creepy Melissa Chen; Substack's Lulu Cheng Meservey, the awful former Quillette editor Colin Wright; Hoover ghoul Niall Ferguson; Angel Eduardo; Quillette author Glenn Loury; Koch employee/Randroid Kmele Foster.

The article is long but the gist is that Bion Bartning, who is basically a normie, although "independently wealthy," decided to wade into a culture war campaign dear to the American Right and the Republican Party - preventing discussions of systemic racism. 

Bartning:

“I’d say that, in the first few months of starting FAIR, I didn’t realize the degree to which this was being politicized,” he told me. “Getting this issue tied up in a culture war between two political parties is dangerous and could end up pushing things toward a more dehumanizing approach, because people get locked into their position.” 

Bartning's tragedy was that someone connected him to Bari Weiss - Madam Culture War herself.

Eventually Bartning achieves this insight:

“There are too few in the donor class who want to bolster moderation,” he said. “That’s part of what’s happening in our culture. You have a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”

Probably the biggest get of the article is the revelation of Weiss' coziness with Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow:

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Bari Weiss is, through and through, a right-wing political operative taking money from some of the most evil and crackpot plutocrats in the world to help the anti-democracy Republican Party make the United States a worse place, through the promotion of culture wars.

For me one of the best aspects of the article is that it provides a window into the Intellectual Dark Web Culture War issues factory:

Weiss had already been talking with a few of her friends about creating a new anti-woke organization. One was Melissa Chen, a writer and the managing director at Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that takes books about concepts such as liberty and reason and translates them into Arabic, to make them more accessible; she later described herself as a conservative who was forming her trajectory in “the anti-woke space.” Another was Peter Boghossian, a former professor best known for getting absurd papers about subjects such as dogs perpetuating rape culture at dog parks published in feminist and postmodern academic journals to expose what he saw as corruption in scholarship, and who has earned some prominence as a public intellectual defending free speech and opposing illiberalism. Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

Bari Weiss is truly a conscience-deficient individual. 

UPDATE: P. Z. Myers comments:

It does me good to see one of those hateful anti-woke organizations falling apart, but it’s also dismaying to see how easily radical conservative groups can suck money out of the pockets of the obscenely rich. I guess if you’re extremely wealthy you can easily throw a million dollars here, a half million there, as long as the recipient panders to the bigotry that comes naturally to bloated capitalist nepo babies.

UPDATE: Charles Murray is such a good buddy of Harlan Crow, he dedicated one of his more recent sociobiology books to him.