Jesse Singal and Razib Khan express their deep concerns about human rights and dignity for trans people

Left side, top to bottom: Matt Walsh, Pamela Paul, Jesse Singal
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Some More News has an excellent installment about all the anti-trans ghouls and grifters out there. Musk, Rowling, Shrier, Pamela Paul, Matt Walsh, Harmeet K. Dhillon and Andy Ngo are mentioned by name. 

Jesse Singal is not mentioned by name, but his face is displayed a couple of times.

The episode points out that a constant theme of anti-trans grifter ghouls is that trans people were talked into becoming trans thanks to some pro-trans conspiracy, and the ghouls love to promote stories of the tiny minority of gender transitioners who detransitioned. The ghouls are very concerned about the possibility of regret by transitioners.

Minute 28:27: 

According to a 2021 meta analysis, less than one percent of participants in gender-affirming surgery regretted it. For context, the regret-rate for successful knee surgery is 2.9% Which you may recognize as more than 1%. Gender-affirming surgery has a lower regret-rate than almost any other elective surgery. 

Now Jesse Singal is best-known for his crusade against trans rights, while his long-time pal Razib Khan is better known for his promotion of race pseudoscience. 

And as of yesterday, his hatred of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

But don't worry, Khan also hates trans people, probably as much as Jesse Singal does. Khan was recently seen on Twitter, mocking the idea that trans rights are human rights. 

Khan likes to frame his contempt for Amnesty International as a concern about their form of advocacy - they don't make an argument in a tweet for why trans rights are human rights, you see, merely an assertion. 

I have not yet found Khan himself making an argument that trans rights are not human rights. Maybe because, if he laid out his hatred and bigotry explicitly, it would make him look even more like a gigantic asshole.

Not to be outdone, Jesse Singal, Khan's long-time pal tweeted:

Singal writes about Trump's anti-trans executive order, while citing fan of "Gender Wars" cards and Pinker protege Carol Hooven, and spewing bullshit about "left-of-center thinkers."

What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.

It's so funny that Singal pretends to care about treating trans people with dignity while being on very friendly terms with the psychopathic ghouls of Kiwi Farms and while attacking individual trans people from behind his paywall-blocked podcast like the disgusting political operative grifter/faux journalist he is.

Who the fuck does he think he's fooling, exactly?

Singal has justifiably become known for being a useful tool of the far-right and Republicans in their project to win votes by demonizing trans people, but he gets mad when people mention that. 

Meanwhile the Jesse Singal follower labeler on Bluesky is chugging along, receiving many positive reviews.

But back to Razib Khan, for he was recently seen promoting the complete Trump ratfucker tool Andy Ngo. I assume that Trump will partner with Ngo and Ngo's former (or current) lawyer, the ultra-evil Harmeet K. Dhillon to do more ratfucking, using antifa as an excuse to crack down on all dissidents, much like the Nazis used Marxists. These Republicans are absolute fascist filth.

Dhillon is discussed in the Some More News video at minute 39:32 with the point made that she's the Swiss Army tool for right-wing extremist causes.

But Khan does not neglect to stop for a minute to lick the boot - this time Marc Andreessen's buddy, Joe "natural aristocracy" Lonsdale. Khan knows that the only reason a mediocrity like him has any notoriety at all is because he's been a right-wing plutocratic bootlicker since at least kooky Holocaust denier Ron Unz.

Why I think Harvard's "Council on Academic Freedom" is owned by Steven Pinker

It starts with the fact that Pinker co-authored the founding announcement of the Council on Academic Freedom, which was printed in the Boston Globe.

Then, in the announcement: 

• The second link goes to FIRE, the organization funded by Koch and other right-wing plutocrats. According to Source Watch:

FIRE is a former member of the State Policy Network, a group of right-wing think tanks and other politically-active nonprofits.

FIRE was a sponsor of Turning Point USA's 2017 "Student Action Summit".[6][7]

Connection to Conservative Dark Money Groups, Collaboration with Hate Group Alliance for Defending Freedom

FIRE has received millions of dollars in contributions from politically-active conservative nonprofits, including over $3.4 million from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, over $3.4 million from Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust, over $1.8 million from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, over $1.3 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, over $1 million from the Searle Freedom Trust, and over $1 million from the Stand Together Trust.

• The third link goes to Heterodox Academy, an organization funded in part by DonorsTrust, the right-wing plutocrat funding vehicle of choice which also funds the racist obscenity VDARE, the owners of the White Supremacist Castle. Heterodox Academy is headed by "one of Charles Koch's 'pet professors,'" John Tomasi.

• The fourth link goes to FIRE.

• The fifth link goes to an article by Steven Pinker's buddy, pioneer of stochastic terrorism, among other awful things, the Koch-funded Quillette author Cathy Young. Naturally Young's article focuses on Pinker himself.

• The eighth link goes to FIRE.

The membership of the Council on Academic Freedom includes:

• Pinker's fellow Quillette author Jeffrey Flier, co-president

• Carol Hooven, a proponent of sociobiology whom Steven Pinker is apparently mentoring, and who praised neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard, 

• Laurence Summers, another buddy of Pinker, who also praised Winegard

• Liz Gaufberg - "heterdox humanist" fan of Heterodox Academy and Bret Weinstein.

• David Haig - supporter of Napoleon Chagnon along with Pinker

• Dan Carpenter defends Amy Wax's right to be a public racist troll while a member of an academic institution and mentions FIRE and two other members of this Council, Jeannie Suk Gersen and Janet Halley. I suspect that defending Wax will be an important issue for Harvard's Council on Academic Freedom, given Wax's prominence at Peter Thiel's CPAC for Racists, at which Pinker, and other supporters of race pseudoscience, spoke.

• Joseph Henrich - evolutionary psychologist - predictably Quillette author Rob Henderson wrote a positive review of his book for the Koch-funded City Journal.

• James Hankins - author at Quillette

• Regina E. Herzlinger - Koch employee

• Jilly Hooley - evolutionary psychologist

• Randall Kennedy - co-author at Quillette with Federalist Society contributor Harvey Silverglate

• J. Mark Ramseyer - notorious for suggesting that comfort women were not coerced

• Stephen Sachs - contributor at the Federalist Society

• Richard Zeckhauser - one-time member of the Council of Academic Advisors for the Koch-funded AEI, chair of Quillette author Jason Richwine's dissertation committee

The focus of the organization is well-illustrated by the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal's commentary on the announcement:

Conservatives are so few at American universities that the battle to restore respect for free and open debate will have to be led by what used to be known as traditional liberals. Well, maybe there’s hope. On Wednesday Harvard University said it’s forming a new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom dedicated to the free exchange of ideas as a cornerstone of “reason and rational discourse.” 

We know that Steven Pinker considers agreement with race pseudoscience an indicator of "reason and rational discourse."  

Fun fact about Harvard - it has a page on its library site about scientific racism. And meanwhile Steven Pinker is merrily promoting those who promote the same.

Where is the ISIR 2024 conference program?

This is a poster, not the program

Every year, the International Society for Intelligence Research posts info about its latest conference along with a conference program so you can see exactly who participated.

This year they have not. Why? We already know that the odious racist Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard participated in 2024. And another member of the racist/ neo-Nazi Aporia gang, Cory Clark gave a presentation that ISIR liked enough to include on the conference page for 2024.

Clark has co-authored with neo-Nazi Aporia editor Bo Winegard, including in Quillette, and has appeared on the Aporia podcast. Her race pseudoscience credentials are rock solid.

Curiously, although Clark is not ashamed to admit, on her Twitter timeline to collaborating with the usual gang of evolutionary psychology dummies, race pseudoscience ghouls and political reactionary grifters including Jesse Singal, Lee Jussim, Jerry Coyne, Carol Hooven, Diana S. Fleischman and Greg Lukianoff, she doesn't mention the ISIR conference at all, in spite of ISIR apparently finding her important enough to highlight.

It doesn't seem possible ISIR could have included anybody more extreme than Clark and Kirkegaard. But the fact that ISIR has declined to publish its program makes me wonder.

To a certain extent, ISIR is finally getting the reputation for racist extremism it deserves. In a Bluesky skeet attacking this blog (before I had a Bluesky account) Eric Turkheimer wrote: "I have no sympathy with ISIR-- broke off all relations a few years ago."

(I got into it with Turkheimer, once I finally had an account and could defend myself and he quit the discussion quickly and without responding to my points in self-defense.)

Turkheimer's problem with me is mainly for pointing out how chummy his pal Kathryn Paige Harden is with Razib Khan. As always with those who seek to defend promoters of hereditarianism from little ole me, there is the charge of "guilt by association."

Sorry Turkheimer, the fact is that not only does Razib Khan consider Harden a friend, Harden has promoted his career (after any reasonably well-informed person knew Khan got the sack from the NYTimes for his racist career) offering, via tweet, to "get you on camera as our 'Expert in the Chair'."

And finally Harden acknowledged Khan in her much-promoted "Genetic Lottery" book, in fact in the same paragraph as Turkheimer.

Harden has also appeared at ISIR conferences, but not recently.

Speaking of behavioral genetics, I recently discovered the work of psychologist Jay Joseph and his paper, co-authored with Ken Richardson called The Bell Curve at 30: A Closer Look at the Within- and Between-Group IQ Genetic Evidence that absolutely trashes the "twins studies" that are the very foundation of all branches of modern sociobiology, including behavioral genetics. It is a joy to read. More in a future post. 

Meanwhile changes are afoot at the ISIR publication "Intelligence" - Richard Haier is out as editor-in-chief. But I don't know if Haier was found to be too racist, or not racist enough. Or something else.

It doesn't seem like ISIR has any motivation to change its racist ways, especially with Trump and race pseudoscience politically ascendant these days, and all that racist plutocrat money slopping around. And the ISIR was founded to promote the race pseudoscience of The Bell Curve and Arthur Jensen.

At least ISIR published a poster for the 2024 conference, so along with eyewitness reports from the conference we know the following participated:

• Camilla Benbow
• Stephen Ceci
• Cory Clark
• Richard Haier
• Wendy Johnson
• Emil Kirkegaard
• Matt McGue
• Brook Macnamara
• Klaus Oberauer
• Franzis Preckel
• Elsbeth Stern
• Sophie von Stumm
• Wendy Williams