Claire Lehmann: How I became a gutter racist

ISIR president Thomas R. Coyle and Claire Lehmann, 
spreading their racist propaganda at Northwestern University
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Claire Lehmann founded racist rag Quillette, which has been funded by far-right crackpot Peter Thiel, which is sufficient reason to consider her a gutter racist. 

And now the gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research has given Lehmann their best racist of the year award. To be precise, Lehmann received the Constance Holden Award for journalists. You can tell who Constance Holden was by the gutter racists who love her.

In his introduction to Lehmann's acceptance speech, officially entitled "A Heterodox Education,"  Thomas R. Coyle, soon to be ex-president of ISIR, explains how deeply allied the far-right racists of Quillette are with the far-right racists of ISIR:

Claire is receiving the award for distinguished journalism, recognizing her contributions to public discourse on intelligence research. She joins a long line of distinguished Holden awardees whose names I put on the slide. Those include Toby Young, who is currently associate editor of The Spectator, Alice Dreger, journalist and author of "Galileo's Middle Finger," Susan Pinker and Bo Winegard, who was former associate editor at Quillette, who is now executive editor, I believe, at Aporia.

Aporia is owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard. 

Lehmann herself lovingly nurtured the career of Bo Winegard from when he was but a wee baby graduate student racist. Lehmann attacked me back in 2018 for daring to point out the fact that Bo Winegard is a racist, before he became a professional Neo-Nazi, working for Emil Kirkegaard.

I should point out that Lehmann's claim is wrong - I did not "boast about getting @razibkah fired from the NYTimes" - I mentioned that some of my blog posts were picked up by journalists like Jamelle Bouie who then used the facts I provided to raise issues about Khan. 

But accuracy and honesty are not requisites to receiving a journalism award from the International Society for Intelligence Research.

Speaking of Emil Kirkegaard, "who has likened pedophilic tendencies to sexual orientation and proposed "sex with a sleeping child" as a "compromise" for pedophiles" - (shudder!) - Lehmann has friendly feelings towards that Neo-Nazi, as I documented in a couple of places on this blog.

Being an apologist for pedophilia is obviously not a problem for Claire Lehmann. In her acceptance speech she traces her journey from her days as a sweet summer child who loved Shakespeare only to be betrayed by Academia and forced to read twentieth-century literature and even ideas she may not necessarily agree with, to being rescued from despair by famous oaf Camille Paglia, headlined in the text version of Lehmann's speech in Quillette  as "Finding My Athena."

Lehmann says:

“Poststructuralism is a corpse!” Paglia declared. She described Foucault’s scholarship as weak and bloodless, imitative of Nietzsche, and lacking in rigour. But she didn’t just attack Foucault’s work, she assailed the entire academic establishment for elevating him as a guru...

Lehmann considers Paglia an antidote for Academia's love of Michael Foucault, but avoids mentioning what Paglia and Foucault had in common: a love of pederasty. 

Lehmann was born in 1985, so she discovered Paglia well after Paglia had written her 1997 Salon article entitled The Purity of Alan Ginsberg's Boy-Love. Paglia was aware of Foucault's pederasty but naturally his was the bad kind:

Allen Ginsberg was the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality. Like the expansive, sensual, democratic Whitman but unlike the twisted, dishonest, pretentious Foucault, he saw the continuity between great nature and the human body, bathed in waves of cosmic energy. Seen from this pagan perspective, Ginsberg's celebration of boy-love was pure and sinless, demonstrating the limitations of Judeo-Christian paradigms of sexuality.

Rather than the virgin-goddess Athena, I would say that Camille Paglia is more like Lehmann's Zeus, who was fond of pederasty.

Lehmann doesn't mention it, but I think another likely reason for her love of Paglia is that both have a serious case of internalized misogyny. 

But in spite of Paglia, it was too late for Lehmann - betrayed by the English department, she moved to psychology, where she discovered her true calling: race pseudoscience:

Jensen expressed something that is often taken for granted but rarely articulated—that reality exists independently of our theories about it, and that it can be studied honestly through careful scientific work. I realised then that critics like Gould and the poststructuralists were not offering up methodological refinements in their critiques with the purpose of furthering inquiry; they were mounting a challenge to the possibility of studying human nature in the first place. 

Now I'm not sure exactly what Lehmann is up to with "critics like Gould and the poststructuralists were not offering up methodological refinements in their critiques with the purpose of furthering inquiry" other than an effort to conflate Gould with poststructuralists, but if what she means is, Gould never explained in detail why he thought Jensen in particular and hereditarianism in general were wrong, well of course he did. As in Gould's New York Review of Books review of Jensen's 1980 book "Bias in Mental Testing" for one very easily obtainable example.

It can never be pointed out enough that race pseudoscience promoters are far more impressed by  psychologists, like Jensen, and political scientists, like Charles Murray and even someone with a marketing degree like Steve Sailer, than they are by a life scientist like evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

In her post on Bluesky in December 2024, Lehmann can be seen recommending racists for others to follow, including Sailer and Aporia.

Then, while studying for her degree, Lehmann found her people - evolutionary psychologists, cranks and gutter racists:

On Twitter, I met a biosocial criminologist named Brian Boutwell, a geneticist named Razib Khan, evolutionary psychologists like David Schmitt, Geoffrey Miller, and Diana Fleischman, and I spent time reading papers by psychologists like David Buss and Roy Baumeister.

Evolutionary psychology is an obvious pseudoscience, as explained so perfectly by P. Z. Myers - but then Myers is a biologist, and so his work and opinions are of no interest to the likes of Lehmann. And Khan is not a real geneticist. According to his Wikipedia page he is "a right-wing[1] Bangladeshi-American writer in population genetics and consumer genomics."  Looks to me like his real job these days is right-wing political operative who pals around with racist freak Curtis Yarvin. Lehmann could recently be heard on Khan's podcast.

Fun fact: Kirkegaard claimed Khan was a big influence on him.

Lehmann gives credit to Steven Pinker too, which is only fair, since Pinker is basically the leading mainstream evangelist for race pseudoscience:

It occurred to me that intelligence research ventured into sacrilegious territory. It undermines a vision of human nature that Steven Pinker described in his 2000 masterpiece The Blank Slate.

Lehmann whines about being called out for being a sleazy far-right political operative.

In 2019, during the peak of the “Great Awokening,” prominent figures like Nassim Taleb repeatedly described me as a “neo-Nazi” online, and the Columbia Journalism Review called me a disinformation “villain” and listed me alongside Mohammed bin Salman and Yevgeniy Prigozhin.

Is it fair to call Claire Lehmann a Neo-Nazi? After all, she only has a friendly relationship with Emil Kirkegaard and promoted the career of Neo-Nazi Bo Winegard. And she only showed up in person to receive an award from an organization that loves to platform Emil Kirkegaard. 

Just because she has no problem with allying with Neo-Nazis, how dare you describe her as a neo-Nazi.

Then in her speech, Lehmann pulls out the classic race pseudoscience lie - that critics of race pseudoscience don't care about the "science" behind her beliefs, but only its morality:

But it was obvious that attacks like these were not about specific findings or methodological disagreements. Like Gould’s attacks on Jensen, or like Katz’s attacks on sexology, the criticism rained on my young publication was moralistic in nature. Rather than focusing on what was true or false, my critics wanted to reframe the question as being one of right and wrong.

This is the "Equalitarian Dogma" bullshit that has been around since at least segregationist Henry Garrett who published an article by that name in 1961 in the neo-Nazi funded Mankind Quarterly - a publication that is now owned by Claire Lehmann's Neo-Nazi buddy Emil Kirkegaard.

Notorious gutter racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton, one of the original guiding lights of the ISIR, wrote a paper called "The Equalitarian Dogma Revisited" in 1994.

Lehmann's own mentee, Bo Winegard used the term, for the same exact purpose, in a paper he wrote with his brother Ben and David Geary, this year's ISIR annual meeting keynote speaker, called Equalitarianism and Progressive Bias. Such a perfect demonstration of the direct line between that olde-thyme Jim Crow gutter racism and today's race pseudoscience gutter racism.

The reason that race pseudoscience ghouls like Lehmann won't acknowledge the actual scientific objections to their racist beliefs is a. they're too stupid to understand real science and b. they suspect they would have their beliefs thrashed soundly, and in Lehmann's case, her racist beliefs are her meal ticket - although naturally she doesn't mention who has funded Quillette, in her speech. So why risk having an actual debate with an actual scientist when you can stay in your far-right safe space bubble and take money for an easy job like regurgitating 19th century racist "science" endlessly?

Laziness, half-truths, racist bullshit and sins of omission are what get you a journalism award from the gutter racist organization the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

Especially when you are a gutter racist like Claire Lehmann.

Caliper Claire Lehmann, still mourning the loss of statues that glorify white supremacy

Claire Lehmann founded the last bastion for phrenology apologists, Quillette, and is in constant turmoil recently along with other members of the Intellectual Dark Web, over the removal of monuments to white supremacy.

And as you can see in the image, Lehmann is trying to use love of white supremacist imagery to rally her troops, the defenders of race science, against Kevin Bird.

Free speech panics in Academia are a favorite tactic of the right-wing free speech grifters so memorably discussed in the GQ article The Free Speech Grifters.

And now Caliper Claire is going to make Stephen Hsu her latest "free speech" cause.

Per Kevin Bird's web site:

Against a backdrop of protests, uprisings against police brutality, and calls for real reform and racial justice, the Particles for Justice collective began an initiative to #ShutDownStem and #ShutDownAcademia to take a day to focus on issues of racial equity in the academy. https://www.particlesforjustice.org/ 

A group of faculty and graduate students began discussing what to do to make tangible change. The topic of Stephen Hsu’s role as Senior Vice President of Research & Innovation came up (note: It was incorrectly thought his title was Vice President of Research & Graduate Studies; his title had recently changed). 

Hsu’s views had been brought up before as a problem, but there had never been a concrete sense of what could or should be done. In line with the focus of the day, which was to discuss and uproot racism and structures that protect racism in the university culture, the group turned its attention towards gathering publicity and public knowledge around Hsu’s views. 

Acacia Ackles (GEU Vice President of Organizing & Outreach), as part of the group, brought me (Kevin Bird, GEU President) into the discussions, because of my experience with addressing the recent resurgence of scientific racism (my efforts in this area were recently highlighted in a 2018 New York Times article). The group gathered evidence from Hsu’s blog and past tweets regarding his publication of views which the group believes to be racist, sexist, eugenicist and anti-scientific, and his promotion of known white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, along with evidence that he failed to uphold conflict of interest protocols regarding his status as a co-founder, shareholder and board member of Genomic Prediction Inc. The following Twitter thread was published. The tweets went live at 5:23 PM on June 10th. See Tweets and Unrolled. The thread immediately gained support from MSU faculty, staff, and students who are familiar with Hsu, and within the broader scientific community, where many are aware of Hsu’s conduct and beliefs. Another account of Hsu’s conduct was published shortly after by MSU professor John Jackson, who studies the history of scientific racism.

Predictably Hsu threatened to sue his critics.

Free speech champion Caliper Claire once suggested to Sam Harris that he sue the Southern Poverty Law Center because they truthfully and accurately reported on Harris's influence on the alt-right.

Meanwhile, as explained by John Jackson on his indispensable Fardels Bear web site:

It has been six days since my post on Stephen Hsu hosting a Holocaust denier on his podcast. He has not responded in any way and certainly not apologized. It has been four days since he has threatened a lawsuit against his critics, including graduate students at his own university. He has not explained or apologized for that threat. 

There is a right-wing, online magazine called Quillette that is a home for people to publish their ideas about how race is real and black people are just dumber than white people, how scientists are afraid to talk about it, and regurgitate segregationist ideas about how the “equalitarian conspiracy” covers up the truth about racial differences. Naturally, they have now decided to ride to Hsu’s rescue. Hsu claims to be agnostic, on race differences in intelligence. But he seems to happily accept support from those who do believe in those differences. He claims everyone should be treated equally, but people who reject that idea rally around him. In their call to defend Hsu, Quillette simply recycles ancient arguments against racial egalitarianism that have been floating around the racist right for half a century. This time the strategy is what I like to call the “Lysenkoist Exchange.”

Stephen Hsu, among other questionable features, considers himself a friend of racist and Holocaust-denying crackpot Ron Unz. I wrote about Unz in detail here. Professional racist Steve Sailer also considers Ron Unz a friend. 

Kevin Bird is a graduate student, and it looks like Lehmann is trying to smear Bird by pointing out his opposition to the glorification of white supremacy through statuary.

Claire Lehmann's hypocrisy strikes me once again - I criticized Bo Winegard's race science mongerism in Quillette two years ago on my personal blog (and continue to do so on this blog) and Lehmann had a meltdown about it, screaming I was " bullying and smearing" him, a wee little grad student.

I "smeared and bullied" Winegard by truthfully recounting his beliefs and expressing my contempt for same. Lehmann is trying to smear Bird by noting he's opposed to public art that glorifies slavers and white supremacists. But that doesn't actually smear him, except with the right-wingers and racists who adore Claire Lehmann.

To get a really good idea of the racist bubble Claire Lehmann lives in, observe her tweet about the statues to white supremacists and slavers:

"No-one" meaning no-one among the race science mongers and white supremacists and Confederacy apologists and eugenic fans and Koch-funded libertarians that comprise Claire Lehmann's social and professional world.

There is a grassroots organization in New Orleans devoted to removing statues raised to the glory of the Confederacy called Take 'Em Down NOLA which has been around since at least 2015.  And of course the Southern Poverty Law Center, but I guess Lehmann doesn't think of them unless she's urging someone to baselessly sue them. 

Certainly none of them count as "someone" in the book of failed human being Claire Lehmann.

Bo Winegard is supporting the cause of his boss.

I wonder if Winegard feels that he has to kiss up to his boss even more than before, Quillette recently put hard-core hereditarian Colin Wright on its payroll and Winegard has some competition.

I think Quillette has become the gateway drug to the wingnut welfare system so beloved of rightwingers.

UPDATE: PZ Myers also makes good points.

Mad about Mamdani - Lulu Lemon is soured on New York's future mayor

 I think someone in the Dispatch
graphics dept. is secretly opposed to the
gutter racism represented by
Claire Lehmann
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Claire Lehmann, gutter racist from Australia, is mad about Zoran Mamdani, the next mayor of New York City.

You see, Lehmann and her right-wing cohort are harboring the delusion that Lehmann is a journalist because the gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) gave her a journalism award at the 2025 annual ISIR meeting of gutter racists.

So the Jonah Goldberg-founded trash magazine, The Dispatch recently featured an article in which Lehmann laments the popularity of Mamdani.

Before I get into the article, I will say that the Dispatch runs a magnificently unflattering image of Lehmann on her author page, which makes me suspect that there might be one - but only one - member of the Dispatch staff who is opposed to racism.

In the article, Lehmann frets that if Mamdani becomes mayor of New York City, it might threaten the white nationalist fascism that she and other toadies of Peter Thiel are working so hard to achieve:

Which brings us back to Mamdani. The son of a postcolonial academic and a filmmaker, he is, in every sense, the next generation of wokeness. He combines the cultural fluency of elite progressivism with the language of bottom-up economic grievance, bridging two worlds that rarely align. As al-Gharbi points out in his book, until now, wokeness has been largely an elite project, preoccupied with identity issues of race, sexuality, and gender, as opposed to economic inequality. But if this movement mobilizes the working class and the downwardly mobile middle classes, it will no longer be confined to the campus or cultural niches. On the contrary, it will ignite into a truly mass movement.

Like many who support Mamdani, I am not a socialist. But given Mamdani's clear pro-New York City policy plans and the outright evil of the other leading candidates Trump-boy Adams and sexual predator Andrew Cuomo - ALSO a Trump-boy -  I am absolutely thrilled to be one of those who will vote for Mamdani. 

Freaking out far-right racists like Claire Lehmann is just the cherry on top. 

I'll be thinking of you when I check the box for Mamdani, fascist biznatch.

Lehmann was absolutely thrilled with the NYTimes' racist-fueled attack on Mamdani - and I suspect she was part of the organized effort against him - in alliance with the most revolting racists like Jordan Lasker, aka "Cremieux."

Because Claire Lehmann is not a journalist, she's a racist right-wing political operative living off right-wing racist plutocrats.

Also in the article, Lehmann brags about her recent racist and misogynist activities:

Earlier this summer, I traveled to the University of Buckingham for the inaugural conference of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science—a gathering that focused refreshingly on analysis as opposed to polemic. Speakers included American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, Dispatch contributor and political scientist Yascha Mounk, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, and Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker—as well as many others—each examining hyper-progressivism from different angles. I also presented at the conference, with my contribution focusing on wokeness through the lens of gender.

Neo-Nazi, pedophile defending Emil Kirkegaard was also in attendance although Lehmann doesn't mention it. I think it's very likely Kirkegaard helped fund the conference, one of the biggest public round-ups of gutter racists outside of the annual ISIR meeting.

Lehmann gave a "how I became a gutter racist" speech while the ISIR was giving her the journalism award. I will be writing about that and her grotesque racist career soon.

Ezra Levant -> Claire Lehmann -> Andy Ngo -> Donald Trump

I've mentioned a couple of times that Andy Ngo and his Republican committeewoman lawyer Harmeet K. Dhillon want to participate in Trump's re-election campaign through hyping Ngo's clash with Antifa, for use as a tactic to deflect from Trump's raging racism. 

Looks like it's working beyond their wildest dreams.

I'm not sure where Trump got the idea of Antifa hitting people over the head with baseball bats, not even Claire Lehmann tried that one, although I guess it isn't any worse than a "chemical attack" as Lehmann claimed, without evidence.

What's even more significant about Lehmann's tweet, more significant than the chemical attack claim or the way that Fox News has been hyping the Antifa story, is Lehmann declaring Andy Ngo a "valued member of the Quillette team."

Quillette, which has been aiding and abetting Andy Ngo's grift for years, was created by Claire Lehmann, who was an Australian correspondant for Ezra Levant's Rebel Media. 

Here is Lehmann appearing in a Rebel Media episode along with Gavin McInnes, who is back at Rebel Media.

In the summer of 2017 Rebel Media looked pretty bad. As Canadaland wrote:

The Rebel Had An Awful Lot Of Sympathy For The White Supremacists In Charlottesville

Just after 1:00 this afternoon, Rebel Media personality Faith Goldy captured one of the clearest videos of the car that mowed into anti-racist protesters at the apparent culmination of the “Unite the Right” convergence of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The driver, who is in custody but has not yet been identified, killed one person and injured nearly 20 others. 

In the hours and minutes leading up to that moment, however, Goldy had spent her live Periscope broadcasts rationalizing the rally organized by white nationalist Jason Kessler — an “extremist” to whom the Rebel once paid the revenues from a video that contained material plagiarized from him — and complaining about what she saw as the unfair treatment of the alt-right by authorities. In particular, she expressed the (wildly incorrect) view that American police are more generous toward Black protesters than white ones.

It did not look good for Levant as Vice News noted:

And while Levant insisted “simply covering controversial figures doesn’t mean we agree with those controversial figures,” The Rebel has nevertheless used its growing platform — with some 400,000 Youtube subscribers — to push sensationalist coverage of the counter-protesters who showed up in Charlottesville over the weekend. Even in his statement aimed at toning down The Rebel’s image, Levant writes that “the alt-right is, in my mind — the mirror image of Black Lives Matter.”

Equating Black Lives Matter with the alt-right is the same "both sides" tactic that Donald Trump used in response to the Charlottesville violence. And it didn't help Levant much because Canadian candidate for Prime Minister, Andrew Scheer, distanced himself from Rebel Media.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer is distancing himself from The Rebel, announcing he will no longer do interviews with the controversial right-wing website until it changes its editorial direction. 

But the Tory leader has stopped short of explicitly denouncing The Rebel, which is under heightened scrutiny in light of the protests in Charlottesville, Va. 

"I am disgusted by the vile comments made by hate groups this past weekend. I believe there is fine line between reporting the facts and giving those groups a platform," Scheer told HuffPost Canada in a statement. 

"I have a positive vision for Canada and I want to share that vision with Canadians and talk about issues that unite us all. Until the editorial directions of the Rebel Media changes, I will not grant interviews to the outlet." 

Scheer granted interviews to the outlet during the Tory leadership race, as did other contenders. But he has faced pressure in recent days to denounce the website over coverage that was seen as sympathetic to organizers of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

Ezra Levant must feel avenged right now. His old protege Claire Lehmann is furthering the far-right cause. Andy Ngo, a valued member of Claire Lehmann's Quillette team is helping Trump deflect from charges of racism - charges that first surfaced most strongly during his presidency in Charlottesville, and which resulted in blowback for Rebel Media.

There is a slight problem with the Antifa tactic - Antifa, being a bunch of anarchists and random zanies likely hate the Democratic Party as much as the Republican Party.

But I am confident that Trump's ratfuckers will come up with a scheme to try to link Antifa and the Democrats. And Andy Ngo has already made an attempt to do just that.

Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web, Race Science and the Jeffrey Epstein files

Well that didn't last long. I called Claire Lehmann the voice of reason last month, but now, the woman who won the International Society for Intelligence Research's Constance Holden journalism award is ho-humming her way through one of the biggest stories of the year, if not the decade.

Claire Lehmann has a history of not caring if someone is pro-pedophilia as can be seen in her praise of Camille Paglia, who loves pedophilia so much she bascally declared it one of the pillars of Western Civilization.

Lehmann's circle of ghouls and grifters jumped in to agree with her about the lack of entertainment value from the Epstein files.

So who are these people who find underage rape by famous men so terribly tiresome?

Well there's Cathy Young, who mostly doesn't find underage rape interesting but she found it absolutely fascinating when a creepy guy published his ex-girlfriend's personal information in order to harm her as much as possible. Young seems to have a real fondness for Eron Gjoni, to the point where she appears to be trying to rehabilitate him, even though at the same time she got him to admit that he had no regrets about his grotesque and indefensible invasion of privacy.

I am convinced that Young has a serious case of internalized misogyny, right along with Lehmann, Paglia and Young's based Gamergate comrade, Christina Hoff Sommers, which is why, I believe, Young gets the maximum enjoyment out of seeing women, especially young women, in emotional pain.

She's also chummy with professional racist Razib Khan.

I've also mentioned Damon Linker on this blog. He's a thinktank creature who was mad that Trump was brought to justice, if only temporarily a few years ago. He's written for Lehmann's own gutter racist publication Quillette and signed the Harper's letter with the rest of the grifters and race pseudoscience promoters.

But let's not forget Matt Taibbi, who also finds stories about rape such a chore. Which is surprising, because apparently Taibbi used to find tales of rape hysterically funny and entertaining enough to write about in detail. 

Taibbi is part of Lehmann's far-right racist gang these days, which, considering all the misogyny in this crowd, is a perfect fit.

To most everybody's amazement, Lehmann was yeeted from X of all places, apparently for being bored with underaged-rape. Lehmann can be seen on Linked In complaining about it.

I find it amazing, all the people whose real names and jobs are displayed on Linked In, going public with their awfulness by supporting a gutter racist like Claire Lehmann. 

The suspension did not last long, and Lehmann is back on X now, which is the right-wing safe space, most of the time, and so a perfect home for her.

But what about Steven Pinker and Jeffrey Epstein?

I will be writing about that soon.

Jon Kay, editor at Quillette, refuses to deny Koch brothers funding

During the recent Twitter mobbing of a Canadian academic by the Quillette/Intellectual Dark Web/Rebel Media gang, I asked Jonathan Kay of Quillette several times, directly, whether or not Quillette gets funding from the Koch brothers, as I strongly suspect they do.

Kay refused to deny it.

During this time he called on Claire Lehmann to "smite" me when I was criticizing her and he played the old tactic of the Quillette/Intellectual Dark Web/Rebel Media to claim that if you criticize Lehmann, who is in fact a professional misogynist, that somehow means that you resent a woman for being successful.

But there's being successful, and there's having right-wing plutocrat sugar daddies support your right-wing media entity.

Now Lehmann blocked me on Twitter long ago because I harshly criticized her and "human biodiversity" proponent Bo Winegard for promoting race science.

But she still chimed in at Kay's behest - since she's blocked me I had to log into Twitter with a different account to get this screen shot. Of course she didn't address me directly, since she's a weasel like that.

If you think about this for two seconds you realize
that Lehmann's take on "smiting" makes Kay's
initial use of the term truly creepy.

I've already discussed Claire Lehmann's catty comments (along with Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young) about young fiction author Kristen Roupenian. That, combined with her response when Jon Kay summoned her to smite me demonstrates yet again that Claire Lehmann has the personality of a high school mean girl but without even a high schooler's wit.

It boggles my mind that Kay got to spend time with Justin Trudeau and yet now prefers to spend his time with people like Claire Lehmann and other members of the Quillette/IDW/Rebel Media gang.

Kay's mother, Barbara Kay, is a well-known far right-winger in Canada - yes there is a whole other world in Canada, my American compatriots - and so I guess preferring shit to Shinola is a Kay family tradition.

Barbara Kay is a fan of Quillette and has written for another rag, The Post Millennial which joined in on the Quillette/IDW/Rebel Media mobbing and smeared me while they were at it. I will talk about that soon.

Claire Lehmann loves race pseudoscience and hates women

It should come as a surprise to nobody that Claire Lehmann, founder of right-wing race pseudoscience rag Quillette, is still promoting race pseudoscience.

And Iona Italia, who interviewed Lehmann for her site Areo, was in full agreement with her. Italia herself has published articles in Quillette.

Now the reason that these two are so sleazy, besides their racism, is because they won't admit they get funding from right-wing plutocrats. 

It's been reported that Quillette gets funding from Peter Thiel, and when I asked ChatGPT if Peter Thiel had funded Areo, this was the response (my highlight):

There have been reports that Peter Thiel has financially supported Areo Magazine in the past. Areo Magazine is a digital magazine that covers politics, culture, and society from a liberal and rationalist perspective. Thiel is known to have supported a number of conservative and libertarian causes and organizations over the years, so it is possible that he has provided financial backing to Areo Magazine as well. However, I don't have access to up-to-date information on whether Thiel is currently supporting Areo Magazine or not.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT has been shown to be factually unreliable, so this must be confirmed by other sources.

And Areo publishes many of the same people who publish in Quillette and has published articles by extreme racists Noah Carl and Razib Khan, and neo-Nazis Bo Winegard and James Lindsay. All while claiming to be a liberal publication. I assume in order to move the "Overton window" - a concept Claire Lehmann is well acquainted with.

I didn't listen to the entire interview with Italia and Lehmann because there's only so much ninnitude I can stomach in one 24-hour period. I actually wanted to find out if Lehmann still admires pedophila-loving Camille Paglia and OF COURSE SHE DOES.

But as I was searching for the Paglia section I landed on the section right before, where they discuss their support for race pseudoscience:

Minute 47:35 (my highlights)

ITALIA

A lot of articles have been published in Quillette about links between race and IQ and about human biodiversity. In fact someone, a mutual of mine on Twitter says that you coined the term human biodiversity 1., you personally, which seems I think is probably incorrect? But I think that that is the thing that is probably on the Left causing the most anger, and I have even been the subject of a lot of kind of the backwash from that myself - an academic who has a very large following wrote this thread in which he said I was a fascist and racist 2.a and I had published lots of articles on race and IQ, and although I think it's perfectly valid to publish on that topic, um I've never published anything on that in Areo 2.b and I said this and all his examples were articles from Quillette. 3. Because he was confused, right who is associated where? What is your response to people who accuse you of having a kind of hierarchical notion of race that is based on differing average IQ or other kind of hereditary markers? 4.

 

LEHMANN

Well, I would disagree with anyone if they were to suggest that I had to have a hierarchical view of races. I mean, that's just completely wrong and I reject that completely. I do not think that all I don't believe the science suggests that all human populations, whether we wanted to describe them as racial populations or all humans of all ethnic backgrounds, I don't think we're all the same basically. And just as men and women are not the same 5. and this, this is not my opinion, this is just scientific fact. 

I guess, what we've been in trouble, what we've gotten in trouble for at Quillette is simply airing a hypothesis called the hereditarian hypothesis.6. Now the group differences in intelligence scores on standardised intelligence tests is a scientific fact. What is controversial is the hypothesis that these gaps may have a genetic, partially genetic component. Now, I'm not a scientist. I'm not doing research in this area. I am not going to make a claim one way or the other. These gaps could be entirely the result of environmental factors like poor nutrition, lack of vitamin D, whatever. But I think to rule out that genes may play some role is to be antiscientific, anti intellectual. So I mean we've published articles that have aired this hypothesis and but this hypothesis is completely taboo. In certain academic circles. 

But I mean we just as we don't apologise for running articles on the efficacy of vaccines and the stupidity of advocating for Ivermectin without good evidence,7. I mean, we will also publish articles about that plausible and valid scientific hypothesis when it comes to individual differences, intelligence and other human other factors important to human behaviour.8.

Now I have a little bit of back - I mean, I'm not a scientist and I'm not doing research in this area, but I was trained as a psychologist and I did learn about intelligence. I did learn about individual differences whilst at university. So I have some confidence in my ability to read scientific papers aroud these subejcts. So I'm confident that everything we've published at Quillette is scientifically valid. 9. 

But I certainly reject any notion that because there may be group differences or individual differences, and there may be differences in IQ scores, I certainly reject any notion that that suggests people are morally unequal 10. or unequal. In terms of their human worth, their value, that innate dignity, I think every human being on the planet is precious, and we all have equal we’re all deserving of equal human rights and and respect and dignity and I abhor ideologies which rank people according to racial groups.11. I think it's abhorrent and vile and I actually don't think there's anything I. I don't think there's any justification of it. I mean I I'm not going to, you know, if I have a sibling or one of my children is let you know schools, Warren and IQ tests and the other, I'm not going to rank them in terms of their moral values. You know, I love my children equally and I think, we have to be able to separate compassion and our love for each other as human beings from, you know, being completely identical on traits, measurable traits 'cause it's just impossible. We can't all be the same. We can't, you know, I can't have the same score as someone else on an IQ test 12., but we have to be able to treat each other equally and with equal dignity and respect. 13.

1.  Steve Sailer coined "human biodiversity" as I just mentioned a couple of days ago. Although it's not surprising if someone confuses Lehmann with Sailer. RationalWiki has a great summation of Lehmann in its Quillette entry:

Claire Lehmann, Editor-in-Chief who founded Quillette in 2015 — an anti-feminist crank, who blames feminists for obesity[12] and has made videos for the alt-right The Rebel Media. Lehmann is a proponent of HBD and was quoted by Hbdchick in 2014 for posting a definition of "human-biodiversity".[13] Lehmann follows more than 16 alt-right accounts on Twitter including Richard Spencer and Steve Sailer.

 

2. a Italia doesn't say who called her a racist and fascist, so I can't verify the claim - a Google search came up empty although it did find Italia defending racist E. O. Wilson, as reported by reactionary race pseudoscience clown Jerry Coyne.

 2. b  A lie - Areo published a pro-hereditarian article in 2017 by Quillette author Oliver Traldi called The Philosophy of Group Differences. Areo has also published notorious racist  Noah Carl, another Quillette author, and not only published neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, they published an article presenting his side of his "I was fired because they hate free speech!" campaign. Written by Christopher Ferguson who of course has also published in Quillette.

3. Understandable confusion, since Areo is Quillette Lite as I discussed four years ago.

4. Notice how Italia claims that IQ is an "hereditary marker."

5. But women are also different from each other - I very much like to think I am very different from right-wing ninnies Claire Lehmann and Iona Italia.

6.a  Sleazy sleazy Lehmann. First, Quillette doesn't "simply air" the hereditarian hypothesis, they heartily agree with it, as when Razib Khan agreed with Charles Murray that Black Americans are an existential threat - when Murray claimed Black people are genetically inclined to criminality.  

Lehmann commented on the article comment thread:

Not a word of complaint about Khan's and Murray's incredibly vicious, racist claims about Black American morality.

(Like much of Quillette content lately, the Khan article is now behind a paywall, but you can still see it via the Wayback Machine.)

6.b  Second, it's the ONLY hypothesis they discuss - they never present criticisms or alternatives to the hereditarian hypothesis. Probably because Peter Thiel is a great big racist.

7.  In the moderate abilitied-brain of Lehmann,  the hereditarian hypothesis is as scientifically valid as vaccinations.

8. 9.  Lehmann thinks the hereditarian hypothesis is "plausible." Probably because she's a racist. And stupid.

10.  Clearly a lie - see note 6.a.

11. Another shameless, easily-refuted lie, as Quillette is a firm supporter of Linda Gottfredson. Gottfredson likes to rank races as I documented here.  

Also Quillette employs Bo Winegard who is such a neo-Nazi he wants to use "racial demographics" to "preserve a country's demographic composition." Presumably in Winegard's mind, he and his friends will be in charge of ranking races to determine the best "demographic composition."

12.  Apparently Lehmann is not aware that IQ tests are scored within a finite range. Of course you can have the same IQ score as someone else.

13.  Unless you're Florence Griffith Joyner. Lehmann became an internationally-reviled Twitter main character for her vicious lie about Flo-Jo. I can find no evidence that Lehmann ever apologized for her false claims about the death of Griffith Joyner.

Now what did Lehmann say about Camille Paglia? 

Minute 53:00 (my highlight)

LEHMANN

It's been a little while since I read Paglia, but I do love her work and she has been very influential. She was, I discovered her when I was an undergraduate in English, I  studied English before I went into psychology. And she was the first person I found who actually criticised the post-structuralists. She was the only critic I could find who was willing to to push back on Foucault and Derrida and the others whose philosophical thought came to dominate the humanities, to its detriment. 

And so I loved her for that. I loved her for her criticism of post-structuralism, I loved her for her sex positive feminism. I consider myself a feminist, but it's a complicated kind of feminism 1. because I actually think that women have a have a lot of power. I don't think we're necessarily oppressed by the patriarchy. I also think that sexism exists. It's just that I think that women have a particular type of power that is, is not, that is female power and some some people might describe it as sexual power.2. That's certainly part of it. But I think female power has been under-appreciated by scholars and even feminists and but Paglia was one of the only thinkers who was able to conceptualise and articulate what female power was, and I found it just extraordinarily refreshing, empowering, invigorating to read her work and she's just such an original thinker. I mean, she she's she's not the most exquisite writer. Her stuff is a little bit punchy, but just the density of original thought in her work is just unparalleled, I think. I think she's just an international treasure. 3.

 

1.  I assume when Lehmann says hers is a "complicated kind of feminism" she means the kind of feminism where you despise women, as a group. This week Quillette is running a defense of Roman Polanski. The author, Peggy Sastre, is one of those misogynist boys-will-be-boys types. Or as the website Philonomist says, Sastre "is a journalist and writer with a PhD in philosophy of science, known for her polemical essays against feminism." 

But "asshole" is more to the point.

2.  So does Lehmann think that, for example, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of her particular kind of female sexual power?

3.  This is what "international treasure" Paglia said about pedophilia:

...As far as Ginsberg's pro-NAMBLA stand goes, this is one of the things I most admire him for. I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In "Sexual Personae," I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization. Donatello's historically pivotal bronze sculpture, "David" (1430), was my main exhibit -- a languidly flirtatious work that would get the artist arrested for kiddie porn these days. In "Vamps & Tramps," I said that Western moralism and hypocrisy have driven the matter underground and overseas, where impoverished Third World boys now supply the sex trade.

Allen Ginsberg was the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality. Like the expansive, sensual, democratic Whitman but unlike the twisted, dishonest, pretentious Foucault, he saw the continuity between great nature and the human body, bathed in waves of cosmic energy. Seen from this pagan perspective, Ginsberg's celebration of boy-love was pure and sinless, demonstrating the limitations of Judeo-Christian paradigms of sexuality.

So does this not bother Lehmann? If she has a young son, would she let someone who agrees with Paglia babysit him? 

Or is she too stupid or lazy to bother to do any research on Paglia before calling her an international treasure?

Lehmann and Italia - what a couple of dull tools, useful only to right-wing racist plutocrats.

UPDATE - I took a quick stroll through professional race pseudoscience hawker Razib Khan's tweets recently and found him promoting Italia promoting an idiotic "decoupling" article in rightwing Unherd from 2020.

From the Unherd article:

As a high-decoupler, Harris thought that it was OK to talk about what-ifs; if there are genetic components to racial differences, then we still need to treat everyone with equal dignity, etc: “I’m not saying there are, but if there are…” He thought he’d performed the ritual.

 

But for Klein, the editor of Vox, the ritual was not strong enough. Murray’s ideas are reminiscent of a grim history, in which pseudoscientific ideas about a hierarchy of humans were used to justify slavery or Jim Crow laws. For Klein (a low-decoupler, in Nerst’s taxonomy), you can’t simply take an idea out of its context like that. The context comes with it.

What utter bullshit. This tells you everything you need to know about the author, in addition to the fact that he writes for rightwing Unherd.

Harris did not simply ask "what-if" - he defended The Bell Curve by linking to an article in QUILLETTE written by Ben Winegard and his twin, Bo Winegard, which claims the hereditarian hypothesis promoted by The Bell Curve is correct. 

According to ChatGPT, Unherd's funders are funded by Peter Thiel  - my highlight.

UnHerd's website lists its supporters and partners, but Peter Thiel is not mentioned among them. It's worth noting, however, that some of the organizations that have supported UnHerd in the past, such as the Nuffield Foundation and the Legatum Institute, have also received funding from Thiel's charitable organization, the Thiel Foundation. Nonetheless, it's important to emphasize that UnHerd maintains editorial independence and the views expressed in its articles do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of its supporters or funders.

It's not just that the IDW-race pseudoscience industry is rightwing and racist, it's that they are so sleazy in their pretending not to be rightwing and racist. 

ChatGPT has something to say about Sam Harris and Peter Thiel - more about that tomorrow.

Claire Lehmann hits the big time

Claire Lehmann portrayed by the great Steven Brodner
I believe her pants are on fire.

Lehmann is described in Columbia Journalism Review this way:

The founding editor of Quillette, the right wing’s highly influential answer to Slate. Lehmann publishes members of the “intellectual Dark Web”—academics, journalists, and tech entrepreneurs who defend debunked race, gender, and climate science.

She even gets her own caricature by distinguished illustrator Steven Brodner.

The piece by Sam Thielman includes Lehmann in a rogues gallery with Kochs, Bin Salman, Murdoch and Trump.

And just think, not long ago Lehmann was spending her time contributing to Rebel Media and attacking people like me for criticizing the race science promoted by Quillette authors like wee little graduate student Bo Winegard. This tweet is from February 2018. Lehmann blocked my personal account on Twitter right after this. 

Please note Bo Winegard was in his mid-30s at the time Claire Lehmann defended him against "bullying" by a nobody with a blog and a Twitter account.

Razib Khan and Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) have both been mentioned many times on this blog.

I didn't actually boast about "getting Khan fired from the NYTimes" - I mentioned I played a role in the NYTimes offer to Khan being rescinded after Jamelle Bouie (among others) wrote about Khan's race science career. Bouie linked to a post on my personal blog written about Khan. I had been keeping tabs on Khan ever since he interviewed Steve Pinker on Khan's Gene Expression web site in 2006.

And the comparison of Khan to Winegard doesn't work - Khan got "fired" from the NYTimes when word got out about Khan's race science - my criticizing Winegard's race science on Twitter was hardly going to get him fired from Quillette - in fact, it's his advocacy of race science that most likely endeared him to Lehmann, and lead to his becoming an occasional contributor to Quillette and now apparently a member of the staff.

Catty Persons

Claire Lehmann, Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young are all members of what I think of as the IDW Misogynist Ladies Club - all three of them have careers built on hating women on behalf of right-wing men like the Koch brothers.

And I do mean misogynist, not just anti-feminist. I've noted Lehmann's misogyny especially, although Sommers and Young have had even longer careers championing the cause of those poor downtrodden men. And Cathy Young still has some serious apologizing to do, in my opinion, for the way she celebrated the Gamergate mob's campaign against women.

But nothing is more illustrative of the deep internalized misogyny of the alt-right Weird Sisters than their attitude towards fiction author Kristen Roupenian.

Roupenian's short story "Cat Person" was published in the New Yorker in December 2017 and "went viral" - clearly it struck a nerve with many people.

It's well-written - but the New Yorker is not known for publishing bad work as even Philistines like Lehmann, Sommers and Young must be aware.

"Cat Person" is about (spoiler alert) a college student who gets involved with an older man, she discovers he lied about being a "cat person" on his online dating profile, she has disappointing sex with him and she breaks up with him.

Now remember, this is a work of fiction. I can't find anything online by any of the three women that explains why they dislike her work so much as fiction.

And there is nothing overtly feminist about the piece - but just writing about a fictional woman's disappointment with a fictional man seems to be enough to enrage them. How dare she.

Lehmann, Sommers and Young have a very personal contempt for Roupenian, whom they never refer to by name. As you can see here, Cathy Young jumped right on the hate train, making a truly bizarre comment about Roupenian's success, and even one of her Twitter followers doesn't seem to understand her response.

Sommers conflates Roupenian with her story of a bad relationship to gloat about a work of non-fiction written by Roupenian recounting a man breaking up with her.

Claire Lehmann uses another work of fiction by Roupenian to tell us it's wrong and she, Claire Lehmann, knows what men really want.

Although Lehmann elsewhere ho-hums that she only got half-way through the piece.

But then Lehmann is rapidly getting a reputation as an ignoramus who doesn't read much at all.

Cathy Young, whose political views I criticized  (and this was even before I realized how invested she was in Gamergate) attacked me in a viciously personal way while discussing me with Steven Pinker's buddy Razib Khan over my criticisms of Khan's race science.

It should be obvious that an incredibly expensive lawsuit in federal court is how nobody wants to "get in the spotlight somehow." The belief that I would do anything to be famous, no matter how harmful to myself, says more about Young than about me.

I said in the previous post that Lehmann, Sommers and Young would not spend so much of their waking lives hating women if they weren't getting paid to do it.

On the other hand, I don't think the Koch brothers or the other right-wing men who support their careers really care about a young short story author.

So although I think the Catty Persons' motivation is primarily financial I also think there is something about the characters of all three women - something twisted and damaged - that makes them so well-suited to their professional careers of incessantly attacking women and women's aspirations.