Apologists for Quillette & Race Science

The Nation has published Donna Minkowitz's piece on Quillette Why Racists (and Liberals) Keep Writing for Quillette.

I knew it was coming because Minkowitz contacted me weeks ago to ask me about information I had posted on this site.

Overall the article covers most of the bases, although I was disappointed Minkowitz didn't mention Kevin Drum's defense, in Mother Jones, of Quillette race science as displayed in a review of Angela Saini's "Superior" in Quillette.

One of Quillette's editors Jon Kay of course denies Quillette's promotion of race science, and once again uses the Drum article to try to paint Quillette as a centrist enterprise.

I hope you're proud of yourself, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones.

Of course Pinkerite responded to Drum's piece: Yes, Kevin Drum, Quillette is defending phrenology.

The responses to Minkowitz's article demonstrated a high percentage of Quillette and race science fans are also supporters of Trump.

And then there are the allegedly liberal apologists for Quillette like Zaid Jilani.

By "non-white contributors" Jilani is referring to Coleman Hughes, kept around by Quillette to attack black people, most notably to argue against slave reparations, a move absolutely adored by rightwing media. 

In September of this year Hughes wrote an article in Quillette in which he attempted, I believe, to avoid the embarrassing fact of Quillette's support for race science by creating an otherwise pointless dichotomy of past-lens vs gap-lens:

The question of black progress, therefore, is less a matter of weighing the reality of progress against the reality of regress than it is a matter of looking at the same reality through two different lenses. Through one lens, progress means reducing the size of black-white racial gaps; let’s call this the gap-lens. But through another lens, progress means improving black outcomes relative to where they were in the past; let’s call this the past-lens. 

The rationale for choosing the gap-lens is this: if not for our racist history, the racial gaps we observe today would not exist. That history includes not only two and a half centuries of chattel slavery, but also the many and varied Jim Crow era policies, from school segregation to redlining, that prevented blacks from taking advantage of the American dream. To measure the width of a racial gap, this view holds, is to measure the depth of America’s failure to redress that history. What’s more, if we fail to close statistical gaps between blacks and whites, then we would be surrendering ourselves to live in a permanently racially-stratified society, a society in which—even if everyone were doing better than their parents—whites would hold more economic power than blacks in perpetuity.

The reason it is important for Hughes to claim we should stop talking about "gap-lens" - which is the difference between African American well-being and white well-being - is because per race science, the gap exists due to African American genetic inferiority.

By focusing on "past-lens" one only compares the well-being of African Americans of the past to that of African Americans at present and avoids the embarrassing fact that race science considers Claire Lehmann to be likely more intelligent by nature than Coleman Hughes.

If Hughes can get his readers to agree we shouldn't think about "gap-lens" he can avoid having to think about Quillette's race science position at all.

And Quillette's race science position is so firm it has its very own race science proponent on staff, as can be seen in Quillette's "Team" listing: Bo Winegard.

Winegard, along with his brother Ben wrote an article for Quillette that is much-beloved by members of the IDW, Sam Harris and Steven Pinker, "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" in which it is falsely claimed that critics of The Bell Curve have misrepresented The Bell Curve's hereditarian position on race and IQ.

More importantly, the article demonstrates the strict hereditarian view of race and IQ which rules out all other reasons for Black-White intelligence testing results gap except genetics. I guess we could call that gap-lens:

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

As Minkowitz responds:

Actually, there is a wealth of data showing that better education and higher incomes lead to higher IQ scores across racial groups.

Only a fool or a race science stooge can deny that Quillette is very clearly devoted to promoting race science.

Right before she quit the NYTimes Bari Weiss was planning a story on Quillette

Quillette's Toby Young pushing the right-wing "cancel culture" narrative of course:

I’m disappointed that Bari Weiss has resigned from the New York Times and not just because she was one of the few voices of reason on the paper. A while ago, I flew to New York at Bari’s request to be interviewed by her for a forthcoming profile of a group of maverick writers and intellectuals in what was billed as a follow-up to her famous piece on the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ — a kind of Junior College branch. 

Among those to be featured were the African American essayist Coleman Hughes; the Australian editor-in-chief of Quillette, Claire Lehmann; and the Swedish columnist Paulina Neuding. We spent an enjoyable afternoon together at the Times building on Eighth Avenue, having our photographs taken and being wined and dined by Weiss in the boardroom. I was looking forward to seeing the piece.

Every one of them is on staff at Quillette except Coleman Hughes

• Claire Lehmann — Editor in Chief, Sydney | claire@quillette.com
• Toby Young — Associate Editor, London | toby@quillette.com 
• Paulina Neuding — European Editor, Stockholm | paulina@quillette.com 

Hughes is apparently kept on by Quillette to attack Black writers and Black projects.

So my guess is that Weiss quit at least in part, specifically because she was discouraged from writing the Quillette piece. Young writes:

As Weiss wrote in her resignation letter: ‘Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it. If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground. And if, every now and then, she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.’

"Just two years ago" in May 2018 Weiss published her "famous piece" promoting the Intellectual Dark Web.

A month after that, Weiss can be seen partying with the Quillette gang.

Top tweet: Pamela Paresky is a Quillette author and works for the Koch-funded FIRE, Lenore Skenazy has been featured on a Quillette podcast, and Cathy Young is of course the contemptible GamerGate promoting Cathy Young.

Bottom tweet: Bari Weiss and Quillette author (also featured in the Koch-connected Spiked) Jacob Mchangama.

My guess is someone at the Times decided that Weiss had to choose between being a writer for the New York Times or being public relations coordinator for the "Intellectual Dark Web." And Weiss chose the IDW.

There were rumors that Weiss would be doing a project with Andrew Sullivan and Peter Thiel (IDW Eric Weinstein's boss) but so far nothing.

Young is trying to use all this for his own project:

I think the time has come to open a US branch of the Free Speech Union, the organization I set up in Britain earlier this year that stands up for the speech rights of its members. If you want to get involved, email me at info@freespeechunion.us.

Comedian Stewart Lee has more to say about Toby Young and his Free Speech Union here.

Steven Pinker: still undefeated as the world's biggest weasel

"Ferahgo the Assassin," by Steven Pinker's

hereditarian ally Emily Willoughby, an image 

made publicly available by Willoughby 

on Facebook. Willoughby borrowed the 

character's name as a pseudonym while 

writing in support of race pseudoscience. 

It's too perfect that a Pinker ally 

identifies with a humanoid weasel.

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

Although Steven Pinker was originally dubbed the world's most annoying man by someone else, I originated calling him a weasel. But I confess that while reading some of Pinker's latest book "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..." I found the flagrance of his weasellitude so breathtaking I'm amazed I was able to write about it outside of an oxygen tent.

In the chapter "The Instinct to Cancel" Pinker argues that it were better if we not discuss race and intelligence in public.

Fear not, Pinker has not given up on race pseudoscience.

I was alerted to Pinker's position by those who have the greatest self-interest in talking about race and intelligence because they have staked their entire careers and livelihoods on the issue: the neo-Nazis at Aporia Magazine.

In an article in Aporia called 'Pinker is wrong. We should "go there"' neo-Nazi Bo Winegard says:

Few topics inspire bad arguments as reliably as race differences in intelligence. So often have I responded to them that I have plausibly been accused of obsession. But as long as the bad arguments persist, someone must respond. Consider it a public service.

But of course Winegard is not doing anything as a "public service" - this is his full-time job. He works for Emil Kirkegaard's race pseudoscience and Nazi network, so brilliantly exposed by Hope not Hate a year ago:

In recent months, however, Aporia has dropped its pretence of balance, as evidenced by the interview that eventually took place with (Jared) Taylor in May 2024. Taylor’s interlocutor was Bo Winegard, Aporia’s new executive editor, who, on the website, has called upon his readers to “​​embrace” white identity politics and believes racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate.”

That's not to say that Winegard is only doing it for the money. I'm prepared to accept that Winegard is such a dullard he truly believes in race pseudoscience, that collection of pre-20th century European folklores presented as science from Social Darwinism to eugenics to Nazism to sociobiology to evolutionary psychology to behavioral genetics. 

I'm in favor of publicly discussing race and intelligence claims so that people who are not right-wing psychologists can gasp in wonder at how stupid race pseudoscience really is.

In the next paragraph, Winegard states why Pinker is so useful to the cause of race pseudoscience:

The latest comes from Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… It deserves attention precisely because it comes from Pinker, a celebrated academic and an outspoken defender of free speech and open inquiry. This is not some indignant progressive who made a career of castigating “racist pseudoscience”, but a rational centrist who has long argued against the left’s denial of human nature.

Pinker's also been called a "celebrity intellectual" by the New York Times.

In "When Everyone Knows...," Pinker makes the case for race pseudoscience while pretending to weigh the pros and cons of discussing the issue:

The case for not going there, to be sure, has many problems. It’s almost impossible to enforce. It faces the polar bear paradox: telling people not to think about an idea forces them to think about the idea. It may be hard to draw the line around the no-go zone so that it doesn’t swallow up neighboring territories, like the study of intelligence or of continental ancestry. It forecloses the possibility of obtaining decisive evidence that racial differences are wholly environmental and eliminable, with all the social benefits that would bring.

And it may be too late. Our era is obsessed with racial differences, attributing them unquestioningly to racism, which only invites curious people to wonder whether they might be attributed to other causes, intensifying the regime that criminalizes such curiosity. As the writer Coleman Hughes has argued, there are good reasons for even the most open-minded people to want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation. But that tacit agreement should be a part of a larger commitment to color-blind policies in public and private life.

Coleman Hughes is in a tough spot - he's Black but has taken money from race pseudoscience-promoting Quillette -  so it is in his self-interest to "want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation." With Pinker's apparent approval, Hughes offers a deal on behalf of hereditarians along the lines of: "we won't mention that Blacks are genetically inferior if you promise to stop making efforts to ameliorate systemic racism via programs like DEI." 

Pinker hates DEI.

Pinker is so comfortable with race pseudoscience that this year he had a byline in Aporia, then appeared on the Aporia podcast.

For Pinker, being a true believer in race pseudoscience has only ever been a minor inconvenience in his progress as a celebrity intellectual. I've found only three times when the issue was raised by the mainstream press: 

• when fellow celebrity intellectual Malcolm Gladwell called him out in 2009 for using data from professional racist Steve Sailer; 
• when the British liberal newspaper the Guardian asked him about Sailer in 2021;
• and when the Guardian wrote about his appearance on the Aporia podcast this year. Pinker's most groveling sycophant Jerry Coyne could be seen whining that the Guardian would dare discuss that appearance.

I am convinced that Pinker's strategy, in order to promote race pseudoscience while maintaining a career as a celebrated academic/rational centrist/celebrity intellectual, is to loudly claim he is opposed to racism - he told the Guardian that racism was stupid - while at the same time promoting the careers of racists who will go there for him, from Sailer, to Razib Khan, to Linda Gottfredson to Claire Lehmann to Richard Hanania to Bo Winegard. 

In his book, Pinker mentions the ISIR meeting participant Cory Clark with approval a couple of times (including to mention she's co-authored a paper with him) but doesn't mention she has worked for Emil Kirkegaard, and when he notes another paper Clark co-authored, fails to mention Bo Winegard is one of the co-authors.

Because that's just the kind of weasel that Steven Pinker is. 

The book's reference section includes racists, hereditarians, evolutionary psychologists and right-wing reactionaries: Lee Jussim, Nathan Cofnas, Roy Baumeister, David Buss, Richard Dawkins, Alice Dreger, Jonathan Haidt, Carole Hooven, Eric Kaufmann, Greg Lukianoff, Donald Symons, Lawrence Summers, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides and Matt Yglesias.

Pinker talks about journalists muzzling themselves:

Journalists, too, despite their ironclad commitment to freedom of the press, muzzle themselves in particular circumstances. They may, for example, choose not to identify confidential sources, juvenile suspects, the victims of sexual assault, or details surrounding prominent suicides. They may decline to publish the manifestos of rampage shooters, or train a camera on sports fans running onto the field.

But he doesn't seem to appreciate how this has helped his career, how his weasellitude is enabled by most journalists being too chummy with celebrity intellectuals to dare ask anything potentially embarrassing. After all, Pinker might get huffy as he did when the Guardian dared ask:

Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website..

I know exactly how high the bar is for journalists to care about the pro-racism activities of celebrity intellectuals like Pinker. Back when the New Yorker was helping to promote behavioral genetics via a glowing profile of Kathryn Paige Harden, I had a brief exchange of emails with the profile's author Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a frequent New Yorker contributor. He said:

If you have emails between Pinker and Sailer, I will gladly review them. Otherwise, I think I'll hold my own counsel on the stories that I do... 

Now we do know about letters between E. O. Wilson and ultra-racist J. Philippe Rushton, which did seem to convince some people that Wilson was a racist. But the reason the correspondence was significant was that it provided evidence that Wilson used his celebrity intellectual powers to help advance Rushton's career.

But we don't need emails between Pinker and Sailer, there is plenty of evidence that Pinker has helped to promote the career of Sailer and many other racists as I've documented for the past seven years on this blog. And by the way, Pinker could be seen promoting Rushton too, on Boing Boing in 2009.

For journalists like Lewis-Kraus, which is almost all of them, Pinker can promote all the racists and appear on all the neo-Nazis podcasts in the world, he will always be acceptable as long as he doesn't record a precise declaration of his beliefs. The rest of us are forbidden from drawing conclusions based merely on a quarter century of Pinker's activities.

But if Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazis does not faze journalists (except the Guardian), I doubt anything will.

So exactly how many Quillette articles are republished by white supremacist American Renaissance?

American Renaissance is, per the SPLC:

Founded by Jared Taylor in 1990, the New Century Foundation is a self-styled think tank that promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites — although in hifalutin language that avoids open racial slurs and attempts to portray itself as serious scholarship. It is best known for its American Renaissance magazine and website, which regularly feature proponents of eugenics and blatant anti-black racists. The foundation also sponsors American Renaissance conferences every other year where racist "intellectuals" rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.

UPDATE: as of July 2021 the number is 25

TOTAL: 7
All except one since 2018

On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism
Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard, and Brian Boutwell, Quillette, June 23, 2016

Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap
Coleman Hughes, Quillette, July 19, 2018

The Dangers of Ignoring Cognitive Inequality
Wael Taji, Quillette, August 28, 2018

The Racism Treadmill
Coleman Hughes, Quillette, May 14, 2018

Is There Room in Diversity for White People?
Steve Salerno, Quillette, May 10, 2018

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity—A Review
Gregory Cochran, Quillette, July 1, 2018

Public Education’s Dirty Secret
Mary Hudson, Quillette, February 10, 2019

BONUS - an article by Jerry Coyne has also been reprinted in American Renaissance.

If ISIS Is Not Islamic, Then the Inquisition Was Not Catholic
Jerry A. Coyne, New Republic, September 13, 2014

Pinkerite is a member of the elite now

Plutocrat bootlicker Jesse Singal is one of the top accounts blocked by other accounts on Bluesky, along with Brianna Wu.

Here they are both at Bari Weiss's Free Press election party, along with other grifters and ghouls like Coleman Hughes, Michael Shellenberger and Nellie Bowles.

 

The reason Wu is part of the IDW/Quillette/Free Press gang of grifters and booklickers is very likely because she was offered a sweet deal to work for them and couldn't resist. After all, Bari Weiss has connections to both Peter Thiel and Harlan Crow, and other insanely fascistic billionaires who are eager to spend their money on the future, Mr. Gittes, the future!

It's a classic right-wing move to hire a member of any group the right wishes to attack, so they can say "see, even one of THEM hates liberals and the left." That's why Coleman Hughes is part of this gang of race pseudoscience promoters, and why anti-feminists Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers have careers at all. Now the gang has Brianna Wu to promote anti-trans views along with the likes of Jesse Singal.

Singal blocked my Pinkerite account, but I can still view his skeets via a Bluesky-affiliated website called Clearsky, which is also where I got the blocking statistics. I'm also blocked by Claire Lehmann and Razib Khan. But I can see their skeets on Clearsky too.

You can get an idea of how tight-knit the gang of bootlickers is by how fast Claire Lehmann and Razib Khan, both promoters of race pseudoscience beliefs - or as Lehmann prefers, "hereditarian" beliefs - jumped in to support Jesse Singal.

But also thanks to Clearsky, I've discovered I'm a member of the elite now. Razib Khan has blocked only a few Bluesky accounts: my two accounts and accounts for Jamelle Bouie and Molly Jong-Fast. And another person I wasn't familiar with, Erin Reed - but if she's blocked by Razib Khan, she must be good.

Adam Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams

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

The transcript is available here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bari Weiss and her allies

Although James Lindsay, Christian nationalist ally/business partner and Trump-lover and shameless hypocrite, was not mentioned in Bari Weiss' article about the Intellectual Dark Web, I was not kidding when I said that he is what passes for an intellectual in the IDW world.

Today we see Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, who then retweeted her retweet.

 

The "liberals aren't liberal, right-wingers are the new liberals" line that Weiss is promoting in this tweet is a leading strategy for those associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a strategy which Claire Lehmann admitted in her reference to the "Overton Window."

A stooge like James Lindsay, who claims to be a leftist while voting for Trump is a prime example of that IDW rat-fucking strategy.

Currently Bari Weiss' pinned Tweet is promoting a variation on the same IDW strategy, suggesting that American liberalism is a dangerous ideology now.

She's worried about the Jews, but she doesn't seem to be at all worried about the fact that leading IDW intellectual James Lindsay has a business partnership with a Christian nationalist kook like Michael O'Fallon, nor that he is cozy with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

It's striking how supportive these IDW-connected people are of each other, refusing to criticize each other for anything. It's almost as if they are all working for the same bosses and the bosses wouldn't like to see signs of disharmony among the employees. 

The possibility that the IDW gang are getting paid by a group of rightwing plutocrats would go a long way towards explaining the disconnect between what they say they care about and what they actually care about, well-illustrated by this Twitter thread.

As Jamison Foser points out, the people who signed onto the Harpers letter seem far more concerned about the well-known and well-paid being criticized for their right-wing opinions than the Trump administration's abuses of power. Bari Weiss seems perfectly comfortable that her pal James Lindsay is an outspoken Trump supporter.

It seems that anything goes in the IDW world as long as someone hates the 1619 project and "critical race theory" as James Lindsay does. 

Here he is demonstrating once again how to have difficult conversations through civility.

The IDW gang, although dominated by white conservatives, does have Black associates, whose primary focus is to attack the work of other Black people. Coleman Hughes, Quillette author who also works for the Koch-funded City Journal is a leading example. 

Here is a City Journal piece from yesterday, promoting Charles Koch's thoughts on "solving America's social problems."

Fourteen percent of the people who signed the Harpers letter had Koch connections and the initiator of the Harpers letter, Bari Weiss' friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, (the "self-expelled guy,") was given a job at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute some months after the Harpers letter was published.

Thanks to Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, I discovered another Black Quillette author,  Chloe Valdry, being promoted by Weiss as providing an alternative antiracism to DiAngeloism.

I'm a long-time critic of Robin DiAngelo & White Fragility, but I doubt that an antiracism campaign created by someone aligned with the race science-promoting Quillette is a significantly better alternative. Valdary's IDW connections indicate she is unlikely to have any problems with "racial essentialism" - or at least not enough to cut her connections to the IDW & Quillette.

Valdary runs a project called Theory of Enchantment and there is no information on its site as to where Valdary gets her funding. I have a few theories about that.

So why doesn't Bari Weiss criticize James Lindsay for supporting Trump, or for being friendly with Richard Spencer or for going into business with Michael O'Fallon? Why are Coleman Hughes and Chloe S. Valdary unconcerned that Quillette and the IDW promote race science? 

The answer as always is likely wingnut welfare. As Krugman said:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

The plutocrats who fund wingnut welfare are keenly interested in swaying pubic opinion, as we see with Charles Koch sharing his thoughts on "solving America's social problems." And they have access to incredible amounts of money. Why wouldn't they use it to buy people to support their right-wing causes? And they don't even care if the people they buy are smart - James Lindsay is a manifestly stupid oaf. But he had a success in the conservative world with his laughable hoax grift - for which he was paid although he refuses to say who paid him. Plutocrats don't care if Lindsay is a fool - he is willing to spend hours online promoting their interests which are then retweeted by the higher-profile Bari Weiss or praised by Steven Pinker.

And if we look at the things James Lindsay says online, when he isn't insulting those who question him or disagree with him, it's clear that one of the things his bosses care about most is erasing Black history in order to promote the notion that Black people are innately less intelligent and their failure to thrive, post-Emancipation is the fault of their own bad genes.

Bari Weiss' pal Andrew Sullivan is well-known for that very thing, from promoting the Bell Curve to his attacks on the 1619 project.

Pinker: the left is "out to lunch" to attribute crime to poverty and racism

During a mercifully brief interview with Graham Lawton of New Scientist, Steven Pinker, the world's most annoying man, compared the belief that crime is caused by poverty and racism to climate change denial.

...scientists are often surprised that there is so much denial... and it is sometimes attributed to scientific uh ignorance or scientific illiteracy... as it turns out itself a uh less than rational belief because it's not based on empirical studies of why people deny climate change... and what those studies show is that the deniers are actually no more ignorant of science than the believers, in fact a lot of people who endorse the scientific consensus are really uh out to lunch when it comes to the science of climate change, they think it has something to do with the ozone hole and toxic waste dumps plastic straws in the ocean. 

What does predict people's belief in climate change is just their politics the farther you are to the right the more denial there is.

Now that's a case in which the scientifically respectable conclusion is aligned with the left but there are also cases that go the other way, where it's the the uh the left that's out of touch with the scientific facts. 

The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism...

But since the media almost always treats Pinker's utterances as unquestionable pearls of scientific wisdom, Lawton did not ask Pinker what he thinks is the true cause of crime.

I looked around for other instances of Pinker discussing crime, and found a Pinker interview from May with his fellow Quillette author Coleman Hughes. While Hughes is a Black American, he is also an apologist for race pseudoscience and a Koch employee, via the Koch-funded City Journal, and I wondered if Pinker was going to go all-in on a race pseudoscience explanation for crime.

Instead what I found was Pinker said something different about racism and crime:

HUGHES

...But I want to ask now a deep and basic question relating to human nature and a kind of fundamental disagreement on what human nature is and how that relates to violence. And and the question, which is deceptively simple, is: "What is the cause of crime? What causes people to commit crime? Does the question make sense? If so, why or why not?" And just how do you view that--because and the context is, most people I talk to about this issue take it for granted that crime is, you know, we know the causes of crime--poverty, inequality, systemic bias, hopelessness, despair. And I have no doubt that that is true in some cases, but I - I - I've been persuaded by by by many arguments that sort of hold that human nature can can kind of just tend towards this to begin with. 

So, where do you stand on that? And how do you, how do you think of that? 

PINKER

Yeah, there are ah, there different kinds of crime and there are different people who commit them out of different motives. Generally, it's certainly true that a lot of crime occurs in poor neighborhoods. And poor people are more likely to commit violent crime. It's not true, necessarily true of violence in general, especially through history when it used to be the aristocrats that had their armed retinues and would engage in contests of honor and revenge, dueling men men of honor as in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet when two aristocratic families have a a street fight. 

So it's, that's not a given, but it tends to be true now. In general it's--although there are many causes of crime--they're not all racism and inequality, the ah especially not when it comes to changes over time.

So apparently Pinker does think that racism and poverty are causes of crime, just not the only ones. 

It would appear that in May 2021, Steven Pinker did not believe "leftists" were incorrect to the point of climate-change-denial-incorrectness. But in December 2021 he did.

Did Steven Pinker change his mind between the May and December? Or is this yet one more example of weak and strong pinkerism? 

Did Pinker change his response based on his audience, the way Pinker's buddy Razib Khan did on the issue of "white supremacy"?

Pinker's interview with Hughes demonstrates Pinker's utter obtuseness - it must be based on his own political leanings - when it comes to data:

PINKER 

...The great American crime decline, which began in 1992, which saw rates of violent crime plunge to half their levels in you know, in New York it plunged 75 percent. This was during a period of rising inequality. And even though there've been there was a slight deep systemic decrease in racism--not enough to have brought crime rates down that quickly, 50 percent in eight years...

We saw in "Better Angels" that Pinker attributed Black American high crime rates to low Black marriage rates. In spite of the data showing the opposite - marriage rates fell along with crime rates.

Pinker doesn't say what metric he is using to determine "inequality" here. But we do have one useful metric, which involves looking at data, so maybe that explains why Pinker missed it: 

American unemployment began to fall after 1992.

And Black unemployment rates, while historically higher than white unemployment, also fell at the same time.

Seriously, what is wrong with Steven Pinker? Is he incapable of the tiniest effort to find data?

I'm not the first to be baffled by Steven Pinker. Way back nineteen years now, Louis Menand wrote the perfect Pinker review and said:

...Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue...

The paragraph captures the "having it both ways" phenomenon seen repeatedly in Pinker's public opinions.

In the Hughes interview, right after Pinker claimed, without evidence, that inequality rose after 1992, he said this:

And even though there've been there was a slight deep systemic decrease in racism--not enough to have brought crime rates down that quickly, 50 percent in eight years--a lot of crime is opportunistic. People, there's a strong correlation between people who commit crime and lack of self-control.

Now "self-control" is a favorite subject of the biosocial criminologists, and they believe Black people possess less of it. As the reliably blunt rightwing biosocial criminologist John Paul Wright wrote:

While self-control is an important executive function, so, too, is intelligence. Indeed, there is no other individual variable as studied as intelligence. While hotly debated, thousands of studies of millions of individual intelligence scores indicate that IQ follows traditional racial categories (Rushton & Jenson, 2005). Asians have an average IQ of 106, Caucasians 100, and Blacks 85 (Lynn, 2006; Sarich & Miele, 2004)…

...Self-control and IQ covary, so that individuals with low self-control are also more likely to have low IQ. These deficits are potent enough to predict many of the negative life-course factors that afflicted individuals will experience. Longitudinal analyses of cohorts of individuals demonstrate that these individuals will face multiple problems across their life- course and that their self-limiting choices will show a high degree of continuity. Most will fail at their education and will then encounter problems in employment… They likely will live a fluid existence, relocating from place to place but often within the same economic stratum (Wright & decker, 1997). Finally their relationships will frequently be marred by conflict, unfaithfulness and unreliability. This pattern holds for anyone with deficits in executive control functions, black, white or Asian, but due to the distribution of low IQ and low self- control found in black populations, it is more often reflected in the lives of blacks.

And

Those passages were published in "Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research" edited by Anthony Walsh and Kevin Beaver.

I was aware that Steven Pinker promoted Brian Boutwell, a biosocial criminologist, but I wasn't aware how connected Pinker was to biosocial criminology until recently. I will be discussing that soon.

Jerry Coyne on the SPLC

Christina Hoff Sommers gloating about SPLC

Steven Pinker fanboy Jerry Coyne wonders whether the Southern Poverty Law Center is going to die.

The SPLC has not been shy about criticizing members of the IDW - Coyne mentions two of them in his piece, Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, married to rightwing political operative and sometime economist Niall Ferguson.

SPLC has also made unflattering mentions of other IDWers including Sam Harris, Christina Hoff Sommers, Stefan Molyneux, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson,  Milo Yiannopoulos - in fact it looks like Steven Pinker might be the only IDW who isn't mentioned in a negative way by the SPLC.

So of course the IDW bitterly hates this venerable organization devoted to fighting racism and sexism.

Coyne cites a recent New Yorker article about SPLC which details its organizational dysfunctions.

Having worked for a variety of organizations over my career, from huge corporations to tiny start-ups to non-profits to government agencies to food co-ops, it doesn't sound all that remarkably bad. It's an organization run by fallible human beings. An organization that is currently cleaning house, which is exactly what it should do.

Coyne writes:

Author Bob Moser worked for a while at the SPLC, and observed some of its dysfunctional culture before leaving. In fact, the racism and sexism was a standing joke at the operation

Then he quotes from the New Yorker piece.

It's hypocritical that he should be so concerned about racism and sexism at the Southern Poverty Law Center when Quillette, which he has praised and which Pinker has written for, is devoted to racism and sexism - carefully couched as science, of course. Utterly crappy science, but the right-wingers who look to Quillette as a shining beacon for their beliefs aren't too picky about the science - it's good enough for them that someone is comforting them: oh no, you and James Damore and Bo Winegard aren't racists and sexists! You're just pro-science!

Quillette's author line-up has long been a sausage party, and looking at every byline currently listed on Quillette today, it still is. I count 31 names of which 6 are women, one of them is Quillette's founder.

Don't hold your breath waiting for Jerry Coyne to complain about that.

1. Mallen Baker
2. Jaspreet Sigh Boparai
3. Tomas Borgardus
4. Spencer Case
5. Jonathan Church
6. Lauren Cooley
7. Libby Emmons
8. Jeffrey S Flier
9. Daniel Friedman
10. Raphael Tsavkko Garcia
11. Blake J. Harris
12. Cameron Hendy
13. Coleman Hughes
14. David G. Hughes
15. Max Hyams
16. Jonathan Kay
17. Claire Lehmann
18. Matt McManus
19. Kathrine Jenson Moore
20. Paulina Neuding 
21. Clay Routledge
22. Steve Salerno
23. Gideo Scopes
24. Zachary Snowdon Smith
25. Debra Soh
26. Bradford Tuckfield
27. Graham Verdon
28. Russel T. Warne
29. Mark S Weiner
30. Bo Winegard
31. Jacob Willer

A major problem with SPLC, it appears to me, is that it's been run for too long by aging white men with 20th-century mindsets. Much like the New Atheists where Sam Harris, at age 51 is the spring chicken.

Meanwhile Donald Trump is aligning with the IDW. There's even an article in the New Yorker about it and Quillette is celebrating it but for some reason it has avoided Coyne's notice.

Adam Rutherford, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Quillette

So it appears to me that Thomas Chatterton Williams is an intellectual light-weight, utterly lacking in integrity, which reminds me of Steven Pinker. 

Thomas Chatterton Williams is best friends with Bari Weiss, so it's no surprise that he's also friendly with her best friends, the IDW-Quillette industrial complex.

Here he is agreeing with Caliper Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, the most race pseudo-science friendly publication since American Renaissance.

Where Williams aligns with the Quillette gang the most, it seems, is on the issue of reparations. Quillette promoted the career of race pseudo-science apologist Coleman Hughes until he ended up being famous as the Black guy who opposed slave reparations in Congress.

Hughes is on the Koch payroll, just like Thomas Chatterton Williams.

We also see Williams snarking about Ta-Nehisi Coates with Quillette author Chloe S. Valdary who also happens to be a fan of man-boy love lover Camille Paglia.

Valdary runs a project, Theory of Enchantment, that appears to have no visible means of funding, so it's likely supported by the standard right-wing plutocratic money that funds so many people in the IDW/Quillette industrial complex.

 

So Thomas Chatterton Williams is pretty cozy with Quillette people, but his friendly colleague Adam Rutherford is definitely not. You can see Rutherford's contempt for Quillette when he mentions it during his interview with Williams.

Rutherford the moment he begins to say "Quillette."

Since he is a critic of race science, and doesn't worship dead famous men as gods, Rutherford is a natural enemy of Quillette. Recently Quillette ran an article by Sean Welsh complaining that Rutherford was not sufficiently respectful of Francis Galton's Great Man of Science status enough to prevent Rutherford from mentioning Galton's support for eugenics. 

Of course Quillette is pretty OK with eugenics, its London editor is Toby Young, known for his support for eugenics. 

I expect Welsh would plotz to see Rutherford calling Voltaire a hideous racist while receiving the Voltaire Medal. 

In spite of all that, I was surprised to see the beginning of this Twitter exchange between Rutherford and Claire Lehmann. I was just saying how extremely diplomatic Adam Rutherford usually is, so he must really despise Quillette to respond that way.

Please note that Lehmann starts the Twitter thread below by retweeting race-obsessive creep and friend of Steven Pinker, Razib Khan.

In that last tweet we see Lehmann griping because Rutherford gave a good review to Angela Saini's book "Superior: The Return of Race Science." Lehmann herself made sure to give the task of reviewing the book to notorious racist Bo Winegard and race pseudo-science extremist Noah Carl. 

But Rutherford almost immediately switches back to his customary diplomacy, conceding a point which I think he should not have conceded.

I had to laugh at Lehmann trying to make Rutherford's reasonable request for a response to a point into "men who have the gall to tell me what to do." 

Dear baby Jesus she is such a clown. As Seth Rogen recently discovered.

I understand why Rutherford usually tries to be nice to the race pseudo-science gang. His job is science communicator. He's not interested in checking to see if Thomas Chatterton Williams is utterly lacking in intellectual integrity, one moment acting as though he has a gotcha moment proving that race is biological on August 12, then on August 18 agreeing with Adam Rutherford that race is not biological.

That's why Pinkerite is here, to point out what absolute weasels people associated with the IDW/Quillette industrial complex are, and I feel no need to be diplomatic about it. 

Although I don't think I could ever be as perfectly shameless as Steven Pinker or Claire Lehmann.  

I like to think of myself as an American cultural critic and author, like Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Except of course I don't take money to be an activist for democracy-hating Charles Koch.