Is Bo Winegard ready to teach at Williams College? What about the University of Chicago?

Bo Winegard has a Substack, dedicated to racism, called Aporia

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Naturally Aporia is on Substack because Substack is run by a bunch of Thiel-connected ghouls who find racism perfectly acceptable to publish.

***

Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago and Luana Maroja, of Williams College recently co-wrote a reactionary political screed in the Skeptical Inquirer, in which they presented racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard as a victim of Marietta College - although they don't mention the college by name:

But the central question about genetics in the culture wars involves behavioral characteristics of different populations and ethnic groups, with differences in intelligence being the subject deemed most taboo. In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry. Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.

They must both be aware of Winegard's long career of supporting "race realism." So why would they dishonestly present him as "merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups"?

Marietta College never released a statement on why it declined to invite Winegard back, but it seems that Coyne and Maroja are convinced Winegard was a victim of political correctness. 

So here's my theory: Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja want "race realism" taught at University of Chicago and Williams College and they'd like Bo Winegard to do the teaching.

I assume neither Coyne nor Maroja would agree to work for their respective colleges if they believed they were too woke to teach race realism. And Coyne, in particular is obsessed with any signs of wokeness. 

As P.Z. Myers noted, Coyne and Maroja are academic insiders:

It’s somewhat peculiar to read the complaints about a dogmatic stranglehold from these people. Coyne is a well-known, established, and successful scientist — he is a graduate of Harvard, and is now an emeritus professor of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious institutions of evolution research in the country. Maroja is a full Professor of Biology, and Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College. I don’t see how they can complain that their careers have been “strangled” by the Left.

Coyne and Maroja are the establishment.* Their careers are built on convincingly supporting the dogmas of biology (which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.) They have immense amounts of academic power and influence, and have far more potential to be the strangler, rather than the strangled. Yet somehow they have the idea that science is being politically purged by progressive social justice, which they claim doesn’t care about truth.

I am no expert on the politics of academia, but it appears to me that both of them have the clout required to get Bo Winegard a job at their colleges. Much like Steven Pinker manages to hook up his fellow proponents of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology.

And after all, if "race realism" is good enough for Marietta, it must be good enough for Williams and UChicago.

Along with multi-decades-long professional racist Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard is an absolute true believer in the essential inferiority of Black people. Which is why he's a defender of The Bell Curve's claims about the innate inferiority of Black people. And why Sam Harris used Winegard's article in racist shitrag Quillette to defend Murray. Sailer and Winegard are in perfect harmony with racist troll Amy Wax.

Of course Bo Winegard has "demographic concerns." You know, like the Nazis.

As long as Bo Winegard promotes the notion of white superiority himself, he will refute the notion of white superiority. What a pathetic racist loser.

UPDATE Bo Winegard is very chummy with Emil. O. W. Kirkegaarrd, who was too embarrassing, finally, even for the International Society for Intelligence Research.

P.Z. Myers bites back!

Excellent post on P. Z. Myers' site Pharyngula in response to the typically wrong-headed Jerry Coyne article in Skeptical Inquirer.

Favorite bites:

(Quoting Coyne): 3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions. 

Great. On this one, he cites me directly as the purveyor of this supposedly misguided claim. I wrote, “The fundamental premises of evo psych [evolutionary psychology] are false,” which is accurate, I did say that. I also said a lot more, explaining what those faulty premises are… but Coyne & Maroja omit that, for some unexplainable reason. Instead, they come up with an anodyne definition of evolutionary psychology: our brains and how they work–which yield our behaviors, preferences, and thoughts–sometimes reflect natural selection that acted on our ancestors.

One problem here is that I agree with that sentence, so once again, they have invented dissent where none exists and have hidden away the problem with evolutionary psychology. The idea that genes and evolution have shaped our behavior is accepted and not at all problematic, but Coyne & Maroja assert that opponents of evolutionary psychology deny the role of evolution on behavior.

Bluntly, that is an outright lie.

They think they can get away with it because they’ve obscured what premises of evolutionary psychology I consider false. It’s a quote mine.

Where I consider evolutionary psychologists to fail is in methodology and poor theory — they take the unjustified shortcut of assuming any modern behavior is the product of genetic traits that were locked in place in the Pleistocene, and are always the product of selection, and that therefore any hypothetical selective scenario they invent is valid and worth publishing as science. They seem to be entirely oblivious to alternative modes of evolution, treating natural selection as the only significant force, ignoring the facts of drift and migration. They are masters of the just-so story, building hypotheticals about ancient human ways of life and ‘testing’ them with surveys of middle-class students enrolled in Psych 101 courses.

I do not deny that human biology and behavior are the product of evolution, but rather that evolution is more complex than evolutionary psychologists imagine it to be, and that the tools of psychology are sadly inadequate to address the problem.

What I teach in the classroom:

Every species is the product of a long history of evolutionary forces, and those forces involve more than just a cartoonish idea of endlessly optimizing selection. You’ve learned about nearly-neutral theory, about lineage analysis, about the mathematics of comparing traits (they would have gotten all that in even my introductory classes), and that accurately determining the evolutionary trajectory of a population requires detailed measurement and observation and rigorous mathematical analysis. Please do apply what you’ve learned to behavior and psychology, but do it better than the evolutionary psychologists have.

And

(Quoting Coyne): 5. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.

Oh god, make it stop. Coyne & Maroja take a bold step in favor of race realism.
To be fair, they take a waffly stance, being ambiguous about how we ought to talk about ethnicities instead, about how many races/ethnicities there are, and how we can use race information to fine-tune medical treatments or even how we can solve crimes by reconstructing perpetrators from their genetic information (see previous section; no, you can’t). He uses these excuses to defend… Bo Winegard?

Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.

“merely suggesting the possibility” is a curiously tepid way to describe a guy who openly describes himself as an “ethno-traditionalist”, “cultural nationalist”, and “racial realist” and who calls Arthur Jensen his “intellectual hero.” He’s a loud and proud racist who thinks white people are superior! 

 Here’s how I handle this in my classes:

Don’t be a fucking racist goober. 

 

More seriously, in the last two weeks of my genetics course I gave the students a dozen peer-reviewed papers on how geneticists were addressing the issue of race, put them in groups, and had them give presentations on the papers they chose to discuss. Get into the literature, and you’ll discover most modern geneticists have little patience with so-called “scientific racism,” any more than they are interested in discussing “scientific creationism.” There are exceptions, obviously. Usually they’re posting on Quillette or other race-realist forums. Or publishing in Skeptical Inquirer or the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

The supposedly liberal Coyne is thrilled that his fellow race pseudoscience promoting ghoul, Andrew Sullivan, likes his garbage.

Jon Stewart helped Sullivan reveal what a right-wing reactionary ass he really is. Exactly reactionary old crank Jerry Coyne's kind of guy.

Oh look, racist Noah Carl is also a big fan of the sleazy racism of Coyne and Maroja.

The Skeptical Inquirer joins forces with rightwing political operative Jerry Coyne

Well you would expect something like this from The Skeptic, which is owned by extreme race pseudoscience supporter Michael Shermer.

But I didn't expect The Skeptical Inquirer would join forces with reactionary race pseudoscience ghoul Jerry Coyne and some creep I assume he met at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists, Luana S. Maroja, who apparently takes money from rightwing crackpot Peter Thiel's leading courtier Bari Weiss.

This is your brain on race pseudoscience
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It should be clear to everybody by now that Jerry Coyne is not a scientist - he is a right-wing political operative, probably taking money from Thiel or Koch or some other racist plutocrat. 

Coyne went after P. Z. Myers, who is a scientist. 

Coyne's utter lack of professional and personal ethics was on full display when he made a presentation at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (featuring racist troll Amy Wax) and mentioned Myers and described him as a "blogger" rather than a biologist. I'm amazed he didn't repeat that in the article:

3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions. The biologist P.Z. Myers joined several other critics of this field (once called sociobiology) when he asserted that: “The fundamental premises of evo psych [evolutionary psychology] are false.” Even social psychologists, who almost universally accept evolution itself, are far less enthusiastic about the idea that evolution explains important aspects of human psychology, social attitudes, and preferences.

But Myers’s widely accepted view is misguided, for the fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology is simply this: our brains and how they work—which yield our behaviors, preferences, and thoughts—sometimes reflect natural selection that acted on our ancestors. Nobody denies this for our bodies—palimpsests of once-adaptive traits that are no longer useful (wisdom teeth, tailbones, and transitory coats of hair in embryos)—but opponents of evolutionary psychology deny it for our behaviors. But there is no scientific reason for such duality. Why on earth should our bodies reflect millions of years of evolution while our behaviors, thoughts, and psychology, molded by the very same forces, are somehow immune to our past? The only way this could be true is if human behaviors lacked genetic variation, a sine qua non for evolution. Yet research has shown that our behaviors are among the most genetically variable human traits!

And so the “sociobiology wars” of the seventies, launched by E.O. Wilson’s eponymous book, continue under a new name, but the subject remains human exceptionalism—the view that we’re somehow nearly free of the evolutionary forces that molded behavior in other species. It’s true that the early days of evolutionary psychology included some “soft” research that proposed dubious and untestable adaptive hypotheses for our behavior, but now the field has reached an explanatory maturity that has to be taken seriously.

Coyne links on "misguided" to an article in - what, an important magazine on biology? Or a general magazine like Scientific American? No, he links to garbage Areo, which is basically Quillette light. 

This is a good opportunity to post again Myers' evisceration of evolutionary psychology, in a superb video.

Coyne mentions E. O. Wilson, who as we know, irrefutably, was a racist.

Now once Areo and Wilson are cited, you know that jaw-dropping racist bullshit will not be far behind. 

All the blather about GWAS and "individual differences" and how race is really really real is worth skipping because all you have to know about Coyne and Maroja is the way they describe career racist Bo Winegard:

But the central question about genetics in the culture wars involves behavioral characteristics of different populations and ethnic groups, with differences in intelligence being the subject deemed most taboo. In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry. Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.

I really hope Coyne's problem is early-stage dementia because otherwise he has no excuse for being such a sleaze. 

First, Marietta College did not release a public statement about Winegard's employment status, giving Winegard and a network of right-wing racist allies a chance to spin the issue as Winegard, Champion of Free Speech. 

Second, Winegard doesn't "merely suggest the possibility" - he is a hard-core true believer in race pseudoscience and agrees 100% with the hereditarian beliefs of The Bell Curve, which is why he is employed by Quillette.

Third, Winegard isn't only a race pseudoscience ghoul, he is a neo-Nazi with dreams of national racial quotas.

This is Jerry Coyne's example of a poor abused martyr for science. 

What a horrible reactionary ghoul Coyne has become. 

And the Skeptical Inquirer is a disgrace.

UPDATE: apparently Skeptical Inquirer has been on a downhill slide for years now, I just haven't been paying attention:

On Facebook:

Kavin Senapathy is with Martina Fern and
92 others.

March 18, 2020 ·

I have an update about how the Center for Inquiry and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have reacted to my recent Undark essay (https://undark.org/.../center-for-inquiry-race.../) in which I criticize their indifference to matters of race, racist pseudoscience, and the white supremacy among their ranks.
Wait for it …
Within days, they removed all of my Skeptical Inquirer articles and my Point of Inquiry episodes from their website...

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From the Undark article:

Meanwhile, scientific racism — the idea that there are biological differences between so-called races, often paired with a notion that the white race possesses superior intellect — has made a disturbing comeback, in tandem with the resurgence of white nationalist groups. This revival of racist pseudoscience has prompted widespread alarm in the scientific community, including a 2018 statement from the American Society of Human Genetics that denounced attempts to use genetics to “bolster bogus claims of white supremacy.”

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss

It looks like the usual reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes have been collected under one cover,  in a book called The War On Science ~ Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech and Open Inquiry and the Scientific Process.

Just in time to help celebrate the Trump administration's war on trans people, women and non-white people. 

People on Bluesky have published the table of contents and most of the contributors have been discussed on this blog. 

This gang of goons is not at all embarrassed to be grouped with ultra-racist crank Amy Wax.

And of course Steve Pinker is in there.

Let's review who's who in the world of politically-motivated pseudoscience wankery:

Dorian Abbot is advisor at the Bari Weiss grift known as the University of Austin (UATX); author at the far-right City Journal; participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

John Armstrong is a right-wing reactionary who likes to retweet racist Toby Young.

Peter Boghossian - a clown associated with the University of Austin, memorably portrayed in New Inquiry last year: 

"Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?”
I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.”

Boghossian attacked me for the thought-crime of being a nobody yet daring to publicly criticize celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker.

Maarten Boudry - Quillette author in league with Jerry Coyne

Alex Byrne is an anti-trans activist and married to Carole Hooven.

Nicholas Christakis supported racist Razib Khan's attack on a Scientific American author who dared to discuss - justifiably - E. O. Wilson's racism. 

Roger Cohen from what I can tell is known for being married to Amy Wax.

Jerry Coyne is best known for once being a respected scientist then turning into a right-wing political operative, appearing at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists and defending white nationalist Bo Winegard. That defense is probably the piece included in this book, since Coyne co-authored it with Luana Maroja and they are listed together in the table of contents. Coyne is most recently known for writing an op-ed claiming trans women are delusional and inclined to sexual assault.

Richard Dawkins is another once-respected scientist who descended into evolutionary psychology crankery and reactionary politics, causing people to ask "what happened to Richard Dawkins?" Well known for promoting a bonkers conspiracy theory that a child was a fiendish bomb maker, in the embarrassing "Clock Boy" incident. 

Janice Fiamengo was a member of the far-right misogynist "men's rights" organization the Honey Badgers

Niall Ferguson is a right-wing reactionary political operative think tank creature, who tried to pull a political op on a college student and got caught - which did not hurt his reputation on the far-right. Appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Karleen Gribble is an anti-trans activist and ally of Carole Hooven

Solveig Lucia Gold appears to be notable only for being married to Joshua T. Katz

Moti Gorin is an anti-trans activist

Carole Hooven is a fan of the viciously anti-transgender "Gender War Cards" and a promoter of garbage evolutionary psychology theories and bullshit explanations for the reactions against Lawrence Summers' "women are losers" speech given by Summers when he was president of Harvard.

Geoff Horsman considers ultra-racist Amy Wax to be a "brave truth-seeker."

Joshua T. Katz is known for student-diddling. Self-declared friend of racist ghoul Amy Wax. On the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute.  Participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Sergiu Klainerman is a right-wing reactionary and Trump supporter.

Anna Krylov is a reactionary crackpot who couldn't reason her way out of a paper bag. I wrote of her logical incoherence in depth a few years ago. An organizer of Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Luana Maroja appears to be an undistiguished academic who expressed her support for white nationalist Bo Winegard along with Jerry Coyne. Participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Christian D. Ott - according to Buzzfeed, 

"Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student." 

Ott unsuccessfully sued for defamation two scientists who protested his hiring.

Bruce Pardy is a rightwing reactionary who claims  '“Socialized healthcare” is medical communism."'

Jordan Peterson - what hasn't been said about rightwing crank Jordan Peterson?

Steven Pinker - ugh - I've written so much about Pinker, but if I had to sum him up, I'd say he's a dissembler who claims to be opposed to racism while promoting the careers of a seemingly endless parade of hardcore racists from Steve Sailer to Richard Hanania.

Richard Redding is a right-winger associated with the Federalist Society

Arthur Rousseau appears to be related to Lauren Schwartz.

Gad Saad is a rightwing evolutionary psychology clown, Trump apologist and climate change denier. Appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
 

Sally Satel is on the payroll of the far-right American Enterprise Institute. Ally of Pinker, Hooven and Lee Jussim.

Lauren H. Schwartz is this anti-trans activist, who is apparently related to Arthur W. Rousseau, since she has also gone by the name Lauren Rousseau.

Alan Sokal became famous for going after the low-hanging fruit of postmodernism, then he allied with the far-right.

Alessandro Strumia is a misogynist hereditarian physicist. Like any standard sociobiologist, he basically believes that everything in contemporary society is the result of evolution - in particular, women evolving to be losers in everything from science to producing wine.

Judith Suissa is an anti-trans activist, co-author with Alice Sullivan

Alice Sullivan is an anti-trans activist, co-author with Judith Suissa

Jay Tanzman is a "freelance statistician" whose claim to fame seems to be that he's the boyfriend of Anna Krylov

Abigail Thompson  - this is the first time I'm hearing about Abigail Thompson, but it looks like she's in deep with Peter Thiel's Stanford-based gang of racists and right-wing political operatives. Thompson gave a talk for the Stanford Business School "Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar." The term "classical liberal" which Thompson used in her protest against DEI statements almost always indicates a libertarian who wants to seem less conservative. The right-wing racist rag Quillette (alleged to have been funded by Peter Thiel) is a big booster of "classical liberalism." The Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar is directly connected to Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (aka "Academic Freedom conference") and the Seminar hosts run the political gamut from libertarian to right-wing racist extremist. 

Speakers for the Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar include racist Cory Clark, racist Nathan Cofnas, racist Victor Hansen, "Catholic epidemiologist" Tyler VanderWeele, James Orr, another hard-core religionist, Quillette contributor Glenn Loury, Bruce Pardy, rightwing reactionary, Mia Hughes an anti-trans activist who works for University of Austin grifter and pro-nuke politician Michael Shellenberger's Environmental Progress, David Neumark a fellow at the conservative Stanford unit the Hoover Institution, Cato racist Ilya Shapiro, Charles Calomaris, a right-winger and at one time a University of Austin grifter, Jordan Lasker a eugenicist and racist (aka "hereditarian"), Roger Pielke, climate change denier, and Justin Huang, an assistant professor of marketing at Michigan State University who believes that "Trump has a public mandate to dramatically reshape the federal government."

At one Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar, run by Daniel Diermeier, you can see Amy Wax is one of the attendees. 

Amy Wax is notorious for her racist statements. She gave a full-throated endorsement of race pseudoscience at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Elizabeth Weiss was the third wife of the race pseudoscience gang's favorite "scientist" whose career was aided and abetted by E. O. Wilson, Jean-Philippe Rushton. Weiss appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Frances Widdowson is an author at racist Quillette, who hates Black Lives Matter. She participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

And Lawrence Krauss is the third person in this collection to be accused of using his position in academia to engage in sexual acts with or harassment against his students. In his case:

BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.

Here is a photo of Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker.

Great Man's Disease

Recently I quoted biologist P. Z. Myers talking about the problem with physicists, in this case Sabine Hossenfelder:

But then (Hossenfelder) did the stereotypical physicist thing: she studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe, energy and matter and mathematics, so she decided to slide over into a field she knows nothing about and explain it to us. That’s why people were pestering me to critique her recent video, titled Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? I guess having a Ph.D. in physics makes you an expert in psychology and sociology as well as biology.

I don't know if this happens more with physicists than other types of scientists, but it's been a named phenomenon since before 1996, as I discovered via Paul Krugman - from whom I also discovered the term "wingnut welfare."

Back in 1996, Krugman wrote:

In the scientific world, the syndrome known as “great man’s disease” happens when a famous researcher in one field develops strong opinions about another field that he or she does not understand, such as a chemist who decides that he is an expert in medicine or a physicist who decides that he is an expert in cognitive science. The same syndrome is apparent in some business leaders who have been promoted to economic advisers: They have trouble accepting that they must go back to school before they can make pronouncements in a new field.

This is an obvious issue for the scientists associated with the Intellectual Dark Web. Steven Pinker, a psychologist, Anna Krylov, a quantum chemist, Richard Dawkins and James Watson are all victims of great man's disease, which obviously can afflict women too.

In the case of Anna Krylov, for example, it is truly amazing that she can be so accomplished in her field and yet be an utter failure at reasoning, as I discuss on this blog. 

Her argument on the catastrophic dangers of "cancel culture," when examined for more than a minute, is incoherent: first she stacks the deck by declaring, seemingly at random, a wide range of things as examples of cancel culture, like 17th century murder by the Catholic Church; then she (and Pinker) mock anyone who thinks the names of science terms are important, while simultaneously claiming that changing those names is a threat to our very future; and then Krylov calls the rescinding of honors from murderous dictators an example of "cancelling" - which completely refutes her position that anything dubbed "cancellation" is pure evil.

And there are plenty more examples, most perniciously when Pinker, Dawkins and Watson support the seriously flawed claims of sociobiology.

One reason why it's hard to cure Great Man's Disease is because our idiot media accepts the high self-opinions of these scientists without question, turning the race pseudoscience-loving mediocrity Steven Pinker into a "celebrity intellectual." 

One of the symptoms of Great Man's Disease is the belief that you don't have opinions, only pure objective conclusions, based on perfect rationality, unpolluted by self-interest, while those who disagree with you are driven exclusively by politics and ideology. A good example is the conviction of Steven Pinker and his sociobiology gang that their critics have no actual arguments against their claims but rather are: 

People who belong or want to belong to a social group, whether centered around political views, or a country or school, ethnic or gender identity, can signal their loyalty to the group and its values by demonstrating their "moral purity."

And then Pinker ensures that he never hears any arguments from his critics by shutting out all but his most groveling fans. And the gullible, feckless media.

P. Z. Myers has an excellent post on this topic, about the case of Skeptical Inquirer and Coyne and Maroja:

Do they seriously think Coyne & Maroja’s BS is not ideological, and is entirely objective and empirical? Its conservative bias is naked and flapping in the wind, but apparently conservatism and prejudice and blind defenses of the status quo are not a subjective presentation of an ideology.

It’s only a must-read for anti-“woke” bigots who want their biases reaffirmed.

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - the tight-knit circle of Koch employees, Thiel flunkies and race pseudoscience promoters

Last week I did a quick survey of some of the speakers who will be in the upcoming Peter Thiel-led CPAC for racists, otherwise known as the Stanford Academic Freedom conference. 

The conference so dedicated to Academic Freedom that the keynote speaker will be Peter Thiel, who is not involved in academia except, I assume, to donate to it in order to garner influence for his right-wing democracy-hating political agenda.

So for the first round I looked at mostly people I recognized as promoters of race pseudoscience, and/or are on the plutocrat payroll, and I had written about many of them on this blog.

This survey of the remaining speakers, like the first survey, demonstrates what a shameless lie the "College Fix" promoted in its claim that the conference is a bipartisan endeavor. It is overwhelmingly slanted to the right.

Well let's have a look at the others:

Luana Maroja is a sociobiologist and a Koch-funded promoter of Koch's favorite claim, that there's not enough free speech for right-wingers on American campuses. Which probably explains why Breitbart loved her enough to spread what Reza Aslan said was a lie about a panel he did with Jamelle Bouie. Naturally Jerry Coyne and professional racist Steve Sailer are fans of hers.

Mimi St. Johns has a very close tie to Peter Thiel - she is currently the editor-in-chief of the far-right newspaper the Stanford Review, which Thiel founded in 1987. Thiel is still very involved with the Review: "While Thiel also makes financial contributions, he has hosted staff reunions at his home, and meets with the editors quarterly as a way to stay current with campus activities in general."

Dorian Abbot is an author for racist Quillette, funded by Thiel and also wrote an op-ed in Newsweek comparing affirmative action to Nazi Germany. His co-author was Iván Marinovic, one of the three Stanford Graduate School of Business Faculty Organizers. 

Fun fact - two of the speakers, Anna Krylov and Richard Lowery are also members of the conference Organizing Committee. The CPAC for racists is an extremely tight-knit group.

John Hasnas is a far-right winger on the Koch payroll via CATO and a contributor at the far-right Federalist Society.

I haven't found direct connections between  Peter Arcidiacono and race pseudoscience and/or right-wing plutocrats, although he seems to be popular with those types of people, probably because they feel his work can be used to oppose affirmative action. 

Solveig Gold is Joshua Katz's wife and predictably a right-winger. The New York Times ran a Better Homes and Gardens style profile about her last summer. 

Joseph H. Manson is a fan of some of the biggest crackpots and racists from the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette including Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Jonathan Katz (another speaker at the conference) and racist extremist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.

John Schendal Rose is an instructor at Duke University with a Master of Theological Studies. He was scheduled to teach a gender-segregated seminar in June 2020, The Moral Life and the Classical Tradition Seminar, "a week-long program for rising high school juniors and seniors as well as rising college freshmen interested in the ancient philosophical tradition and its influence in the Christian moral life." I hope he gets a chance to witness for Christ to Jerry Coyne, a militant atheist.

Speaker John H. Cochrane one of the three Faculty Organizers of the conference, is a Hoover man, like speaker Niall Ferguson and a member of the Koch network via CATO. He's written for National Review about his loathing of government funded healthcare, like a good right-wing libertarian would.

John M. Ellis works for right-wing plutocrats via the Sarah Scaife Foundation-funded National Association of Scholars, whining about political correctness ruining higher education. Rand-roids love him.

Erik Kaufmann is a Koch man via the Manhattan Institute.

Steven Koonin can be seen giving an interview to Ayn Rand fanatics in order to promote climate change denial.

Bjorn Lomborg is another climate change denier.

Jay Bhattacharya is identified as "a scholar connected to right-wing dark money" at Exposed by CMD and the article also mentions Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration which "recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

John Ioannidis is another Covid genius who "tried to convince President Donald Trump that locking down the country would be the real danger."

Richard Shweder is a right-winger who likes to whine about "identity politics" for the Koch-connected DonorsTrust-funded Heterodox Academy.

Hollis Robbins can be seen on Linked In promoting Koch man Tyler Cowen (also a speaker at the CPAC for racists) and she gave him an interview in 2019 here. She says something interesting in that interview:

"I don’t understand why founders don’t have more operas about them, why we don’t see operas and movies about Steve Jobs, about Peter Thiel, about Jeff Bezos. There’s the David Fincher film of the founding of Facebook, but that’s pretty much it. The founders, entrepreneurs today are titans."

So you can see why Thiel would like her. And she sounds pretty clueless since there have been several movies and documentaries about Steve Jobs. As far as Thiel, well, she may be interested to know that I have written a play which features a Thiel-like character (called Toby Peel) and it will receive its first public reading in a couple of weeks. But I don't think Thiel would like it. 

So what this looks like to me is that the Koch people have been cultivating Robbins, best known for working with Henry Louis Gates, for a few years, and her appearance at this conference is part of sealing the deal. But that's just my best guess.

Scott W. Atlas is a long-time Republican and Trump advisor best-known for spreading Covid-19 misinformation.

Michael W. McConnell is a Bush nominee, a Hoover Institute man and a contributor to the Federalist Society online site.

Eugene Volokh is a conservative/libertarian Koch man via Reason Magazine.

Frances Widdowson is an author at racist Quillette, who also happens to hate Black Lives Matter.

So there you have it. The whole political spectrum from libertarian to Republican to conservative to right-wing to Trump supporter to race pseudoscience supporter to full-on racist. 

And the keynote speaker is a democracy-hating, Trump-funding, racism-funding sociopath.

What's that anti-woke fanatic Anna Krylov up to now?

"Western civilization" propaganda from Dorian Abbot and
the rightwing-funded "Minding the Campus"
which, of course, hates the 1619 Project
------------------------------------------------------------------

I've written a few times about Anna Krylov and her boyfriend Jay Tanzman (Jerry Coyne referred to
them as partners and Tanzman as a "freelance statistician") especially Krylov who wrote a screed against renaming science terms, hyperbolically comparing that to being burnt at the stake. Krylov and Tanzman have also written for racist Quillette - of course.

Recently they were seen publicly aligning with a whole bunch of racists like neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, co-authoring a paper which is yet another attempt by the racist right to "move the Overton window" and make race pseudoscience mainstream. I wrote about that here.

I guess that's why they put me on their mailing list. I recently found something in my inbox with the headline "A New Online Collection Documents Censorship in Science."

It says:

Following up on their perspective on scientific censorship published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, co-author Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman have published an online collection of scientific papers, viewpoints, and op-eds documenting the modern rise of censorship in science. The collection, titled Spotlight on Scientific Censorship, can be viewed here.

They mean following up on the aforementioned paper they produced with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard and the other race pseudoscience ghouls.

The collection is the usual right-wing garbage written by the usual racists and associates of the Intellectual Dark Web and its very own Austin University. 

This latest effort by the racist right to move the Overton window in favor of racism is being promoted on the Substack (of course) of Dorian Abbot, associated with Austin University.

Abbot was recently mentioned here on Pinkerite as part of the gang giving evolutionary psychologist Carole Hoover (fan of the hateful, Kiwi Farms-praising Gender Wars playing cards) an award for her support of hereditarianism.

A glance at Abbot's Twitter timeline shows that although he is a professor of geophysical sciences, he is far more interested in promoting right-wing political schemes. I suspect it's because being a right-wing political operative pays better than a geophysical sciences professorship. 

Abbot's Substack, "Heterodox STEM" also publishes... 

• Eric Rasmusen, a rightwing bigot, infamous for his misogyny
• Bo Winegard supporter Luana Maroja
• Ben Slivka, right-wing tech bro obsessed with wokism
• Peter Bonilla, Koch goon
• Randy O. Wayne, opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion
• Alex Small, member of the Heterodox Academy gang
• Julia Shaletzky, member of the Heterodox gang
• Michael Bailey, anti-trans extremist and creep, seen on Bo Winegard's extremist racist Substack Aporia, wants to "open the Overton window"
• William McNally, right-winger, likes all the other right-wingers
• Frank and Louie - "anti-woke" goons
• Mitt Castor, fan of right-wing extremist ghoul Christopher Rufo
• Judy Parrish, climate change denier
• Daniel Nuccio, contributor at the far right, Koch-funded College Fix
• Lee Jussim, contemptible "stereotypes are real!" ghoul - another participant in  Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists

And on and on, the usual collection of right-wing ghouls, goons and grifters.

And of course this latest Krylov/Tanzman effort is being promoted by a fellow participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (Dorian Abbot was there too) their travel buddy Jerry Coyne.