Two charts demonstrating how far-right is the board of advisors of FAIR

When Christopher Rufo announced the creation of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, he claimed it was a coalition of liberals, moderates and conservatives and he illustrated this claim with an image of the FAIR board of advisors.

As you might expect from a cynical, right-wing operative who takes money from Charles Koch, this claim was a big fat lie. The board was very right-leaning then, and it's only become more right-leaning ever since.

Having followed the antics of the Intellectual Dark Web for several years now, I recognized at a glance that the board was packed with members of the Intellectual Dark Web, Quillette authors and other promoters of race pseudo-science, and a little research proved that all current members of the board but one have a connection to at least one right-wing cause or organization.

Then recently, the New Yorker published an article that made it clear that Rufo is probably the Kochtopus flunky of the year, thanks to his cynical and successful efforts to build up the previously obscure "critical race theory" into a Republican target of hatred and hysteria.

New York Magazine also ran a critique of Rufo:

Rufo’s role is clear. He takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. “The goal,” he tweeted, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” In an interview with the Post, he said the tweet described an “obvious” approach: “If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign.”

I think it's likely FAIR itself is funded by Koch, considering how many Koch employees are on the board, and also because the one issue that unites the FAIR board of advisors is opposition to critical race theory, as this table demonstrates.

I think it's likely that you don't get on the board of advisors of FAIR unless you vow your undying opposition to critical race theory, but in this table I only included those board members who are on the public record opposing CRT - but I'd be willing to bet that Ajouz, Davis, Hill, Keig and Kors just haven't gotten around to discussing CRT on social media, or I missed their public declarations somehow.

Alexander Lloyd makes clear how important Critical Race Theory hysteria was in his decision to join the FAIR board of advisors.

The closest FAIR has to a liberal is Lisa Feldsher, who is the only board member not in the table. Feldsher does not have much social media presence, but she's not exactly what you would call a flaming progressive. Her political issues are anti-Semitism and the standard right-wing trope, if liberals and Hollywood really cared about social justice they would solve problems even in places where they have no power to make changes while at the same time implying that Islam is the main source of homophobic violence in the world.

I created a second chart, which is less granular than the table. In this pie chart I matched each FAIR board member with one affiliation. Since this web site is devoted to criticizing the IDW, if they are a named member of the IDW, they are counted as IDW even if they have several other affiliations. 

The next tier is a Koch organization affiliation, then a Quillette byline, then a connection to a right-wing organization like The Federalist or they are known for right-wing positions, like Megyn Kelly, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan. 

Finally if they have no other affiliations (that I have discovered yet), they are counted as anti-CRT. Lisa Feldsher is counted as "Other" although I'd bet serious money she also is opposed to CRT.

The data make it inescapably clear, that FAIR is a far-right organization, judging by its board of advisors.

FAIR and "Neo-racism'

NHAI co-author Gregory Cochran expressing
his contempt for anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson
for daring to notice that NHAI is a bunch of BS.

According to Eugene Volokh, a Koch employee, the goal of FAIR, which I wrote about recently, is litigation. 

Volokh quotes the FAIR site:

FAIR supports students, teachers, and employees who are being compelled to affirm principles with which they disagree, who are stopped from expressing their true views, and who are being punished and silenced if they do not comply. To that end, FAIR is building a nationwide network of independent attorneys who can offer advice and, if necessary, pursue litigation. If you are a lawyer with civil litigation experience and would like to join FAIR's legal network, please contact letitia@fairforall.org.

As always with this kind of thing, the issue is how far they are willing to stand by people and the principles with which those people disagree. I think we can rule out Nazis - I doubt FAIR will come to the legal aid of a Nazi who was fired for publishing a manifesto on the company web site in which they declare that Jews likely can't do work for the company as well as non-Jews, due to biologically-innate tendencies. 

Although I suspect the FAIR Advisors - a right-leaning group that includes Trump supporters, Koch employees and race science supporters - would gladly stand by someone making the same claim about women, in place of Jews, as several of them did in the case of the James Damore memo. 

But some of the Advisors believe that there are innate biological differences between Jews and everybody else - Andrew Sullivan is clearly still a believer in the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis, as can be seen in a relatively recent interview published by the New York Times:

But he also can’t quite stop himself, even as I sat there wishing he would. “Let’s say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I’m just saying — there’s something there, I think. And I’m not sure what it is, but I’m just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over.” 

Steven Pinker also seems to be a fan, still, of NHAI as seen in his joining with other Koch-connected individuals to complain that Bret Stephens was criticized for citing NHAI as a reference in one of his NYTimes op-eds, and the citation was redacted.

The NHAI was presented as a paper written by Henry Harpending, a "white nationalist" and Gregory Cochran, a right-winger and Quillette author with a great love of Conan the Barbarian, who considers NHAI on par with the theories of Einstein. 

Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson debunked the NHAI paper, a fact that Pinker and other NHAI supporters resolutely ignore. Although it did lead to Cochran insulting Ferguson on a few occasions, without, of course, any attempt to address Ferguson's points.

Racists believed in Jewish intellectual superiority long before Harpending and Cochran came along. As segregationist Henry E Garrett wrote in the notoriously racist Mankind Quarterly in 1961:

...By almost any criterion, the Jews have produce a disproportionate number of intellectually gifted persons and this despite the handicaps under which they have often lived and worked. Did "culture" alone produce these outstanding men or was there better native endowment to begin with?

Pinker gave a talk on NHAI around the time the Harpending/Cochran paper was published, called "Jews, Genes and Intelligence," in which he suggests NHAI is correct, commenting:

I think it's safe to say that the current approach at least the approach for in recent decades was to deny the existence of intelligence. I mentioned the Mismeasure of Man as the foremost example to deny the existence of genetically distinct human groups. There is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever that there are that it's purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do this Nazis but on the other hand there is a quotation I don't know who's responsible for it: reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

I thought of that while reading the FAIR web site's glossary of terms which includes this FAIR neologism:

neo-racism noun

neo-rac·ism | \ nē-ō-ˈrā-ˌsi-zəm 

1a. : a belief that race is a real and inescapable social construct that determines an individual’s identity, agency, beliefs, ability, or culture, such that members of different race groups can never understand each other due to intrinsic and insurmountable cultural differences.

1b. : prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, or antagonism directed against a person or people based on this belief.

2 : discrimination, behavior or attitudes toward individuals or groups that reflect and foster the belief that members of some race groups are permanently subordinate to members of other race groups.

It's a curious insertion "a real and inescapable social construct." Why not write "...a belief that race determines an individual’s identity, agency..." What is the point of inserting a clause about social construct? Wouldn't the belief be racist without that inclusion?

Ah, but that's where the "neo" comes in. I think it's likely some number of FAIR advisors - foremost Andrew Sullivan and Steven Pinker - want to suggest that the belief in biological race has no negative implications - it's those who believe race is a social construct who are the real racists. 

If that is the case, it's truly sleazy, but sleaziness is the hallmark of race science, as discussed recently in the New Yorker:

In 2020, a paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science that examined how I.Q. was related to a range of socioeconomic measures for countries around the world. Unfortunately, the paper was based on a data set of national I.Q. estimates co-published by the English psychologist Richard Lynn, an outspoken white supremacist. Although we should be able to assess Lynn’s scientific contributions independently of his personal views, his data set of I.Q. estimates contains some suspiciously unrepresentative samples for non-European populations. For instance, the estimate for Somalia is based on one sample of child refugees stationed in a camp in Kenya. The estimate for Haiti is based on a sample of a hundred and thirty-three rural six-year-olds. And the estimate for Botswana is based on a sample of high-school students tested in South Africa in a language that was not their own. Indeed, the psychologist Jelte Wicherts demonstrated that the best predictor for whether an I.Q. sample for an African country would be included in Lynn’s data set was, in fact, whether that sample was below the global average. Psychological Science has since retracted the paper, but numerous other papers and books have used Lynn’s data set.

The last part is especially important - in spite of a retraction, in spite of the obvious problems with Lynn's data, his work is still being used. Just as NHAI is still being defended by Pinker and Sullivan.

And that's why race science is not actually science, but a blatant attempt to "biologize inequality" as anthropologist Marvin Harris said.

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. 

Is FAIR the FOX News of anti-Critical Race Theory? Or: deja vu for Megyn Kelly

I've been talking about the organization FAIR (Freedom Against Intolerance and Racism) over the past several months. It has a right-leaning board of advisors, full of race pseudoscience promoters, Trump supporters and Megyn Kelly.

Speaking of Megyn Kelly, she was the star of the movie Bombshell, which was about how disgusting Fox News was in sexualizing its female employees, making women feel they had to cater to the sexual desires of disgusting pig Roger Ailes (and others) to get ahead.

And now we see FAIR advisor Melissa Chen on Twitter publicly offering sexualized images to FAIR advisor Peter Boghossian.

FAIR is an organization that presumes to lecture the world on the proper way to educate children and young adults (by forbidding discussions of racism) and this is how a member of its board of advisors acts in public. 

I have never had any respect for FAIR advisors, to be sure, but even I would not have guessed that Melissa Chen, also a member of the board of an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders (with, inevitably, Steven Pinker) was capable of behaving in public with so little dignity.

And it's unlikely any male member of the FAIR or Ideas Beyond Borders boards would do this.

The fact that it's to service a truly loathsome, sleazy grifter like Peter Boghossian, makes it even more grotesque.

It must feel like deja vu for Megyn Kelly.

FAIR update ~ a lawsuit, the New Yorker, Megyn Kelly & new members

FAIR has had a fair amount of churn in its board of advisors since the organization was founded in March, so it's no surprise the board of advisors has changed again since we last looked. 

The board started out with a mere 31 members, but now has 39 and it has consistently added right-wingers to the board, in spite of Christopher Rufo's lie that the organization represents all points on the political spectrum.

But before we review the new board there's headline news in FAIR world. 

To the surprise of nobody paying attention to the legalistic ambitions of FAIR, a member of the board of advisors, Maud Maron, has instigated a lawsuit against the Legal Aid Society for calling her a racist. The Society calls the suit "...a frivolous and misguided attempt to use litigation to harass a nonprofit employer and its employees who have spent their careers advancing social justice causes."

The New Yorker did a profile of Christopher Rufo, the Koch-funded Trump supporter, called How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory. From the article:

As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. “We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. “ ‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote.

Absolutely cynical, which is what anybody who knows anything about this pack of grifters, race pseudo-science promoters and Trump supporters would expect.

Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly was in the news recently for attempting to downplay the January 6 insurrection:

Conservative journalist and pundit Megyn Kelly is downplaying the seriousness of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying national media covering the insurrection that day made the incident out to be worse than it actually was.

"A faction turned," Kelly said during a recent episode of her podcast of the people who gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest the congressional certification of President Biden's Electoral College victory. "But there's no question the media represented this as so much worse than it actually was."

Kelly is the perfect representative of the FAIR board of advisors: conservative and full of shit.

So there are four new members of the board, since last check-in and all four are what you'd expect: right-wingers and "critical race theory" grifters: Yiatlin Chu, Angel Eduardo, Zander Keig and Alan Charles Kors. More details about each below.

FAIR seems to be the Intellectual Dark Web 2.0, with an anti-critical race theory agenda in perfect harmony with the Republican Party.

1. Michael Ajouz - Republican, donated to Romney and Ted Cruz.

2. Ayyan Hirsi Ali - right-wing anti-Muslim and on the Koch payroll via the American Enterprise Institute. Named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

3. Peter Boghossian -  recently attacked Pinkerite's founder, has the possible distinction of appearing as a guest more than anybody else on racist Stephan Molyneux's show. Quillette author. Business partner of Christian nationalist right-wing extremist Michael O'Fallon.

4. Liang-Fang Chao - "Computer Scientist" - Critical Race Theory alarmist grifter.

5. Melissa Chen - Quillette supporter.  Writer for conservative The Spectator, Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders, which has, on its board of directors - inevitably - Steven Pinker.

6. Yiatlin Chu [new] - Critical Race Theory alarmist grifter and pal of Maud Maron.

7. Daryl Davis - Trump supporter.  Not a Trump supporter, I was wrong about that. It's disturbing that Davis has lent his legitimately good-guy persona to FAIR which is full of rightwingers and race pseudoscience supporters.

8. Angel Eduardo [new]  - fan of free speech grifters, promoter of "cancel culture" panic, published in Areo, Quillette's twin sister. Anti Critical Race Theory.

9. Lisa Feldsher - runs a PR firm with many corporate clients. Fake liberal.

10. Niall Ferguson -  husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and right-wing creep, who was involved in a controversy in which he targeted a liberal student, as discussed by Krugman in 2018. Employee of Koch through AEI.

11. Kmele Foster - right-wing, anti Black Lives Matter, on the advisory council of the Koch-funded FIRE.

12. Tim van Gelder - "entrepreneur, philosopher" and fan of right-wing, Koch-funded free speech grifter  Andrew Doyle, a former member of the FAIR board of advisors

13. Samantha Harris - contributor at the Federalist Society, Senior Fellow at the Koch-funded FIRE. Connected to Maud Maron somehow. Author at Quillette. Lawyer of Joshua T. Katz, member of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

14. Jason D. Hill - self-declared conservative, Ayn Rand fan and author at the far-right Federalist. Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, founded by right-wing extremist David Horowitz.

15. Nathan Hoffman - Republican operative working against the public school system.

16. Coleman Hughes - Koch employee via City Journal, Quillette author, apologist for race science.

17. Inaya Folarin Iman - Founder and Director of anti-Black Lives Matter The Equiano Project and along with right-wing IDW member Douglas Murray is a director the Free Speech Union, founded by eugenics fan and Quillette editor Toby Young.

18. Zaid Jilani - former left-winger and author at Quillette.

19. Zander Keig [new] - Conservative.

20. Megyn Kelly - known for saying Santa Claus and Jesus were white when she was a star at Fox.

21. Alan Charles Kors [new] - co-founder of the Koch-funded FIRE.

22. Alexander Lloyd - fan of Quillette and members of the IDW, Bitcoin bro.

23. Glenn Loury - right-wing, Quillette author, Koch-funded.

24. Maud Maron -  called a racist by the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, then sued them for it.

25. John McWhorter - author at Quillette, supported by Koch via AEI and City Journal.

26. Douglas Murray - named member of the IDW and according to Wikipedia: His views and ideology have been linked to far-right political ideologies by a number of academic[10]and journalistic[11] sources. He has also been accused of promoting far-right conspiracy theories,[12][13][14] and of being Islamophobic.[15]

27. Steven Pinker. Of course.

28. Robert Pondescio -  author at The Federalist, fan of the work of Charles Murray, senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at right-wing think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Senior fellow of the Koch-funded AEI.

29. Wilfred Reilly - conservative author at far-right Regnery Publishing - founder William H. Regnery died recently.

30. Ian Rowe - Koch employee via AEI.

31. Christopher Rufo - rabidly pro-Trump, Koch employee via City Journal. Rufo does not have a byline in Quillette, but predictably, Quillette adores him.

32. Michael Shermer - named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, doesn't believe systemic racism exists, critical race theory alarmist and creep.

33. Abigail Shrier - Quillette author, rabidly anti-trans.

34. Erec Smith - Quillette author and co-founder of right-wing organization Free Black Thought along with Charles Murray apologist Michael DC Bowen and Jason Littlefield, author at Quillette's twin Areo and opponent of critical race theory. Fun fact: Smith, Littlefield and Zander Keig are all in business together in an organization called Empowered Pathways.

35. Eli Steele - Quillette author, Koch employee via City Journal.

36. Andrew Sullivan - right-winger, promoted The Bell Curve, race science promoter.

37. Bari Weiss - right-winger, promoter of the Intellectual Dark Web and pals with same.

38. Thomas Chatterton Williams - chateau bouncer, Koch employee via AEI

39. Kenny Xu - Development Officer at Young America's Foundation a right-wing youth organization. Author at the Federalist and the Daily Signal. Trump supporter.

John Oliver vs. CRT Panic

Excellent episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" in which he discusses the end-goal of the CRT panic, created out of thin air by Koch employee and Trump supporter Christopher Rufo.

Rufo is a former member of the Koch-connected and race pseudoscience-friendly FAIR board of advisors.

I have to do an update on FAIR soon because I think it's now even further right-wing than ever. They've added nuclear energy shill Michael Shellenberger and yet another Quillette author, Jacob Mchangama.

I think the presence of so many Quillette authors (and Quillette editor Jon Kay) and race pseudoscience promoters Andrew Sullivan, Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer is a signal that the purpose of FAIR and its CRT panic is not only the standard right-wing scheme to force the US government to fund religious schools via "school choice."

Race pseudoscience, which claims Black Americans are innately, genetically inferior - and therefore as stated in a Quillette review by Razib Khan - an existential threat to America - cannot survive if Black American history is well-known. The reason Black Americans have not thrived is due to the legacy of slavery itself, plus Jim Crow, plus redlining, plus terrorism like the Tulsa massacre, etc etc. The attempt to erase Black history is the attempt to declare that Black American failure to thrive is the result of bad genes.

And that's why FAIR is not only against CRT, it is against teaching Black history, period, especially the 1619 project.

Michael Shermer, an official member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" who has been a member of the FAIR board of advisors since the very beginning of the organization, is very much a supporter of race pseudoscience as I discussed in the post Michael Shermer and Equalitarianism and the White Citizens' Councils. He also likes to call critics of Steven Pinker "cockroaches." He's also an admirer of pedophila apologist Camille Paglia.

Here we see FAIR board member Michael Shermer "debunking" the 1619 project with far-right historian Mary Grabar, who supports anti-1619 Project legislation:

Mary Grabar, a fellow at the right-wing Alexander Hamilton Institute, has written an essay praising Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) for introducing the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.” This is the right-wing version of “cancel culture,” except it adds government repression to the mix, making it far worse.

Grabar endorses censorship because she dismisses the idea that teachers are competent professionals who can be trusted to analyze complex concepts: “few teachers have the ability or the time to teach beyond the materials given to them.”

Grabar compares the 1619 Project to Howard Zinn, about whom she wrote a book called Debunking Howard Zinn because “Howard Zinn was bad–a communist, a corrupt teacher, a fraudulent historian, and an anti-American agitator.”

Like the 1619 Project, legislators have tried to ban Zinn from schools. Grabar complains that “When in 2017 Arkansas State representative Kim Hendren, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of Zinn’s book in state-funded classrooms,” the Zinn Education Project “framed the attempt as censorship.” Yes, how shocking, to describe legislation literally banning a book from public school as censorship.

Funny how often "free speech" advocates on the right end up supporting censorship.

It's Black History Month - the IDW & the GOP hate Black History

It's Black History Month. Let's talk about how much the Right - and its IDW division - hate Black History.

Over in the cesspit known as Twitter, as reported by right-wing garbage heap Fox News, the Right are at each others' throats, while promoting the fiction that Steven Pinker is on the Left. He's about as Left as Jerry Coyne. 

Fox News is displaying attacks against Pinker by Colin Wright and Christopher Rufo. 

Rufo is a hypocrite, naturally, and so in response to Pinker tweeting a link to Cathy Young's criticism of Rufo and his connection to Ron DeSantis and his scheme to erase Black History, Rufo tweeted "Sorry, buddy, we're not going to listen to people who can't even open their comments."

Do I have to mention that Rufo blocked me on Twitter every bit as much as Pinker did?

Cathy Young herself is hardly blameless. I consider her a pioneer of stochastic terrorism.

But the whole thing is odd, because Steven Pinker is a supporter of Rufo's campaign against Critical Race Theory, which is the founding motivation of FAIR FOR ALL. 

Pinker was a member of the FAIR board of advisors when it was first created in March 2021 along with Rufo. And although Rufo is no longer there, Pinker is.

FAIR is a who's who of right-wing political operatives and members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Colin Wright has never been a member of the FAIR board of advisors, but they haven't forgotten him. He's mentioned in December 2021 in the News section: New Video: Doing ‘DEI’ Right with Colin Wright.

Now before getting cozy with Rufo's CRT grift, Colin Wright was best known as a hateful transphobe:

Colin Wright, an anti-trans extremist writer for right-wing site Quillette and founder of Reality’s Last Stand, posted a very heinous tweet harming the safety of LGBTQ+ minors by criticizing suicide prevention outlet The Trevor Project’s “quick exit” feature that allows LGBTQ+ youth to have safe conversations without being snooped on by their non-LGBTQ+-affirming parent(s) or other family members and then subsequently get berated, abused, and/or even disowned, or worse, killed. 

His Twitter account was even suspended for extreme transphobia, before fascist Elon Musk came along to set all the little fashies free from Twitter jail.

But both transphobia and hostility to Black history are hallmarks of the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette. And Wright quickly jumped on board Rufo's anti-CRT campaign, aligning with Trump.

I wonder how Jerry Coyne will react to the attacks on Pinker. On the one hand, Coyne adores Pinker, on the other hand Coyne is a fan of Colin Wright.

It is odd though, this public drama, considering that all the main characters, Pinker, Young, Rufo, and Wright have taken Koch money. And Koch and the Intellectual Dark Web have nurtured Rufo's CRT-panic grift since the beginning.

What Ron DeSantis is doing is the ultimate political expression of the IDW/Quillette campaign against Black history.

Rufo may talk about "Critical Race Theory" but what he's really after is to kill the 1619 Project.

Mr. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law relegates the study of the experiences of Black people to a prohibited category. The canceling of students’ access to accurate, truthful education that reflects their diverse identities and that of their country should chill every American. Not only do these laws offend First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression; to the extent they harm certain groups on the basis of race, gender or other protected status, they also violate principles of equal protection. And they are a chilling precursor to state-sponsored dehumanization of an entire race of people.

This disturbing pattern of silencing Black voices and aggressive attempts to erase Black history is one of the most visible examples of performative white supremacy since the presidency of Donald Trump. In 2019 the Florida legislature undermined Amendment 4, which a supermajority of Floridians supported and would have restored the voting rights of more than a million formerly incarcerated people. In its place, lawmakers put in place a pay-to-vote system that redisenfranchises hundreds of thousands of those citizens, many of them Black. Similarly, Florida’s antiprotest law, H.B. 1, was enacted in 2021 in response to the 2020 protests against police violence, when Black organizations and peaceful demonstrators in Florida — along with their allies — took to the streets with demands for justice...

..Several book bans and other antitruth measures introduced in the past two years target The New York Times’s 1619 Project (and curriculum), which was created by Nikole Hannah-Jones — who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work — and is a linchpin in today’s conversations about the role of systemic racism in America’s history and its enduring impacts. In Wyoming and Texas, lawmakers and school officials have proposed measures mandating that objectively horrific historic events like the Holocaust and the trans-Atlantic slave trade be presented to American children neutrally and without judgment. (The Wyoming measure failed to pass the state’s legislature.) But why would we want our children to look at these atrocities without judgment?

Rufo and his allies hate the 1619 project. From Jerry Coyne to Colin Wright to neo-Nazi James Lindsay. 

You would think that Pinker and Young would be happy that their side is winning.

Could this be an example of unintended consequences? 

Could Young and Pinker have really not considered that their constant harping on "wokeness," along with Pinker echoing infamous racist Amy Wax in an attempt to downplay the power of systemic racism, could have political consequences?

I mean, I did not think they were especially bright people, but even I didn't think they were that clueless.

Or is it all phony? Like Jerry Coyne claiming to be on the Left, while constantly agreeing with the Right. Much like this.

But they always pretend - or maybe they are just that self-deluded - that what they really care about is "free speech." 

Fox News refers to Colin Wright as an "evolutionary biologist" but he is not a practicing one. He is on wingnut welfare, paid to promote the views of right-wing plutocrats. I assume he switched to that career because several of his science papers were retracted.

To be fair, although blocking critics is what members of the IDW/Quillette gang do, Wright did not block my Twitter account. This isn't especially significant now, since I'm never on Twitter, but it was something different from the standard member of the IDW/Quillette gang. I guess he refrained from blocking for "free speech."

But to Wright, free speech means if you disagree with him, he will make unsupported vicious attacks against you. And then run away.

But you can't expect good faith from people who have devoted their lives to promoting hatred on behalf of evil old plutocrats.

About Cathy Young's piece - a perfect illustration of her through-the-lookinglass view of the world in this section:

If DeSantis’s objective had been simply to appoint board members who would counteract excessive “woke” influence at New College, he could have picked plenty of people who weren’t in that mold. For instance, Columbia University professor and author John McWhorter, a self-identified black liberal whose book Woke Racism is scathingly critical of Kendi-style “anti-racism” even as McWhorter has been no less scathing about Trump. Or, say, Christina Hoff Sommers, a former academic who is sufficiently “anti-woke” to have been classed among the earlier-mentioned “intellectual dark web” and to have been targeted for deplatforming at several progressive universities, but has said that she regards Trump as an example of “amoral masculinity” rather than positive masculinity. Or social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, who has strongly criticized academia’s move toward prioritizing “social justice” over truth and who recently resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology over a new rule requiring presenters at the society’s annual conference to submit a statement on equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

McWhorter is not only a long-time employee of Koch-funded organizations and an author at race pseudoscience-loving Quillette, he is also on the board of advisors of the CRT-crazed FAIR.

Sommers, like Young is a pioneer in stochastic terrorism, misogyny division. 

Jonathan Haidt is a long-time supporter of race-pseudoscience, recently seen at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. And another member of the anti-CRT crazed FAIR.

The American Right may not agree about Trump, but they do agree about race pseudoscience and transphobia. And the utility of grifts like anti-CRT and the classic free speech grift.

UPDATE February 9: far from defending Pinker from attacks by Rufo, disgusting right-wing goon Jerry Coyne is celebrating Rufo:

After the bad publicity, Texas Tech, according to a tweet by Christoper Rufo, has suspended this DEI policy.

FAIR - more right-wing than ever

A little over a month ago I wrote about how FAIR, the organization touted by Trumper toady Christopher Rufo as bi-partisan has a board of Advisors that is distinctly right-leaning. 

More recently I wrote about how phony bi-partisanship is apparently a preferred Koch organization strategy.

FAIR has added two more people to its Advisors board. 

Let's meet them:

• Michael Ajouz - Republican, donated to Romney and Ted Cruz.

• Kenny Xu - Development Officer at Young America's Foundation a conservative youth organization UPDATE - Author at the Federalist and the Daily Signal

So FAIR is even more right-wing than before!

UPDATE - I just noticed the FAIR Advisors lost Andrew Doyle, the talentless right-wing satirist who was paid by Koch to run the Spiked "Unsafe Space Tour" so the further tilt to the right isn't as extreme as I thought but Kenny Xu more than makes up for the loss of Doyle in terms of right-wing views. And Ajouz gave money to TED CRUZ.

FAIR grifter update - even further right than ever - can it be possible???

Nothing gives Warren more credibility than the fact
that misogynist rightwing tax-evading
plutocrat Elon Musk hates her.

The FAIR board of advisors is leaning so far right now, it's a wonder it hasn't fallen over entirely.

Back in July I did a tally of the board and its political leanings. Very far right.

So who's out now and who is in?

Well the only one who appears to be gone is Christopher Rufo. I guess his main assignment of trying to prevent discussions of race in American classrooms under the umbrella of CRT is taking up all his time.

But Rufo is verrrrry far right. A Trump supporter, a Koch employee, and is or was "a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank known for its opposition to the theory of evolution and advocacy for intelligent design to be taught in public schools."

Will the FAIR gang be able to not only make up for Rufo's extremism, but add enough members of right-wing alignment to allow the FAIR board of advisors to tilt even further starboard?

You can count on the FAIR gang. 

The newly added members are Jonathan Kay, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Tim Urban and John R. Wood, Jr.

Jonathan Kay of course is the right-wing editor of the race pseudoscience rag Quillette. So Quillette connection. Check.

Batya Ungar-Sargon: "Newsweek opinion editor: Fauci represents 'extremely arrogant and highly politicized elite." Wrote an anti-woke book. Complete rightwing establishment media asshole. Check.

Tim Urban worships Elon Musk. Elon Musk was seen on Twitter recently, combining plutocrat disdain for paying taxes with misogyny. So economically conservative. Check.

John R. Wood, Jr. - Republican who loves Trump. Check.

Watch him at CPAC asking God to bless Trump. It will make your skin crawl.

So these four, while individually not as horrible as Christopher Rufo, are each pretty horrible in their own special way and that more than makes up for the loss of Rufo.

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

I recently got a heads-up from someone on Twitter that the Right has a new grift - FAIR, the "Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism."

Trump-lover Chris Rufo claimed on Twitter that FAIR is a coalition of liberals, moderates, and conservatives in defense of the American principles of free expression, civil rights, and equality under the law, but the Board of Advisors in fact skews very heavily to the right.

There are thirty-one Advisors, and eleven of them are associated with a Koch-funded organization (AEI, City Journal, FIRE, Spiked), seven of them are authors for the race science-promoting Quillette (some are both Koch and Quillette) and almost all the rest are associated with right-wing organizations and causes, including at least two hard-core Trump supporters.

There are probably more right-wing and race science connections that I missed. I will update the  connections of the FAIR Board of Advisors as I discover them.

It looks like another example of wingnut welfare, along with the sleazy IDW campaign to brand right-wing race science as "liberal" and is most likely funded at least in part by Charles Koch, who is already funding a third of the Advisors.

I guess James Your Mom Lindsay really is in the IDW/Quillette doghouse since his two fellow grifters Boghossian and Pluckrose made the team but he didn't.

Left to right, top to bottom:

1. Ayyan Hirsi Ali - right-wing anti-Muslim and on the Koch payroll via the American Enterprise Institute. Named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

2. Peter Boghossian - right-wing grifter, recently attacked Pinkerite's founder, has the possible distinction of appearing as a guest more than anybody else on racist Stephan Molyneux's show. Quillette author. Business partner of Christian nationalist right-wing extremist Michael O'Fallon.

3. Liang-Fang Chao - "Computer Scientist" - Koch/Quillette/race science, rightwing connections unknown.

4. Melissa Chen - Quillette supporter.  UPDATE: writer for conservative The Spectator, Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders, which has, on its board of directors - inevitably - Steven Pinker.

5. Daryl Davis -  Trump supporter.  Not a Trump supporter, I was wrong about that. It's disturbing that Davis has lent his legitimately good-guy persona to FAIR which is full of rightwingers and race pseudoscience supporters and Koch-funded hacks.

6. Andrew Doyle - talentless right-wing satirist, paid by Koch to run the Spiked "Unsafe Space Tour."

7. Lisa Feldsher - runs a PR firm with many corporate clients. Koch/Quillette/race science, rightwing connections unknown.

8. Kmele Foster - right-wing, anti Black Lives Matter, on the advisory council of the Koch-funded FIRE.

9. Tim van Gelder - "entrepreneur, philosopher" - Koch/Quillette/race science, rightwing connections unknown.

10. Samantha Harris - contributor at the Federalist Society, Senior Fellow at the Koch-funded FIRE. Connected to Maud Maron somehow. Author at Quillette. Lawyer of Joshua T. Katz, member of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

11. Jason D. Hill - self-declared conservative, Ayn Rand fan and author at the far-right Federalist. Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, founded by right-wing extremist David Horowitz.

12. Nathan Hoffman - Republican operative working against the public school system.

13. Coleman Hughes - Koch employee via City Journal, Quillette author, apologist for race science.

14. Zaid Jilani - former left-winger and author at Quillette.

15. Megyn Kelly - known for saying Santa Claus and Jesus were white when she was a star at Fox.

16. Alexander Lloyd - fan of Quillette and members of the IDW,  Bitcoin bro.

17. Glenn Loury - right-wing, Quillette author, Koch-funded.

18. Maud Maron - called a racist by the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid

19. John McWhorter - author at Quillette, supported by Koch at AEI and City Journal.

20. Steven Pinker. Of course.

21. Helen Pluckrose - grifter, cozy with right-wing Christian nationalist extremists Sovereign Nations, anti-feminist. Interviewed and heavily promoted by Quillette.

22. Robert Pondescio - author at The Federalist, fan of the work of Charles Murray.

23. Wilfred Reilly - conservative author at far-right Regnery Publishing.

24. Ian Rowe - Koch employee via AEI.

25. Chris Rufo - rabidly pro-Trump, Koch employee via City Journal.

26. Michael Shermer - named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, creep.

27. Abigail Shrier - Quillette author, rabidly anti-trans.

28. Eli Steele - Quillette author, Koch employee via City Journal.

29. Andrew Sullivan - right-winger, promoted The Bell Curve, race science promoter.

30. Bari Weiss - right-winger, promoter of the Intellectual Dark Web and pals with same.

31. Thomas Chatterton Williams - chateau bouncer, Koch employee via AEI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The news comes from the New Yorker:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bartning:

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

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

Eventually Bartning achieves this insight:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bari Weiss is truly a conscience-deficient individual. 

UPDATE: P. Z. Myers comments:

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

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