Sabine Hossenfelder, Quillette, racism and Thielbucks

I reported on Sabine Hossenfelder's connection to the Intellectual Dark Web several weeks ago.

I thought she was bad news then - I had no idea how bad.

She can be found on Twitter in 2021 promoting racist garbage rag Quillette, while defending infamous transphobe and disgraced journalist Jesse Singal. 

I had a feeling her bad take on trans youth was not a one-time incident.

In the screenshot above, I included her response to a comment, because it demonstrates her personality alignment with the Intellectual Dark Web - that smug certainty that they are perfectly rational and objective and untouched by politics, and only those they disagree with have political or ideological commitments.

More recently Hossenfelder can be seen promoting Quillette's sexual harasser's pity party article, written by known harasser Laurence Krauss. I wrote about that recently.

And weeks before she retweeted another article by Laurence Krauss in Quillette. 

PZ Myers has another post about "Krauss, the right-wing cartoon."

Oh look, Hossenfelder was called out for retweeting Quillette in 2020 and claims she doesn't see anything racist in Quillette.

Ezra Klein breaks the issue down:

Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, resigned after publishing an article by the paper’s architecture critic titled “Buildings Matter, Too.” David Boardman, the chair of the board that owns the Inquirer, said Wischnowski had done “remarkable” work but “leaves behind some decades-old, deep-seated and vitally important issues around diversity, equity and inclusion, issues that were not of his creation but that will likely benefit from a fresh approach.”

One interpretation of these events, favored by frustrated conservatives, is that a generation of young, woke journalists want to see the media remade along activist lines, while an older generation believes it must cover the news without fear and favor, and reflect, at the very least, the full range of views held by those in power.

“The New York Times motto is ‘all the news that’s fit to print,’” wrote the Times’s Bari Weiss. “One group emphasizes the word ‘all.’ The other, the word ‘fit.’”

Another interpretation is that the range of acceptable views isn’t narrowing so much as it’s shifting. Two decades ago, an article like (Tom) Cotton’s could easily be published, an essay arguing for abolishing prisons or police would languish in the submissions pile, and a slogan like “Black Lives Matter” would be controversial. Today, Black Lives Matter is in the sphere of consensus, abolishing prisons is in legitimate controversy, and there’s a fight to move Cotton’s proposal to deploy troops against US citizens into deviance. The idea space is just as large as it’s been in the past — perhaps larger — but it is in flux, and the fight to define its boundaries is more visible.

I have no doubt at this point that Sabine Hossenfelder is one of those "frustrated conservatives" who does not get the problem with comparing Black lives to buildings. The comparison is exactly the point the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is making. 

And there is the effort by conservatives to portray all Black Lives protests as violent. That was not the case. But Black protests have been portrayed that way since the Civil Rights era, a point made by this just-released video from "Some More News."

Hossenfelder is a real dummy, to insert herself into American racial politics like that. 

But maybe not - now that Hossenfelder is being promoted by Big Think, she's no doubt getting her Thielbucks. 

So she won't have to worry about what non-conservatives think. Like the other members of the IDW gang she will be safe inside the right-wing bubble.

Can a Hossenfelder byline in Quillette be far behind?

We know Quillette promotes race pseudoscience. An important reason we know this is because founder Claire Lehmann admitted it.

So this is not Hossenfelder innocently promoting Quillette, unaware of its racism.

Hossenfelder is promoting Quillette because she finds racism perfectly acceptable.

Sabine Hossenfelder and the Intellectual Dark Web

Hossenfelder is not nearly as impressive
as she finds herself.
_______________________________________________________

I recently became aware of German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder when I came across her videos on nuclear energy, in which she minimizes the dangers of nuclear energy and especially nuclear waste storage. 

(Watch John Oliver on that topic.)

I immediately smelled Intellectual Dark Web.

Also, I found her personality so irritating that even though I basically agree with her about the absence of free will, I found myself coming up with pro-free will arguments as I watched her video on the subject.

So, did she have an IDW connection? I Googled her and found her hobnobbing with race pseudoscience promoter Michael Shermer. Bingo. I have a practically infallible nose for the stench of the Intellectual Dark Web after doing this blog for four and a half years.

But worst of all, Hossenfelder thinks Steven Pinker's melange of sociobiology and reactionary politics, "The Blank Slate," is an important book. 

I've read The Blank Slate. It's hot garbage. The New Yorker had Pinker's number when the book was first published.

(Fun fact: in The Blank Slate we find that Pinker is a big fan of pro-pedophilia Camille Paglia.)

I just found Rebecca Watson has a great response to Hossenfelder's feckless and poorly-supported commentary on transgender issues. And I had to share.

P. Z. Myers wrote:

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.

See also Sabine Hossenfelder, Quillette, racism and Thielbucks.

Sabine Hossenfelder is pushing an agenda and shouldn't be taken seriously

I'd say that Sabine Hossenfelder is pushing an agenda and (say it through clenched teeth)

SHOULDN'T BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.

Excellent, patient and thorough debunking of Hossenfelder's infamous, poorly-sourced, biased and dishonest video on transgenderism. On a YouTube channel called eigenchris.

Rebecca Watson also has a good response to Hossenfelder.

I seriously doubt that, even should Sabine Hossenfelder be made to watch eigenchris' video, she would see the problem with her own claims on transgenderism, because I think Hossenfelder, like many people associated with the Intellectual Dark Web is convinced that she speaks from pure, objective rationality and only those who disagree with her are tainted by politics and/or ideology.

That idiotic, arrogant certainty is straight out of the Anna Krylov playbook.

Sabine Hossenfelder is (say it with a British accent) the worst.

More Hossenfelderbashing and capitalism

Sabine Hossenfelder is a fool, in my opinion, to make videos outside of her supposed area of expertise, physics. But considering that her non-physics opinions on issues like race and trans are invariably conservative and reactionary, I can't help wondering if she's getting funding from the usual plutocratic creeps.

Hossenfelder's claim that capitalism is a driver of scientific discovery is absurd and simplistic. 

Unfortunately I don't agree with Rebecca Watson either, that capitalism is responsible for "most if not all of society's greatest ills, including but not limited to income inequality and runaway climate change."

It's been my observation that on the Left, even more than before, capitalism is now considered the root of all evil. I doubt that. 

Capitalism was not created by a bunch of heartless monsters out to destroy the world. It evolved in response to the problems of daily human existence. 

I looked around the Internet to see what the consensus was on the origins of Capitalism, and Teen Vogue sums up what I found, pretty well:

The origins of capitalism are complicated, and stretch back to the 16th century, when the British systems of power largely collapsed after the Black Death, a deadly plague that killed off up to 60% of Europe’s entire population. A newly formed class of merchants began to trade with foreign countries, and this newfound demand for exports hurt local economies and began to dictate overall production and pricing of goods. It also led to the spread of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism.

The death of feudalism — a hierarchical system often seen as oppressive that kept poor people bonded to their masters’ land, which they farmed in exchange for a place to live and military protection — also left rural British peasants with no homes and no work, which eventually funneled them away from the countryside and into urban centers. These former farm workers then had to sell their labor in a newly competitive work environment in order to survive, while the state worked in concert with the new capitalists to establish a maximum wage and “clamp down on beggars.”

I doubt many would argue that feudalism is better than capitalism. And the claim that capitalism led to "the spread of slavery" is easily disputed by the many and varied forms of slavery that have existed outside of the age of capitalism. 

As for Watson's claim that capitalism is responsible for "runaway climate change" I think that's a case of "correlation is not causation." While climate change may have happened during the age of capitalism, humans destroying their environment and the phenomenon of unintended consequences also exist outside of capitalism.

And since I assume Watson doesn't want to trade capitalism for feudalism, what is her alternative? Socialism? Does she seriously think that humans couldn't make decisions with unintended consequences in a socialist system?

Humans fuck up - they trust people who should not be their leaders - see the Roman emperors, the European monarchies, the Catholic Church, Hitler, Stalin, Trump etc. etc. etc.; they don't think through all the possible consequences of decisions; they can be greedy and cruel and careless - and all without capitalism. 

Capitalism is just a collection of human-value exchange mechanisms, basically an accounting system, which is being mistaken for the actual root causes of human error and weaknesses and bad judgment - in Watson's case - and is being mistaken for the root cause of scientific discovery - as in Hossenfelder's case.

Just as nobody plotted to replace feudalism with capitalism, if capitalism dies out, it won't be the result of a plot, it will be because a new system of human-value exchange mechanisms evolved to better meet the needs of the people living in that society. 

In other words, human behavior is much more complicated than either Hossenfelder or Watson seem to understand. 

I don't claim to have a grasp on the whole thing myself - just enough to know that both Hossenfelder and Watson are being simplistic.

But at least Watson is not impressed by Pinker's idiotic "The Blank Slate" as Hossenfelder is. 

Sabine Hossenfelder - Intellectual Dark Web grifter - I called it two years ago

 I knew Sabine Hossenfelder was in deep with the right-wing, reactionary Intellectual Dark Web two years ago. I also speculated she was taking money from Peter Thiel. 

I think it's even more likely now she's taking money from Thiel since she's now citing Thiel and Musk in her videos as I found out in this excellent video by Professor Dave, AKA David Farina.

One of Hossenfelder's claims is that "fewer breakthroughs are being made" in science. This is similar to what Peter Thiel claims in his keynote address to the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference:

And the the version of the question that I have come to ask over the last 15 years um about you know um is the universal question, is about the progress of all these things. How fast are science and technology as a whole progressing? Is the sort of propaganda, the STEM propaganda accurate, that uh we have just sort of exponentiating progress, runaway progress things are getting sort of, you know it's just dizzying how fast things are improving. Or is it is it perhaps quite the opposite and and so and and so if if one could show that the science and technology areas are actually pretty weak, that the so-called crown jewels of STEM are not actually delivering the goods. This strikes me as a decisive, crushing uh blow.

Yes, I know it's a babbling mess, but you can see he's concerned about how fast science and technology as a whole are progressing.

It looks to me like Hossenfelder has sold her career as a respectable physicist to promote Peter Thiel's crackpottery.

And now, here's my chance to share a link to a video from my new favorite Youtube channel, Angela Collier, entitled billionaires want you to know they could have done physics, because it mentions Thiel. (Bonus: she trashes Ayn Rand about half-way through the video.)

Collier points out that these billionaires have all the time and money in the world, and if they really cared about physics they would buy themselves actual physics expertise by taking classes.

I think billionaires like Thiel have decided they'd rather buy actual physicists. 

Although I gotta say, even I didn't guess Hossenfelder would be retweeting actual Nazis, as demonstrated in the Professor Dave video.

Weaponized crackpottery and the influence of the Intellectual Dark Web

Professor Dave notes in his latest video that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is parroting Peter Thiel's talking points about the alleged slow-down of scientific advancement, and speculates that Hossenfelder is on the Thiel payroll. Something I've been wondering about for years now.

Thiel is of course known for funding Trump. It's very likely he and his network are behind the Trump administration's attacks on science and academia.

The fact that Hossenfelder has decided to support infamous crackpot and Thiel employee Eric Weinstein - often given credit, if you can call it that, for coining the name "Intellectual Dark Web" - is something she would be more likely to do if she, too, was on the Thiel payroll. 

Although I suppose it's possible she decided to torch her science career out of sheer stupidity. 

I recorded Peter Thiel giving a speech at Stanford in 2022 - and created a transcript - and in his stream-of-consciousness babble, he explains his paranoid belief that there is a nefarious influence preventing scientific advancement, which boils down to, basically, hippies, claiming they were influenced by Charles Manson (my highlighted emphasis):

But but if I had if I had to sort of give a single again steelman idea. The best argument for why, why this has been so slow for the last 50 years and I think we have to somehow engage with and take take more seriously. Is that there is something about science and technology that has taken you know very dystopian very destructive turn in the um, in the in the 20th century and there are you know it, it is, it is not we're not in the 18th century 19th century you know rationalist enlightenment age, where it seems to be simply making everything better in every way, all the time. You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component.

Thiel is one of the richest men in the world and has funded race pseudoscience garbage heap Quillette, the main publication of the Intellectual Dark Web. 

You can blame at least some of the insanity of our current political situation on the malign influence of crackpot plutocrats like Thiel.

Physicist Angela Collier explains why the claim that science, or at least physics, has slowed down is bullshit in this video. At minute 0:31, Collier makes a passing reference to Hossenfelder's article Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years.

And on top of Thiel's wacky talking points, propagated thanks to money or stupidity by the likes of Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hossenfelder, there's the whole TESCREAL crackpottery. But that's a post for another day. But for now, here is a good intro - Peter Thiel's name is dropped at minute 4:25.

Professor Dave hits it out of the park again - another excellent video about grifter Sabine Hossenfelder

Damn this guy is good - so thorough, so much patience to explain the hereditarian idiocy step by step.

God it's so annoying to listen to Hossenfelder talk. Why does she talk through gritted teeth like that?

I posted another video Dave made about Hossenfelder in April 2025.

Happy birthday 5 Pinkerite!

Five years. 

Hard to believe I've been writing about Steven Pinker, race pseudoscience and the Intellectual Dark Web for so long. 

Unfortunately Steven Pinker is still out there promoting race science and racists.

He's had a long career of promoting racist Steve Sailer, then racist Razib Khan, and now he's promoting infamous racist Richard Hanania.

Pinker only subscribes to one account on Twitter/X and that is Richard Hanania's account. This was big news, when it broke that Hanania had a career as a racist troll called Richard Hoste.

The revelation about Pinker's support for racist Hanania did not shame Pinker into removing his subscription to Hanania - and he subscribes to Hanania to this day.

But news of Hanania's extremist racist past wouldn't shame Pinker into ending his subscription because, I am convinced, Steven Pinker has absolutely no sense of shame.

Certainly not about supporting racists, since he's been doing it for at least twenty years.

Hanania himself is also utterly shameless. He and Pinker and other members of the hereditarian gang attacked a critic of race pseudoscience because get this, the critic aligned with right-wing ghouls in his youth.

Hanania naturally, like the shameless hypocrite he is, expected to be forgiven for his youthful racism. 

Except he's still a racist.

And Steven Pinker still supports that racist. Calling Steven Pinker "The World's Most Annoying Man" is really far too kind to a shameless weasel like Steven Pinker.

So what else have I talked about in the past year?

• Last year I said Elon Musk is on track to destroy Twitter. And so he continues. That wasn't hard to predict though.
• Thanks to the hereditarian mob attack, led by the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, it is clear that Rational Wiki is one of the very few media sources exposing race pseudoscience that disturbs the right-wing racist goon squad. So I decided to contribute to the site. Articles I've written:
• E. O. Wilson
• Charles Murray
• Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence
• Razib Khan - which I've been adding to recently because he's obsessed with calling everything and anything "retarded"
• Last year Carole Hooven, Steven Pinker's protegé, was promoting Neo-Nazi racist goon Bo Winegard. This year she was rewarded for her devotion to the cause of hereditarianism, by getting a cushy wingnut welfare gig. And then they gave her an award for her service to hereditarianism. 
• And it turns out Hooven's a big fan of "Gender Wars" playing cards which glorifies the psychopathically evil "Kiwi Farms." Other fans of the cards include Pamela Paresky, Jordan Peterson and J. K. Rowling.
• Jerry Coyne also promoted racist goon Bo Winegard
• I added some sections to Coyne's Rational Wiki entry.
• I found out racist weirdo Emil Kirkegaard, who is still being published by the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research (ISIR) was trashing me on his racist website.
• The racist Substack Aporia shared a sausage fest video from ISIR
• ISIR is closely associated with an organization founded with and to support racist Arthur Jensen, "The Institute for Mental Chronometry" which continues on, giving money to race pseudoscience goons associated with ISIR.
• I knew Peter Thiel was a supporter of racist Quillette and also, he's a religious, babbling lunatic - but it was made  clear to me by his blurb for Richard Hanania that Peter Thiel is indisputably evil.
• I discovered the horrifically evil Chaya Raichik and her stochastic terrorism Twitter account Libs of TikTok
• Famous racist Richard Lynn died. I am not sad about it.
• I discovered the YouTube channel "Some More News" and became a financial contributor. 
• When interviewed by another hereditarian goon, Claire Lehmann admitted Quillette promotes hereditarianism.
• I discovered a great decade-old article about cranky old reactionary Richard Dawkins
• Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer are even closer pals than I realized
• I discovered, unfortunately, who Sabine Hossenfelder is. She's a reactionary dummy, impressed by Steven Pinker's idiotic "The Blank Slate"

The top most-visited posts this year:

Is Peter Thiel a babbling lunatic?

1.61K

PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous

548

That sleazy Harper's Letter, almost three years later, let's review

497

WTF Pinker NFT LOL

375

Fighting with Steve Sailer and his racist pals on Twitter

345

Did City Journal and Cancel Watch hatch a scheme to blackmail a critic of race pseudoscience and censor RationalWIki?

307

Sabine Hossenfelder, Quillette, racism and Thielbucks

290

Amy Wax and her racist rant at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference

220

Sabine Hossenfelder and the Intellectual Dark Web

214

Steven Pinker and the race pseudoscience network

209

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.

Meet Coel Hellier, apologist for white supremacist Johann Blumenbach and race pseudoscience

I'd never heard of Hellier until he decided to publish in right-wing hereditarian garbage rag
Quillette, specifically to defend race pseudoscience.

Hellier is a professor of astrophysics - what is it about physicists that make them such absolute assholes? 

Biologists, like Robin May who has a PhD in mammalian cell biology, agree that race is bullshit - but physicists always think they know more than anybody else about everything. 

Just like that idiot Sabine Hossenfelder.

And like Hossenfelder, Hellier is impressed by hereditarian charlatan Steven Pinker, who is a psychologist for chrissakes - psychology is the softest of all the sciences. But Pinker, like many a white male mediocrity, is convinced that he has all the answers on any given topic, although he's often been accused over the course of his career of advocating for two opposing beliefs at the same time.

And he's a hard-core, if weaselly, hereditarian.

Hellier attempts to rehabilitate Blumenbach:

After citing many examples of “negroes of capacity,” whom he considers comparable  to the inhabitants of “well-known provinces of Europe’’, he concludes that:  

there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro.

Those do not read like the thoughts of a man motivated by a desire to establish a racial hierarchy that would justify slavery.

Blumenbach got a lot right. And he drew his conclusions, as a scientist should, from a thorough analysis of the anatomical evidence. 

If you are the kind of person who is too ignorant or lazy to bother to find out anything about Blumenbach on your own - in other words, Quillette's target audience - you might simply accept Hellier's insistence that Blumenbach was a real scientist and not at all a racist.

But anthropologist Marvin Harris has the goods on Blumenbach:

...Johann Blumenbach in Germany and Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in France, were in their own fashion white supremacists. Both believed that Adam and Eve had been white (God’s image!). Both regarded the emergence of other types as a form of “degeneration.” But unlike the racists of the nineteenth century and thereafter, both Blumenbach and Buffon believed that the degenerative course of raciation could be reversed and that under proper environmental control all the contemporary forms of man could be made to revert to the original...

But then Harris is merely an anthropologist not a professor of astrophysics, so presumably Hellier dismisses anything he says.

Hellier is a right-wing extremist who promotes Republican political operatives like failed scientist Colin Wright and evil Trump-ghoul Christopher Rufo. He's part of idiot Lee Jussim's racist reactionary gang too. He published a piece in the Heterodox STEM Substack (where racists and Nazis are welcome) which is run by far-right reactionary Dorian "I hate feminism" Abbot. And can be seen retweeting all kinds of reactionary idiots like the Bo Winegard-promoting Jerry Coyne.

And he's an anti-trans fascist. What did you expect?

Collier kicks ass

I always welcome the chance to post videos or links to videos by physicist Angela Collier (follow her on Bluesky) here on Pinkerite. I've done it several times since first discovering her this year.

And I have never had a better reason to post a Collier video than this one, her latest, which calls Intellectual Dark Web namer and Peter Thiel flunky Eric Weinstein a "grifter, " calls IDW-associated physicist Sabine Hossenfelder a "grifter" and  calls the infamous "The War on Science" book "unreadable." She also gives shouts out to two other YouTube creators I've mentioned here, Professor Dave and Shaun.  

Just watch it, it is magnificent.

The IDW and friends and what awful people they are

Great Youtube video The “Skeptics” Are Crashing Out HARD from Genetically Modified Skeptic, which talks about the Laurence Krauss grifterpalooza book The War on Science and many of the people I've talked about on this blog, including Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Sabine Hossenfelder, Laurence Krauss, Carole Hooven, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Human Diversity Foundation and OF COURSE Pinker.

Pinkerite is 6 years old

The big news of the year of course was that the race pseudoscience candidate Donald Trump is back in power in spite of being a rapist, a traitor and a felon 34 times over. He's ready to destroy American democracy,

I am curious to see Steven Pinker's reaction - last I heard he was not a fan of Trump in spite of so many of his IDW fellow travelers being on the side of fascism - but I can't be bothered to go look on Twitter anymore and see if he tweeted about it. It's such garbage thanks to Musk.

The second biggest news is the banger of an expose on Emil Kirkegaard and his racist machinations from Hope not Hate. 

And also that the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) let  Kirkegaard participate in its conference this year. 

I created a database of people mentioned in all ISIR conference programs.

And last November Kirkegaard was in German news for his connection to the German fascist political organization Alternative für Deutschland.

So what else have I talked about in the past year?

• I discovered who Marc Andreessen is. Ugh.
• I created a Rational Wiki article for Richard Haier.
• I wrote about the Neo-Nazi connections of the ISIR
• I wrote about Richard Jensen, patron saint of the ISIR, and his feeble "science" 
• I was one degree from Rachel Maddow (sort of) thanks to John Jackson
• I discovered that ANTIFA has been doing the work the FBI should be doing in monitoring and countering far-right racist organizations. And thanks to the Trump election, they will likely continue to do the FBI's work.
• Steve Sailer was sued, Pinkerite got a third citation and Jerry Seinfeld was palling around with Bari Weiss.

The top most-visited individual posts this year:

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 551

• Jerry Seinfeld is apparently a member of the Bari Weiss right-wing racist club - 482

• Polite Conversations' Eiynah and her revealing interview with Sam Harris - 409

• Sabine Hossenfelder and the Intellectual Dark Web - 252

• Jerry Coyne promotes racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard's racist Substack Aporia ~ Steven Pinker promotes an attack on a critic of Bo Winegard and Emil Kirkegaard - 220

• Aporia - the most prominent bunker full of racists on Substack - 192

• Steven Pinker fights to maintain his title of "World's Most Annoying Man" - 191

• The Institute of Mental Chronometry gives money to its gang members - and the University of Minnesota is so proud - 163

• Is Emil Kirkegaard taking refuge from the law in DAS LANDHAUS ADLON? - 163


• The Brian Ferguson Interview - 150