Best title of the year: why Quillette sucks

 At Boing Boing: Why Quillette sucks

Lehmann's clueless vulgarity was such that even right-wingers cringed at her tweets. The New York Times' Jamelle Bouie, certainly not among them, remarked that it'd been a while since he'd seen "Twitter unite against a single person like it has united against the Australian caliper magazine lady."

She did have a defender, though, in the form of commentator Dave Rubin, who (while careful to distance himself from her) suggested that she should sue someone who had called her website, Quillette, a "white supremacist blog". While Rubin's proposal is legally illiterate, it did strike me that the casual invocation of "supremacist" obscures what Quillette's all about, the culture that eats its strategy for breakfast. It's not just the distinction hinted at by Bouie, between the Calipers racists and the Hoods racists, but the peculiar culture of self-serious, middle-class, constantly sneering Britishy media people who think things are just absurd.

I'll note here that Jamelle Bouie was instrumental in preventing Razib Khan, race pseudo-science hawker and friend of Claire Lehmann from getting a gig at the NYTimes by publicizing Khan's race statements - and Bouie linked to my personal blog which had a post from 2013 which presented quotes from the first incarnation of Khan's Gene Expression web site.

I mentioned this later on Twitter, while criticizing racist Bo Winegard and his promotion of race science, and Claire Lehmann had a meltdown, although, as is her habit, she wasn't concerned with accuracy - I never said I got Khan fired.

Which ties into another aspect of the Boing Boing piece:

The "intellectual dark web" of free-speech absolutists, as it was self-defeatingly named, is a regular source of legal threats and covert (if perhaps naive) support of authoritarian personalities and institutions. The "censorship" they complain of often amounts to mere criticism, experienced by their giant egos as injury. But the formal state-backed censorship they threaten to use themselves is all too real. Lehmann herself once threatened to sue someone for "defaming" Quillette because it's "going to be fun".

I wrote about Lehmann's threatened lawsuit, mentioned above, in a two-parter: How conservative and white supremacist is Quillette?

I don't know if I buy the emphasis on a British/Commonwealth point of view the article has. The Intellectual Dark Web, closely tied to Quillette, is mostly Americans.

The most important journalism concerning Quillette has yet to be written, which is the article examining, in depth, who funds Quillette.

Right-wing race-monger Razib Khan testifies: getting cancelled is no big deal

I had the misfortune of thinking about the race-obsessed, history-denying, right-wing Razib Khan recently because it came to my attention that "The New Liberals" - funding source unknown - had promoted Khan by interviewing him for its podcast. 

The audio clip included with the promotional tweet expresses to perfection what an utter asshole Khan is, especially on the issue of race. 

Khan's voice is as obnoxious as his politics so I have transcribed the audio for you, dear Pinkerite reader, but I won't pretend it wasn't an awful experience:

Ultimately like I know people in Academia who talk about like systemic racism and prejudice and all this stuff, I just say like it's really easy, all you need to do is minorities that you think should have these jobs, you guys just need to like draw straws and one out of five of you resign and free up the positions, hire somebody of color, and we're all good, right, it's a simple thing to do, but they never do it, do they? They don't make the hard decision, I told an acquaintance of mine who wanted to talk to me about racism and I just got sick of it, and I was just like, well what you need to do is give your son's inheritance to a Black family. If you're talking about wealth and equality right now, he needs to be poor, and make his own way, and they need to have money, so just do it. And the person flipped out at me. Cause they just wanted to talk. And I'm just not super interested in talking. I am a non-white person. I don't need to be talked to about racism all the time. It's not interesting to me.

Listening to that clip... I didn't think I could have a lower opinion of Khan, but wow, those supremely obnoxious words plus that obnoxious voice is a powerful combination.

Talking about racism isn't interesting to him, claims Razib Khan, and he denies the very existence of systemic racism, but he has been obsessed with race and genetics, for a long time. 

You have to wonder what possible acquaintance of Khan's, who isn't already a flaming race-obsessed rightwing stooge, would try to talk to Khan about race. 

I checked out Khan's substack to see if he is still obsessed with race, and of course he is. It seems to be the one thing he cares about more than anything else in the world. 

But I found something worthwhile on Khan's blog. I found Khan testifying that getting "cancelled" is absolutely no big deal. 

Of course I also had to endure Khan's prose, which is always awful, as well as his bloated self-regard.

Testify, race-monger:

Six years on, I cannot think of a single person I value or a single place I’ve wanted to be that I no longer have access to because the New York Times deemed me beyond the pale. There are a boatload of fascinating, principled people in America and beyond who don’t care who the 21st-century New York Times thinks is pure enough. I’ve recorded podcasts with dozens of them. Thousands more give me their emails and pay me good money to tell them data-backed stories about the history of the human race on Substack.

I doubt the people who pay Khan good money do it for the alleged "data-backed stories about the history of the human race" but rather, for Khan's right-wing race-mongering. 

While reading, I was also reminded of another facet of Khan's personality, his cowardice, when he refers to Jamelle Bouie without naming him:

Cathy Young is buddies with Khan & a shitty person

It’s a funny commentary on our times that one of the people they say was most rabid behind the scenes about protecting the readership of The New York Times from a dangerous mind like mine, has since joined The New York Times. Does America feel safe now, buddy?

There's a reason the people who hire Khan are generally right-wing extremists like the publishers of the racist Taki's Magazine - they don't care about literary qualities, they care that he's conservative and promotes race pseudo-science. 

But like people on the Koch dole, like the equally obnoxious Cathy Young (Khan's buddy), they imagine they have careers because of their intellectual and literary excellence.

But back to Khan's testimony. I was recently talking about Jamelle Bouie's role in keeping Khan off the NYTimes and my small part it in. So it's good to know that, in spite of the constant whining about cancel culture, in every conceivable media outlet, by Khan's friends like Steven Pinker and Pinker's toady Jerry Coyne, an enterprising right-wing race-monger can still make a good living saying supremely stupid, obnoxious things, even without the imprimatur of the New York Times. As Bari Weiss can surely tell you.

I wish Khan would get the word out to the other members of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex, that getting cancelled is no big deal because Angel Eduardo was just being promoted by The New "Liberals" for whining about it.

It seems that Eduardo is the latest edition to the the right-winger-packed Board of Advisors of FAIR. 

I will have plenty to say about that clown car soon.

Jamelle Bouie on Bari Weiss - she was hired to be a regime censor

Bouie details what an absolute grifting right-wing fraud Bari Weiss is. 

It was obvious to me how evil Bari Weiss is when she published her Intellectual Dark Web article, and was a major reason why I started this blog.

NYTimes columnist Bouie is a long-time critic of the race pseudoscience gang, even linking to my personal blog over ten years ago when racist Razib Khan was on the verge of being hired by the New York Times. Which is most likely why Khan hates Bouie so much.

Weiss of course was an employee of the New York Times, which helped boost her grifting right-wing reactionary career, leading to the destruction of CBS news. Unfortunately the only alternative to the New York Times is the even-worse, oligarch owned and controlled Washington Post. 

That's what happens to mainstream journalism in an age of oligarchs and fascism. 

How it started:

How it's going.

 

Moral of the story: grifters gonna grift.

Oh, so that's how Peter Thiel knows so much about the antichrist.

Claire Lehmann: How I became a gutter racist

ISIR president Thomas R. Coyle and Claire Lehmann, 
spreading their racist propaganda at Northwestern University
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Claire Lehmann founded racist rag Quillette, which has been funded by far-right crackpot Peter Thiel, which is sufficient reason to consider her a gutter racist. 

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

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

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

Aporia is owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard. 

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

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

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

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

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

Lehmann says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Especially when you are a gutter racist like Claire Lehmann.

I guess it doesn't bother NYTimes columnist Ross Douthat that Razib Khan is a huge racist

 Because of course it does not.

Douthat can be seen on the Razib Khan podcast Khanversation helping to legitimize Khan's career of promoting race science. 

Apparently Khanversation is a joint project of Khan and rightwing R Street think tank creature Josiah Neeley 

It goes without saying Neeley doesn't care that Khan is racist either. Because the American conservative movement has no bottom.

While Khan is hobnobbing with Douthat, on the other hand he absolutely hates another NYTimes columnist Jamelle Bouie.

Khan of course is a long-time supporter of race pseudoscience, and is a member of the racist boys club obsessed with "Jewishness" as I documented yesterday. 

And Khan was denied a place at the NYTimes, back when the NYTimes was generally more anti-racist, after his career as a political operative promoting racism was publicized by Bouie, among others.

The Atlantic was not impressed by Douthat's book.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Maybe that's why Douthat had to resort to far-right media, racist and all, to help promote it.

Bee-yoo-ti-ful takedown of Bari Weiss by John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight"

Normally when I post Youtube videos here, most are from excellent but fairly obscure content creators. 

To be sure, I have posted content from "Last Week Tonight" before, but there has never been an episode so perfectly aligned with the Pinkerite mission than this week's report on Bari Weiss taking over CBS news.

What an absolute thing of beauty, especially the frequency with which Oliver mocks Weiss's egomania, starting with her self-aggrandizing characterization of quitting the NYTimes as her "Jerry Maguire moment."

And this Last Week Tonight episode may have finally made Bari Weiss notorious enough that even those to whom I have mentioned the name "Bari Weiss" in the past will no longer immediately respond "Barry White started a right-wing publication? Wait, isn't he dead?"

Right out of the gate, Oliver points out that Weiss was given control over a news organization when she herself has no experience in news - she's always been op-ed. Her rightwing garbage heap "The Free Press" is opinion-heavy - and often from right-wing extremists and racists as I discussed a year and a half ago.

Oliver mentions Weiss's idiotic retweet of the parody Twitter account @OfficialAntifa and her mischaracterization of (aka "lies about") NYTimes staff meetings.

He mentions the rightwing plutocrats who bankrolled her including techno-fascist Marc Andreessen.

I have been discussing the awfulness of Bari Weiss since I began this website so there was little new I learned from the report, although I did learn that the Free Press has been publishing shitty editorial cartoons by right-wing playwright David Mamet - who I knew was a right-wing hysteric 18 years ago.

Oliver fact-checks The Free Press.

• Its article about trans-care that turned out to be utter bullshit.

• Lies told by the Free Press about crime in Austin, Texas.

• Claims that reports of malnutrition in Gaza were fake.

Then Oliver gets into Bari Weiss's clown college for racists, known as the University of Austin, which I have discussed so many times here.

The result of this magnificent report will be that the circle of people who consider Bari Weiss a far-right sleaze-merchant and laughingstock will grow considerably.

• Salon: John Oliver slams CBS for putting Bari Weiss in charge

• Daily Beast: John Oliver Tears Into Nepobaby Billionaire Trying to Take Over HBO

• Variety: John Oliver Slams Bari Weiss’ Takeover of CBS News: She’s ‘Spent Years Putting Out Work’ That ‘Is at Best Irresponsible and at Worst Deeply Misleading’

Of course there are some who will celebrate Weiss's career as the world's most successful courtier, raking in that right-wing money by bending the knee and kissing the ass. On Bluesky, Jamelle Bouie questions the awful Sally Jenkins about her promotion of a celebration of the Weiss victory by the awful Caitlin Flanagan.

And like gutter racist Claire Lehmann (she and Bari go way back) Weiss is shitting her pants over Zohran Mamdani, as if there were not already enough reasons to vote for him.

Yes, Steven Pinker is a jerk

Because Pinker hates Trump, it can seem like he's one of the good guys. 

But then you remember what an absolute jerk he is.

Bluesky is noticing Pinker's jerkitude lately because of Pinker's NYTimes editorial, Harvard Derangement Syndrome.

First because Pinker and his right-wing friends have been attacking Harvard for ages, but now Pinker has appointed himself as champion of Harvard, because Trump is attacking it.

But in addition to Pinker's hypocrisy, there is his promotion of race pseudoscience. 

He's been doing this for years, but it is noticed only rarely, since Pinker has been generally protected by his status as a "celebrity intellectual" and the press has always treated him with reverence, sometimes even writing dreamily about his twinkling blue eyes.

Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times is on Bluesky pointing out Pinker's latest episode of promoting race pseudoscience, in that Harvard editorial.

And let's not overlook Pinker's promoting the claims of behavioral genetics, which always goes so well with race pseudoscience, with the claim that "educational attainment is partially in the genes."

In addition to being wrong about race, Pinker is wrong about marriage - it does not reduce crime. I discussed why in detail five years ago.

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.

Claire Lehmann hits the big time

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

Lehmann is described in Columbia Journalism Review this way:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pinkerite is a member of the elite now

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Sullivan, race science monger

Rightwing pundit Andrew Sullivan has long been known as a fan of evolutionary psychology, pointed out so perfectly by Slate's Tom Scocca in this tweet.

To understand Scocca's point you have to know that proponents of evolutionary psychology are strict adaptationists - they believe almost all current human behavior is based on sexual selection, the sexual choices made by pre-historic people. This is why the existence of homosexuality is such a problem for evolutionary psychology.

More on the drawn and quartered conception of evolution that evo-psychos subscribe to and why it's wrong from P. Z. Myers. 

June 19 was Juneteenth and Sullivan decided to observe it by misrepresenting a piece in the NYTimes by Jamelle Bouie about the participation of the enslaved in fighting for freedom, including in the Civil War.





Now we see Sullivan joining in with the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette gang to mourn the loss of statues to white supremacists and slavers. It seems there are few things that get IDW types madder than the loss of their beloved public statuary to scumbags who never should have been honored in the first place. 

And he isn't content to retweet a Christina Hoff Sommers - he has to go even lower than that - writer and journalist Donna Minkowitz who wrote an excellent piece about Quillette for The Nation caught Sullivan retweeting race science monger "HBD Chick" - HBD stands for human biodiversity, a term invented by professional racist Steve Sailer, and a code word for the race science belief in black genetic inferiority. 

Can Andrew Sullivan sink any lower?

A lawyer representing Bill Watterson really has to
put a stop to HBD Chick associating her grotesque racism
with his character Hobbes.

Meanwhile, good news about Ron Unz's pal Stephen Hsu:

Michigan State University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. announced Friday that Stephen Hsu is resigning as Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, returning to a tenured faculty position, effective July 1.

John Jackson of Fardels Bear has more.

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan express their deep concerns about human rights and dignity for trans people

Left side, top to bottom: Matt Walsh, Pamela Paul, Jesse Singal
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Some More News has an excellent installment about all the anti-trans ghouls and grifters out there. Musk, Rowling, Shrier, Pamela Paul, Matt Walsh, Harmeet K. Dhillon and Andy Ngo are mentioned by name. 

Jesse Singal is not mentioned by name, but his face is displayed a couple of times.

The episode points out that a constant theme of anti-trans grifter ghouls is that trans people were talked into becoming trans thanks to some pro-trans conspiracy, and the ghouls love to promote stories of the tiny minority of gender transitioners who detransitioned. The ghouls are very concerned about the possibility of regret by transitioners.

Minute 28:27: 

According to a 2021 meta analysis, less than one percent of participants in gender-affirming surgery regretted it. For context, the regret-rate for successful knee surgery is 2.9% Which you may recognize as more than 1%. Gender-affirming surgery has a lower regret-rate than almost any other elective surgery. 

Now Jesse Singal is best-known for his crusade against trans rights, while his long-time pal Razib Khan is better known for his promotion of race pseudoscience. 

And as of yesterday, his hatred of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

But don't worry, Khan also hates trans people, probably as much as Jesse Singal does. Khan was recently seen on Twitter, mocking the idea that trans rights are human rights. 

Khan likes to frame his contempt for Amnesty International as a concern about their form of advocacy - they don't make an argument in a tweet for why trans rights are human rights, you see, merely an assertion. 

I have not yet found Khan himself making an argument that trans rights are not human rights. Maybe because, if he laid out his hatred and bigotry explicitly, it would make him look even more like a gigantic asshole.

Not to be outdone, Jesse Singal, Khan's long-time pal tweeted:

Singal writes about Trump's anti-trans executive order, while citing fan of "Gender Wars" cards and Pinker protege Carol Hooven, and spewing bullshit about "left-of-center thinkers."

What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.

It's so funny that Singal pretends to care about treating trans people with dignity while being on very friendly terms with the psychopathic ghouls of Kiwi Farms and while attacking individual trans people from behind his paywall-blocked podcast like the disgusting political operative grifter/faux journalist he is.

Who the fuck does he think he's fooling, exactly?

Singal has justifiably become known for being a useful tool of the far-right and Republicans in their project to win votes by demonizing trans people, but he gets mad when people mention that. 

Meanwhile the Jesse Singal follower labeler on Bluesky is chugging along, receiving many positive reviews.

But back to Razib Khan, for he was recently seen promoting the complete Trump ratfucker tool Andy Ngo. I assume that Trump will partner with Ngo and Ngo's former (or current) lawyer, the ultra-evil Harmeet K. Dhillon to do more ratfucking, using antifa as an excuse to crack down on all dissidents, much like the Nazis used Marxists. These Republicans are absolute fascist filth.

Dhillon is discussed in the Some More News video at minute 39:32 with the point made that she's the Swiss Army tool for right-wing extremist causes.

But Khan does not neglect to stop for a minute to lick the boot - this time Marc Andreessen's buddy, Joe "natural aristocracy" Lonsdale. Khan knows that the only reason a mediocrity like him has any notoriety at all is because he's been a right-wing plutocratic bootlicker since at least kooky Holocaust denier Ron Unz.