The Koch-connected and transphobic Letter participants

According to SourceWatch:

As of February 2020, Charles Koch Institute listed the Reason Foundation as a "participating organization" on its website.

The Reason Foundation publishes Reason Magazine which recently bragged that 14% of the signers of the Harper's Letter are Reason contributors, with another six recently promoted by Reason.

There are also a whole lot of Reason contributors here, including Deirdre McCloskey, Cathy Young, Jonathan Rauch, Jonathan Haidt, Emily Yoffe, Jesse Singal, Kmele Foster, Katie Herzog, John McWhorter, Kat Rosenfield, Nadine Strossen, Laura Kipnis, Wendy Kaminer, Francis Fukuyama, and Malcolm Gladwell. (On it, too, are recent Reason interview subjects Meghan Daum, Coleman Hughes, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Steven Pinker, Bari Weiss, and Garry Kasparov.)

Professional racist Steve Sailer is very pleased with Williams and the Letter:

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a sensible young part-black man of letters, has organized an open letter in Harper’s by old-fashioned center-left liberals against cancel culture.

I think the Letter is likely a project Williams dreamed up together with someone representing Koch interests, which has been for quite some time trying to influence the media and academia through free speech grifts.

The author of the Reason piece, Matt Welch, is described talking to Andrew Sullivan about the naughty Left in The Ringer.

Last week, Kmele Foster, Matt Welch, and Michael Moynihan interviewed the conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan for their podcast, The Fifth Column. The hosts and their guest spent much of the hourlong interview discussing the bellicose state of political discourse and left-wing activists who refuse to debate their opponents and even their allies, including Sullivan. “The only right that gay people had, for the longest time, was the the First Amendment right,” Sullivan said. 

I'm surprised Sullivan wasn't asked to sign the Letter, especially since like many funded by Koch (including Letter signers Pinker and Haidt,) he's a fan of race science and appears to be tight with "HBD Chick" a pal of Steve Sailer.

It's funny to see Welch trying to deflect from Koch race science support in the article:

No, I don't want to hang out professionally or personally with Nazis and/or race/IQ obsessives...

You do, Matt Welch. You already do.

Welch tries to use the "but Lefties signed the Letter" tactic:

The vast majority of public-facing writers and intellectuals I see scoffing at "cancel culture" and dismissing as a single tiresome monolith a grouping that includes Katha Pollitt, Martin Amis, Shadi Hamid, Margaret Atwood, Greil Marcus, George Packer, Michelle Goldberg, Randi Weingarten, and Zaid Jilani, are at some point just telling on themselves. You do not want to hear left-of-center thinkers bemoaning the free speech "illiberalism" on the left, and you are not curious whether at least a handful of people you have previously respected might have a legitimate concern or two about an issue you claim to hold dear. Noted.

I think those Lefties were invited to sign the Letter - a Letter that on the surface sounds high-minded and craftily avoided naming names or specifics about the cases they were complaining about - exactly so that its devisers could claim bi-partisan support.

And two of those Lefties are known as transphobes. And Jilani is a fan of Quillette an author at Quillette.

Apologists for Quillette & Race Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Minkowitz responds:

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

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

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.

Meet the ghouls, grifters, goons and stooges who support Nazi-platforming Substack

The three Nazi-platforming stooges

 So the other day I predicted:

Now Katz has drafted an open letter to the Substack ghouls, entitled Substackers against Nazis that I doubt will impress the Substack ghouls and their bosses...

Today I see in the NYTimes:

Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech

When are people like Jonathan Katz going to admit that the entire purpose of Substack is to platform racist ghouls!

That's what all the racist freaks are talking about when they talk about "moving the Overton window."

Or as it says in the NYTimes article:

While Substack says it does not allow users to call for violence, even that distinction can be murky, Professor Braddock said, because racists and extremists can walk up to the line without overtly doing that. But their rhetoric can still inspire others to violence, he said.

Allowing Nazi rhetoric on a platform also normalizes it, he said.

“The more they use the kind of rhetoric that dehumanizes or demonizes a certain population,” Professor Braddock said, “the more it becomes OK for the general population to follow.”

THAT'S THE ENTIRE REASON FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SUBSTACK!!!

Don't believe me - believe the white supremacist, Richard Hanania, who has been promoted by Hamish McKenzie on Substack - according to Katz:

(Hanania has said that “Substack itself was created to explicitly push back against leftist suppression of speech” — another comment I’d like McKenzie to weigh in on.)

The Koch-funded, racist-supporting (they go waaaay back with Charles Murray) Reason Magazine of course supports Substack. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some Koch money invested in Substack too.

Katz responds to Matt Taibbi here - unfortunately Katz is still on Substack so I am not going to resubscribe so I can read all the content. But I will have to quote from the piece because it's so perfect - Taibbi is even more contemptible than Freddie deBoer, which is saying a lot:

And look, I don’t blame Matt. If I were a hack post-leftist overwriter who peaked during Occupy Wall Street and responded to sexual-harassment allegations by worming his way under the sweaty wings of Ted Cruz and Elon Musk—only to get hoodwinked into pushing neocon Sinophobic talking points that blew up on arrival—I might make up a strawman on a Tuesday night and torch him too. Certainly easier than engaging with anything I’ve ever actually said.

Business Insider makes a good point - it isn't just that Substack is platforming Nazis, it's that Substack has a profitable business arrangement with Nazis!

The Katz letter was bound to be countered by a letter from a bunch of right-wingers and stupid feckless stooges of the right. 

As I just recently said, signing this kind of letter is how the right does "virtue signaling."

Some of the people on this list are harmless nobodies who dabble in the arts or like to promote their religions or hobbies online, but there are many on this list who are rightwing ghouls, goons, and grifters. Just awful - and very much not harmless - people. Quite a few Quillette authors, anti-vax wackos, anti-trans fanatics and wingnut welfare recipients. At least one of them is a public Nazi sympathizer.

To my amazement, Steven Pinker is not on this list - but his influence is apparent...

1. Elle Griffin, author of The Elysian - a fan of Steven Pinker - OF COURSE! ~ enthusiastic supporter of her plutocratic paymasters
2. Alex Kruger, author of Garden of Anxiety
3. Alexander Hellene, author of A. Hellene Author  - misogynist idiot
4. a. natasha joukovsky, author of quite useless - management consultant/conservative idiot
5. Angela Nagle, author of Angela Nagle - darling of Fox News
6. Abigail Shrier, author of The Truth Fairy - rabidly anti-trans crusader and Quillette author
7. Alberto Romero, author of The Algorithmic Bridge
8. Bari Weiss, author of The Free Press - OF COURSE the sugar baby of Harlan Crow, and very, very likely, Peter Thiel - and an absolutely contemptible human being supports Substack - I've no doubt she gets paid by the same people who support Substack - she also signed this letter
9. Ben Dreyfuss, author of Calm Down - rightwing idiot gloats about Substack platforming Nazis
10. Bowen Dwelle, author of An Ordinary Disaster
11. Bridget Phetasy, author of Beyond Parody - rightwing idiot, Quillette author
12. Cameron M. Bailey, author of Emeth - obsessed with being a Freemason
13. Charles Eisenstein, author of Charles Eisenstein - anti-vaxxer idiot
14. Christin Balan, author of Writer in Progress 
15. C.L. Steiner, author of Not Complaining - wants to ridicule Nazis, but not deny them a big mainstream audience
16. Colin Wright, author of Reality’s Last Stand - in a five-way tie with Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Konstantin Kisin and Michael Shermer for the most contemptible right-wing ghoul on this list - not only a former Quillette staffer, but an anti-trans obsessive and pal of right-wing uber-ghoul Christopher Rufo
17. Connor O’Brien, author of Regions
18. Contarini, author of Contarini’s Attic 
19. Damon Linker, author of Notes from the Middleground - dictator-appeasing idiot
20. Darryl Cooper, author of MartyrMade - Trump apologist idiot and Nazi-symp who reportedly used his personal Twitter account to claim that “FDR chose the wrong side in WW2.”
21. david roberts, author of Sparks from Culture  
22. Dee Rambeau, author of Of a Sober Mind - conservative dummy, cites hereditarian Jonathan Haidt as an expert
23. Doomberg, author of Doomberg - idiot: "As a general rule, Doomberg has stayed clear of the direct debate over whether anthropogenic carbon emissions are warming the planet and whether such a trend represents an existential threat..."
24. DuVay Knox, author of Hard Knox Life
25. Dwarkesh Patel, host of Dwarkesh Podcast - promoter of racist idiot Razib Khan
26. Edward Snowden, author of Continuing Ed - Russian, traitor to the United States of America
27. Erik Hoel, author of The Intrinsic Perspective - OK I have to admit, he got off a pretty good slam on Steven Pinker: "I now must remind myself to be like Steven Pinker: expectant, assured, confident in the work my twenty busy bees of Harvard-educated research assistants have done"
28. Ethan Strauss, author of House of Strauss - creepy rightwinger
29. Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), author of FAIR Substack - LOL - nest of race pseudoscience promoters and wingnut welfare recipients, supported by Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow
30. Freddie deBoer, author of Freddie deBoer - former leftist, promoter of race pseudoscience, called Nazi freak Richard Hanania an "interesting thinker" - Jeet Heer had a great response to deBoer's friendship with Hanania - deBoer is so utterly pathetic - does anybody except racists and Nazis like him?
31. Freya India, author of GIRLS - internalized misogyny idiot, recommends Freddie deBoer AND Putinbot Konstantin Kisin AND racist Quillette author Rob Henderson on her Substack 
32. Glenn Loury, author of The Glenn Show - right-wing idiot, signed this letter too
33. Greg Lukianoff, author of The Eternally Radical Idea - works for Koch via FIRE
34. Gurwinder, author of The Prism
35. Heather Heying, author of Natural Selections - named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, evolutionary psychology idiot who promoted Ivermectin for Covid - big fan of game theory - also signed this letter
36. Jason Crawford, author of The Roots of Progress - idiot fan of Steven Pinker
37. Jay Bhattacharya, author of The Illusion of Consensus  - anti-vax idiot, "old college pal of Peter Thiel" also signed this letter
38. Jennifer Sey, author of Sey Everything - rightwing idiot, recommends Bari Weiss on her Substack
39. Jessica Reed Kraus, author of House Inhabit - supporter of crackpot RFK Jr.
40. Jimmy Doom, author of Jimmy Doom’s Roulette Weal 
41. Julie Bindel, author of Julie Bindel - anti-trans fanatic
42. Julie Gabrielli, author of Building Hope
43. Katherine Brodsky, author of Random Minds - rightwing idiot, ally of racist Razib Khan
44. Katherine Dee, author of Default Wisdom  - absolute asshole - calls Jonathan Katz' concerns a "temper tantrum"
45. Kathleen Sykes, author of The Charrette - declares herself a "deep thinker" so of course she recommends rightwing idiot grifters like anti-trans fanatic Jesse Singal (twice!) and anti-feminist Meghan Daum
46. Kent Peterson, author of Kent’s Substack
47. Konstantin Kisin, author of Konstantin Kisin’s Newsletter - Putinbot - signed this letter too
48. Lawrence M. Krauss, author of Critical Mass - utterly contemptible individual, author (of course) at Quillette
49. Lee Fang, author of Lee Fang  - ally of Glenn Greenwald, also signed this letter
50. Leighton Woodhouse, co-founder of Public - Publishes a bunch of grifters like Michael Shellenberger and Zaid Jilani
51. Li Kentgen, author of The 3 C’s of Belonging 
52. Lisa Kuznak, author of Mechanical Pulp
53. Luke Burgis, author of Anti-Mimetic - and author at racist Quillette
54. Lyle McKeany, author of Just Enough to Get Me in Trouble
55. Malcolm Cochran, author of Antheros - author at racist Quillette
56. Matt Taibbi, author of Racket News - awful, signed this letter too
57. Maurissa, author of RissaJean: Field Notes on Love, Life, and Loss 
58. Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum anti-feminist, author at racist Quillette
59. M. E. Rothwell, author of Cosmographia
60. Michaela McKuen, author of McKuen Musings
61. Michael C. Moynihan, host of The Fifth Column - racist idiot Andrew Sullivan considers him an "old friend"
62. Michael Mohr, author of Sincere American Writing - fake leftist who counts himself among a pack of right-wing idiots and Quillette authors:  "This, in turn, allowed many of us—including some very prominent writers, such as Ted Gioia, Glenn Loury, Freddie DeBoer, Ben Dreyfus, Bridget Phetasy, Matthew Taibbi, Richard Dawkins, and others—the opportunity to sign a pro-free speech letter written by Elle Griffin."
63. Michael Nayna, author of The Process - far-right promoter of Putinbot ghoul Konstantin Kisin
64. Michael Shellenberger author of Public - rightwing ghoul, also signed this letter
65. Michael Shermer, author of Skeptic magazine - blatant racist and Pinker's pal also signed this letter
66. Nellie Bowles, author of Chosen by Choice idiot wife of the contemptible Bari Weiss, also signed this letter
67. Nikita Petrov, author of Psychopolitica - apparently a Koch employee, works for the far-right Manhattan Institute's Glenn Loury
68. N.S. Lyons, author of The Upheaval - anti-feminist asshole
69. Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Abbey of Misrule - religious fanatic and anti-vaxxer nut job
70. Paul L Jordan III, author of The Taproot 
71. Peter Boghossian, author of Peter Boghossian - utterly contemptible, part of the Harlan Crow-funded FAIR grift. Signed this letter too.
72. Peter Clayborne, author of Anarchy Unfolds  - signed both the pro and anti-Nazi letters - JFC
73. Phisto Sobanii, author of The Partisan - aaaasshole who cites the ghoulish Matt Taibbi as a voice  of reason
74. Rachel Haywire, author of The Cultural Futurist 
75. Rav Arora, author of The Illusion of Consensus - right-wing anti-vaxxer
76. Razib Khan, author of Unsupervised Learning - racist idiot
77. Richard Dawkins, author of The Poetry of Reality - cranky old bigot, also signed this letter
78. Rob Henderson, author of Rob Henderson’s Newsletter rightwing idiot, author at racist Quillette
79. Ruth Gaskovski, author of School of the Unconformed  - Luddite
80. Sam Kahn, author of Castalia - aaaaaasshole - author at the asshole-infested Persuasion, another bunch of reactionary letter-signers
81. Samuel Lopez-Barrantes, author of if not, Paris
82. Sarah Haider, author of Hold That Thought - rightwing idiot also signed this letter
83. Sasha Latypova, author of Due Diligence and Art - anti-vaxxer nut job
84. Scott D, author of Moderately Offline
85. Dr Sharon Blackie, author of The Art of Enchantment 
86. Slavoj Žižek, author of ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS - anti-trans reactionary also signed this letter
87. Tabitha Blair, author of Rudegal Tab Rants - anti-vaxxer nut job
88. Taylor Foreman, author of The Creativity Gap - idiot
89. Ted Gioia, author of The Honest Broker - author at racist Quillette, City Journal and Bari Weiss's Substack
90. Tomas Pueyo, author of Uncharted Territories - gender essentialist creep
91. Walter Kirn, author of Unbound - ally of the ghoulish Matt Taibbi and the even more ghoulish Christopher Rufo - also signed this letter
92. Zachary Davis, author of Wayfare

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

Basically, anywhere there is an obscenely wealthy plutocrat funding right-wing/Libertarian political causes, there you will likely find Bari Weiss

How bad was the infamous Harper's Letter?

Consider first, that it was created by Thomas Chatterton Williams who, I don't believe coincidentally, was put on wingnut welfare via the Koch-funded AEI a few months later.

I once admired Williams, but by the time of his embarrassing chateau incident (he declared on Twitter that he kicked a friend out of his home in France for criticizing Bari Weiss) I had realized he was in deep with the right-wing Libertarian ghouls in and around the Intellectual Dark Web. 

That was bad enough, and then the New Yorker's Ian Chotiner interviewed Williams and revealed what an extreme intellectual lightweight he is. 

Williams' friendship with Bari Weiss is key. She is a central figure in the Intellectual Dark Web, a member of the far-right leaning FAIR, an organization based on the cynical, sleazy right-wing campaign against "critical race theory" and more recently a supporter and defender of far-right homophobic treasonous, stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok, funded by Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon, while aiding and abetting far-right goon Elon Musk.

Here is Weiss in June 2020, promoting her people: Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill); another Koch employee Kmele Foster (@kmele) a devotee of Ayn Rand; stochastic terrorist James Lindsay (@ConceptualJames), a Trump supporter and partner of far-right religious extremist Michael O'Fallon, Lindsay was banned from the old Twitter for being a neo-Nazi; and IDW founder and crackpot Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein), employee of scary weirdo Peter Thiel. 

Basically, anywhere there is an obscenely wealthy plutocrat funding right-wing/Libertarian political causes, there you will likely find Bari Weiss.

At the time of the Harper's Letter, Tom Scocca in Slate discussed how sleazy the stunt was:

What were the Harper’s signatories trying to accomplish? For a document announcing an emergency, their letter (addressed, as the writer Luppe Luppen pointed out, to no one) was studiously vague about exactly what it meant to warn the reader against. It presented a nonspecific and mostly pluralized litany of complaints:

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

At least one item—”a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed study”—did seem to have an identifiable antecedent: David Shor, a researcher at the consulting company Civis Analytics, tweeted out a study concluding that voter backlash against violent protest in 1968 had tipped the presidential election to Richard Nixon and was fired after people denounced the tweet. There seems to be fairly broad agreement, among people who would even know about this incident, that Civis was wrong to fire him, and the incident does look like a classic example of a company sacrificing an innocent for “panicked damage control.” But this pattern of targeted pressure and overreaction is not a new crisis. It has been established for years by now, in right-wing and left-wing outrage campaigns alike, and the fault lies with the institutions that still haven’t figured out how it works, not with the generalized, newly ascendant cultural revolution that the Harper’s letter or Trump wishes to raise the alarm about.   

Yet, rather than defending Shor and criticizing Civis by name, the letter anonymized his case and stuck it next to a complaint about powerful people losing their jobs “for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes”—a rickety construction that leaves the reader wondering if it’s supposed to cover the times that aren’t just clumsy mistakes, or how one is to decide which mistakes are more than just clumsy. Also, which “journalists are barred from writing on certain topics”? In June, two Black journalists were prohibited from covering the Black Lives Matter protests by the owner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but the letter admonishes the reader that “resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion,” while the Post-Gazette is in the hands of a passionate Trumpist.

But it wasn't only sleazy in its hypocrisy, but also in the sense of using phony bipartisanship, a favorite Koch tactic, by recruiting well-known people on the left who should have known better: Katha Pollitt, Dahlia Lithwick, Jeet Heer and Gloria Steinem.

Here is a list of all the signers of the Harper's letter: the Quillette contributors, the transphobes, right-wingers, Koch employees and the feckless dummies of the center and left.

1. Elliot Ackerman |  journalist
2. Saladin Ambar |  academic
3. Martin Amis | Islamophobe novelist
4. Anne Applebaum | journalist and defender of Roman Polanski
5. Marie Arana | author
6. Margaret Atwood | sort-of-feminist novelist
7. John Banville | author
8. Mia Bay | historian
9. Louis Begley | novelist
10. Roger Berkowitz | Bard College and author at right-wing racist Quillette
11. Paul Berman, writer | author at Quillette
12. Sheri Berman | Barnard College
13. Reginald Dwayne Betts | poet
14. Neil Blair | agent of transphobic J.K. Rowling
15. David W. Blight | Yale University historian - should have known better
16. Jennifer Finney Boylan | transgender author - rescinded signature (although it's still listed at Harpers) when she realized what this stunt was really about, when she saw that J.K. Rowling had signed it. More recently she wrote a piece about Rowling.
17. David Bromwich | Yale University
18. David Brooks | annoying center-right columnist
19. Ian Buruma  | Bard College
20. Lea Carpenter | writer
21. Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus) - should have known better
22. Nicholas A. Christakis | Yale University, right-wing, defender of Razib Khan
23. Roger Cohen | center-right journalist
24. Ambassador Frances D. Cook | career politician
25. Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project | should have known better
26. Kamel Daoud | journalist
27. Meghan Daum, writer | former liberal, current member of the IDW/Quillette gang
28. Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis | should have known better
29. Jeffrey Eugenides | writer
30. Dexter Filkins | journalist
31. Federico Finchelstein | The New School
32. Caitlin Flanagan | anti-feminist
33. Richard T. Ford | Stanford Law School
34. Kmele Foster - Koch employee, Ayn Rand fan, promoted by Bari Weiss
35. David Frum | former Bush speechwriter
36. Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University | Quillette author, Reason Magazine contributor
37. Atul Gawande | Harvard University, Biden administration
38. Todd Gitlin | Columbia University
39. Kim Ghattas | journalist
40. Malcolm Gladwell | Koch funded-Reason Magazine contributor
41. Michelle Goldberg, columnist - should have known better
42. Rebecca Goldstein | married to Steven Pinker
43. Anthony Grafton | Princeton University
44. David Greenberg | Rutgers University
45. Linda Greenhouse - should have known better
46. Rinne B. Groff | playwright
47. Sarah Haider | Quillette cause
48. Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern - long-time promoter of race pseudoscience
49. Roya Hakakian | writer
50. Shadi Hamid | Brookings Institution
51. Jeet Heer, The Nation - should have known better
52. Katie Herzog, podcast host |  defender of Andy Ngo, fan of Quillette, Reason Magazine
53. Susannah Heschel | Dartmouth College
54. Adam Hochschild | author
55. Arlie Russell Hochschild | author
56. Eva Hoffman | writer
57. Coleman Hughes | writer for (Koch-funded) Manhattan Institute, author at Quillette
58. Hussein Ibish | Arab Gulf States Institute
59. Michael Ignatieff | politician
60. Zaid Jilani, journalist | member of the IDW/Quillette gang including FAIRforall, Quillette author
61. Bill T. Jones | New York Live Arts
62. Wendy Kaminer | advisory council member of Koch-funded FIRE, Reason Magazine contributor
63. Matthew Karp, Princeton University | far-left
64. Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative | the chess guy
65. Daniel Kehlmann  | writer
66. Randall Kennedy | law professor
67. Khaled Khalifa | writer
68. Parag Khanna | author
69. Laura Kipnis | Northwestern University, Reason Magazine contributor
70. Frances Kissling | Catholics for a Free Choice
71. Enrique Krauze | historian
72. Anthony Kronman | Yale University
73. Joy Ladin | Yeshiva University
74. Nicholas Lemann | Columbia University
75. Mark Lilla | Columbia University
76. Susie Linfield | New York University
77. Damon Linker | works for Libertarian Niskanen center, dictator appeaser
78. Dahlia Lithwick, Slate - should have known better
79. Steven Lukes | New York University
80. John R. MacArthur | Harper's publisher
81. Susan Madrak | writer - should have known better
82. Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer for right-wing Unheard, friend of Quillette
83. Greil Marcus | music journalist
84. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center - should have known better
85. Kati Marton | author
86. Debra Mashek worked for DonorsTrust -funded Heterodox Academy
87. Deirdre McCloskey | Libertarian, Reason Magazine contributor
88. John McWhorter | Reason Magazine contributor
89. Uday Mehta | City University of New York
90. Andrew Moravcsik | Princeton University
91. Yascha Mounk |  Persuasion - appears to be another media outlet for the IDW, with several Harper's Letter signers including McWhorter, Yoffe, Haidt and Pinker.
92. Samuel Moyn | Yale University
93. Meera Nanda | writer and teacher
94. Cary Nelson | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
95. Olivia Nuzzi | New York Magazine
96. Mark Oppenheimer | Yale University
97. Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer - should have known better
98. George Packer | writer
99. Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita) - should have known better
100. Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – should have known better
101. Orlando Patterson | Harvard University
102. Steven Pinker - ugh
103. Letty Cottin Pogrebin - should have known better
104. Katha Pollitt, writer - should have known better
105. Claire Bond Potter, The New School - should have known better
106. Taufiq Rahim | New America
107. Zia Haider Rahman | writer
108. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen | University of Wisconsin
109. Jonathan Rauch | Brookings Institution/The Atlantic, Reason Magazine contributor, Quillette contributor
110. Neil Roberts | political theorist
111. Melvin Rogers | Brown University
112. Kat Rosenfield | Reason Magazine contributor
113. Loretta J. Ross | Smith College
114. J.K. Rowling | children's book author, infamous transphobe
115. Salman Rushdie, New York University
116. Karim Sadjadpour | Carnegie Endowment
117. Daryl Michael Scott | Howard University
118. Diana Senechal | teacher and writer
119. Jennifer Senior | columnist
120. Judith Shulevitz | writer
121. Jesse Singal, journalist | infamous transphobe, Reason Magazine contributor
122. Anne-Marie Slaughter | lawyer
123. Andrew Solomon | writer
124. Deborah Solomon | critic and biographer
125. Allison Stanger, Middlebury College | became a political cause of the race pseudoscience right for her support for infamous race pseudoscience racist Charles Murray
126. Paul Starr | American Prospect/Princeton University
127. Wendell Steavenson | writer
128. Gloria Steinem - should have known better
129. Nadine Strossen | defender of race pseudoscience, Reason Magazine contributor
130. Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., | Harvard Law School
131. Kian Tajbakhsh | Columbia University
132. Zephyr Teachout | Fordham University
133. Cynthia Tucker | University of South Alabama
134. Adaner Usmani | Harvard University
135. Chloe Valdary - part of the Quillette/IDW world
136. Helen Vendler | Harvard University
137. Judy B. Walzer | academic
138. Michael Walzer | academic
139. Eric K. Washington | historian
140. Caroline Weber | historian
141. Randi Weingarten | American Federation of Teachers
142. Bari Weiss - I would bet she was one of the instigators of this stunt
143. Cornel West | public intellectual
144. Sean Wilentz | Princeton University
145. Garry Wills | historian
146. Thomas Chatterton Williams | Koch employee, creator of the Harper's Letter stunt
147. Robert F. Worth | journalist and author
148. Molly Worthen | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
149. Matthew Yglesias | political operative at Libertarian think tank, friend of Razib Khan
150. Emily Yoffe, journalist | right-leaning "cancel culture" hysteric, Reason Magazine contributor
151. Cathy Young, journalist | Koch-funded career, pioneer of stochastic terrorism IMO
152. Fareed Zakaria | political commentator

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