Racists agree: Lee Jussim is the best

I received a heads-up recently about Lee Jussim's book, "Social Perception and Social Reality" on Amazon.

Lee Jussim is a failure of a psychology professor at Rutgers University whose work (which as far as I can tell involves screaming "stereotypes are real!" over and over again) is so insignificant that the only people who pay attention to him are racists.

He's an absolute disgrace to Rutgers. 

I've mentioned on this blog that among Lee Jussim's biggest fans is the hardcore racist organization American Renaissance. Although being a hardcore racist organization does not stop Donors Trust from giving it money.

Here is the American Renaissance blurb, displayed right there on Amazon, for Jussim's "Social Perception and Social Reality."

American Renaissance has published pieces from Quillette, including work from the Winegard twins, Gregory Cochran and Jerry Coyne. Lee Jussim has also written for the racist, "hereditarian" Quillette. Of course.

The book got a five star rating on Amazon, from seven people, and five people gave reviews. There are no other ratings, by the way. All five people who have read Jussim's book think it's just the greatest.

Jussim could also be seen at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

He's also a buddy of hardcore racist and "biosocial criminologist" John Paul Wright.

Jussim is a devoted member of the racist-right mob, as you can see from his Twitter timeline. He admires people like Bari Weiss and Jonathan Haidt. Also, Jussim appears to have an obsessive hatred of Claudine Gay.

The racist-right loves Bari Weiss so very much. I guess because she knows how to get funding from disgusting  billionaire sugar daddies like Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow.

Rutgers professor Lee Jussim goes full White Citizens Council

Pinkerite has been pointing out for a long time that the IDW is right-wing, especially in its promotion of race science.

So I was not surprised to find the Trump-loving, right-wing extremist publication Breitbart moaning on behalf of right-wing race science promoter, Lee Jussim, professor at Rutgers University, because Psychology Today did not want to join in the right-wing grievance grift for which Quillette has become so well known.

So Quillette published Jussim's Orwellian lexicon when Psychology Today wouldn't play along.

The question is, why did Jussim try to post it at Psychology Today in the first place, knowing how perfect it would be for Quillette? Why not send it to Quillette first?

The answer of course is the grievance grift - right-wingers want to make Jussim look like a poor victim of political correctness because of his extremist hereditarian lexicon.

Just a few entries demonstrate Jussim's extremism:

Equalitarianism: A dogmatic, quasi-religious belief that all groups are equal on all traits that matter, usually accompanied by the belief that the only credible source of group differences is discrimination and outrage at anyone who suggests otherwise. Often accompanied by the belief that women and minorities are inherently or essentially more virtuous. 

Europhobia: Fear of Europeans and prejudice against Europeans, their descendants, and practices and ideas that originated in Europe. 

Evopsychophobia: Fear of evolutionary psychology, especially of the possibility that social groups (such as men and women) might have evolved different psychological traits and behavioral tendencies.

I'll take them in reverse order. Evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience that pretends to be based on evolution, but in fact throws out three-quarters of evolutionary theory to focus only on adaptation as biologist PZ Myers explains.

The fear of evolutionary psychology is the fear of charlatans infiltrating academia with their just-so stories.

Europhobia is a big deal with far-right bigots who believe European culture is perfect and above criticism. If you dare suggest that European culture is not the very best of all possible cultures in every way, you are Europhobic.

Equalitarianism though really gives away Lee Jussim's racism.

As I have pointed out Equalitarianism is a term that "human biodiversity" types like the Winegards brothers borrowed from the segregationists at the White Citizens' Council. And they are not unaware of its use by the White Citizens' Council. Note the reference to religion by Jussim and the use of the term "goddess" in relation to the term by Carlton Putnam.

From in the book The Citizens' Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction by Neil R. McMillen

Setting forth his ethnological assumption in an influential and widely circulated book, Race and Reason (1961), Putnam asserted that one need not have advanced scientific training to dispute theories of racial equalitarianism: “Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo… can compare this settlement with London or Paris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence…” That so few informed Americans saw things so clearly was compelling proof to Putnam that the nation had been victimized by a “pseudo-scientific hoax” popularized by such early exponents of racial equipotentiality as Franz Boas and several subsequent generations of like-minded anthropologists more devoted to “the demo-goddess of Equalitarianism” than to “the Goddess of Truth.”

Breitbart and Quillette are centers for right-wing racism and it appears to me that in addition to being a creep, Lee Jussim of Rutgers University is a right-wing racist who knowingly uses segregationist terminology to attack critics of the hereditarian swill he promotes.

I suppose we can take some comfort in the fact that Quillette is still on a downward slide on Patreon, according to Graphtreon estimates. Although I'm sure they'll find right-wing racist plutocrats to support them, maybe the same ones who support the career of racist Steve Sailer.

Pinkerite graphophobia: meet Colin Wright and Lee Jussim

I've observed previously how many fans of Steven Pinker are appalled by the concept of representing information in graphic form.

Steve Sailer's fans don't much like it either.

Here we see Quillette author Colin Wright, who clearly hasn't read the diagram's accompanying text, claiming there's no validity to the diagram.

And also that it's insane and truly kooky.

According to his Quillette bio Wright has a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara. Considering that UC Santa Barbara is a center for evolutionary psychology and the professional home of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Napoleon Chagnon it's maybe not so surprising that Wright seems more interested in evolutionary psychology than evolutionary biology. Which would make him very useful to Quillette, which is devoted to promoting evolutionary psychology. I will be looking at some of its articles on EP soon.

It's odd though, that the IDW and its allies didn't seem at all perturbed by the Bari Weiss  NYTimes article in May 2018 "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" linking together some of the same people that I did - and the Weiss article provides even less explanation than my diagram and text.

Weiss links Steven Pinker to four extremists, ever so casually, in a single paragraph, like this:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

I only linked Pinker to two of those four extremists. And I explained who they were and why I was linking them.

And Wright wasn't the only one to have such an extreme response to my diagram. I received dozens of hostile tweets claiming it was evidence I was crazy, and also, "nutso" per Rutgers professor and Quillette author Lee Jussim.

(Jussim is Nate Honeycutt's PhD advisor. Honeycutt was the 2014 honoree for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) Student Spotlight. FIRE, as discussed yesterday, is funded by the Kochs and other right-wing plutocrats.)

So why the almost primitive aversion to graphics from Wright and Jussim? Why the need to claim that factually accurate information is "truly kooky" simply because it's presented as an image?

One theory I have is that many IDW people are not big readers and had not seen the Weiss article.  So instead of learning of the Pinker to Molyneux connection for the first time from someone who admires and lionizes the IDW, they received the information from a critic who thinks there might be something disturbing about the fact that, for good reasons, Steven Pinker is counted as part of the same group as Stefan Molyneux.

The fact that Steven Pinker has promoted the career of a flat-out racist like Steve Sailer, and in such a well documented way must be unpleasant to some of Pinker's admirers, but rather than reassessing their hero-worship of Pinker, they prefer to declare whoever (except Bari Weiss) mentions this unpleasant fact to be craaaaaazy.


Speaking of Steve Sailer, after arguing with IDWs on Twitter about the diagram, it occurred to me that it might be time to revise it. It would be more appropriate to link David Duke to Richard Spencer rather than Molyneux. I found a tweet from Molyneux denouncing Duke.

Richard Spencer however can be seen in this video in a car with David Duke and it seems they coordinated during the Charlottesville disaster.

David Duke is a fan of Steve Sailer too, but I'm not sure exactly what Steve Sailer's opinion is of Duke, although I have never found him criticizing him. I asked Sailer directly on Twitter, but so far no response.

I didn't know much about Lee Jussim before tangling with him and Pamela Paresky and their friends on Twitter the other day over Jesse Singal's hypocrisy. Jussim is apparently in deep with the IDW, but I didn't think he was a hardcore proponent of race science. So I was really surprised to find him retweeting John Paul Wright in a contentious exchange between Jussim and some people I follow on Twitter.

John Paul Wright is the most blatantly racist of the academic promoters of race science.

Wright mentioned on his Conservative Criminology blog that he admired Jussim and said he looked forward to meeting him. I assume they have met since then, offline. They certainly seem to have "met" on Twitter.

John Paul Wright has his own connection to Stefan Molyneux, appearing on his Youtube channel to share thoughts on race and crime and to rant against the left.

This is why it's important to model the IDW - you document the interconnections, some more significant than others, among plutocrats like the Kochs, conservative scientists with political axes to grind and right-wing extremists.

And although I have nothing against information presented as text, people can absorb information from pictures at a glance. It's a principle I use in my work as a technical writer. Graphics are a good method to convey complex information as painlessly as possible.

Fortunately I've never worked with any developers on my tech writing jobs who have had meltdowns over graphic information. Then again, developers often use graphic models themselves to convey connections among components in a system.

I imagine if Colin Wright and Lee Jussim saw one of these they would freak right the hell out.

Has Cathy Young read Quillette?

Recently on Twitter, fellow critics of the IDW were discussing the fact that Lee Jussim (who is not a fan of Pinkerite) was once a critic of race science. I was surprised by this, I had assumed he was always a race science promoter, pushing terms from the segregationist south like "Equalitarianism" and forming a mutual admiration society with biosocial criminologist John Paul Wright.

But one of the fellow critics shared with me some threads from the time of Jussim's opposition to race science and I was surprised by this exchange. Cathy Young asked Jussim if he would turn his anti-race science argument into an article and said that Quillette would be an "obvious choice" for the submission.

Which is why I wonder if Cathy Young, who has written for Quillette has ever read Quillette. In all the years I've been tracking Quillette, I have not detected any evidence that it's ever published an article that argues against race science. It's always been clear to me, in spite of Quillette's claim to be about "free thought" that in fact it is dedicated to right-wing positions, including race science.

It would be surprising if they did run a critique of race science, since one of the people listed in Quillette's Who We Are (described elsewhere as "Quillette's team"), Bo Winegard, has a career that appears to be built entirely on a foundation of race science, in addition to the fact that he is a racist. I doubt Claire Lehmann, who has nurtured and defended the career of Winegard would suddenly turn on his very raison d'être.

The timeline of Jussim critiquing race science is curious. The screen cap of the argument I posted is from August 11, 2019, but Jussim was already declaring his admiration for biosocial criminologist John Paul Wright some time before June 2019, which is when I wrote about the Jussim-Wright connection. 

But could Quillette really have published an anti-race science piece and I somehow missed it? I tweeted to everybody on Quillette's Who We Are page (if they were on Twitter and hadn't blocked me) to ask. No response, of course.

I've been listening to Adam Rutherford's "How to Argue with a Racist" and he addresses Bo Winegard's "blacks are better at basketball" trope. I will be talking about Rutherford's work soon.

American Renaissance admires Lee Jussim's work

Lee Jussim, chairman of the psychology department at Rutgers, and author at Quillette wrote a book that caught the fancy of the white supremacists at American Renaissance in 2015 in their review entitled "A Blow Against Anti-White Science."

Lee Jussim, Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Oxford University Press, 2014, 404 pp., $84.00.
This is a very important book. It is an extensive and painstaking refutation of a set of mistaken assumptions that have dominated social science research since the 1950s, and continue to bias the thinking of most professionals in the field. It is a book for specialists–exhaustive and meticulously documented–but it systematically dismantles the illusions that helped give rise to today’s reflexive suspicion of whites. The author, Lee Jussim, is chairman of the psychology department at Rutgers University, and has spent his entire professional life as a social psychologist.

I hadn't noticed Lee Jussim until running into him on Twitter in April, but since then have been keeping an eye out. His promotion of the idea that stereotypes are real struck me as pointless, but on reflection suspected it was one more trick from the evolutionary psychologists to biologize inequality.

Then I found Steven Pinker quoting him and knew I was right.

Pinker had his ass handed to him by Elizabeth Spelke in their debate in 2005 reprinted in Edge.org although he calls on Jussim to help him out:

There is a widespread myth that teachers (who of course are disproportionately female) are dupes who perpetuate gender inequities by failing to call on girls in class, and who otherwise having low expectations of girls' performance. In fact Jussim and Eccles, in a study of 100 teachers and 1,800 students, concluded that teachers seemed to be basing their perceptions of students on those students' actual performances and motivation... 

...Likewise, Alice Eagly and Jussim and Eccles have shown that most of people's gender stereotypes are in fact pretty accurate. Indeed the error people make is in the direction of underpredicting sex differences.

Spelke's response (my highlights)

So, what's causing the gender imbalance on faculties of math and science? Not differences in intrinsic aptitude. Let's turn to the social factors that I think are much more important. Because I'm venturing outside my own area of work, and because time is short, I won't review all of the social factors producing differential success of men and women. I will talk about just one effect: how gender stereotypes influence the ways in which males and females are perceived. 

Let me start with studies of parents' perceptions of their own children. Steve said that parents report that they treat their children equally. They treat their boys and girls alike, and they encourage them to equal extents, for they want both their sons and their daughters to succeed. This is no doubt true. But how are parents perceiving their kids?

Some studies have interviewed parents just after the birth of their child, at the point where the first question that 80% of parents ask — is it a boy or a girl? — has been answered. Parents of boys describe their babies as stronger, heartier, and bigger than parents of girls. The investigators also looked at the babies' medical records and asked whether there really were differences between the boys and girls in weight, strength, or coordination. The boys and girls were indistinguishable in these respects, but the parents' descriptions were different.

At 12 months of age, girls and boys show equal abilities to walk, crawl, or clamber. But before one study, Karen Adolph, an investigator of infants' locomotor development, asked parents to predict how well their child would do on a set of crawling tasks: Would the child be able to crawl down a sloping ramp? Parents of sons were more confident that their child would make it down the ramp than parents of daughters. When Adolph tested the infants on the ramp, there was no difference whatever between the sons and daughters, but there was a difference in the parents' predictions.

My third example, moving up in age, comes from the studies of Jackie Eccles. She asked parents of boys and girls in sixth grade, how talented do you think your child is in mathematics? Parents of sons were more likely to judge that their sons had talent than parents of daughters. A panoply of objective measures, including math grades in school, performance on standardized tests, teachers' evaluations, and children's expressed interest in math, revealed no differences between the girls and boys. Still, there was a difference in parents' perception of their child's intangible talent. Other studies have shown a similar effect for science.

There's clearly a mismatch between what parents perceive in their kids and what objective measures reveal. But is it possible that the parents are seeing something that the objective measures are missing? Maybe the boy getting B's in his math class really is a mathematical genius, and his mom or dad has sensed that. To eliminate that possibility, we need to present observers with the very same baby, or child, or Ph.D. candidate, and manipulate their belief about the person's gender. Then we can ask whether their belief influences their perception.

It's hard to do these studies, but there are examples, and I will describe a few of them. A bunch of studies take the following form: you show a group of parents, or college undergraduates, video-clips of babies that they don't know personally. For half of them you give the baby a male name, and for the other half you give the baby a female name. (Male and female babies don't look very different.) The observers watch the baby and then are asked a series of questions: What is the baby doing? What is the baby feeling? How would you rate the baby on a dimension like strong-to-weak, or more intelligent to less intelligent? There are two important findings.

First, when babies do something unambiguous, reports are not affected by the baby's gender. If the baby clearly smiles, everybody says the baby is smiling or happy. Perception of children is not pure hallucination. Second, children often do things that are ambiguous, and parents face questions whose answers aren't easily readable off their child's overt behavior. In those cases, you see some interesting gender labeling effects. For example, in one study a child on a video-clip was playing with a jack-in-the-box. It suddenly popped up, and the child was startled and jumped backward. When people were asked, what's the child feeling, those who were given a female label said, "she's afraid." But the ones given a male label said, "he's angry." Same child, same reaction, different interpretation.

In other studies, children with male names were more likely to be rated as strong, intelligent, and active; those with female names were more likely to be rated as little, soft, and so forth.

I think these perceptions matter. You, as a parent, may be completely committed to treating your male and female children equally. But no sane parents would treat a fearful child the same way they treat an angry child. If knowledge of a child's gender affects adults' perception of that child, then male and female children are going to elicit different reactions from the world, different patterns of encouragement. These perceptions matter, even in parents who are committed to treating sons and daughters alike.

I will give you one last version of a gender-labeling study. This one hits particularly close to home. The subjects in the study were people like Steve and me: professors of psychology, who were sent some vitas to evaluate as applicants for a tenure track position. Two different vitas were used in the study. One was a vita of a walk-on-water candidate, best candidate you've ever seen, you would die to have this person on your faculty. The other vita was a middling, average vita among successful candidates. For half the professors, the name on the vita was male, for the other half the name was female. People were asked a series of questions: What do you think about this candidate's research productivity? What do you think about his or her teaching experience? And finally, Would you hire this candidate at your university?

For the walk-on-water candidate, there was no effect of gender labeling on these judgments. I think this finding supports Steve's view that we're dealing with little overt discrimination at universities. It's not as if professors see a female name on a vita and think, I don't want her. When the vita's great, everybody says great, let's hire.

What about the average successful vita, though: that is to say, the kind of vita that professors most often must evaluate? In that case, there were differences. The male was rated as having higher research productivity. These psychologists, Steve's and my colleagues, looked at the same number of publications and thought, "good productivity" when the name was male, and "less good productivity" when the name was female. Same thing for teaching experience. The very same list of courses was seen as good teaching experience when the name was male, and less good teaching experience when the name was female. In answer to the question would they hire the candidate, 70% said yes for the male, 45% for the female. If the decision were made by majority rule, the male would get hired and the female would not.

A couple other interesting things came out of this study. The effects were every bit as strong among the female respondents as among the male respondents. Men are not the culprits here. There were effects at the tenure level as well. At the tenure level, professors evaluated a very strong candidate, and almost everyone said this looked like a good case for tenure. But people were invited to express their reservations, and they came up with some very reasonable doubts. For example, "This person looks very strong, but before I agree to give her tenure I would need to know, was this her own work or the work of her adviser?" Now that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But what ought to give us pause is that those kinds of reservations were expressed four times more often when the name was female than when the name was male.

So there's a pervasive difference in perceptions, and I think the difference matters. Scientists' perception of the quality of a candidate will influence the likelihood that the candidate will get a fellowship, a job, resources, or a promotion. A pattern of biased evaluation therefore will occur even in people who are absolutely committed to gender equity.

I have little doubt that all my colleagues here at Harvard are committed to the principle that a male candidate and a female candidate of equal qualifications should have equal chance at a job. But we also think that when we compare a more productive scholar to a less productive one, a more experienced teacher to a less experienced one, a more independent investigator to a less independent one, those factors matter as well. These studies say that knowledge of a person's gender will influence our assessment of those factors, and that's going to produce a pattern of discrimination, even in people with the best intentions.

From the moment of birth to the moment of tenure, throughout this great developmental progression, there are unintentional but pervasive and important differences in the ways that males and females are perceived and evaluated.

The IDW & the Trump administration mainstream race science

Lee Jussim, like Betsy DeVos, is a fan of @cjprofman

I missed an article in US News and World Report from March of this year reporting that Betsy
DeVos, Trump's extremely controversial choice for Secretary of Education, used the work of John Paul Wright, author at Quillette and guest of Stefan Molyneux to justify recent actions:

In making the latter point, DeVos' commission cited several times a study in which researchers argued that the discipline discrepancies between black and white students are "likely produced by pre-existing behavioral problems of youth that are imported into the classroom, that cause classroom disruptions, and that trigger disciplinary measures by teachers and school officials." 

"Differences in rates of suspension between racial groups thus appear to be a function of differences in problem behaviors that emerge early in life, that remain relatively stable over time, and that materialize in the classroom," researchers wrote in a 2014 paper that counters the concerns about inequitable discipline that caused the Obama administration that same year to enact its guidance. 

"Early misbehavior is tied to later misbehavior and, in turn, that misbehavior is tied to school suspensions," the researchers concluded. "These findings highlight the importance of early problem behaviors and suggest that the use of suspensions by teachers and administrators may not have been as racially biased as some scholars have argued." 

The research was published in the Journal of Criminal Justice by John Paul Wright, a professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, and four others.

Later on in the article Wright is quoted as saying:

"I would never say that black children are, categorically, more of a discipline problem than other students," he says. "That said, any number of studies show that problem behavior, including juvenile delinquency, is not uniformly distributed across racial groups. In general, African-Americans have the highest comparative rates of problem behavior – a fact that shouldn't surprise anyone given many African-American youth remain socially and economically disadvantaged."

But that's not what Wright believes is the fundamental problem with African Americans as he explained in his chapter "Inconvenient Truths: Science, Race, and Crime" in Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research edited by Anthony Walsh and Kevin M. Beaver, he wrote:

Page 149:
...Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially. 

Page 150:
From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality. 
The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.

Betsy DeVos is not the only fan of John Paul Wright in mainstream academia. Lee Jussim, acting head of the Rutgers Psychology Department recently tweeted his dream team for a hypothetical university. In addition IDW member Claire Lehmann, Jussim listed John Paul Wright, by his Twitter account handle cjprofman, to lead his dream Criminology department.

John Paul Wright & Lee Jussim

This is what John Paul Wright, author at Quillette and professor at the University of Cincinnati thinks of black people:



So it's especially bizarre that he would accuse a black woman college student of "playing the race card" while defending his pal Lee Jussim. The quote above is from Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research.

The woman in question is accusing Rutgers professor Lee Jussim, author at Quillette, and his followers of harassing her.

Steven Pinker and his fan boys

Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right
and hereditarian connections

I am certainly not interested in saying anything untrue about Steven Pinker. I think his verifiable history of promoting race science and in the case of Steve Sailer, promoting the career of a bona fide racist, while at the same time swanning around the world, expressing his opinions on everything and anything in the role of - in the words of the recent NYTimes hagiography - "celebrity intellectual" is sufficiently ghastly sans embellishment.

And if Pinker's fan boys are to be believed, I haven't said anything untrue about Pinker. Because if I did say something untrue about their hero and sometime shoe model, wouldn't they tell me about it?

But all I can get out of them is content-free insults.

My article Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections, especially seems to enrage them to the point of inarticulation. Just the concept alone, a diagram containing information, short-circuits their brains.

It's annoying enough when Steve Sailer and other recipients of wingnut welfare, like Quillette staff members Colin Wright and Bo Winegard insult me personally without explaining what is wrong with the data presented -

- but even Pinker's college professor fan boys do it.

For instance, Lee Jussim a "distinguished professor" and chair of the department of psychology at Rutgers suggested that it was insane to present Pinker's connections in a diagram format.

 

Now Jussim is in deep with Quillette and uses segregationist terminology and his career seems to consist of saying over and over: "stereotypes are real" so I don't hold him in very high regard to begin with. But as wacky as I think he is, I still find it bizarre that he is so repulsed by information in pictorial form. It's all verifiable stuff. It's a fact that Steven Pinker chose to publish the work of Steve Sailer in the 2004 edition of "The Best of Science and Nature Writing." It's in the public record. Pinker even admits it on his web site.

So why is it so crazy that I drew a line between Pinker and Sailer, and Pinker and the book he edited? I explain why I did so in the text. Why does Lee Jussim consider this "nutso"?

And now another college professor has come at me over Pinker. My article Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections is posted at Academia and I occasionally get comments. This weekend I got a couple from Douglas Eckberg, retired professor of Sociology from Winthrop University.

He stopped by to suggest that my work is somehow tainted because I am a "left-wing partisan" (I've written about Steven Pinker's hypocrisy on this issue) and then suggested I don't understand Pinker's work (presumably he classifies me with Stephen Jay Gould as well as all those New Yorker and NYTimes reviewers who have panned Pinker's books, as just too stupid to comprehend Pinker's brilliance.) Naturally, he does not say what I got wrong about Pinker.

Steve Sailer marveled that unlike James Watson or Lawrence Summers, Pinker has received very little blow-back over his support for hereditarian hypotheses. Although like all "Summers was a martyr to political correctness" complainers, Sailer neglects to mention that Summers went to work at the Obama administration after stepping down as president of Harvard. Although since Sailer considers Obama his arch-enemy maybe Sailer considered that a demotion.

I suggested Pinker gets away with it because of Pinker's relentless self-promotion coupled with Pinker's lack of intellectual integrity. But another strong possibility is Pinker's fan boys in mainstream media.

This was first most glaringly obvious when Pinker, speaking at a Koch-funded event, claimed the New York Times among others radicalized the alt-right. He received some negative response for that so the New York Times got one of Pinker's fan boys Jesse Singal (also on the Koch payroll but best known for antagonizing the trans community) to defend Pinker. His piece was so dishonest PZ Myers responded:

But then this kind of disingenuous denial of reality, of focusing superficially on he said/she said note-taking, is exactly what the New York Times specializes in.

It certainly does when it comes to Pinker. Recently Pinker got to play free speech martyr because some linguists did not want him to represent them. He was defended everywhere from the National Review to Mother Jones. It was his dream come true I imagine - much like Christiana Hoff Sommer's response to someone yelling Black Lives Matter at her in front of a camera.

And the New York Times gave the martyr a big spread, How a Famous Harvard Professor Became a Target Over His Tweets.

One of the very few voices speaking for the linguists, Todd Synder, wrote a response to the deck-stacking by Michael Powell in the NYTimes:

Meanwhile, it is the public signatories of (the linguist letter) — especially early-career linguists like myself — who have already been met with threats of abuse and retaliation. Both from online trolls, fans of Pinker and the “Intellectual Dark Web” (unfortunately unsurprising, given the current state of the online world) and from some more senior voices in the field, enough so that some non-signatories of TOL felt the need to write a public letter condemning such reactions. If anyone in this story is in danger of suffering any actual consequences as a result of “fraught cultural battles”, it’s people like me whose careers are potentially jeopardized by willing to take a public stance which threatens to upset the status quo. And all the more so for my colleagues who are women, or who are non-binary, who are people of color, who already have a tougher time fighting for a career, and who attract an unequal amount of the harassment and abuse from Pinker supporters.  

Pinker sees himself as someone bravely standing against public opinion, but he represents the status quo, not its opposition. His is the voice that “carries power”, not the letter writers’. It would be nice if the Times would reflect that actuality, rather than making Pinker out to be the powerless victim.

Although I should say that I was not impressed by the linguist letter which deliberately put aside Pinker's support for race science:

Though no doubt related, we set aside questions of Dr. Pinker’s tendency to move in the proximity of what The Guardian called a revival of “scientific racism”,

The Letter was so weak and feeble a statement against Pinker I could easily believe it was written by friends of Pinker in order to give him a chance to play the free speech martyr. That has ended up being its main impact.

It's my impression that there is a kind of gentlemen's agreement among the mostly white men who run established media, to avoid embarrassing Steven Pinker, their celebrity intellectual, with questions about his support for race science.

But maybe that's why Pinker's fan boys get so tongue-tied with rage by my article with the diagram. It has an impact. The diagram makes it clear at a glance that Pinker has connections with the alt-right, conservatives and hereditarians. It may not be considered significant by Pinker or the media, since I'm a nobody and they are big on credentials, but people do look at it, and unlike most of the text-dense and often very badly written academic papers available online, people can understand the information easily and quickly. I have a background as a technical writer - helping people to absorb complex information quickly is my job. But it's not what you'd call a prestigious intellectual job, not like being an op-ed writer for the Times like David Brooks.

The fan boys hate the diagram, not because anything in it is incorrect, but because I have ignored the gentlemen's agreement and embarrassed, not Pinker himself (I believe he has no sense of shame) but rather the fan boys.

Meanwhile Pinker needs a safe space on Twitter so he has set his account so only those he follows or mentions can comment on his tweets.

In this tweet we see Pinker promoting two other race science proponents. 

The story continues - the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf is also a Pinker fan boy.

The League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters publishes a paper

This tweet from Bo Winegard not only 
tells you everything you need to know about 
that racist neo-Nazi dirtbag, but all you
need to know about the people who 
agree to co-author anything with him.

Jerry Coyne and the "Journal of Controversial Ideas" are promoting a paper written by the most 
contemptible gang of right-wing grifters, racists and race pseudoscience promoters who ever took money from Charles Koch and Peter Thiel.

This paper appears to be a pretentious version of another race pseudoscience coprolite, "Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias" by Bo Winegard, Cory Clark, Connor Hasty, Roy Baumeister. Winegard, Clark and Baumeister are listed as authors in both.

Just looking at the list of authors makes it clear this has nothing to do with science and everything to do with a rightwing political campaign.

The good news is that the fact that so many evolutionary psychologists are participating in this political campaign probably indicates that evolutionary psychology is being greeted increasingly with skepticism by real scientists. 

And since evolutionary psychology is indeed a pseudoscience - see biologist P. Z. Myers' explanation for exactly why - they have no option but to try to salvage their bogus wrong-side-of-science-history careers by aligning with Koch grifters and race pseudoscience ghouls.

As you might expect, professional racist Steve Sailer is thrilled that so many of his fellow racists have banded together.

Here's the gang:

Cory J. Clark https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3083-9179 cjclark@sas.upenn.edu, Lee Jussim, Komi Frey, Sean T. Stevens, Musa al-Gharbi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9433-7402, Karl Aquino https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0710-4120, J. Michael Bailey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4756-1705, NicoleBarbaro, Roy F. Baumeister https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1413-3296, April Bleske-Rechek https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3578-2105, David Buss https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4467-7019, Stephen Ceci https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2835-9707, Marco Del Giudice, Peter H. Ditto, Joseph P. Forgas, David C. Geary https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3029-6343, Glenn Geher, Sarah Haider, Nathan Honeycutt https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6529-130X, Hrishikesh Joshi, Anna I. Krylov, Elizabeth Loftus https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2230-6110, Glenn Loury, Louise Lu, Michael Macy https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0024-5027, Chris C. Martin, John McWhorter, Geoffrey Miller https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6026-5372, PamelaParesky https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0691-9811, Steven Pinker https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2319-4085, Wilfred Reilly, Catherine Salmon https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0144-5207, Steve Stewart-Williams https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8568-6846, Philip E. Tetlock, Wendy M.Williams https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6666-4000, Anne E. Wilson https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7954-6038, Bo M. Winegard, George Yancey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5591-6604, and William von Hippel 

Let's break down the list of ghouls, goons and grifters:

• Cory J. Clark - race pseudoscience ghoul and frequent co-author with racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.
• Lee Jussim - loved by racist American Renaissance,  his entire career appears to consist of ranting over and over again "stereotypes are real." Was a presenter at crackpot Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists
• Komi Frey - Koch employee via FIRE
• Sean T. Stevens - Koch employee via FIRE - author at racist Quillette
• Musa al-Gharbi - Koch employee via Reason - author at racist Quillette
• Karl Aquino - evolutionary psychologist, marketing ghoul division, previously produced evo-psycho garbage with Baumeister
• J. Michael Bailey - infamous anti-trans crusader
• Nicole Barbaro - Koch employee via Heterodox Academy - public supporter of racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, joining the far-right effort to portray him as a poor beleaguered martyr of science
• Roy F. Baumeister - race pseudoscience ghoul who has published with Cory J. Clark and Bo Winegard
• April Bleske-Rechek - evolutionary psychologist - author at racist Quillette
• David Buss - the king of evolutionary psychology, especially now that Tooby is dead, confuses female sex slavery with female choice, like you do when you're an evolutionary psychologist
• Stephen Ceci - evolutionary psychologist,  beloved by the gang at the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research 
• Marco Del Giudice - evolutionary psychologist
• Peter H. Ditto - evolutionary psychologist - has teamed up with Bo Winegard before
• Joseph P. Forgas - evolutionary psycologist - author at racist Quillette
• David C. Geary - evolutionary psychologist and Quillette goon, coauthored with the Winegard twins
• Glenn Geher - evolutionary psychologist - referenced Winegard as if he isn't a right-wing political operative who has devoted his life to promoting race pseudoscience
• Sarah Haider - rightwinger reactionary and ally of racist Razib Khan
• Nathan Honeycutt - Koch employee via FIRE - Lee Jussim was his Ph.D advisor
• Hrishikesh Joshi - evolutionary psychologist - author at racist Quillette
• Anna Krylov - culture war reactionary hysteric who compared changing scientific terms to being burnt at the stake and the worst crimes of the Soviet Union. Helped organize crackpot Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists 
• Elizabeth Loftus - defended Harvey Weinstein
• Glenn Loury - Koch employee via the Manhattan Institute - author at racist Quillette
• Louise Lu - "I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Behavioral Marketing at Stanford Business School." So I'm gonna say "grifter in training"
• Michael Macy - evolutionary psychologist - takes racist ghoul Satoshi Kanazawa seriously
• Chris C. Martin - evolutionary psychologist who likes to retweet extremist Diana Fleishmann who works for racist rag (even worse than Quillette) Aporia
• John McWhorter - right-winger and longtime Koch employee - author at racist Quillette
• Geoffrey Miller - creepy evolutionary psychologist and racist, husband of extremist Diana Fleischmann
• Pamela Paresky - rightwing grifter, former (or possibly still is) Koch employee via FIRE and fan of the incredibly ghoulish Gender Wars cards 
• Steven Pinker - the world's most annoying man and in my opinion one of the public figures, along with Andrew Sullivan, most responsible for mainstreaming race pseudoscience - he's so pernicious I named this blog after him
• Wilfred Reilly - rightwing political operative and defender of the Proud Boys who would like to see the word  "retard" back in circulation
• Catherine Salmon - evolutionary psychologist - co-author with notorious crackpot and racist Michael Woodley
• Steve Stewart-Williams - evolutionary psychologist
• Philip E. Tetlock - evolutionary psychologist, coauthored with Cory Clark
• Wendy M. Williams - evolutionary psychologist - coauthored a paper with Ceci boo-hooing over student protests that cited the Winegard twins' Quillette article defending The Bell Curve.
• Anne E. Wilson - evolutionary psychologist 
• Bo Winegard - infamous for his promotion of race pseudoscience, as well as his belief that there should be race-based national quotas. Currently part of the racist Aporia Substack, likes to retweet racist Steve Sailer and is a holy cause for racism apologists like Jerry Coyne
• George Yancey - appears to be a Christian nationalist or at the very least a Christian nationalist apologist -  a crackpot who opposes gay rights and pushes the idea that "support for sexual minorities is strengthened by hatred of conservative Christians"
• William von Hippel - evolutionary psychologist - author at racist Quillette

What a collection of rightwing political operatives, reactionaries, racists, evolutionary psychologists and Quillette authors - and there is a lot of overlapping among those categories.

I don't think there's any reason to doubt that every damn one of them knows how extreme Bo Winegard is, and they either don't care because they agree with his extremism, or they are getting paid too much by their rightwing patrons to object to publicly working with a stupid, racist neo-Nazi.