So why is Koch so bad?

Illustration from The Economist article Kochtopus's Garden

I make a big deal about all the connections between Steven Pinker and his friends and Charles Koch. But why? What's so bad about Koch? 

I was first alerted to the awfulness of Charles Koch - or rather the Koch brothers because David Koch was still alive then - thanks to Jane Mayer's 2010 New Yorker piece
Covert Operations The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. 

From the piece:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

And...

The brothers realized that their brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box. Charles Koch became openly scornful of conventional politics. “It tends to be a nasty, corrupting business,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’m interested in advancing libertarian ideas.” According to Doherty’s book, the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.”

And...

The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.” 

The Kochs were not happy about the article and tried to retaliate against Mayer according to a NYTimes article What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers.

Eleven years later, David Koch is dead but Charles Koch is still at it. And it appears that what Charles Koch has decided is that since voters don't like libertarian ideas, the real problem is democracy itself. Mayer recently wrote again for the New Yorker about Koch:

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.

But they have a plan - phony bipartisanship:

On the call, McKenzie, the Koch operative, cited one “ray of hope” in the fight against the reforms, noting that his research found that the most effective message was arguing that a politically “diverse coalition of groups opposed” the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union. “In our message example that we used, we used the example of A.C.L.U., Planned Parenthood, and conservative organizations backed by Charles Koch as an example of groups that oppose H.R. 1,” he said. “I think, you know, when you put that in front of people . . . they’re, like, ‘Oh, conservatives and some liberal groups all oppose this, like, I should maybe think about this more. You know, there must be bigger implications to this if these groups are all coming together on it.’ ”

However, that test message was inaccurate. Planned Parenthood does not oppose the For the People Act. It is, in fact, on a list of organizations giving the legislation their full backing. And the A.C.L.U. supports almost all of the expansions of voting rights contained in the bill...

I think Koch flunkies got the memo. Just recently I noted that Koch employee and Trump supporter Christopher F. Rufo was trying to pass off FAIR as a bipartisan group when it is clear it is far right-leaning and full of people who take money from Koch-supported organizations.

Mayer and the New Yorker are national treasures for their reporting on Koch. It's curious that the New Yorker is also one of the few media outlets that isn't baffled by Steven Pinker's bullshit - or the bullshit of other Koch-funded grifters.

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

Conor Friedersdorf ~ Koch man AND Thiel man 💲💲💲💲💲

I've noted before that Conor Friedersdorf is a wingnut welfare recipient, spouting right-wing talking points while funded by Charles Koch.

But there's no law against taking money from more than one right-wing plutocrat at a time, and it looks like Friedersdorf has decided to throw himself in with the blatantly racist Quillette. It was credibly claimed that Quillette has taken money from Peter Thiel.

💲KA-CHING!!!💲

And speaking of double-dipping - from the beginning I suspected that Koch was in the financial mix for Quillette - and not just because so many Quillette authors were also taking money from Koch organizations.

And now the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute is reprinting Quillette articles. 

So it's not just the Donors Trust-funded white supremacist American Renaissance reprinting Quillette articles.

Fun fact: Peter Thiel also contributes to Donors Trust.

UPDATE:

I wrote to Friedersdorf about this, not expecting a reply, but I got one:

Nancy,

Are you under the impression that you get paid to go on the Quilette podcast? You do not. Nor do I make any money from the Koch brothers, one of whom is dead. 

I am paid by The Atlantic and by the Best of Journalism newsletter that I started. 

Thanks for writing, I'm glad to be able to correct your inaccurate impression.

Best,

Conor

------------------------

So here I thought Conor Friedersdorf was offered too much money to refuse, but it turns out he's so unconcerned about Quillette's promotion of race pseudoscience that he's willing to do a Quillette podcast for free. I guess my suspicion that he agreed with Pinker was correct.

And I assume what he meant to say was that he was not taking money from Charles Koch anymore, since according to the American Prospect:

It's not just the IDW itself: Some of its key popularizers also get Koch funding. Bari Weiss and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf—who has been one of the most visible defenders of Peterson in the mainstream media—have both received cash prizes from the Koch-funded Reason Foundation, where David Koch himself sits on the board of trustees. And remember “The Coddling of the American Mind”? Well, one of its co-authors, Greg Lukianoff, is the head of that campus free-speech watchdog, FIRE. That organization is funded, of course, by the Koch brothers (for good measure, the Charles Koch Institute also did a laudatory write-up of the piece).

The Atlantic is perhaps the worst offender. Last year it launched “The Speech Wars,” a reporting project that seeks “to understand where free speech is in danger and where it has been abused.” Even though the magazine had just been bought by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and was seeing all-time high circulation and web traffic, The Atlantic solicited funding for the project from none other than the Charles Koch Foundation (the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Fetzer Institute are also underwriters).

I never used the term "Koch brothers" in my email to Friedersdorf. I wrote about David Koch's death back in 2019.

And as far as Friedersdorf's "Best of Journalism" newsletter - it's on Substack and I have my suspicions about that platform.

But I guess Friedersdorf is right, my impression was inaccurate - I had thought he was a financial opportunist, but now my impression is that he is a true believer in race pseudoscience.

And looky here - Trump's would-be enabler Damon Linker, "senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center," is working for Quillette. I assume Quillette pays for articles, if not for podcasts.

Quillette was once considered an IDW publication, but it appears to be rapidly becoming the  publication of the American right. 

Another indication - besides the Donors Trust thing - how comfortable the American right and faux centrists are with race pseudoscience. 

Heterodox Academy, Koch and Quillette

Although Heterodox Academy claims its purpose is "to improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement" - it's clear that what they actually want is to promote a rightwing agenda, when you look at their self-congratulatory piece on "Five Years of Challenging Orthodoxies."

The article presents the thoughts of Sam Abrams, Bradley Campbell, Jonathan Haidt, Irshad Manji, Chris Martin, Steven Pinker, Paul Quirk, Nadine Strossen, Jonathan Zimmerman.

So let's look at who these people are.

• Sam Abrams has connections to Koch: "visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC; faculty fellow at George Mason’s Institute for Humane Studies"

• Bradley Campbell is an author at Quillette.

• Jonathan Haidt is an author at Quillette and a supporter of Bret Stephens' promotion of race science. Haidt is also a friend of FIRE which is indisputably funded by plutocrats, especially Koch.

• Irshad Manji is an author at Quillette.

• Chris Martin is an author at Quillette.

• Steven Pinker is an author at Quillette and in spite of the mainstream media gentlemen's agreement to avoid mentioning it, a firm supporter of race science as well as being a part-time promoter of nuclear power.

• Nadine Strossen is a frequent contributor to the Koch-funded Cato and a supporter of Bret Stephens' promotion of race science.

I have not yet found any direct connections between Quillette or Koch and Jonathan Zimmerman, although he is infamous for claiming that the reason that Jeffrey Toobin got in trouble for jerking off - and showing his penis to his co-workers in the process - in the middle of a business call was because people just hate masturbation. Which is apparently the fault of the Enlightenment.

...Yet nobody is likely to forget that he had sex with himself, which has been a big no-no since the advent of the Enlightenment.

That’s when the West invented the autonomous individual, endowed with natural rights. But liberty was dangerous, too: Freed from constraints, the individual could easily descend into corruption and vice.

Masturbation embodied all of those fears. It was solitary, fueled by fantasies that each person invented. And when that started, there was no telling when it would stop...

It is about the stupidest defense of Toobin that I have seen yet, and makes me doubt Zimmerman's judgement even without a Quillette or a Koch connection.

Speaking of masturbation, it seems of the contributors to the Heterodox self-love fest, only Paul Quirk is without a direct Koch or Quillette connection, or an embarrassingly bad op-ed. Or at least none that I have found yet.

So of the nine people highlighted by Heterodox Academy, five have direct Quillette connections and two have direct Koch connections.

This tells you everything you need to know about how extreme the goals of Heterodox Academy really are. Which should be no surprise because Heterodox Academy was co-founded by Haidt and by Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz of the Federalist Society which receives donations from - surprise! - Koch.

FIRE and Heterodox Academy aren't the only publicly-acknowledged examples of Koch's interest in pushing academia to the right - Koch famously funds and influences George Mason University.

The documents reveal in surprising detail that for years, as George Mason grew from a little-known commuter school to a major public university and a center of libertarian scholarship, millions of dollars in donations from conservative-leaning donors like the Charles Koch Foundation had come with strings attached. 

 

As early as 1990, entities controlled by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch were given a seat on a committee to pick candidates for a professorship that they funded, the records show. Similar arrangements that continued through 2009 gave donors decision-making roles in selecting candidates for key economics appointments at the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded think tank on campus that studies markets and regulation. The appointments, which also created faculty lines at George Mason, were steered to professors who, like the Kochs, embraced unconstrained free markets.

More recently, in 2016, executives of the Federalist Society, a conservative national organization of lawyers, served as agents for a $20 million gift from an anonymous donor, and were given the right to terminate installments of the gift at their discretion. Emails disclosed by the university show that Federalist Society officials were also involved in hiring discussions and had suggested a student for admission. In turn, a professor at the law school wrote the society asking for help securing recommendations for prestigious federal judicial clerkships for students active in the society.

It's all one big happy Koch family.

The mind of a racist, part 6: Steve Sailer and IDW funding

When Steven Pinker dropped him in 2011, Steve Sailer lost his most direct connection to mainstream respectability, and had to be content to promote his career through the right-wing racist ecosystem of VDARE, Taki and Unz.

In 2017 New York Magazine wrote an article about Sailer, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right, about his "subliminal influence" on well-known conservatives:

As Michael Brendan Dougherty of The Week has observed, Sailer has exerted “a kind of subliminal influence across much of the right … even in the places where his controversial writing on race was decidedly unwelcome.” Sometimes that influence has not even been subliminal — David Brooks has cited Sailer in The New York Times on the correlation between white fertility rates and voting patterns, Times columnist Ross Douthat has referenced Sailer’s analogy between Breitbart-style conservatism and punk rock, and the economist Tyler Cowen has described him as “the most significant neo-reaction thinker today.”

The Tyler Cowen connection is most important: Cowen is a Koch man, discussed at Naked Capitalism: Tyler Cowen, Koch Brothers Funding, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, and Academic Freedom

The Intellectual Dark Web has many ties to Koch money, most prominently through the careers of Charles Murray and Christina Hoff Sommers. Sommers is a resident scholar of the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute and Murray is AEI's F. A. Hayek Chair in Cultural Studies. Other IDWs have received direct Koch organization funding and Steven Pinker has received indirect Koch funding.

And now Mercatus has a new funding scheme aiming to provide financial aid to members of the IDW and the like-minded, "Emergent Ventures" noted in September 2018 by TechCrunch:

Tyler Cowen,  who I interviewed here, is a fascinating economist. Part pragmatist and part dreamer, he has been researching and writing about the future for a long time in books and his blog, Marginal Revolution. Now he and his university, George Mason, are putting some money where his mouth is. 

Cowen and the team at GMU are working on Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program for moon shots. The goal is to give people with big ideas a little capital to help them build out their dreams. 

“It has long been my view that risk-takers are not sufficiently rewarded in the world of ideas and that academic incentives are too conservative,” he said. “The intellectual scene should learn something from Silicon Valley and venture capital.” 

Cowen is raising $4 million for the first fund. He announced the fund in a podcast on the Mercatus website. 

“People such as Satoshi and Jordan Peterson have had huge impacts (regardless of one’s degree of enthusiasm for their ideas), and yet in terms of philanthropic funding the world just isn’t geared to seed their ambitions,” said Cowen.

Peterson is a member of the IDW, and is known for his crackpot ideas (biologist PZ Myers made a series of videos about them) and I assume the Satoshi mentioned is not the pseudonym of an influential bitcoin programmer but rather Satoshi Kanazawa, best known for his claims that "Sub-Saharan Black African countries suffer from chronic poverty and disease because their people have lower IQs, and black women are objectively less attractive than women of other races..."

Both claims with which Steve Sailer enthusiastically agrees.

Satoshi Kanazawa also wrote an obituary of extreme race science promoter J. Phillip Rushton (seen here addressing the white supremacist American Renaissance convention) and  called him a "modern-day Gaileo."

It seems in the case of Cowen and Emergent Ventures, Sailer's controversial writing on race is welcome, at least coming from someone who is not Sailer.

According to the Emergent Ventures web site:

Launched with $1 million grant from the Thiel Foundation, the mission is to jumpstart high-risk, high-reward ideas that advance prosperity, opportunity, and wellbeing. The fellowship provides participants with the short-term resources and support to quickly develop and test their ideas. 

In addition to financial support, participants will have access to mentors and networks in the George Mason community, such as Mercatus’ faculty director, Tyler Cowen, and industry leaders across the country. Emergent Ventures is looking to make a bet on talented individuals with unique ideas for changing the world. Sign up above to keep in touch.

The apparent founder of the IDW, Eric Weinstein, works for Trump supporter Peter Thiel and promotes him often.

Steve Sailer's views are not at all out of line with the views of people whom Koch and Thiel and Cowen want to support. And we know Sailer and leading race science promoter and Koch favorite Charles Murray have a mutual admiration.

So why doesn't Sailer get Koch money?

We know he doesn't, at least as of April 2019.

The person Sailer is tweeting at is Alex Nowrasteh, who works for Koch via the Cato Institute.

But Sailer doesn't seem to like him much and he really doesn't like Koch, even grouping him in with the biggest of the right-wingers' bete noirs:

The BLM/Hillary/Koch/Soros/NYT plan for betting the country on less law and order?

It seems that the AEI/Koch faction of the right prefers open borders and Sailer and the current ruling faction of the Republican Party, the Trumpers, prefer closed borders.

It's the classic division of conservative America - the rah rah capitalism side and the rah rah racism side.

I don't think the two sides disagree fundamentally about a race-based human hierarchy. I don't think the Koch side has any love for people from Central and South America.

Immigrants, especially unskilled immigrants, will work for cheap and that's good for people like Koch.

The difference between the two sides is the degree to which racism trumps capitalism. Steve Sailer is fine with capitalism, but he hates other "races" more than he loves capitalism. And although Charles Murray doesn't mind being associated with him, Sailer is probably just a little bit too obvious about his open contempt for black people for those who control the plutocrat purse strings.

But it could change. If the IDW manages to gain mainstream acceptability for race "science" the rah rah capitalism wing will no longer have to feel embarrassed about Steve Sailer's bluntness, and might start shoveling money his way.

It's possible they are already considering it, based on tweets I happened to observe. I originally wrote about that here.

This tweet (below) indicates to me that rather than dismissing Sailer, it's possible those in Kochland are arguing whether to publicly align with Sailer.

If they do, we will know that the right has decided to make a full-scale attack on any progress made since the days of the Civil Rights Movement. And they may even attempt to twist the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. to do it.

When will someone representing Bill Watterson make HBD Chick stop 
smearing his work by associating Hobbes with her racism?

Steven Pinker and Spiked and the Koch brothers

Steven Pinker is a right-winger in spite of his claiming otherwise, and his thinking this idiotic & transparent "parody" Twitter account Titania McGrath is hilarious pretty much closes the case.

Predictably Pinker's fan-boy Jerry Coyne also thought it was a laugh-riot.

I'm on the record as having issues with both New Atheists and "Social Justice Warriors" but as low as my opinion is of SJWs, I could see immediately that "Titania McGrath" was fake.

What's more interesting about the incident than Pinker's oafish sense of humor is that it reveals another connection between Steven Pinker and Spiked as well as a connection between Spiked and the Koch brothers.

Spiked columnist Andrew Doyle was behind the McGrath character. Pinker made his infamous alt-right comments at Spiked Magazine’s 'Unsafe Space Tour' panel discussion at Harvard University.

Doyle, who is deeply concerned about "political correctness" as shown by his Spiked output, thinks that Candace Owens, leading influencer of the New Zealand mass murderer was "smeared" by being described as a "far-right media personality." The rest of that article is a defense of members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

But while looking at the responses on Twitter to Pinker's Spiked-related tweet I found this article which says that Spiked has received support from the Koch brothers:

We found three payments over the past two years from the Charles Koch Foundation. They amount to $170,000, earmarked for “general operating support”. The payments were made to Spiked US Inc. On Spiked’s “Donate” page is a button that says “In the US? Donate here”. It takes you to the PayPal link for “Spiked US, Inc”. Spiked US, in other words, appears to be its American funding arm. Beyond a postal address is Hoboken, New Jersey, it is hard to see what presence it has in the US. It appears to have been established in 2016, the year in which the Koch donations began. 

When I asked Spiked what the money was for and whether there had been any other payments, its managing editor, Viv Regan, told me that the Charles Koch Foundation has now given Spiked US a total of $300,000, “to produce public debates in the US about free speech, as part of its charitable activities.” She claims the foundation supports projects “on both the left and the right”. The Koch Foundation has funded “a free-speech oriented programme of public debates on campus titled the Unsafe Space Tour” and four live events, the first of which is titled ‘Should we be free to hate?’. She told me “We’re very proud of our work on free speech and tolerance, and we are proud to be part of the programme.” 

But I have been unable to find any public acknowledgement of this funding. Neither on the videos of the debates, in the posters advertising them or in reports of the events in Spiked magazine is there any mention of the Charles Koch Foundation. From what I could see of the title slides in the videos, they acknowledged an organisation called the Institute for Humane Studies, but not the Foundation. Spiked has yet to reply to my questions on this matter. 

The Koch brothers are famously careful with their money. According to Jane Mayer, they exert “unusually tight personal control over their philanthropic endeavours”. David Koch told a sympathetic journalist, “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.” So what might have attracted them to this obscure organisation? 

Spiked magazine, now edited by Brendan O’Neill, appears to hate left-wing politics. It inveighs against the welfare state, against regulation, the Occupy movement, anti-capitalists, Jeremy Corbyn, George Soros, #MeToo, “black privilege” and Black Lives Matter. It does so in the name of the “ordinary people”, whom, it claims, are oppressed by the “anti-Trump and anti-Brexit cultural elites”, “feministic elites”, “green elites” and “cosmopolitan politicians”.

So to recap: Steven Pinker blamed the left and the media for radicalizing the alt-right while speaking at a panel that was part of the "Unsafe Space Tour" which was funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.

I think that when all is said and done it will turn out that virtually all members of the Intellectual Dark Web received funding, directly or indirectly, from the Koch brothers.

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.

Connections

There are all kinds of connections among the hard right, the IDW and deep-pocket plutocrats as I documented in my Steve Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections diagram.

I speculated that Claire Lehmann was getting money from the Kochs for Quillette when she did an interview with Tyler Cowen of the Mercatus Center. I still have not come up with proof that she gets funding from Koch - the only big-pocket donor she'll admit to is a right-wing Australian, Mark Carnegie. But given that so many other right-wing media outlets get money from the Kochs, it seems unlikely that Quillette would be left out.

According to SourceWatch:

Mercatus has received funding from a number of foundations that support conservative causes. 

The Center received $5.5 million from the Koch-linked DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund between 2010 and 2012. The Charles G. Koch Foundation reported giving $8.8 million from 2002 to 2012, and the David H. Koch Foundation gave $100,000 to George Mason University for "Mercatus Center Programs" between 1999 and 2001. 

In February 2014, the Mercatus Center received a $1.99 million grant from the conservative John Templeton Foundation.[32] 

Between 2002 and 2008, the right-wing Bradley Foundation gave $50,000 to George Mason University specifically designated for the Mercatus Center.

Cowen is listed as a member of the Mercatus Board of Directors and "Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University; Chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University."

The Koch influence on George Mason University was documented by the New York Times:

As early as 1990, entities controlled by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch were given a seat on a committee to pick candidates for a professorship that they funded, the records show. Similar arrangements that continued through 2009 gave donors decision-making roles in selecting candidates for key economics appointments at the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded think tank on campus that studies markets and regulation. The appointments, which also created faculty lines at George Mason, were steered to professors who, like the Kochs, embraced unconstrained free markets.

Today the Atlantic story "We Need a New Science of Progress" popped up in Twitter. It's written by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison, and says:

Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”

Collison co-founded Stripe"...which received backing from Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Sequoia Capital."

Peter Thiel is of course the employer of the most devoted member of the IDW project, Eric Weinstein.

Collison appears to be an admirer of the Kochs.

Can you give us an example of what you’ve learned from studying Koch Industries?

It’s very striking to me how Warren and Charlie at Berkshire and how the folks at Koch Industries are so into a kind of epistemology, and structuring of doubt, and accounting for biases, and mechanisms for a clarity of thinking, to a very striking degree. Obviously, if you read the public writings, or if you go to Omaha and you listen to what Warren and especially Charlie talk about, it’s sort of half investing and half applied epistemology, half philosophy. And that’s been the case as well to a remarkable degree with Koch. And I don’t know them well enough by any means to opine in a deep sense. I’ve never been to one of their factories, I’ve never looked at one of their financial statements, and so I’m not qualified to assess in any kind of comprehensive way, but just in terms of what it seems that the leadership prioritizes, it’s interestingly consistent across two of the most successful multi-decadal institutions in the U.S.

So Cowen works for Koch, Collison admires Koch, and then there are IDW connections, including a positive reference in the Atlantic article to Niall Ferguson who is married to IDW Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Progress Studies has antecedents, both within fields and institutions. The economics of innovation is a critical topic and should assume a much larger place within economics. The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University seeks to encourage optimistic thinking about the future through fiction and narrative: It observes, almost certainly correctly, that imagination and ambition themselves play a large role. Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson have called for an “applied history” movement, to better draw lessons from history and apply them to real-world problems, including through the advising of political leaders. Ideas and institutions like these could be more effective if part of an explicit, broader movement.

Ferguson is a right-wing economist who hates Paul Krugman - he seems kind of obsessed with him. Ferguson was also criticized for his homophobic comment about John Maynard Keynes. 

Of greater interest to Pinkerite is Ferguson's activities as a campus political operative. 

According to the Stanford Daily:

 Emails between the Hoover Institution’s Niall Ferguson and well-known Republican student activists John Rice-Cameron ’20 and Max Minshull ’20 reveal coordination on “opposition research” against progressive activist Michael Ocon ’20 — referenced as “Mr. O” — and efforts to shore up support among members of the Cardinal Conversations steering committee.
Ferguson resigned from his leadership role in the Cardinal Conversations program on April 16, after Provost Persis Drell became aware of the email chain.

***

[The original Cardinal Conversations steering committee] should all be allies against O. Whatever your past differences, bury them. Unite against the SJWs. [Christos] Makridis [a fellow at Vox Clara, a Christian student publication] is especially good and will intimidate them,” Ferguson wrote. 

“Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” Ferguson wrote.
The previous messages were interspersed with greater discussion of the Cardinal Conversations committee and planning process, as well as a discussion appearing to be about student government. 

In the email chain, Ferguson wrote, “Some opposition research on Mr. O might also be worthwhile,” referring to Ocon.

Krugman observed:

Ferguson later sort of apologized, but it was more of an “I’m sorry that you feel that way” than a true apology, and he began by decrying the fact that these days few academic historians are registered Republicans, which he takes as ipso facto evidence of biased hiring and a hostile environment. 

So what’s really going on here? It’s true that self-proclaimed conservatives are pretty scarce among U.S. historians. But then, so are self-proclaimed conservatives in the “hard,” physical and biological sciences. 

Why are there so few conservative scientists? It might be because academics, as a career, appeals more to liberals than to conservatives. (There aren’t a lot of liberals in police departments — or, contra Trump, the F.B.I.) Alternatively, scientists may be reluctant to call themselves conservatives because in modern America being a conservative means aligning yourself with a faction that by and large rejects climate science and the theory of evolution. Might not similar considerations apply to historians? 

But more to the point, conservative claims to be defending free speech and open discussion aren’t sincere. Conservatives don’t want to see ideas evaluated on their merits, regardless of politics; they want ideas convenient to their side to receive (at least) equal time regardless of their intellectual quality. 

Indeed, conservative groups are engaged in a systematic effort to impose political standards on higher education. For example, we now know that the Koch brothers have used donations to gain power over academic appointments at least two universities.

Ferguson has tweeted his support for another rightwing political operative on campus, Andy Ngo.

With all this far-right, IDW and Koch baggage, it seems likely that Cowen and Collison are motivated by something other than the disinterested quest for knowledge.

For one thing, their Atlantic article seems to offer a defense of the Koch attempts to influence academia:

In 1861, the American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new kind of research institution. Recognizing the “daily increasing proofs of the happy influence of scientific culture on the industry and the civilization of the nations,” and the growing importance of what he called “Industrial Arts,” he proposed a new organization dedicated to practical knowledge. He named it the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Rogers was one of a number of late-19th-century reformers who saw that the United States’ ability to generate progress could be substantially improved. These reformers looked to the successes of the German university models overseas and realized that a combination of focused professorial research and teaching could be a powerful engine for advance in research. Over the course of several decades, the group—Rogers, Charles Eliot, Henry Tappan, George Hale, John D. Rockefeller, and others—founded and restructured many of what are now America’s best universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and more. By acting on their understanding, they engaged in a kind of conscious “progress engineering.”

Cowen and Collison don't mention that William Barton Rogers "...was a slaveowner, with two slaves in his household in 1840 and six slaves in 1850."

I think it's likely that once Quillette starts talking about this "science of progress" project we'll have a better idea of how it aligns with the IDW project of mainstreaming race science, although I think this passage in The Atlantic article is probably a hint:

Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East. Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In each case, the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort. Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerland’s Basel region in life sciences.

One of the greatest moments in the "science of progress" is James Burke's TV series "Connections." Someone has posted the first four episodes of the original series on Youtube.

One of the lessons of "Connections" is that innovations from many different cultures often end up combining for technological change unanticipated by the original inventors, and which may not be used until long after they are discovered or invented. "Ideas ahead of their time" as Burke says.

Burke makes this point in the second episode of "Connections" 

TRANSCRIPT:
beginning at 11:09 

Now if you're not a sailing buff you may not be turned on by the lateen sail, but as you'll see it means a great deal more to you than you might think. 

See, although it was nice to be able to zigzag everywhere, sailing, like that, wasn't the only thing that happened because of this canvas triangle. 

The lateen sail permitted one other thing. With it you could leave port pretty well when you wanted to, without having to wait for a wind that was going in the same direction you were, and that meant you would leave port more often, that meant there was more cargo on the move, more trade, more prosperity. 

It's probable that the Arabs introduced the lateen sail into Western Europe just about in time to play a major role in the recovery of the European economy after the chaos and confusion of the so-called Dark Ages. 

However by about 1200 there was so much bulk cargo like grain or Crusaders going to the Holy Land, so much bulk cargo on the move that the ships had got very much bigger and then they ran into another problem, the problem of steering.

You see up until that point you've steered with a couple of oars one off either side of the stern. But by about 1200 the ships are so big that those oars just really weren't feasible anymore. Which is why they probably picked up an idea from the Chinese that solved the problem - this - the stern post rudder. With the stern post rudder you could handle a ship of almost any size in almost any sea condition. 

So by the 13th century the Europeans had all the technology - the lateen sail, the old square sail, the stern post rudder to go anywhere they wanted to. 

They didn't need to use it until 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Turks and after that it was if you wanted something from the Far East it was either pay that price the Turks wanted, for letting it come through their territory oh go get it yourself. 

Which is just what the Europeans did in the great 16th century voyages of discovery.

In other words, Europeans owed "the great 16th century voyages of discovery" and subsequent imperialism to the Arab lateen sail and the Chinese stern post rudder - but which they didn't use to cross the Atlantic for over two hundred years - until they were prompted by superior Turkish military might.

So components of three different cultures allowed the European trans-Atlantic trade, which involved of course slaves and slave labor, which William Barton Rogers, a hero of the Collison/Cowen "progress of science" narrative, used to increase his wealth.

Given the IDW and rightwing connections and given the project begins by lionizing a slaver, I don't hold much hope for this "science of progress" project resulting in either science or progress.

Strong pinkerism and Koch funding

Steven Pinker recently gave the keynote speech on "the nature of academic controversies" for the 2019 Fire Faculty Conference and doubled-down on his "intelligent alt-right" comments originally made as part of the Spiked tour in 2017.

Pinker's message, yet again, is that universities are responsible for the extremism of the alt-right.

After spending a lot of time in the speech declaring his liberal bona fides, Pinker says, near the end (thanks to the Youtube automatic transcript):

...the regressive left is an incubator of the alt-right and I say this from some painful experience when I have seen some former students of mine who have gravitated to the alt-right because they see what happens in universities when positions such as that there may be sex differences or cultural differences are immediately squashed the people voicing them are punished and their reaction is well you can't handle the truth they tend then to form their own self-contained bubbles and in which far more extreme and radical and unsubtle positions and gain a footing can fester unchallenged because they're in their bubble academia is in its bubble and so in cases like sex differences police shootings and the advantages and disadvantages of capitalism you can get extreme versions cultivated in alt-right and other non academic circles precisely because these are debates that don't take place in refereed forums in which the flaws and the extreme versions can be pointed out and mitigated so let me sum up some of us are more controversial than others  admittedly some of us are extremely  controversial despite what at least I would consider to be relatively moderate positions...

This is an example of "strong pinkerism." As I noted, when Pinker is in a room with people who might not agree with his more extreme opinions, he reverts to weak pinkerism, as when he declined to argue with Paul Krugman on whether or not we know why New York City was such a violent place in the 1960s, in spite of the fact that Pinker spent pages in his "Better Angels" book claiming it was the fault of dirty hippies and blacks not getting married.

Pinker's original defense of the alt-right was presented as part of a tour funded by Charles Koch. A Koch-funded event is the perfect place for strong pinkerism. They want Pinker to blame universities for the worst evils of the world.

Which is why a FIRE event is another perfect place for strong pinkerism.

FIRE - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is heavily funded by Charles Koch, according to the invaluable Sourcewatch web site:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education does not disclose its donors, but some of its funding sources are known through other tax filings. FIRE's known funders include:

• Adolph Coors Foundation: $45,000 (2012, 2015)

• Bradley Foundation: $1,490,000[9]

• Charles G. Koch Foundation:$955,561 (2008-2014)

• Claude R. Lambe Foundation: $740,000 (2005-2007)

• DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund: $1,372,500 (2012-2015)

• Jaquelin Hume Foundation: $235,000 (2001-2011)

• Randolph Foundation: $62,000 (2009-2011)

• Sarah Scaife Foundation: $355,000 (2012-2014)

• Searle Freedom Trust: $300,000 (2008-2013)

Koch is especially interested in promoting the view that universities are too left-wing as part of the Koch attempt to capture American universities as documented by the NYTimes:

As early as 1990, entities controlled by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch were given a seat on a committee to pick candidates for a professorship that they funded, the records show. Similar arrangements that continued through 2009 gave donors decision-making roles in selecting candidates for key economics appointments at the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded think tank on campus that studies markets and regulation. The appointments, which also created faculty lines at George Mason, were steered to professors who, like the Kochs, embraced unconstrained free markets.

Koch doesn't donate money to FIRE out of the goodness of his heart, it's part of his political campaign against liberalism. And Pinker is one of the favorite useful idiots of Koch. Which is why he emphasizes his liberal bona fides - to give cover to the fact that FIRE is a NOT a non-partisan quest for fairness but rather a project of right-wing plutocrats who have no interest in fairness or justice whatsoever.

This is one of the reasons why Steven Pinker is so annoying - his utter lack of intellectual integrity, which is the source of the constant see-sawing between weak and strong pinkerism.

Claire Lehmann's Quillette aligning yet again with the Koch brothers

You can hear the tone in the videos she's made for Canada's far-right Rebel Media. I can't listen to Lehmann speak for more than a few seconds before my teeth start grinding.

I don't have the definitive evidence that Lehmann is paid by the Koch brothers that I do for Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young, who both have Reason magazine bylines, but I think it's inevitable that they would pay her to do what she does.

I don't think Lehmann, Sommers and Young would spend so much of their waking lives hating feminists - or even just any woman who writes popular fiction that presents a man in an unflattering light - if it wasn't a lucrative and easy gig.

Although Cathy Young especially seems to
really enjoy her job of hating other women
out of a misguided belief that this
is supporting men somehow - you can
read Cat Person here
and decide for yourself if the prose
is as bad as all that.

Here's Lehmann's participation in a Mercatus Center project, another Koch brothers-funded enterprise. The term "political correctness" is used twenty-nine times in the interview. Follow the link and use the handy search box to see for yourself.

It was recently brought to my attention that Lehmann is publishing Michael Shellenberger, whose speciality is anti-renewable energy. Here he defends the Koch brothers

Shellenberger runs a pro-nuclear power organization "Environmental Progress" - what a perfect Koch brothers-esque astroturf name - and one of his Science and Economy Advisors is... Steven Pinker.

And here's Shellenberger's paen to Marie Curie who according to this NYTimes piece from twenty years ago:

...tended to deny the perils of radiation, despite being deeply troubled by the deaths in the 1920's of colleagues and radiation workers from leukemia.

Sounds like the perfect mascot for Shellenberger.

Now I haven't found evidence that Shellenberger is being funded by the Koch brothers, but his projects certainly align perfectly with the Koch brothers hostility toward renewable energy. And "Environmental Progress" defends the Koch brothers here:

Policymakers and journalists have made much of corporate funding for efforts to kill clean energy. Mostly those efforts have focused on the Koch brothers and Exxon. Fair treatment would require more focus on groups like ELPC and Sierra Club, which have taken money from natural gas companies while fighting nuclear energy, America’s largest source of clean, low carbon power.

Rolling Stone fights the Koch brothers over their anti-environment policies.

So how are things at Chernobyl?

...For almost three decades the forests around the shuttered nuclear power plant have been absorbing contamination left from the 1986 reactor explosion. Now climate change and lack of management present a troubling predicament: If these forests burn, strontium 90, cesium 137, plutonium 238 and other radioactive elements would be released, according to an analysis of the human health impacts of wildfire in Chernobyl's exclusion zone conducted by scientists in Germany, Scotland, Ukraine and the United States.