Steven Pinker and Amy Wax and Persuasion

So Pinker hasn't been promoting Razib Khan, directly, that I could find, since 2021. So what has Pinker been up to?

Publishing his usual bullshit, specifically in the "Persuasion" Substack.

Persuasion, which was founded in June 2020, a few weeks before the Harper's Letter was published, appears to be part of the Harper's Letter scheme, associated with the Intellectual Dark Web and the Quillette gang.

Thirteen signers of the Harper's Letter are associated with Persuasion, including founder and editor in chief Yascha Mounk. The named instigator of the letter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, currently taking money from the Koch-funded AEI, is on the Board of Advisors.

Persuasion also has an About page which lists "People," which includes Mounk and some members of the Board of Advisors, like Pinker, Haidt, Yoffe, McWhorter; various others (including "David"); plus two more Harper's Letter-signers, → Jonathan Rauch and → Ian Buruma.

You can see how much Persuasion is aligned politically with the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette by a glance at the "Most popular" articles on its home page:

• The Neoracists - by Quillette author and Koch employee John McWhorter. The article is about  how bad it is to be anti-racist.

• Keira Bell: My Story - about regretting being transgender - anti-trans is a pillar of the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette, and, because those are funded by the same people who fund conservative politicians, a new pillar of the Republican Party. Quillette talks about Bell a lot. Of course.

• Why I'm Losing Trust in the Institutions - Mounk's attack on the CDC for being excessively woke. You can see Mounk whining about people calling him on his bullshit while he pretends to be "of the left." Classic Koch phony bipartisanship. I found an excellent critique of Persuasion here. 

• A Taxonomy of Fear - Emily Yoffe's "cancel culture" screed. She makes sure to namecheck her favorite reactionaries of the IDW/Quillette industrial complex including race pseudoscience promoter Jonathan Haidt, Koch employee (via FIRE) Greg Lukianoff, contemptible anti-feminist Quillette author Meghan Daum, and of course Thomas Chatterton Williams. They live in an inbred world, these IDW/Quillette people. Which makes it especially fun when Yoffe writes:

Many people ask why any of this should matter in the age of Donald Trump—a president who attacks free speech, stokes bigotry and division, and believes he is above the law. It matters because we have seen what happened when his enablers on the right failed to stand up to the worst impulses of their leader. These enablers are now morally responsible for the tragic consequences of their inaction.

But if Peter Thiel has funded Quillette - and I think the claim is true - then the very people Yoffe admires take money from the same guy who funds Trump. It makes the "left is just as bad" defense incredibly hollow.

• The Warped Vision of "Anti-Racism" by Trump-loving right-wing extremist Batya Ungar-Sargon, who, like Pinker, Haidt, McWhorter and Thomas Chatterton Williams is on the Board of Advisors of the (I believe) Christopher Rufo-founded, right-wing anti-CRT-scam FAIR for all. Ungar-Sargon's is the second "anti-racism is bad" piece in Persuasion's "Most Popular" list which should tell you exactly who is reading Persuasion. Her article spews the usual bullshit about the 1619 Project ("it's postmodern!") you can expect from the Quillette/IDW gang of goons and ghouls. Even if she takes money from Newsweek instead of Quillette.

• The Rittenhouse Verdict Shouldn't Have Been a Surprise - by contemptible infamous transphobe Jesse Singal, also on the Koch payroll.

Pinker has published two articles in Persuasion. The most recent is from this month and continues his current project of presenting himself as the arbiter of Rationality while promoting race pseudoscience as calm, cool reason.

I've long noted that Pinker is a weasel, so it is no surprise that he compares those who disagree with race pseudoscience to members of QAnon:

QAnon might be likened to a live action role-playing game, with fans avidly trading clues and following leads. Its progenitor, Pizzagate (according to which Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizzeria), also had a make-believe quality...

...Many of us are nonplussed by this way of thinking. It’s one thing to believe that Hillary Clinton is a morally compromised person—everyone is entitled to an opinion—but it’s quite another thing, and completely unacceptable, to express that opinion as a fabricated factual assertion.

But it’s our mindset that is exotic and unnatural. For many of us, it’s the dividend of a higher education which has imparted the sense that there is a fact of the matter about states of the world; that even if we don’t know it, there are ways of finding out; and that, as Bertrand Russell put it, “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” Indeed, one could argue that this mindset is the most important dividend of higher education.

Or at least, it used to be. Here's another candidate for a mythology zone: the sacred creeds of academic and intellectual elites. These include the belief that we are born blank slates, that sex is a social construction, that every difference in the social statistics of ethnic groups is caused by racism, that the source of all problems in the developing world is European and American imperialism, and that repressed abuse and trauma are ubiquitous.

In spite of my best efforts, Pinker is not known primarily as a promoter of race pseudoscience, but his belief about race and racism is the same as that of Amy Wax, who is well-known as a racist.

Let's review:

Steve Pinker: 

...another candidate for a mythology zone: the sacred creeds of academic and intellectual elites... that every difference in the social statistics of ethnic groups is caused by racism...

Amy Wax:

The centerpiece of wokeness is that all disparities, all group disparities, are due to racism, racism, racism, racism.

How is what Pinker said any different from what Wax said? I see no difference in content, only a difference in style.

Although Pinker gives an extra little weasel twist by portraying his racism as pure rationality, opposed to those crazy myth-loving "elites."

And note that Pinker's term "sacred creed" is very close to the term "sacred values" used by  Quillette Associate Editor Bo Winegard, a long-time promoter of race pseudoscience and even an advocate of national ethnicity quotas (you know, like the Nazis were.) Pinker is on the record as admiring Bo Winegard and his twin brother Ben.

Steven Pinker is the genteel mask of the hardcore racism that Amy Wax shouts from the rooftops.

And that's why Steven Pinker is more pernicious than Amy Wax and that's why this blog focuses on media-darling/sacred cow celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker and not on the more obviously racist Amy Wax.

It's Black History Month - the IDW & the GOP hate Black History

It's Black History Month. Let's talk about how much the Right - and its IDW division - hate Black History.

Over in the cesspit known as Twitter, as reported by right-wing garbage heap Fox News, the Right are at each others' throats, while promoting the fiction that Steven Pinker is on the Left. He's about as Left as Jerry Coyne. 

Fox News is displaying attacks against Pinker by Colin Wright and Christopher Rufo. 

Rufo is a hypocrite, naturally, and so in response to Pinker tweeting a link to Cathy Young's criticism of Rufo and his connection to Ron DeSantis and his scheme to erase Black History, Rufo tweeted "Sorry, buddy, we're not going to listen to people who can't even open their comments."

Do I have to mention that Rufo blocked me on Twitter every bit as much as Pinker did?

Cathy Young herself is hardly blameless. I consider her a pioneer of stochastic terrorism.

But the whole thing is odd, because Steven Pinker is a supporter of Rufo's campaign against Critical Race Theory, which is the founding motivation of FAIR FOR ALL. 

Pinker was a member of the FAIR board of advisors when it was first created in March 2021 along with Rufo. And although Rufo is no longer there, Pinker is.

FAIR is a who's who of right-wing political operatives and members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Colin Wright has never been a member of the FAIR board of advisors, but they haven't forgotten him. He's mentioned in December 2021 in the News section: New Video: Doing ‘DEI’ Right with Colin Wright.

Now before getting cozy with Rufo's CRT grift, Colin Wright was best known as a hateful transphobe:

Colin Wright, an anti-trans extremist writer for right-wing site Quillette and founder of Reality’s Last Stand, posted a very heinous tweet harming the safety of LGBTQ+ minors by criticizing suicide prevention outlet The Trevor Project’s “quick exit” feature that allows LGBTQ+ youth to have safe conversations without being snooped on by their non-LGBTQ+-affirming parent(s) or other family members and then subsequently get berated, abused, and/or even disowned, or worse, killed. 

His Twitter account was even suspended for extreme transphobia, before fascist Elon Musk came along to set all the little fashies free from Twitter jail.

But both transphobia and hostility to Black history are hallmarks of the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette. And Wright quickly jumped on board Rufo's anti-CRT campaign, aligning with Trump.

I wonder how Jerry Coyne will react to the attacks on Pinker. On the one hand, Coyne adores Pinker, on the other hand Coyne is a fan of Colin Wright.

It is odd though, this public drama, considering that all the main characters, Pinker, Young, Rufo, and Wright have taken Koch money. And Koch and the Intellectual Dark Web have nurtured Rufo's CRT-panic grift since the beginning.

What Ron DeSantis is doing is the ultimate political expression of the IDW/Quillette campaign against Black history.

Rufo may talk about "Critical Race Theory" but what he's really after is to kill the 1619 Project.

Mr. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law relegates the study of the experiences of Black people to a prohibited category. The canceling of students’ access to accurate, truthful education that reflects their diverse identities and that of their country should chill every American. Not only do these laws offend First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression; to the extent they harm certain groups on the basis of race, gender or other protected status, they also violate principles of equal protection. And they are a chilling precursor to state-sponsored dehumanization of an entire race of people.

This disturbing pattern of silencing Black voices and aggressive attempts to erase Black history is one of the most visible examples of performative white supremacy since the presidency of Donald Trump. In 2019 the Florida legislature undermined Amendment 4, which a supermajority of Floridians supported and would have restored the voting rights of more than a million formerly incarcerated people. In its place, lawmakers put in place a pay-to-vote system that redisenfranchises hundreds of thousands of those citizens, many of them Black. Similarly, Florida’s antiprotest law, H.B. 1, was enacted in 2021 in response to the 2020 protests against police violence, when Black organizations and peaceful demonstrators in Florida — along with their allies — took to the streets with demands for justice...

..Several book bans and other antitruth measures introduced in the past two years target The New York Times’s 1619 Project (and curriculum), which was created by Nikole Hannah-Jones — who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work — and is a linchpin in today’s conversations about the role of systemic racism in America’s history and its enduring impacts. In Wyoming and Texas, lawmakers and school officials have proposed measures mandating that objectively horrific historic events like the Holocaust and the trans-Atlantic slave trade be presented to American children neutrally and without judgment. (The Wyoming measure failed to pass the state’s legislature.) But why would we want our children to look at these atrocities without judgment?

Rufo and his allies hate the 1619 project. From Jerry Coyne to Colin Wright to neo-Nazi James Lindsay. 

You would think that Pinker and Young would be happy that their side is winning.

Could this be an example of unintended consequences? 

Could Young and Pinker have really not considered that their constant harping on "wokeness," along with Pinker echoing infamous racist Amy Wax in an attempt to downplay the power of systemic racism, could have political consequences?

I mean, I did not think they were especially bright people, but even I didn't think they were that clueless.

Or is it all phony? Like Jerry Coyne claiming to be on the Left, while constantly agreeing with the Right. Much like this.

But they always pretend - or maybe they are just that self-deluded - that what they really care about is "free speech." 

Fox News refers to Colin Wright as an "evolutionary biologist" but he is not a practicing one. He is on wingnut welfare, paid to promote the views of right-wing plutocrats. I assume he switched to that career because several of his science papers were retracted.

To be fair, although blocking critics is what members of the IDW/Quillette gang do, Wright did not block my Twitter account. This isn't especially significant now, since I'm never on Twitter, but it was something different from the standard member of the IDW/Quillette gang. I guess he refrained from blocking for "free speech."

But to Wright, free speech means if you disagree with him, he will make unsupported vicious attacks against you. And then run away.

But you can't expect good faith from people who have devoted their lives to promoting hatred on behalf of evil old plutocrats.

About Cathy Young's piece - a perfect illustration of her through-the-lookinglass view of the world in this section:

If DeSantis’s objective had been simply to appoint board members who would counteract excessive “woke” influence at New College, he could have picked plenty of people who weren’t in that mold. For instance, Columbia University professor and author John McWhorter, a self-identified black liberal whose book Woke Racism is scathingly critical of Kendi-style “anti-racism” even as McWhorter has been no less scathing about Trump. Or, say, Christina Hoff Sommers, a former academic who is sufficiently “anti-woke” to have been classed among the earlier-mentioned “intellectual dark web” and to have been targeted for deplatforming at several progressive universities, but has said that she regards Trump as an example of “amoral masculinity” rather than positive masculinity. Or social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, who has strongly criticized academia’s move toward prioritizing “social justice” over truth and who recently resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology over a new rule requiring presenters at the society’s annual conference to submit a statement on equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

McWhorter is not only a long-time employee of Koch-funded organizations and an author at race pseudoscience-loving Quillette, he is also on the board of advisors of the CRT-crazed FAIR.

Sommers, like Young is a pioneer in stochastic terrorism, misogyny division. 

Jonathan Haidt is a long-time supporter of race-pseudoscience, recently seen at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. And another member of the anti-CRT crazed FAIR.

The American Right may not agree about Trump, but they do agree about race pseudoscience and transphobia. And the utility of grifts like anti-CRT and the classic free speech grift.

UPDATE February 9: far from defending Pinker from attacks by Rufo, disgusting right-wing goon Jerry Coyne is celebrating Rufo:

After the bad publicity, Texas Tech, according to a tweet by Christoper Rufo, has suspended this DEI policy.

"An antiwoke organization implodes" - buh-bye FAIR!

“You have a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”

I was going to write about Jerry Coyne whining about the criticism of his little IDW grift perpetrated in cahoots with Quillette author and crackpot Anna Krylov. Best part, Coyne uses the phrase "Lee Jussim is an antiwoke social psychologist at Rutgers." Pinkerite has often noted the right-wing reactionary, vicious, race pseudoscience-loving loserosity of Lee Jussim. 

The second best part was when Coyne unironically describes race pseudoscience-promoting reactionaries Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt and Koch employee and reactionary Quillette author John McWhorter as "of the left."

Jerry Coyne and his right-wing allies live in a hermetically-sealed bubble.

Coyne was especially mad at P. Z. Myers, because Myers had this excellent response to the Krylov/Coyne grift. One of the best parts: "screw you McWhorter."

UPDATE: Myers responds to Coyne's complaints. Will Coyne ever stop embarrassing himself with his pathetic right-wing stoogery?

But there is much MUCH bigger news, which I found by looking at Coyne's website - the far-right reactionary FAIR grift "implodes!"

I had already noted how many members of the FAIR board of advisors were right-wingers, Trump supporters and Republicans.

The news comes from the New Yorker:

Professionally, Bartning had never worked on issues related to race or civil rights; he was an entrepreneur and investor who had helped American Express launch its online travel business and later helped lead the personal-care company E.O.S. One of his most recent ventures was a failed startup that sought to connect local farms with chefs. But he resolved to do something about what he was seeing at Riverdale—maybe even start an organization to counter it. He read an article in the Jewish magazine Tablet, about the rise of a new ideology on the left—a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality”—and another parent offered to connect him with Tablet’s editor and with the author of the article, Bari Weiss.

I had always assumed that Christopher Rufo was the real founder of FAIR, although Bartning had been given the credit, as I noted in September 2021. 

But as with so many horrible right-wing reactionary projects, this one is the work of Peter Thiel's leading courtier, Bari Weiss.

The New Yorker article demonstrates what professional journalists should be doing: getting past the lies. Although the article's description of right-wing extremist Peter Boghossian was unfortunately extremely flattering.

The article, written by Emma Green, mentions so many people I've discussed on this site for their connection to race pseudoscience and/or the Intellectual Dark Web: creepy Melissa Chen; Substack's Lulu Cheng Meservey, the awful former Quillette editor Colin Wright; Hoover ghoul Niall Ferguson; Angel Eduardo; Quillette author Glenn Loury; Koch employee/Randroid Kmele Foster.

The article is long but the gist is that Bion Bartning, who is basically a normie, although "independently wealthy," decided to wade into a culture war campaign dear to the American Right and the Republican Party - preventing discussions of systemic racism. 

Bartning:

“I’d say that, in the first few months of starting FAIR, I didn’t realize the degree to which this was being politicized,” he told me. “Getting this issue tied up in a culture war between two political parties is dangerous and could end up pushing things toward a more dehumanizing approach, because people get locked into their position.” 

Bartning's tragedy was that someone connected him to Bari Weiss - Madam Culture War herself.

Eventually Bartning achieves this insight:

“There are too few in the donor class who want to bolster moderation,” he said. “That’s part of what’s happening in our culture. You have a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”

Probably the biggest get of the article is the revelation of Weiss' coziness with Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow:

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Bari Weiss is, through and through, a right-wing political operative taking money from some of the most evil and crackpot plutocrats in the world to help the anti-democracy Republican Party make the United States a worse place, through the promotion of culture wars.

For me one of the best aspects of the article is that it provides a window into the Intellectual Dark Web Culture War issues factory:

Weiss had already been talking with a few of her friends about creating a new anti-woke organization. One was Melissa Chen, a writer and the managing director at Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that takes books about concepts such as liberty and reason and translates them into Arabic, to make them more accessible; she later described herself as a conservative who was forming her trajectory in “the anti-woke space.” Another was Peter Boghossian, a former professor best known for getting absurd papers about subjects such as dogs perpetuating rape culture at dog parks published in feminist and postmodern academic journals to expose what he saw as corruption in scholarship, and who has earned some prominence as a public intellectual defending free speech and opposing illiberalism. Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

Bari Weiss is truly a conscience-deficient individual. 

UPDATE: P. Z. Myers comments:

It does me good to see one of those hateful anti-woke organizations falling apart, but it’s also dismaying to see how easily radical conservative groups can suck money out of the pockets of the obscenely rich. I guess if you’re extremely wealthy you can easily throw a million dollars here, a half million there, as long as the recipient panders to the bigotry that comes naturally to bloated capitalist nepo babies.

UPDATE: Charles Murray is such a good buddy of Harlan Crow, he dedicated one of his more recent sociobiology books to him.

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.

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

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

How bad was the infamous Harper's Letter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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