Steven Pinker and the race pseudoscience network

Carole Hooven was seen last August on Pinkerite, along with Larry Summers, when each was promoting Quillette's racist/neo-Nazi editor Bo Winegard last year.

It seems that Hooven's career is now supported by Steven Pinker. I'm not surprised.

Pinker is a long-time supporter and some-time contributor of racist rag Quillette, and an admirer of Bo Winegard.

Pinker is no doubt a supporter of Hooven because she's another believer in the sociobiology/evolutionary psychology school of gender and race essentialism, the "scientific" justification for right-wing bigotry.

In this article in the September 2022 edition of the Archives of Sexual Behavior,  Hooven defends Larry Summers' belief in the inferiority of lady brains in STEM.

In spite of Summers' claim, women's participation in STEM is steadily rising. 

We know that's not due to women's genetics or brain structure changing in such a short period of time. 

Maybe it's due to pushback against the essentialist beliefs that sociobiologists like Summers, Pinker, Winegard and Hooven cling to for dear life.

In the article, Hooven proposes the crackpot social affinity theory that is the absolute favorite sociobiologist explanation for why people are hostile to their pseudoscience-based claims. Bo Winegard is a big fan.

Hooven:

Why do people direct such outrage at scholars who are trying to do their jobs, discovering and communicating how the world works? In the aftermath of the Summers imbroglio, Steven Pinker, the well-known professor of psychology at Harvard, argued that Summers had been met with such vitriol because he had violated a cultural taboo. (Pinker 2005)  People who belong or want to belong to a social group, whether centered around political views, or a country or school, ethnic or gender identity, can signal their loyalty to the group and its values by demonstrating their "moral purity." (Paresky, 2022)

Paresky is Pamela Paresky, who has been on the Koch payroll.

This fanciful explanation demonstrates how detached sociobiologists are from basic human social reality - maybe that's why they believe so reflexively that virtually all contemporary human behavior is the result of evolved biological essences.

The far more likely explanation for the Summers controversy is because at the time Summers made the statement he was the president of Harvard, speaking at a conference on why women were underrepresented in STEM, and Summers suggested the problem was women themselves.

To spell it out in a way that even a sociobiologist might grasp, Summers represented a clear institutional threat to women who were interested in STEM careers. How idiotic do you have to be to seriously believe the controversy was due to "moral purity"?

I would say that Hooven, Pinker, Paresky and Winegard are being deliberately obtuse, but I'm afraid it might not be deliberate. 

In this recent video, at minute 1:10 Hooven says:

...(Pinker's) also interested in, obviously, at lot of the kinds of issues that I'm interested in, The Blank Slate, is, you know, his early book, had a big impact on me and my thinking - how I thought about sex differences...

...more than anyone else at Harvard... he gave me a new office, he took me into his department, he stood up for me, he counseled me, it's been a really difficult time and he, if it weren't for him I really would not be at Harvard any more and I am because of him.... 

But Pinker has long been a champion of those who support sociobiology, as his ongoing support for hardcore race pseudoscience extremist Linda Gottfredson demonstrates.

And of course his support for the career of professional racist Steve Sailer.

"The Blank Slate" was Pinker's evolutionary psychology manifesto, so perfectly reviewed by Louis Menand in the New Yorker when it was released in 2002:

Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals." 

My theory for why Pinker tries to "have it both ways" is because he wants plausible deniability for his actual beliefs about Black people.

The New Yorker review mentions Judith Rich Harris, but the review does not mention how instrumental Pinker was in promoting the career of Harris. 

Moreover, when her great encourager Steven Pinker and I each nominated her paper for the annual award for “outstanding paper on general psychology,” the judges selected her as co-recipient of the—I am not making this up—George A. Miller Award. (To his credit, Miller later termed the irony “delicious.”)

Harris is so popular among believers in sociobiology that a leading promoter of "biosocial criminology," Kevin Beaver, is the Judith Rich Harris Professor of Criminology at Florida State University.

Beaver is on the editorial board of Evolutionary Psychological Science along with Pinker and other believers in race pseudoscience such as Todd K. Shackleford, Sam Harris, David C. Geary, as well as the infamously misogynist Dario Maestripieri and the guy who can't tell female desire from female slavery, David Buss.

Biosocial Criminology holds that Black people are innately less intelligent, and more criminally-inclined than members of other "races." We know this because there is a book edited by Kevin Beaver, Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research in which his fellow biosocial criminologist John Paul Wright is given a chapter to argue that belief:

Page 149:

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

Page 150:

From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality. 

The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.

I have no doubt Pinker holds similar beliefs. He has consistently promoted and supported those who hold these beliefs (Razib Khan, Bo Winegard, Linda Gottfredson, Steve Sailer) and his beliefs echo those of racist Amy Wax.

Unfortunately any time Pinker is interviewed, the interviewer treats him with kid gloves, due to the rarely broken gentlemen's agreement and refuses to make Pinker express exactly what he believes, as in this interview:

The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism...

So if the problem isn't poverty and racism... what exactly is the problem? Pinker is too much the weasel to come right out and say it.

Pinker's influence extends to the promotion and support of the much debunked claims of the hypothesis called "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" created by two racists, who were brought together by racist Steve Sailer.

The publisher of the Hooven video, Freedom Pact likes to platform members and friends of the IDW including Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Niall Ferguson, Chloe Valdary, Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray and David Buss. 

The Freedom Pact website reveals nothing about who is funding them, but given how IDW-leaning its guests have become since 2018, including two interviews with Ivermectin-promoting Bret Weinstein, the brother of Peter Thiel's employee and apparent crackpot, Eric Weinstein, and given Thiel's reported financial support for race pseudoscience-promoting and IDW-connected Quillette, I have my suspicions.

And I predict that one day Carole Kennedy Hooven will have her own Quillette byline, where she can share her grievances with Quillette's far-right, racist and mostly male readership.

If Quillette will support Amy Wax's right to be a public racist troll while working for an educational institution, they'll certainly support Hooven. 

Meet Nina Paley, culture wars grifter and Kiwi Farms fan

I assumed Alex Byrne was a garden-variety culture wars grifter, writing for racist rag Quillette. I figured he was hoping to advance his career by maybe scoring some wingnut welfare, like Carole Hooven, or maybe getting a Fox News interview, also like Carole Hooven.

But I discovered Byrne has a very interesting collaborator: Nina Paley who did illustrations for Byrne's forthcoming book which is apparently loved by Steven Pinker and Christina Hoff Sommers.

Paley is notable enough to have her own Wikipedia page, although I never heard of her until today.

Paley has created a "Gender Wars" deck of cards. The red cards are the "gender-critical" good guys and the black cards are people she lumps together as "transactivists," including a mass murderer. 

Now I don't have a high opinion of culture war grifters to begin with, but even I was stunned to see that Paley included Kiwi Farms as one of the good guys in her deck of cards.

Kiwi Farms is evil to the point of being psychopathic:

Founded by Joshua Moon, a former 8chan administrator, Kiwi Farms evolved into a popular platform for creating harassment campaigns. Its users often fixated on transgender people, relentlessly stalking and doxing them. At least three of its victims died by suicide.

In the image Paley created, the cow represents "lolcows" - the people selected by Kiwi Farms for torture. Paley apparently thinks this is cute and funny.

Paley did a podcast with Joshua Moon. She and her podcast co-host Corinna Cohn provide a dishonest description of Kiwi Farms:

In 1993 John Gilmore famously said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” To learn why that’s no longer true, listen to Josh Moon enumerate “the amount of things that have broken that people in the industry assumed could never break,” as activists with personal vendettas and political agendas relentlessly employ every possible strategy to silence his small but notorious gossip site Kiwi Farms. From Cloudflare to Hurricane Electric, ISPs, data centers, and payment processors, literally anything up and down the Border Gateway Protocol has been targeted to shut down the ‘Farms. With ISIS, the KKK, Stormfront, neo-nazis, and child porn all continuing to enjoy online services, who expected “the gossip site that makes fun of troons” to be the straw to break the Internet’s backbone? And why have the individuals and organizations who once stood against censorship lost their own?

Here's what is actually meant by "makes fun of the troons":

Mother Jones:

Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized—people who are transgender, neurodivergent, disabled, financially struggling—with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns. Despite its penchant for destroying lives, Kiwi Farms has been mostly overlooked by the media for much of the site’s existence. That is partly because of who it attacks, but also because reporters are wary of becoming targets themselves. The users call their victims “lolcows” because their pain can be milked for laughs. The group made its purpose clear on its Twitter page before it was taken down: “Gossip and exploitation of mentally handicapped for amusement purposes.” 

 

Kiwi Farms users deploy slightly different tactics for various victims, but the rough beats are the same. First, the group assembles extensive dossiers. Then they use the information (some true, some contorted, some fabricated) to torment their targets. 

 

When Sagal posted about her suicidal thoughts, Kiwi Farms users sent private messages urging her to kill herself, a friend said. When posters learned that Terryberry, an 18-year-old with learning disabilities, used the internet to make friends, they worked to get her social media accounts shut down while mocking her mental health struggles. They relentlessly tormented Ginder for being nonbinary. One thread went on for more than a dozen pages. 

Lacking a sense of empathy is said to be an indicator of psychopathy. 

I'm wondering if Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven like Kiwi Farms as much as Nina Paley apparently does. (YES - see below)

And you'll never guess - Paley is also an author at Quillette. Also interviewed by Paley: Razib Khan, Alice Dreger, Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven.

And as you've probably guessed, Joshua Moon is also a huge racist.

UPDATE: Paley conveniently posted fans of her cards on Twitter, and it turns out Carole Hooven is a big fan, promoting them on Twitter.

Stay classy, you poor cancelled martyr!

Also a fan, another Koch employee (besides Hooven) Pamela Paresky. Hooven cited her when she promoted the crackpot sociobiologists' social affinity theory. Apparently Paresky thinks these cards are hysterical! I knew Paresky was a wingnut ass, but I didn't guess what a hate-filled ghoul she is.

Paresky wants to "protect kids" - but presumably NOT the ones selected to be lolcows by Kiwi Farms.

And crackpot Jordan "enforced monogamy" Peterson is a fan.

Imagine hating trans people so much that you condone the glorification of psychopathically evil Kiwi Farms.

It's hard not to laugh at a right-wing wacko like Peterson: This Jordan Peterson Impression Will Absolutely Make Your Day

Oh, and in case you're a wingnut and you think I'm a hypocrite because I detest Kiwi Farms attempting to destroy the lives of nobodies, while condoning a mocking impression of celebrity grifter Jordan Peterson, consider this an illustration of the difference between rightwing humor and leftwing humor.

Rightwing humor punches down - at misfit nobodies and sexual minorities.

Leftwing humor punches up -  at wealthy public grifters.

More evidence of an IDW - Koch connection: meet Pamela Paresky

The hypocrisy of the IDW is an ever-reliable subject. Here we see Jesse Singal advocating arguing constructively in The Atlantic.

Jesse Singal refused to argue with me about his support of Steven Pinker, blocked me on Twitter, and then teamed up with Quillette author, Koch money recipient  and leading cheerleader of the misogynists targeting women in Gamergate, Cathy Young, like this.

Notice how he congratulates himself on "nonengagement" while simultaneously smearing me where I presumably can't see it and respond in my own defense.

The people associated with the IDW seem to never tire patting themselves on the back for standing up for one virtue or another while doing the exact opposite.

Jesse Singal has also written for AEI, supported by the Koch brothers.

Pamela Paresky, author at Quillette, has done even better than that. She is Chief Research Officer to the President and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a rightwing organization with ties to the Kochs according to SourceWatch:

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has deep ties to the Koch brothers. The organization has received funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust.

FIRE has received money from other plutocrats, like the Bradley Foundation.

I don't think it can be underestimated how useful the free speech grifting of the IDW is to the Kochs. While FIRE and Quillette and Areo Magazine and Fox News focus the spotlight on random students acting stupid at various colleges, which they portray as "the left" meanwhile this is what the Kochs are getting up to in Academia:

What Charles Koch and Other Donors to George Mason University Got for Their Money

Yet there is evidence that donors, including the Koch Foundation, continue to exert extraordinary influence at universities, in many cases unwritten or even unstated. Daniel Kovenock, a professor of economics at Chapman University, which has received Koch funding, said he believed that the foundation had changed its methods. 

“Instead of explicit contractual provisions governing use of the funds, it’s now a wink and a handshake,” Professor Kovenock said. 

A former professor and administrator at Arizona State University described the “drama” involving an offer in 2014 by the Koch Foundation to donate money for a new professor dedicated to teaching the history of capitalism. 

The professor, Matthew J. Garcia, said that he had welcomed the foundation’s donation to his program — the school of historical, philosophical and religious studies — but that he had insisted normal hiring procedures be followed to fill the job. 

The hiring search was anything but normal, the professor said. As it progressed, a university dean told him, “A.S.U. will never hire anyone that Koch doesn’t approve,” according to Professor Garcia.

The IDW - useful and complicit idiots.

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.

Four Koch toadies defend race science

Steven Pinker has been quiet lately about race science, but never fear, he still firmly supports it.

Politico recently published an article The New York Times Surrendered to an Outrage Mob. Journalism Will Suffer For It  by Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Pamela Paresky and Nadine Strossen defending Bret Stephens' citation of a wildly speculative paper, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI), in an op-ed in the NYTimes.

A few months before Stephens' piece I had discussed the NHAI paper with anthropologist Brian Ferguson who debunked its claims.

Jerry Coyne, Pinker's ever-loyal toady, promoted the Politico article on his blog, in a post entitled Four heavy hitters criticize the New York Times for “Orwellian” retroactive censorship. 

Pinkerite discussed the article in question by Stephens, The Secrets of Jewish Genius, at the time it was published. I quoted Stephens from the article: 

The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper.

The 2005 paper quoted by Stephens is Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, which Stephens linked to in his op-ed.

Now if it's "common" to believe that Jews tend to be smart, couldn't Stephens have found another source to back up his claim? And in fact, Stephens supporters, while trying to defend Stephens, were able to do just that (my highlights.)

Stephens took up the question of why Ashkenazi Jews are statistically overrepresented in intellectual and creative fields. This disparity has been documented for many years, such as in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene by the eminent sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. In his Times column, Stephens cited statistics from a more recent peer-reviewed academic paper, coauthored by an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. Though the authors of that paper advanced a genetic hypothesis for the overrepresentation, arguing that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group because of inherited traits, Stephens did not take up that argument. In fact, his essay quickly set it aside and argued that the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind.

So if the four defenders of Stephens could find a source of statistics other than NHAI, why couldn't Stephens? I think it's likely because Stephens agrees with NHAI and wants to promote it but also wanted to maintain plausible deniability. For in spite of the claim by his four defenders that Stephen's essay "argued that the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind" what Stephens actually does is throw out a bunch of possible explanations without committing to any one of them. Then Stephens leaves it as an open question:

These explanations for Jewish brilliance aren’t necessarily definitive. 

Stephens is practiced at this method, as in his piece on climate change, in which he says:

None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.

He's not saying severe anthropogenic climate change is impossible, he's just implying ordinary citizens should be skeptical of environmentalists.

I imagine this trick, of casting doubt on settled science while maintaining a pose of neutrality, or contrariwise promoting an unfounded speculation while maintaining a pose of neutrality makes him a desirable ally of the Kochtopus.

And of course faux neutrality is a favorite tactic of the IDW - associates of Quillette have long tried to claim the rag is centrist while it has relentlessly promoted right-wing views and its founder  Claire Lehmann hobnobs with conservatives and takes their money.

Steven Pinker is a practiced hand at plausible deniability.

The Stephens defenders attempt to downplay the connection between Henry Harpending's racism and his co-authoring a paper that supports race science:

Second, the Times redacted a published essay based on concerns about retroactive moral pollution, not about accuracy. While it is true that an author of the paper Stephens mentioned, the late anthropologist Henry Harpending, made some deplorable racist remarks, that does not mean that every point in every paper he ever coauthored must be deemed radioactive. Facts and arguments must be evaluated on their content. Will the Times and other newspapers now monitor the speech of scientists and scholars and censor articles that cite any of them who, years later, say something offensive? Will it crowdsource that job to Twitter and then redact its online editions whenever anyone quoted in the Times is later “canceled”?

The four Stephens defenders imply that the problem critics have with citing NHAI is not because of its lack of "accuracy" (the real issue is NHAI is unsupported speculation) but because it's "immoral" which is always race science promoters response to criticism of their poorly-supported, speculative claims about race.

Steven Pinker, as the Politico article fails to mention, is in the public record as a supporter of the NHAI paper. Some years ago he gave a speech, still available on Youtube, called "Jews, Genes and Intelligence." Although he never bluntly states that the NHAI hypothesis is correct, he begins the lecture by strongly defending a pillar of race science belief - that "race" is biological:

I think it's safe to say that the current approach at least the approach for in recent decades was to deny the existence of intelligence I. mentioned the miss measure of man as the foremost example to deny the existence of genetically distinct human groups. there is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever that there are that it's purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do this Nazis but on the other hand there is a quotation I don't know who's responsible for it reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

Pinker then spends the rest of the lecture coming up with support for the NHAI hypothesis.

So contrary to his misleading self-presentation in the Politico piece, Pinker is not a neutral observer of a controversy about NYTimes "censorship" or simply a believer in free speech - he is a devoted partisan of the cause of race science. As is another co-author of the piece, Jonathan Haidt.

You can see Haidt here speculating, much as Charles Murray has done, that any day now we will have evidence for innate ethnic inferiority:

The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.) 

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

What I find most interesting in this passage is Haidt's emphasis on "ethnic differences in moralized traits" which is a favorite topic of biosocial criminologists. 

 The Politico article provides bios of all four authors, but none of them mentions the authors' connections to Koch.

I have mentioned frequently on this blog Pinker's connection to Koch.

I have also mentioned the fact that Pamela Paresky works for FIRE, which is funded by Koch.

Haidt co-wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind" with Greg Lukianoff, who is president of FIRE. And I suspect if I dig I could find other connections between Koch-funded organizations and Haidt. Once I get around to that I will report what I find.

Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU is now tight with the Koch network through her connections to the Cato Institute, founded by Charles Koch:

Cato has also worked on occasion with the American Civil Liberties Union. For example, Nadine Strossen, the president of its board, contributed a chapter to a 2000 book on President Clinton's civil liberties record, and she delivered the B. Kenneth Simon Lecture at Cato's 2005 Constitution Day event, a speech that was subsequently published in Cato's Supreme Court Review.

And Strossen is a contributor at The Federalist Society. According to Slate in a piece about Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo:

...the Federalist Society, a lavishly funded conservative legal group that currently serves as a pipeline to the Trump administration. (Many of Trump’s judicial nominees are members of the Federalist Society, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, whom Leo reportedly selected for the seat himself.) Leo is friends with David and Charles Koch, who have both donated generously to his organization.

So I think it's fair to say all four of the co-authors defending Bret Stephens are Koch toadies.

And in typical right-wing hypocrisy, it seems to bother the four toadies not at all that Bret Stephens himself is no friend of free speech. He infamously tried to get professor David Karpf fired because Karpf made a joking reference to Bret Stephens and bedbugs in a tweet.

Race science promoters and Koch toadies are nothing if not massive, shameless hypocrites.

Jerry Coyne and the "generally left-wing" articles in Quillette

Jerry Coyne is not named as a member of the IDW by Bari Weiss, but is nevertheless what I like to think of as a second string member of the IDW.

So I was really surprised to see Coyne criticizing an article in Quillette. The IDW tend to watch each others backs, even the possibly least-popular IDW, Candace Owens.

Coyne: The worst article ever to appear in Quillette...

The author, John Staddon, is identified as “James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Duke University”. His answer to the title question, by the way, is “yes”.
This may in fact be the worst piece that Quillette has ever published...

However, Coyne begins the article like this:

In general I like the articles in Quillette: they’re generally left-wing but also critical of the Left’s excesses—a theme that has led some misguided ideologues to call the site “alt-right.”

How is it possible that anyone could claim that Quillette articles are "generally left-wing"? Is this part of the standard right-wing through-the-looking glass, like the way they claim that professional misogynists Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers are feminists? I thought Mari Uyehara, in her immortal article for GQ, The Free Speech Grifters, perfectly captured this right-wing mind-fuckery:

Weiss's column titled "We're All Fascists Now" highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a "self-identified" feminist and a "registered" Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers's more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza among its past fellows.

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a "factual" one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn't know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she's been silent on harassment of women in techand finance. And she's been outspoken about the due-process rights of men accused of rape on college campuses, but apparently has no interest in addressing the complexity of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.

In fact, I think Quillette articles have begun leaning further right lately. I haven't done a systematic analysis of all Quillette articles, which I suppose I will be obliged to do someday *siiiigh*. So far I've only done occasional spot checks of its bylines - spoiler alert, Quillette authorship skews very heavily male, in spite of the fact, as Quillette's fans will endlessly tell you, it was founded by Claire Lehmann, actual woman.

Quillette has, since the beginning, reflected many of the values of Lehmann's former boss, rightwing extremist Rebel Media's Ezra Levant, in that it is anti-trans, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist, anti-left, anti-socialist, pro evolutionary psychology and pro race science. Although at least Quillette hasn't replicated Levant's obsession with Justin Trudeau, probably because Lehmann is Australian, not Canadian.

Fun side-note - in spite of the fact that Claire Lehmann's boss was Levant, Jonathan Kay's boss is now Claire Lehmann but there has been some antagonism between Kay and Levant, per the National Post:

Levant has long focused enormous attention on the Trudeau family. He called Pierre Trudeau a “slut” and Margaret Trudeau “(not) much better,” in 2014. Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, “is everything Ezra hates,” said Jonathan Kay, who worked with Levant at the National Post.
(Levant denies any fixation with Trudeau. He also believes Kay, who ghostwrote Justin Trudeau’s memoirs, holds a grudge against him for publicizing that fact.)

Lately I've noticed additional rightwing party platforms on Quillette: anti-immigration and pro-nuclear/anti-green energy. I think this is likely the result of an increasing Koch influence, either indirectly through Quillette authors supported by the Kochs (Cathy Young, Charles Murray, Pamela Paresky, probably others - I will definitely be doing an article on the IDW-Koch connections ASAP) or directly through Koch Foundation money - but I haven't found evidence for the latter... yet.