Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 1: Race essentialism

The problem with a confidence trickster is that they prey on people's tendency to believe them. People who are opposed to racism will tend to believe and side with others who oppose racism.

And Robin DiAngelo, author of "White Fragility" published last year, has made a profitable career based on the credence given to her claims by people of good will who oppose racism, including many in the media.

And that is why Robin DiAngelo is so pernicious.

And since many anti-racists on Twitter think DiAngelo is a great thinker and a great opponent of race-based injustice, it is necessary to explain why DiAngelo is not helping to improve the situation of race in America.

1. DiAngelo is a race essentialist much like the proponents of race science are.

Like the proponents of race science, DiAngelo uses terms like "black" and "white" but refuses to explain exactly who falls into these categories. But that does not prevent race science - nor DiAngelo - from making essentialist claims about "whites" and "blacks" when it suits them.

In the case of race science, "black" people are held to be innately less intelligent and more criminal.

In DiAngeloism "white" people are held to be racist, regardless of actions or beliefs.

DiAngelo literally believes that all white people are racist, from Donald Trump to herself, quoted here in a Slate interview:

I want to be clear. I don’t see myself as redefining the term. I want to change the way the average white person understands what racism is, but I am using the sociological definition. You asked me, “What would you call the difference perhaps between Trump and me?” But I actually think, yeah, we both are racists. I see that as a continuum that I’m on and will be on for the rest of my life. In any given moment, I have to ask myself, “How am I doing on this continuum? What end am I behaving closer to? How do I know?” He and I may be on different spots on the continuum, but we’re both on it. I don’t tend to distinguish between the two of us, which probably shocks some readers, but if you’re asking me to somehow identify that difference, I would say “avowed” versus maybe “implied” or “implicit.”

So DiAngelo thinks there is a continuum of racism - but all white people are on it.

The race science proponents don't think all black people are stupid or criminal. They just think blackness gives them a likelihood of being that way.

Just as DiAngelo thinks being white gives one a tendency to be racist. 

And in fact by these standards DiAngelo is more extreme than race science proponents, which hardly seems possible and yet: race science proponents will admit there are black people who are smart and who are not criminals. 

DiAngelo will not admit any white person is not racist.

You don't have to take my word for it that DiAngelo believes all white people are racist - this is what one of her admirers wrote:

That anyone can be prejudiced, but in America, only white people are racist. And, actually, all white people are racist because, as DiAngelo says:  

"Racism comes out of our pores as white people. It's the way that we are."

DiAngelo constantly mentions America, as in the Slate interview. If you haven't been following her career for four years, as I have, you might think she is, reasonably, basing her belief in white racism on the North American race system begun with slavery and continued up to the present time, which impacts relationships between "white" and "black" people. But that is not the case.

Unlike many who write about race, DiAngelo also applies the charge of innate racism to those who grew up outside the North American system, as in the story DiAngelo tells in her recent book:

 I was working with a small group of white participants when a woman I will refer to as Eva stated that because she grew up in Germany, where she said there were no black people, she had learned nothing about race and held no racism. I pushed back on this claim by asking her to reflect on the messages she had received from her childhood about people who lived in Africa. Surely she was aware of Africa and had some impressions of the people there? Had she ever watched American films? If so, what impression did she get about African Americans? I also asked her to reflect on what she had absorbed from living in the U.S. for the last 23 years, whether she had any relationships with African Americans here, and if not, then why not. 

We moved on, and I forgot about the interaction until Eva approached me after the workshop ended. She was furious and said that she had been deeply offended by our exchange and did not “feel seen.” “You made assumptions about me!” she said. I apologized and told her that I would never want her to feel unseen or invalidated. 

However, I also held to my challenge that growing up in Germany would not preclude her from absorbing problematic racial messages about black people. She countered by telling me that she had never even seen a black person “before the American soldiers came.” And when they did come, “all the German women thought them so beautiful that they wanted to connect with them.” This was her evidence that she held no racism. With an internal sigh of defeat, I gave up at that point and repeated my apology. We parted ways, but her anger was unabated. 

A few months later, one of my co-facilitators contacted Eva to tell her about an upcoming workshop. Eva was apparently still angry. She replied that she would never again attend a workshop led by me. Notice that I did not tell Eva that she was racist or that her story was racist. But what I did do was challenge her self-image as someone exempt from racism. Paradoxically, Eva’s anger that I did not take her claims at face value surfaced within the context of a volunteer workshop on racism, which she ostensibly attended to deepen her understanding of racism.

"Eva" was understandably insulted that Robin DiAngelo would tell her that she, Robin DiAngelo, understands her more than she understands herself. That Robin DiAngelo would imply she doesn't know whether she is racist or not.

DiAngelo implies that the German woman was racist because although she consciously grew up with the message that black people were beautiful, she might have seen an American film or received "messages" about people who live in Africa and that would have made her unconsciously racist.

As an aside: exactly which American films does DiAngelo think would make a German into an anti-black racist? I am not aware that black people are routinely shown as bad in American films, and until very recently the problem was more about an absence of black people than black people being portrayed badly.

Now it is certain that DiAngelo could find bigotry and a preference for whites in Germany. Human beings tend to prefer their own groups and people who look like them. What DiAngelo does is attempt to make that solely a "white" pathology, not an unfortunate pan-human tendency.

But as Germany, of all places, has demonstrated, "white" people are certainly capable of injustice and horrific cruelty against other "white" people. A system of "othering" is what is necessary and doesn't have to be other based on skin color. But of course it isn't just white people who can be vicious towards members of their own "race" as the Rwandan genocide or the killing fields of Cambodia demonstrate.

And as with race science, there is a problem with DiAngelo's essentialist race system - where do those who are "mixed-race" fall in the black-white continuum? Is one only innately half-racist if one is half-white?

This demonstrates the problem with all forms of race essentialism - it attempts to freeze human ancestry at one point in time, call that frozen essence "race" and then make claims based on that bogus construct. And it is especially ironic that race science and white fragility essentialists are doing this at a time when intermarriage happens more now than ever.

Coming next - Part 2: Robin DiAngelo broke US labor anti-discrimination law - and bragged about it.

Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 2: She broke US labor law and bragged about it

Sarah Jeong was defended by people who
cited Robin DiAngelo

Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad continued from part 1

2. Robin DiAngelo broke US labor law and bragged about it.

Now I am not a lawyer so my opinion is not backed by professional expertise, but I am fairly confident that Robin DiAngelo broke the law.

She certainly discriminated against someone on the basis of "race."

This is from the US Equal Opportunity Employment Commission web site:

Race discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because he/she is of a certain race or because of personal characteristics associated with race (such as hair texture, skin color, or certain facial features). Color discrimination involves treating someone unfavorably because of skin color complexion.
Race/color discrimination also can involve treating someone unfavorably because the person is married to (or associated with) a person of a certain race or color.
Discrimination can occur when the victim and the person who inflicted the discrimination are the same race or color.

Robin DiAngelo's article for "The Good Men Project" entitled White Women’s Tears and the Men Who Love Them demonstrates what I'm talking about:

When another police shooting of an unarmed black man occurred, my workplace called for an informal lunch gathering of people who wanted to connect and find support. Just before the gathering, a woman of color pulled me aside and told me that she wanted to attend but she was “in no mood for white women’s tears today.” 

I assured her that I would handle it. As the meeting started, I told my fellow white participants that if they felt moved to tears, to please leave the room. I would go with them for support, but asked that they not cry in the mixed group. After the discussion, I spent the next hour explaining to a very outraged white woman why she was asked not to cry in the presence of the people of color. 

So just to recap:

• An employer called for a gathering to be run by DiAngelo.
• One bigoted individual in the workplace told DiAngelo she had a problem with a specific group of people on the basis of their gender and ethnicity.
• DiAngelo assured that individual she would "handle it."
• DiAngelo then informed the members of that ethnicity only that if they cried during the discussion, they had to leave the room.
• At least one individual was very upset by being singled out by race that way.

Please note - the reason an individual would cry in this scenario is in sympathy with a mistreated black person. Diangelo is so dedicated to race essentialism that even when a white person expresses sympathy for a black person it is considered offensive.

If expressions of human sympathy are to be judged by race, what possible hope is there to make bridges across the biologically bogus, but socially real chasm of race in the United States?

Now I'm not sure how much the claim of the innate racism of white people and the related belief that non-white people can't be racist was created by DiAngelo or whether the "woke" discourse of academia influenced DiAngelo. In any case, it is a common belief among segments of progressives that it's OK to be bigoted against "white" people.

We saw this last year in the case of Sarah Jeong, when Jeong was invited to join the NYTimes and it was pointed out that she had tweeted anti-white comments, including #cancelwhitepeople.

One of Jeong's defenders went with the "that's just how we talk" argument:

This is, incidentally, why you hear a lot of people on the social left say there’s no such thing as “reverse racism.” We interpret language through social context. Because of the way racial power structures are set up, the same set of words mean very different things when you swap out “white people” for “black people,” “Asians,” “Jews,” etc. The phrase might be racist in one context, in the sense of conveying actual racial animus, but not in another. 

This meaning of the phrase “white people” is obvious to people who have been listening to these social media conversations, or even from even a cursory search of Twitter for the term.... 

Jeong’s tweets, in context, clearly fit this type of rhetoric. When she writes “dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” she is not, as Sullivan accuses her of doing, “equat[ing whites] with animals.” Rather, she is commenting on the ubiquity of (often uniformed) white opinion on social media — a way of pointing out how nonwhite voices often don’t appear or get drowned out in social media discourse. 

Again, this is obvious to people who are steeped in the kind of online communities Jeong spends time in. But what happened, as my colleague Aja Romano notes, is that a few alt-right websites pulled out Jeong’s tweets in a deliberate attempt to hurt her career and reputation. What’s actually happening here is a racist movement, the alt-right, trying to damage a left-wing woman of color — and mainstream conservatives are furthering their narrative. 

I don’t necessarily blame Sullivan and French for not hanging out on Social Justice Twitter, where their views would be ... unwelcome, to say the least. What I do blame them for is joining an alt-right pile-on without trying to understand where their left-wing intellectual opponents are coming from and what they’re talking about.

As usual the responsibility is not on "Social Justice Twitter" to explain themselves, but on their critics to educate themselves and accept - without question or complaint - the ways in which Social Justice Twitter has decided to redefine terminology.

Is there any greater example of privilege than assuming that if there is misunderstanding over your in-group terminology the fault lies with members of the out group?

"White fragility" was used to attack those who had issues with Jeong's hiring:

But that’s pretty much what the Times did with its explanation. It more or less validated the dangerous misconception that conservative trolls harassing a woman of color in a male-dominated field, an action that could potentially drive away even more marginalized voices, is equal to a woman of color joking about “canceling” white people, which carries no real-life weight because that doesn’t mean anything. White fragility is real, and so I’ll grant that some readers may have had their delicate skin stung by Jeong’s comments, but it’s more than likely that the very same trolls who tried to endanger Jeong’s position at the Times were acting in bad faith. The Times also ignores the fact that the current alt-right hysteria about besieged whiteness is also fuel for a violent movement that uses its power in the White House to justify inhumane and racist policies. 

Another aspect ignored by Jeong's defenders is that the force of American racism varies quite a lot depending on the ethnicity of the target. Jeong's defenders call her a "woman of color" but does anybody think the racial animosity against Asians, especially at the present time, is comparable to the African American experience?

Do you really have the right to sing the blues - and use the history of the most extreme American racial injustice to excuse your anti-white bigotry - when you are not an African American?

The New York Times, in refusing to rescind Sarah Jeong's offer, made it clear that in some cases it is perfectly fine to attack a "race" without consequences.

In contrast Razib Khan had his offer to join the NYTimes rescinded (something I played a small role in) although his anti-black beliefs had been stated much less blatantly than Jeong's anti-white beliefs.

So there is a demonstrably popular belief that there is a white exception to prohibitions of public expressions of racial bigotry.

However, the United States Equal Opportunity Commission does not make exceptions for anti-white bigotry. And that is why I believe Robin DiAngelo broke the law.

It's important to understand the reasoning behind the Social Justice belief in a white exception, which is something I call "micro-revenge." If you point out to them that this is in fact what they are doing, they will deny it.

But Robin DiAngelo revealed that ethnic revenge is a motivating factor when she justified her support for anti-white bigotry by citing the death of Emmett Till.

And that is the third reason why Robin DiAngelo is bad - she promotes ethnicity-based revenge. I will talk about that next.

Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 4: Her easily debunked claim about Jackie Robinson

Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 1: Race essentialism
Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 2: She broke US labor law and bragged about it
Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 3: she supports micro-revenge

Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 4: her easily debunked claim about Jackie Robinson

In 2017 The Good Men Project published DiAngelo's article No I Won't Stop Saying White Supremacy in which she made this claim:

Take, for example, the Jackie Robinson story. Robinson is often celebrated as “the first African American to break the color line and play in major-league baseball.” While Robinson was certainly an amazing ball player, this story line depicts Robinson as racially special; a black man who broke that color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: “Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.” This is a critical distinction because no matter how fantastic a player Robinson was, he simply could not play in the major leagues if whites—who control the institution—did not allow it. Were he to walk onto the field prior to being granted permission by white owners and policy makers, the police would have removed him.

Narratives of racial exceptionality obscure the reality of ongoing institutional white control while reinforcing the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy. They also do whites a disservice by obscuring the white allies behind the scenes who worked hard and long to open the field to African American players. These allies could serve as much needed role-models for other whites (although we also need to acknowledge that in the case of the desegregation of baseball, there was an economic incentive for these allies).

DiAngelo says: Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: “Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”

But that is how the most popular story goes.

DiAngelo virtually never gets pushback from a respectful, verging on worshipful media, but occasionally nobodies get a chance to argue back, as some do in the comments section of this article. This commenter starts by quoting DiAngelo (bold):

The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: ‘Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.’ ”

There is NO ONE… and by that, I mean literally NO ONE who thinks Jackie Robinson was the first black person “strong enough” or good enough. In fact, many people consider Satchel Paige to be the greatest pitcher of all time and he wasn’t allowed to pitch outside the Negro Leagues until he was almost 40 and well past his prime. Everyone understands that in football, baseball and the NBA, as in other aspects of life, there were black athletes who were capable of competing but not allowed to and further, I don’t know of anyone who represents it as anything else. I wasn’t taught anything other than that when I was in school in the 70’s.

For you to misrepresent this is an indication of either serious ignorance or a very warped sense of reality and a need to assign blame that doesn’t exist.

The movie "42" was released in 2012, five years before DiAngelo's 2017 article. Robinson's widow was pleased with the results:

Jackie Robinson's widow, Rachel Robinson, was involved in the production of the film and has praised the end result, saying, "It was important to me because I wanted it to be an authentic piece. I wanted to get it right. I didn't want them to make him an angry black man or some stereotype, so it was important for me to be in there. ... I love the movie. I'm pleased with it. It's authentic and it's also very powerful."[23]

There is a scene early in "42" where Rachel sees a "whites only" bathroom and comments she's never seen one before. Jackie responds "we aren't in Pasadena anymore." This speaks to the point I made in Part 3 of this series - the atrocity of Emmett Till's death was very much a Southern-specific event.

"42" does not downplay the racism of the entire United States, but it does make a distinction between parts of the country. Even in the late 1940s white Americans were not completely homogenous in their levels of racism. And the movie certainly doesn't downplay the racism within baseball itself.

There is a scene in "42" where Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers owner who was the leading force for baseball integration, tells Robinson that the reason he wanted to integrate was because he played with a great black ballplayer who was "broken because of the color of his skin." In other words the movie makes clear that there were certainly great black ballplayers before Robinson. So in 2012, a major motion picture was pushing the narrative that DiAngelo claims is not being pushed: "Jackie Robinson (was) the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball."

Then in 2016, just a year before the DiAngelo piece, Ken Burns made a documentary about Robinson which clearly represents the intense racism that had kept Robinson - and all black players - out of the major leagues.

It's certainly possible that two things can be true at once - that blacks were not allowed by whites to play major league baseball and at the same time Robinson was promoted first because he had personal qualities that Branch Rickey felt were needed (and this is portrayed in the movie 42) in order to withstand the enormous pressure of being the first black player in a racist country.

There are no media alternatives in the last ten years, as far as I know to these two portrayals of Jackie Robinson. There is zero evidence that anybody, anywhere is suggesting that Robison was selected only because he was the first black ballplayer who was good enough. And given how many black ballplayers have excelled since Robinson, only the most delusional of racists would believe that somehow no black players were good enough before Robinson.

So why does Robin DiAngelo feel she has to lie about the "white" attitude towards Jackie Robinson? Why does she feel she can get away with making such an easily-debunked assertion?

And why should anybody accept DiAngelo without question on anything knowing she seemingly deliberately misrepresents the facts?

I said in part 3 that DiAngelo does not care about facts. I believe her goal is to provide justification for micro-revenge. Yes white people behaved horrifically towards Robinson, black athletes and blacks in general - all this is presented in "42" and in the Burns documentary. DiAngelo wants to pretend that nothing has improved since 1947, just as she pretends that what happened to Emmett Till in 1955 Mississippi somehow represents a typical social interaction in the present.

White people as a group, dominating non-white people, as groups, is an accident of history.

Europeans just happened to get their hands on superior technology in the context of nation-states (after the nation-states had spent centuries slaughtering each other) before the inhabitants of other geographies did.

As Thomas Chatterton Williams noted, white supremacists are similar to the "woke" like DiAngelo in their belief in the specialness of white people. The only difference is whether white people are especially good, per the white supremacists, or especially bad, per "white fragility."

I say white people are not special. "We" were the beneficiaries of technology and nation-state organization through chance, not through innate superiority.

And "we" have the same intelligence and stupidity, bigotry and charity, brutality and sympathy as people of color. And "we" are increasingly making love matches with "them."

Normally Pinkerite must fight those who think that white people are innately superior. But sometimes Pinkerite must fight those who think that white people are innately inferior - most often morally inferior.

Now if Robin DiAngelo wants to call herself a racist, based on her own invented terminology, she's welcome to do so. But I am not a racist, in spite of being white. And I believe that judging someone for the color of their skin, instead of the content of their character is, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., bullshit.

I'm not saying I am a saint. I have a preference for people who are like me, like most people.

But our values determine which differences matter the most.

The oldest of my brothers is a rightwinger, so extreme that a few years ago he argued with me on Facebook on behalf of the Confederacy. And this in spite of the fact that two of our maternal great-great grandfathers fought for the Union.

I've barely spoken to my brother since we were teenagers, so different in outlook, taste and habits we are that there's virtually nothing we have to say to each other. And since he's come out as a Confederacy sympathizer, I haven't spoken to him at all.

I am sure that I would prefer to spend time with each and every black person I have ever known than with my own brother. My brother and I are only thirteen months apart in age, "Irish twins" as they say. By both nature and nurture he is the closest living person to me, but he is a virtual stranger to me. Because our values are so completely different.

Human sympathies are far more complex than essentialists like race science proponents or "white fragility" proponents like Robin DiAngelo would have you believe. And we must not accept their simple-minded view of the world, and force everybody into these artificial "race" silos. We must acknowledge not only the history of European brutality against others, but also we must acknowledge that European imperialists invented "race" categories. And in order to create a more just future, the concept of race itself must be rejected.

Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 3: She supports micro-revenge

Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 1: Race essentialism
Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 2: She broke US labor law and bragged about it

Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 3: she supports micro-revenge

In Part 2 of Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad, we saw that DiAngelo admitted she discriminated against white people (and in doing so likely broke US labor law) in a workplace setting because a bigot complained in advance of a company workshop about "white women's tears."

DiAngelo then asked the bigot to act as a consultant for her article for "The Good Men Project" as she says in the article:

I asked the woman of color I referred to in the opening of this article if I had missed anything in this list. This was her response:

“It’s infuriating because of its audacity of disrespect to our experience. You are crying because you are uncomfortable with your feelings when we are barely allowed to have any. You are ashamed or some such thing and cry, but we are not allowed to have any feelings because then we are being difficult. We are supposed to remain stoic and strong because otherwise we become the angry and scary people of color. We are only allowed to have feelings for the sake of your entertainment, as in the presentation of our funerals. And even then, there are expectations of what is allowed for us to express. We are abused daily, beaten, raped and killed but you are sad and that’s what is important. That’s why it is sooooo hard to take.”

Now recall that the offense in question was the possibility that a white person might cry in sympathy over the shooting of a black person. How would crying in sympathy over violence against a black person demonstrate "We are abused daily, beaten, raped and killed but you are sad and that’s what is important"?

I think the unspoken reasoning behind such a statement is this: black people have been the targets of extreme injustice by a white majority, therefore, as a white person you should be the target of a small injustice like, for instance, you are not permitted to cry in the presence of a black person.

That is what micro-revenge is. And it's about time that Social Justice social media admit that this is what they support. Although I suspect they only support it when the target of the micro-revenge is some unnamed, random "white" person. I think they might feel differently if they themselves became the target of micro-revenge.

The advantage of micro-revenge is that you can target any white person for punishment on behalf of any and all injustices ever perpetrated against people of color but since the revenge is small - being told to leave the room, being told you can't cry, being told it's OK if a person of color tweets #CancelWhitePeople - one is unlikely to be held accountable, even if US labor law is broken.

DiAngelo then adds support to the workplace bigot's argument in favor of micro-revenge by using the murder of Emmett Till:

Men of color may also may come to the aid of white women in these exchanges, and are likely also driven by their conditioning under sexism and patriarchy. But men of color have the additional weight of racism to navigate. This weight has historically been deadly. For black men in particular, the specter of Emmett Till and countless others who have been beaten and killed over a white woman’s claims of cross-racial distress is ever present. Ameliorating the woman’s distress as quickly as possible may be felt as a literal matter of survival. Yet coming to the rescue of a white woman also drives a wedge between men and women of color. Rather than receive social capital that reinforces his status, a man of color put in this position must now live with the agony of having to support racism in order to survive.

I don't know where Robin DiAngelo grew up or what her experiences have been, but I am not much younger than her, and it has not been my experience that black men are going around comforting white women. I mean sure, I've known lots of black men and many have been very nice, and so I assume they would comfort someone in distress - but black men going around comforting white women as a "matter of survival" did not exist in any place I have lived, which has mainly been in New York and New Jersey.

Emmett Till's death was a very specifically Southern phenomenon. Till himself grew up in Chicago and was killed when he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. It is very likely that had Till stayed in Chicago he would never have been murdered, even if he had whistled at a white woman.

This is the kind of sleazy thing that Robin DiAngelo does - takes an event that happened in the South in 1955 and presents it as if it is typical of the present time. As if all white American women living now are scheming Southern belles looking for a chance to grab power by weaponizing emotions and the threat of lynching.

And then there is the stretcher that Americans are haunted by the "specter of Emmett Till" - not only do most white Americans not know who Till was, I'll wager that a considerable percentage of black Americans don't know who he was either. Americans are famously bad at history, so this should surprise nobody.

Ultimately though, I don't think DiAngelo cares whether her assertions about white people are literally true: sixty-four years ago, a white woman's sensitivities were used to justify Emmett Till's murder. Therefore white women in the workplace in the present time, many of whom were not born in 1955, do not deserve to have their sensitivities respected - even if their sensitivities are in  sympathy with black people. That is the logic of ethnic revenge, in this case, micro-revenge.

DiAngelo's career is based on selling "white fragility" and white people being assholes is the essence of white fragility. So why wouldn't she jack up her rhetoric to make white people in general seem even worse than a too-high percentage already are? It's good for business. And certainly the media, let alone her followers, will never ask her to provide evidence to support her claims.

She is so bold about making unsupported statements about white people's attitudes that she made a claim about Jackie Robinson, which she not only failed to provide evidence for, but she made the claim in spite of all kinds of easily-accessible evidence against.

Which we will discuss in Part 4.

Pinkerite's second anniversary

Pinkerite's second anniversary was November 17 and it seems that very little has changed in the world of Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Science in the past two years. 

The first Pinkerite blog post was about Steven Pinker defending race science promoter Linda Gottfredson.

The most recent post is Steve Pinker having kind words for the far-right, race science promoting Quillette.

But a few things have changed since Pinkerite's first anniversary:

• Quillette staff member Bo Winegard has proven to be a hard core bona fide racist.
• Quillette staff member Andy Ngo went from a right-wing grifter on the fringes of the political world to a right-wing grifter at the center of the Republican/Trump party's bogus "law and order" campaign.
• Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Guiffre's testimony provides details that seem to point to Steven Pinker spending time on Epstein's island.

Some Pinkerite accomplishments this year:

• Interview with Maxine Margolis.
• Added race science info to infamous race science promoter John Paul Wright's Wikipedia page.
• Begun adding Natural History column "The Human Strategy" written by anthropologist Marvin Harris in the 1970s.

Top posts of the second year:

• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 1: Race essentialism - 2.24K
• I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and the "biological reality of race" - 1.58K
• The Brian Ferguson Interview - 1.4K
• Stephen Jay Gould v The Bell Curve - 608
• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 584
• The Native American/East Asian "race"  560
• The mind of a racist, part 1: Steve Sailer, promoted by Steven Pinker - 535
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 2: She broke US labor law and bragged about it - 522
• Meet the IDW's rightwing Christian extremist sugar daddy Michael O'Fallon - 454
• James Lindsay and his allies - more shameless IDW hypocrisy - 422
• Four Koch toadies defend race science - 360
• The Maxine Margolis Interview - 315
• Yes, Kevin Drum, Quillette is defending phrenology - 247
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 3: She supports micro-revenge - 239
• How conservative and white supremacist is Quillette? Part 1 - 218
• The mind of a racist, part 3: Steve Sailer and the Unz Review - 215
• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 201
• Quillette, Andy Ngo and the Trump campaign - 201
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 4: Her easily debunked claim about Jackie Robinson - 191
• The Bell Curve Part One: there goes the ball game - 184

I was surprised that my series on Why Robin DiAngelo is Bad, published in June 2019 suddenly became popular in 2020. It seems that bigger media hitters than Pinkerite had discovered how wacky DiAngeloism is and began to criticize the concept of "white fragility." 

It's nice that I'm not a lone voice howling in the wilderness about DiAngelo any more. I will be writing a follow-up on DiAngelo soon.

Pinkerite's statement against all forms of race essentialism

Pinkerite follows a good number of progressive Twitter accounts, but unfortunately some of them believe that although it is unacceptable to make race-based claims about human beings, in most cases, they believe it is OK to make them about "whites."

Pinkerite believes that it is unacceptable to make race-based claims about individuals regardless of which "race" they are.

So, for example Pinkerite opposes a highly profitable business run by Robin DiAngelo, which insists that all white people are racists. DiAngelo considers both herself and Donald Trump to be racists. She does recognize a "continuum" - you can either be a conscious racist, or an unconscious one.

Regardless of political views or actions, there is no way any individual so labeled "white" by DiAngelo can demonstrate they are not racist.

DiAngelo not only considers white Americans to be racists due to the influence of the centuries-long slave system and its aftermath: she considers all white people racist. She demonstrates this in her recent book when she rejected a woman's defense against automatic racism because she did not grow up in the North American race system. DiAngelo made it clear that this did not matter. To be white is to be racist, according to DiAngeloism.

Many white people, especially liberals, one of DiAngelo's primary targets, consider racism to be both evil and stupid, and many, like Pinkerite, believe that race itself should be understood as a social convention invented by European colonizers to justify exploitation of non-Europeans. It is not a biological reality, interchangeable with "ethnicity" or "ancestry" or "lineage" in spite of claims and careless use of terminologies by people such as Steven Pinker.

DiAngelo believes it is perfectly just to declare any individual white person to be racist and if they push back against what they consider an unfair accusation of evil and stupidity, they are then declared an exemplar of "white fragility." In this way DiAngelo and her followers never have to support their claims, because to even question DiAngelo's claims is evidence of "white fragility" which renders one's opinions a sign of pathology.

This is a rather ingenious tactic by DiAngelo, whose profitable career benefits from compliant media people who justifiably fear that asking DiAngelo hard questions will result in a "white fragility" scarlet letter.

But you don't even have to push back to be declared an example of "white fragility."

The term "white fragility" is defined as "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation."

DiAngelo uses the neutral-sounding term "racial stress" but what that means, in practice, is that an individual is accused of racism.

Please note, the white fragility response to the accusation of racism is signaled by "argumentation" and "silence" and withdrawal. There is no response of the accused that is acceptable to the cult of DiAngelo. To be accused of racism is to be proven a racist in DiAngeloism. Even displaying the emotion of guilt is considered a sign of white fragility.

It's understandable that many assume DiAngelo's good faith because she claims to represent an important and worthy cause, the opposition to race-based injustice. But pathologizing white "race" does not counter racist beliefs - rather it feeds into race-based essentialism.

Thomas Chatterton Williams said it best:

This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring.

Williams has both European and recent African ancestry and there is no place for "mixed-race" people in the essentialist systems of a Robin DiAngelo or a Julius Evola.

It is interesting to note that both the race science proponents and "white fragility" proponents are doing their best to make race a more rigid and more essential component of human identity at a time when humans of all "races" are socializing and having babies more than at probably any other time in human history.

Pinkerite disagrees with DiAngeloism that the way to fight racism is to double-down on essentialist thinking by accusing individuals of stupidity and evil based solely on their "race."

Adam Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams

I've been watching a lot of Adam Rutherford videos lately, focusing on those related to his most recently published book, "How to Argue with a Racist" and the other day I came across a video conversation between Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams recorded August 18, 2020.

The transcript is available here.

I was surprised by the video for several reasons, starting with the very low number of views - only 233 when I watched it. It was sponsored by a Florida bookshop, Books and Books as a promotion for the shop and for Rutherford's book.

I was especially surprised that Williams was so agreeable to Rutherford's message, which is that race is a social but not a biological phenomenon.

One of Williams' best pals is Bari Weiss, who promotes the race science-friendly "Intellectual Dark Web," and the claim that systemic racism has not existed since the 1960s. 

One of Weiss' best friends is Andrew Sullivan, who is, along with Steven Pinker, the foremost media normalizer of race science, and race science says that race is a biological phenomenon.

Recently Thomas Chatterton Williams has become a member of the heavily right-leaning Board of Advisors of FAIR, which includes Pinker, Sullivan and Michael Shermer, another promoter of race science. 

FAIR is so thoroughly controlled by the pro-race science position that there is, on the FAIR web site, a new FAIR-invented word for racism that deliberately excludes those who believe race is a biological phenomenon: "Neo-racism."

The FAIR Board of Advisors: race pseudo-science promoters,
Quillette authors and Koch beneficiaries

Then there are nine board members who are Quillette authors, in addition to Pinker. While those authors may not have come out in direct support of race science (although I consider Coleman Hughes a race science apologist), Quillette's pro-race science position does not concern them enough that they refuse to write for it.

Many beneficiaries of Charles Koch are FAIR board members - and that's just the ones that are obviously getting Koch money. I personally would wager that Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss have some kind of Koch dark money conduit, since at least the time when both stormed off their big establishment media gigs simultaneously.

But it's indisputable fact that the following FAIR board members take money from Koch-supported organizations: Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Kmele Foster; Samantha Harris; Coleman Hughes; Glenn Loury; John McWhorter; Ian Rowe; Christopher Rufo; Eli Steele, and Thomas Chatterton Williams himself.

Charles Murray, who is not on the FAIR board, is also a recipient of Koch money. Koch money and race pseudo-science seem to go together. 

Speaking of Sullivan and Murray, they were just promoting race pseudo-science together today.

Williams "spearheaded" the Harpers letter published in July, 2020. I noted that many of the signers had Koch organization connections. Then in December 2020 it was announced that Williams would be on the Koch payroll. 

But in August 2020, in between the Harpers letter and coming out of the wingnut welfare closet, Thomas Chatterton Williams seemed to agree with Adam Rutherford that race is not a biological phenomenon.

There was one moment in the discussion early on, at minute 11:45, when Williams mentioned the Robin DiAngelo-influenced content at the Museum of African American History, but Rutherford said he hadn't heard of it and then they moved on, before Williams got a chance to point out that the museum content, which made essentialist claims about race, came from "woke" opponents of racism.

I'm a long-time critic of Robin DiAngelo because of her race essentialism, but it is absurd for Williams to criticize her for her essentialist beliefs when he publicly aligns himself with Andrew Sullivan, who has had a much longer career than Robin DiAngelo of promoting race essentialism.

I'm not entirely convinced Rutherford was unaware of the museum controversy. He's usually on top of the latest controversies, judging by his videos and Twitter feed, and he is good at handling people, to the point where I believe if he ever stopped being a science communicator he could have a job as a diplomat. He's professional and even charming in his public appearances. This comes, I suppose, from years of being a frequent presenter of sometimes controversial subjects. His diplomacy, along with his scientific expertise, makes him one of the best possible opponents of race science. 

Before speaking to Rutherford, Williams got quite exercised about the Museum, as can be seen by these tweets.

But in conversation with Rutherford, Williams drops the hot potato at the slightest push-back and then spends the rest of the interview agreeing with everything Rutherford said.

This seeming lack of intellectual integrity makes me wonder if Williams has modeled his career on that of Steven Pinker. More in the next post. 

70-year-old reactionary has thoughts about the kids these days

I find it funny that the same media outlet, The Good Men Project, that promoted the career of Robin DiAngelo nine years ago is now promoting the career of Steven Pinker. 

Although Pinker and DiAngelo do have one thing in common - both believe in ethnic essentialism. 

But while Pinker aligns with the race pseudoscience organization International Society for Intelligence Research, DiAngelo is the freelance purveyor of the belief that "white" people (however DiAngelo defines white, she's never been clear about that) are all born to be hopeless racists. Unless they spend thousands to take DiAngelo's seminars where they may be absolved of their original sin.

Pinker likes to spend his time with racist grifter Michael Shermer who, unlike Pinker, is a blatant admirer of the racist charlatan J. Phillip Rushton. Pinker is too much of a weasel to admit his real beliefs, although the fact that he spends so much of his time hobnobbing with racists is a give-away.

Pinker is still a subscriber on Twitter/X to professional racist Richard Hanania. The image above was captured today.

So Pinker, who recently turned 70 (I wonder if he considers himself old now, instead of middle-aged as he did a year ago), shares his diagnosis for what is wrong with the kids these days. Surprise surprise, it is what every right-wing reactionary grifting ghoul has been saying for at least five years: wokeness.

Robert Conquest, the historian, is sometimes credited with a law that states that any institution that is not constitutionally right-wing becomes left-wing. You can see the drift that has happened to many institutions recently. They have not become left-wing in the economic quasi-Marxist sense but “woke” in the sense of identitarian politics, seeing culture and history as a zero-sum struggle among racial and sexual groups. A kind of intolerant identitarian politics has captured several societies with well-defined intellectual goals. It has happened to the ACLU, the American Humanist Association, and Planned Parenthood.

On top of being entirely predictable and annoying Pinker is such a hypocrite. Pinker supports people like Michael Shermer, Richard Hanania and Linda Gottfredson, who indisputably believe that culture and history is a zero-sum struggle among racial and sexual groups. They believe human society is a genetically-determined hierarchy of intelligence with white men at the top. Although to be fair, sometimes race pseudoscience mongers claim East Asians are on top, depending on which pseudoscience monger you're talking to.  Although even if they believe that East Asians are the most intelligent, you can still find them barking about the superiority of Western Civilization™. 

And then sometimes they declare Jews to be separate from whites while claiming Jews are on top (per the never-tested, far-fetched Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.) 

This is not hyperbole - Gottfredson can be heard literally ranking races by intelligence with Stefan Molyneux in 2016. If Pinker has ever spoken out against Gottfredson, I've never found any evidence of it. There's far more evidence of Pinker defending Gottfredson, as he did in 2018.

You can be sure that Pinker's interviewer, Scott Douglas Jacobsen, does not ask Pinker about his support for Hanania or Steve Sailer or other racists, since Jacobsen can be found in 2022 promoting right-wing racist hereditarian trash rags Areo and Quillette as "freedom of speech" publications. 

Just the kind of lazy quasi-journalist who serves Pinker's interests the best.

The Pinkeresque career of Thomas Chatterton Williams

I once admired Thomas Chatterton Williams. I liked his literary style and anti-essentialist point of view when he critiqued Ta-Nehisi Coats.

Three years ago I was talking about my disgust with Robin DiAngelo and said:

The author Thomas Chatterton Williams, who is partly black, wrote a piece last October about the fetishization of race that happens among anti-racists as well as racists. Williams wrote:

I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish. 

This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural.

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

But then he decided to become an activist when he "spearheaded" the transparently Koch-connected Harpers Letter and then went on the Koch payroll.

What we see Williams doing in the tweet above is called "having it both ways" and it reminds me of Steven Pinker, who has been accused by his critics throughout his career of wanting to have things both ways.

Stephen Jay Gould:

Which claim does Pinker want to make: that pluralism reigns in evolutionary psychology (and I characterized the field unfairly), or that adaptationism reigns as a synonym for “evolutionary reasoning” (and my warnings are sterile)? He can’t have them both.

Louis Menand's review of The Blank Slate:

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. 

Richard McKay Rorty in Daedelus:

 Most scientists are content with this trade-off. But every so often a scientist like Pinker tries to have it both ways, and to suggest that science can provide empirical evidence to show that some ends are preferable to others.

And here's an example I observed: Pinker claiming he doesn't agree with The Bell Curve on race while simultaneously sharing a link to a Quillette article that says The Bell Curve was correct about race. He's thanked by Ben Winegard, co-author of the article. 

Another thing that Pinker and Williams have in common is "weak and strong Pinkerism" which I adapted from Ezra Klein's term "weak Murrayism." When sharing the stage with someone Pinker respects, like Paul Krugman, Pinker avoids mentioning that he already offered a solution on a topic Krugman says there is no answer for: the changing violence levels in New York City. Pinker's solution, offered in "The Better Angels of Our Nature," was marriage. 

But he did not mention it during their talk, perhaps because he suspected Krugman would scoff at it. And he would probably be right. In 2012 Krugman criticized the "marriage is magic" belief promoted by Pinker in Better Angels and by Charles Murray.

Krugman:

...the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.

But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?

Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.

Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?

As I mentioned recently, it was easy enough to debunk the argument that marriage prevented violence by looking at the marriage and violence statistics. Krugman makes the same point in the last paragraph quoted above. 

In his video with Adam Rutherford, Williams, who feels very strongly about Robin DiAngelo-style essentialism, barely mentions the issue, then drops it. 

Another item I noticed - at about minute 34:35 in the video, Williams starts babbling something semi-coherent about Obama and Kamala Harris:

- yeah I think that is a good thing and I think that you know she [Kamala Harris] provides in some ways a more interesting conversation around this than Barack Obama did for a variety of reasons, one of which is that um you know she married a white man and I think that uh you know in a way Barack Obama marrying Michelle Obama and and the children and being in that family I think it brought him into a into a, I think that we all have a kind of we all have a way of kind of eyeballing it and seeing if it looks like what we think it is, and I think Barack Obama satisfied many people but Harris raised the question for others in a in a way that maybe is going to be really interesting um but getting y'all go ahead -

It sounded like he was deliberately obfuscating, so I looked up what Williams said on Twitter. Ah hah - much clearer.

So by marrying Michelle, Obama was, according to Thomas Chatterton Williams, "marrying into blackness." He didn't state that clearly in the interview, probably believing that Rutherford might push back on that. And who wouldn't? Williams appears to have never heard of the "one drop" rule. But of course he is aware of it. Why would he then claim that Obama, who was already plenty Black per the one drop rule, "married into blackness?" And he seems to be defending the concept of "biological race" saying: "if biological race isn't real then how is the daughter of a man from Jamaica and a mother from India "black" in the sense that the 8th generation descendant of Georgia slaves is?"

If he asked Rutherford, I assume Rutherford would have pointed out that the answer is that biological race isn't real, but the one drop rule is a real social race convention, which is why those two vastly different ethnic combinations are both considered Black.

So which does Williams believe - that race is not biological, in agreement with Rutherford? Or that it is biological? Perhaps Williams doesn't know, himself, because he hasn't thought it through in any real depth. This would be no surprise, because his interview with Ian Chotiner in the New Yorker in July 2020 made it clear that Thomas Chatterton Williams is an intellectual lightweight.

IAN CHOTINER 

What about people having the right to say certain things based on their identity? I was wondering if you thought that people could be privileged to say certain things or speak on certain topics, or that the most important thing was to judge the words themselves.

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS 

 

I studied philosophy. I genuinely believe that the most important thing is to judge the quality of the insights, the idea, the language, the argument. I don’t think that there is a Black point of view, because Black people don’t all agree on anything. When you say that somebody has more authority to speak as a Black person, what does that mean? 

 

CHOTINER

In “Losing My Cool,” you wrote, “Where I lived, books were like kryptonite to” the N-word [the text uses “niggas”]—“they were terrified, allergic, broke out in rashes and hives.”

WILLIAMS

I stand by everything in that book.

CHOTINER

That’s not something a white person can really say in most polite societies. It’s also an idea that I think a lot of people would find very problematic—that books were like kryptonite to Black people.

WILLIAMS

That’s why the context is important. The whole book was about how books were my father’s life and that the Black culture that he comes from was one that prioritized education as the most important thing that a human being could participate in, the act of cultivating yourself. That comes in the context of me saying that the kind of street culture that I was in was making a false claim that books were kryptonite, that they were not for us. We were fooling ourselves in that we were participating in a culture that was monetizing the glorification of our anti-intellectualism, which is my argument against hip-hop culture. When it’s sliced into this little bit on Twitter, it’s to make me look like some type of racist who hates his Blackness. When, in fact, the book is a love letter to the kind of Black culture and tradition that my father comes from.

CHOTINER

Just to give the context, you finish off that paragraph by saying, “Charles Dickens was something that swung between your legs, not the author of Martin Chuzzlewit. You could get your ass kicked for name-dropping and using big words. Brothers weren’t out to be poets or theoreticians; most of the time, they weren’t even trying to be articulate—they talked with their hands (fists, daps, slaps, pounds, peace signs, jump shots, tabletop percussion) and yearned to be athletes and rappers, not scholars or gentlemen.” The point I was trying to make was that this is something that you can say and get published in a book because of your identity and other people can’t.

 WILLIAMS

Other people can’t, but is that the best way that we can have conversations around knowledge and human experience, that other people can’t? That I’m not sure about. Because I can imagine a situation where you could understand my experience enough where you could actually suggest some insight into the dynamics that play around toxic masculinity or street authenticity that gets conflated with racial authenticity.

The fact that you’re not allowed to publish that is not my choosing. I think that there’s a way that you could engage in that that would be good-faith and would be equally insightful even if you’re coming from outside the identity. It’s not the blood or the skin that gives you the ability to understand the spirit.

CHOTINER 

I know that the kryptonite and book line is from a Chris Rock bit from a long time ago.

WILLIAMS 

Exactly.

CHOTINER 

But it also seems to me an idea that has a racially charged history to it, and that we should want to be careful when people say things like that. Maybe that’s where we disagree.

WILLIAMS 

Here’s where I draw a line, and this is why it takes people to actually listen to arguments and not scan quotes for gotcha clickbait. I’m not saying you. I’m saying that people love the gotcha as a very good way to get likes and a good way to get the dopamine hits. I engage in it just like a lot of us, because we’re all incentivized to behave this way, and it’s worth something to resist. But, if you engage in a good-faith way, then I think you can actually have conversations about difficult subjects. What I’m saying is that we’re not reading each other in the way that’s conducive to everybody having the ability to encounter the other’s experience. We’re engaging each other in ways that contribute to the fortification of identity epistemology, and I think the thing that’s so sad about that is it limits the amount of conversation we could have. That is impoverishing if what you actually care about is knowledge and ideas and making a kind of multi-ethnic society work.

CHOTINER 

 

I guess my point would be that if a white person said that line, I’m not sure the appropriate response would be to sit and thoughtfully listen to them.

WILLIAMS  

It really depends on what made a white person say that.

CHOTINER 

I can think of one thing that might.

 WILLIAMS 

What’s that?

           CHOTINER 

I was kidding...

So Chotiner's point is that, in spite of Williams' philosophical training, Williams takes advantage of "identity politics" to write about Black people in a way that would be perceived much differently had his identity been white.

I want to point out something else. Williams wrote in his book:

You could get your ass kicked for name-dropping and using big words. Brothers weren’t out to be poets or theoreticians; most of the time, they weren’t even trying to be articulate—they talked with their hands (fists, daps, slaps, pounds, peace signs, jump shots, tabletop percussion) and yearned to be athletes and rappers, not scholars or gentlemen.”

It's striking that Williams would portray this as an ethnic issue. Williams is 40 so he would have been in high school in the 1990s. In the 20th century there was a word for boys in American high school culture who were anti-intellectual, who preferred athletics to academics: jocks. Plenty of white boys are also jocks. I went to school with them. 

That Williams chose to portray jock attitudes as a form of "black culture" probably goes a long way towards explaining how he ended up on the Koch payroll.

I thought this was the most astute response to the Chotiner interview.

My theory is that Pinker and Williams have incoherent theories about the world and display a lack of intellectual integrity in discussions with smart "celebrity intellectuals" because ideas are not really what drives them. I think what drives them are their careers: making money and getting respect. And so, when they receive recognition by being linked with someone who is well-known and well-respected, Pinker and Williams feel there is no point in engaging in a serious clash of ideas. Once Pinker was on stage with Krugman, and once Williams was on Zoom with Rutherford, game over: they had achieved their objective. 

As intellectually slothful as Pinker and Williams are, they must be aware that their own careers are not based on brilliance or originality or insightfulness, but rather on their ability to please right-wing plutocrats who have in turn advanced their careers. A practice known as wingnut welfare.

If Williams really believes that he can be purely a writer while on the Koch payroll, he's kidding himself. He's going to have to perform activist functions. Koch isn't interested in ideas either - Koch is interested in having his tame intellectuals promote policies that benefit the financial interests of Charles Koch.

Another issue that I think Williams avoided during his interview with Rutherford - Rutherford's contempt for Quillette. More in the next post.

Bari Weiss and her allies

Although James Lindsay, Christian nationalist ally/business partner and Trump-lover and shameless hypocrite, was not mentioned in Bari Weiss' article about the Intellectual Dark Web, I was not kidding when I said that he is what passes for an intellectual in the IDW world.

Today we see Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, who then retweeted her retweet.

 

The "liberals aren't liberal, right-wingers are the new liberals" line that Weiss is promoting in this tweet is a leading strategy for those associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a strategy which Claire Lehmann admitted in her reference to the "Overton Window."

A stooge like James Lindsay, who claims to be a leftist while voting for Trump is a prime example of that IDW rat-fucking strategy.

Currently Bari Weiss' pinned Tweet is promoting a variation on the same IDW strategy, suggesting that American liberalism is a dangerous ideology now.

She's worried about the Jews, but she doesn't seem to be at all worried about the fact that leading IDW intellectual James Lindsay has a business partnership with a Christian nationalist kook like Michael O'Fallon, nor that he is cozy with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

It's striking how supportive these IDW-connected people are of each other, refusing to criticize each other for anything. It's almost as if they are all working for the same bosses and the bosses wouldn't like to see signs of disharmony among the employees. 

The possibility that the IDW gang are getting paid by a group of rightwing plutocrats would go a long way towards explaining the disconnect between what they say they care about and what they actually care about, well-illustrated by this Twitter thread.

As Jamison Foser points out, the people who signed onto the Harpers letter seem far more concerned about the well-known and well-paid being criticized for their right-wing opinions than the Trump administration's abuses of power. Bari Weiss seems perfectly comfortable that her pal James Lindsay is an outspoken Trump supporter.

It seems that anything goes in the IDW world as long as someone hates the 1619 project and "critical race theory" as James Lindsay does. 

Here he is demonstrating once again how to have difficult conversations through civility.

The IDW gang, although dominated by white conservatives, does have Black associates, whose primary focus is to attack the work of other Black people. Coleman Hughes, Quillette author who also works for the Koch-funded City Journal is a leading example. 

Here is a City Journal piece from yesterday, promoting Charles Koch's thoughts on "solving America's social problems."

Fourteen percent of the people who signed the Harpers letter had Koch connections and the initiator of the Harpers letter, Bari Weiss' friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, (the "self-expelled guy,") was given a job at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute some months after the Harpers letter was published.

Thanks to Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, I discovered another Black Quillette author,  Chloe Valdry, being promoted by Weiss as providing an alternative antiracism to DiAngeloism.

I'm a long-time critic of Robin DiAngelo & White Fragility, but I doubt that an antiracism campaign created by someone aligned with the race science-promoting Quillette is a significantly better alternative. Valdary's IDW connections indicate she is unlikely to have any problems with "racial essentialism" - or at least not enough to cut her connections to the IDW & Quillette.

Valdary runs a project called Theory of Enchantment and there is no information on its site as to where Valdary gets her funding. I have a few theories about that.

So why doesn't Bari Weiss criticize James Lindsay for supporting Trump, or for being friendly with Richard Spencer or for going into business with Michael O'Fallon? Why are Coleman Hughes and Chloe S. Valdary unconcerned that Quillette and the IDW promote race science? 

The answer as always is likely wingnut welfare. As Krugman said:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

The plutocrats who fund wingnut welfare are keenly interested in swaying pubic opinion, as we see with Charles Koch sharing his thoughts on "solving America's social problems." And they have access to incredible amounts of money. Why wouldn't they use it to buy people to support their right-wing causes? And they don't even care if the people they buy are smart - James Lindsay is a manifestly stupid oaf. But he had a success in the conservative world with his laughable hoax grift - for which he was paid although he refuses to say who paid him. Plutocrats don't care if Lindsay is a fool - he is willing to spend hours online promoting their interests which are then retweeted by the higher-profile Bari Weiss or praised by Steven Pinker.

And if we look at the things James Lindsay says online, when he isn't insulting those who question him or disagree with him, it's clear that one of the things his bosses care about most is erasing Black history in order to promote the notion that Black people are innately less intelligent and their failure to thrive, post-Emancipation is the fault of their own bad genes.

Bari Weiss' pal Andrew Sullivan is well-known for that very thing, from promoting the Bell Curve to his attacks on the 1619 project.