Why did a Kiwi farmer offer tech support to Jesse Singal?

Jesse Singal wonders if his Kiwi Farms tech support is any good
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kiwi Farms is a website known for targeting people, encouraging doxxing and swatting, and encouraging people to commit suicide. Several articles have been written about their tactics.

Mother Jones had this to say about Kiwi Farms:

Most websites aren’t known for having a “kill count.” Kiwi Farms is. Its victims reportedly include Julie Terryberry, who in 2016 took her life after being targeted by users of the site. Two years later, after years of harassment from Kiwi Farms trolls, Chloe Sagal lit herself on fire in a public park. In June 2021, an American video game developer based in Japan, named David Ginder, took their life amid a campaign of Kiwi Farms abuse.

Kiwi Farms is a forum similar in design to 4chan or 8chan, where anonymous posters gather. But instead of just spreading noxious discourse, Kiwi Farms users turn to the site to plan and coordinate. They work to make the lives of their targets a living hell. Their tactics include doxxing, SWATing, defaming, encouraging self-harm, and stalking, online and sometimes off.

The Australian magazine Crikey wrote:

The nearly decade-old US forum is notorious for hosting hate content — including the Christchurch mass killer’s footage and other terrorist manifestos — and coordinating harassment, stalking and revealing private information about people (known as “doxxing”).

Kiwi Farms members have relentlessly bullied people who’ve expressed suicidal ideation, often picking on marginalised groups. Multiple suicides have been linked to the forum.

The thing that seems to upset Singal the most about Kiwi Farms is reporting that emphasizes its harassment of people over other issues:

The reporting on Kiwifarms continues to be abysmal. I have no doubt the site harassed Fong-Jones, but to leave out the fact that Trans Lifeline's old leadership IN FACT EMBEZZLED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FROM THE ORGANIZATION is inexcusable.[81]

So recently Jesse Singal posted on Bluesky : 

"A kiwi farmer reached out to me claiming to have figured out the tech problems I'm having. Does this makes sense to those who are techier than me? I indeed get an error when I click on the user name so no idea how to block."

Bluesky users noticed. 

This is the archived Kiwi Farm page that contains the post Singal refers to. It's on a thread titled: Bluesky - "Decentralized" Twitter Alternative. Leftist Tranny Hugbox. "Answer" to Elon Musk's "Fascist" Takeover of 𝕏 (Formerly Twitter). 

Apparently Singal's tech problem was that there was a Bluesky account able to rig their account name to prevent anyone from blocking them - and Singal wanted to block them. 

It should be noted that Singal had no problem blocking Pinkerite's Bluesky account.

Singal's skeet seems to imply that he has a comfortable enough relationship with Kiwi Farms that his response to being contacted is not "why is someone from a dangerously psychopathic website contacting me?" but rather: "is their technical advice any good?"

Certainly Kiwi Farms has a generally positive view of Singal, and the site features a long-running discussion thread titled (the following link goes to an archive, not Kiwi Farms itself): Megathread Jesse Singal Derangement Syndrome - jsingal69 vs TroonWorld)

"Troon" is a favorite Kiwi Farms slur for transgender people.

It's true there are some negative comments about Singal himself in the megathread but what do you expect from a website devoted to psychopathy? These are people who pride themselves in having no empathy. They especially hate transgendered people but they're quick with racial slurs and anti-Semitism too. One post criticizes Singal for looking Jewish.

Kiwi Farms is currently being sued by Liz Fong-Jones, who has shared a slide presentation about Kiwi Farms called Reverse engineering hate.

Fong-Jones posted this on her Linked-In:

For the better part of a week, Bluesky has been engulfed in a crisis over uneven enforcement of its terms of service. Anti-trans pundit Jesse Singal joined the platform, was automatically banned, unbanned, then labelled with "intolerance" to limit his reach, then finally manually unlabelled. He has remained up on the platform since last Friday, and has been using his presence on the platform to post private health information, direct harassment mobs at vulnerable people, and otherwise serve as a lightning rod for "colonizing Bluesky with 'normal people'" drawn from his Twitter following.

As Bluesky crosses 25 million accounts, it is faced with the ire of its longest standing users who supported the platform in its earliest years. A public petition launched today demanding that Bluesky not grant a special exemption to people who are "famous" or "journalists" that allows them to break the Terms of Service and drive marginalised people off the platform. In only 8 hours, the petition has 13,000 signatures. Thousands of users have separately pledged to not subscribe to the service's forthcoming premium product until confidence in moderation is restored.

And in a follow-up comment writes:

Personally, I do not blame Aaron Rodericks here; the buck stops with Jay Graber, her executive team, and the board. It is her right to make a business decision to choose to keep Singal on the platform. That choice will have far reaching consequences for whether the platform is truly a change from Twitter for the better, or merely a repetition of the same problems with moderation and safety Twitter faced.

And then:

Strangely enough, Platform T&S saw no problems with immediately yeeting Libs of Tiktok and Kiwi Farms / Joshua Moon off the platform. The only reason I can think of that Singal has an exemption is because he wears the cloak of journalism while stabbing with transphobic harassment.

Nina Paley included Jesse Singal as one of
her anti-trans good guys in her "Gender Wars"
cards along with Matt Walsh and Kiwi Farms.
--------------------------------------------------------

Like Steven Pinker condemning racism, Singal tries to "maintain a facade of being outwardly supporting of trans rights."

 
And yet in the case of Pinker and Singal, they persistently ally with extremists. Pinker with Steve Sailer and Richard Hanania, Singal with Nina Paley (a big fan of Kiwi Farms) and... Richard Hanania. But Pinker never uses the N word and Singal never uses the word "Troon" so the ill-informed may believe that Pinker and Singal are just fine, just asking questions in good faith about their area of interest.

When Steven Pinker was criticized for his positive comments about the alt-right, Singal defended him. 

It really is remarkable, the overlap between people who promote race pseudoscience and the people who promote hostility towards the personal lives of trans people. 

I knew of Alice Dreger for her support of the racist E. O. Wilson and her connection to Quillette, but I only recently became aware of something called "the Dregerian Narrative." Dreger is an influential anti-trans activist.

It's like they're all part of an organized group, all using the same talking points.

I think that journalist Tom Scocca has provided the best analysis of the Jesse Singal narrative:

In absolute numbers, there are many, many more people who regret having gotten abortions than who regret a gender transition. But like detransitioners, they are a tiny fraction of the relevant total. Presented with a study showing that the percentage of patients who regret getting abortions appears to be in the low single digits, Reuters did not send its investigative team to find the exceptions, but simply went with the headline “Overwhelming majority of U.S. women don’t regret abortion: study.”

What makes trans care different? The ordinary liberal reader may be squeamish about this or that aspect of abortion, but they are fundamentally committed to the idea that abortion patients and their doctors are the ones best equipped to figure out what to do with a pregnancy. It is not the job of some outside party or institution—a controlling parent or spouse, a church, a Republican legislative majority, a major national newspaper—to step in and second-guess what they do with their bodies. 

For trans care, this liberal theory of autonomy and decision-making is cast aside. The theoretical Times reader is ready to consume 15,000 words about the risks, controversies, and downsides of contemporary gender treatment because, at bottom, they are assumed to be dismayed by it all. An abortion patient is really pregnant, but trans youth—children who “say they’re transgender,” as the Atlantic put it back in 2018—maybe aren’t really trans, or wouldn’t be, if they had more time and better information. 

The finer points of this belief are usually laid out only in bits and pieces. Jesse Singal, in a newsletter post defending the Times story about the perils of undisclosed social transition at school, was more direct than the Times itself dared to be: 

A lot of kids appear to suddenly (or seemingly suddenly) come out as trans, and anecdotally, at least, it seems like it happens more often in the case of kids who are on the autism spectrum and/or have other mental health problems and/or are dealing with some sort of jarring event, whether a pandemic or a divorce or something else.

That is, the gender dysphoria that leads young people to seek gender treatment is only a side phenomenon of the fact that they are emotionally disturbed, and possibly mentally disabled. In their vulnerability, they’ve been caught up in a wave of sudden public approval for gender nonconformity and pushed to identify themselves as trans. Singal wrote: 

…you’ll see that mere discomfort with the way you are “supposed” to act or dress as a boy or girl, and a desire to act or dress differently, means you’re trans (if you want to be), even if you don’t have gender dysphoria. Sure enough, a lot of people, particularly young ones, seem to come out as trans much more to make a statement about their desire to transgress gender boundaries than because they are suffering serious anguish at having a (fe)male body or being seen by others as (fe)male.

The recent increase in the number of young people identifying as trans, by this account, is not mainly because some of the brutal societal barriers against being visibly trans have been lifted, but because fashion and social contagion are capturing more and more adolescent tomboy girls or homosexual boys, lumping them in with the smaller population of genuine trans kids who truly need transition to treat their dysphoria. And then, the story goes, a combination of overeager clinicians and bullying activists—hostile to the very idea of skepticism or doubt—works to steer the not-really-trans kids onto the path toward hormones and surgery, away from their natural bodies and true identities, as fast as possible. 

Singal has also been accused of unprofessionalism, per Protean Magazine:

Singal’s habit of consistently and viciously attacking his critics poisons the well; it deflects any chance of real criticism, since it allows him to claim that any given critic simply personally dislikes him. He has, of course, helped ensure that this is the case by treating them poorly. This bad behavior extends beyond minor Twitter slap fights—it’s also a means of warping the conversation, punishing and dismissing dissenting voices before they can even speak. Leveling threats and directing abuse at sources and experts in this way goes beyond mere unprofessionalism—for a journalist, it’s genuinely unethical.

Perhaps this is why so many trans people and their allies detest Jesse Singal. 

And Singal for his part does not seem at all concerned about his reputation. After all, he is still a mainstream journalist, and journalists like Benjamin Ryan of the NYTimes, NBCNews, Washington Post, and the Guardian are his devoted defenders. Plus Singal pumps out right-wing propaganda for Reason Magazine. 

And with Trump ascendent, anti-trans hatred is ascendant. It looks like Jesse Singal is ready to take his place as a courtier of the kakistocracy, partying with the Bari Weiss gang of grifters on election night.

So that is probably why, even though he was in the middle of a controversy over whether or not he should be allowed to stay on Bluesky due to antagonizing trans people, Jesse Singal decided to reveal that he had a comfortable relationship with people at Kiwi Farms.

Peter Thiel and his network of "liberal" goons

Back in February 2022 I floated my suspicion that many IDW-friendly new media people were being financially supported by Peter Thiel.

I missed, until just today, the Vanity Fair article published two months after my piece that makes me think it even more likely. The Vanity Fair article included a talk with racist, scary-eyed, Catholic neo-fascist Thiel employee Blake Masters about that very topic:

I asked him about the term Thielbucks, and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters and cool-kid cultural figures as a sort of cultural vanguard.

“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,” he told me, “or if anyone actually does anything.”

“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks. “I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”

“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.” He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare. “Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”

I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel. “Maybe, yeah,” he said. “We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”

"Red Scare" claimed to be leftists.

Of course not everything that scary Bible-quoting Peter Thiel funds, like racist anti-trans Quillette, is a secret. 

He's an open funder of Big Think. 

I finally realized this because I saw recently that Big Think was promoting Steven Pinker, and decided to look at who is behind Big Think. Not only Peter Thiel, but Larry Summers, mentioned on this blog in the past year for his support of Quillette neo-Nazi editor Bo Winegard.

Both Pinker and Summers are considered by some to be liberals, since Pinker was a vocal Obama supporter and Summers worked for the Obama administration.

I already knew there was a Pinker-Thiel connection since Pinker has published in Quillette, but I've often wondered if there were other Thiel vehicles paying Pinker directly, in the way that Pinker also takes money from various Koch vehicles, as in the infamous Unsafe Space tour.

And speaking of the Unsafe Space tour, Pinker's remarks there were defended by disgraced journalist Jesse Singal.

Pinker and Quillette have been promoting Singal's career for years. 

I don't doubt that Singal takes money from Thiel. 

In an article from 2018 in Jezebel:

Private messages posted on a closed discussion forum and provided to Jezebel demonstrate that Singal is, in fact, aware of the criticism he has received for his Atlantic cover story and his coverage of trans issues more broadly. He’s just uninterested in hearing it, dismissing the bulk of it as an example of trans community “groupthink” and uninterrogated in-group bias, which prevents us from reporting on something like adolescent transition as fairly and accurately as he can. (Jezebel has repeatedly reached out to Singal for comment; he had not provided one as of our publication time, but we will update if he does.)

From one such exchange:

There should, of course, be more trans writers and artists. But…trans people, like members of any other group, have their own prevalent forms of groupthink. Time and time again my reporting and research has conflicted with what [the biggest-name trans activists have] told me[.] On other issues, of course, I would trust trans people more than anyone else—who better to talk about the humiliation of living in a state with a ‘bathroom’ bill, or the difficulty of getting hormones, or other stuff that only trans people have to deal with? But overall, no, I don’t think trans people are more qualified to write about the tricky science stuff going on here than I am. I’d just be lying if I said otherwise.

Singal posted these messages in the discussion forum of a closed listserv he belongs to, hosted on Google Groups. The listserv, per its “About” page, aims to provide an “off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics and wonks.” It has been around for at least eight years (I found discussion posts dating back as far as 2010), and has just over 400 members (403 at the time of this writing). These members include New York Times best-selling authors, Ivy League academics, magazine editors, and other public intellectuals—in short, a lot of important people who influence public discourse through their written work. They use the listserv’s forum to discuss current events, news from their respective fields, articles they’ve read, articles they’ve written, and other topics of public importance. There are a number of threads about trans stuff, and they read like a greatest hits of the past decade of trans-related cultural anxieties: whether Chelsea Manning would pose a threat in a women’s prison; Janet Mock’s contentious 2014 interview with Piers Morgan and the “Twitter mob” she inspired; Elinor Burkett’s New York Times piece about Caitlyn Jenner and womanhood; comparisons between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal; erasure of the word “vagina”; saying “pregnant people” vs. “pregnant women”; and a number of Jesse Singal’s articles over the past few years.

It seems pretty clear that Singal has been posing as a "liberal" journalist for years in order to promote an anti-trans agenda, which has existed at the Thiel-funded Quillette since at least 2018.

And much testimony indicates Singal has been wildly successful. I wrote about his "pioneering" work recently, as noted by Tom Scocca.

In April last year, Protean Magazine also testified to Singal's influence:

Threatened, Abbott and Paxton felt around for a weapon—and a wedge issue was close at hand. The initial groundwork of this maneuver was laid by fringe narratives from “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs) and the far right. But in their campaign to mainstream the ideology that backs trans hatred, those bigots have not been entirely alone. They have been able to count on the help, conscious or not, of popular, liberal-minded writers—among them a cisgender, self-appointed expert on all things trans: Jesse Singal. Behind a veneer of empathy and concern, Singal has supplied anti-trans narratives that the right has found appealing. Singal would insist that he is not personally transphobic. Nevertheless, his writing on the subject has contributed to the wave of transphobia that is already beginning to have concrete ramifications for policy, endangering the well-being and the lives of trans people.

Singal recently deleted his Twitter account. Some have suggested it was from embarrassment when it was revealed that Singal may have violated journalistic ethics.

I think Jesse Singal has no personal experience with a sense of shame.

I think rather he's being rewarded by the Thiel organization for a job well done and is moving to a higher, even-better remunerated stage in his career, much like Thomas Chatterton Williams was given a wingnut welfare gig shortly after the Harpers Letter. 

(And of course Singal has already taken money from Koch. One of his gigs was defending the Harpers Letter.)

As Blake Master said, when asked who Thiel was funding:

“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,” he told me, “or if anyone actually does anything.”

Another "liberal" media person I think is on the Thiel payroll is anti-abortion "leftist" Elizabeth Bruenig. Peter Thiel backs anti-abortion candidates like Masters and Vance.

Trans writer Jude Doyle wrote last July:

The clearest parallel is to the anti-trans pundit Jesse Singal (with whom Bruenig maintains an unsurprising friendship). The vast majority of trans people can read a Singal piece and see an argument for rolling back trans rights, but his rhetoric is carefully hedged so that some well-meaning Boomer parent can believe he’s “just asking questions.” Reproductive rights advocates can read an Elizabeth Bruenig piece and see that she’s against them. People on the sidelines often have no idea why those advocates are upset. 

Bruenig’s slipperiness allows her (like Singal) to make an argument significantly to the right of the one she claims to be making. Still, the argument is clear. Consider a sentence from that 2014 piece on “pro-life liberalism:” “Since we care enough about the outcome of pregnancy to insist against abortion, then we must continue to care about the outcome when abortion is no longer a legal option.”

I think Jesse Singal likely inherited his ethics from his father.

Is it fair of me to mention that Singal's big-shot lawyer father was picked up for soliciting a prostitute? Well, is it fair of Jesse Singal to stick his nose into transpeople's business, thus aiding and abetting - either fecklessly or for pay - the far-Right in its search for a vote-getting scapegoat? 

And speaking of sleazy little fascists who want to stick their noses into people's business, Peter Thiel wants to track your menstrual cycle.

Jesse Singal: Kiwi Farms needs a more broad-based psychopathy

Jude Doyle is one of several trans people
Herzgal disparages in the podcast episode.
-----------------------------------------------------

Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, reactionary grifters to the core, snipe at their transgender enemies from behind their paywalled podcast "Blocked and Reported" - hosted on fascist Marc Andreessen-funded Substack - in an episode called Premium: Liz Fong-Jones And Kiwi Farms Keep Fighting (The Parable Of Mailfrawd). 

If you think that episode title sounds like an effort at both-sidesing the vicious psychopathic website Kiwi Farms versus one of their targets, you would be right.

I couldn't access the podcast via the website Archive Today, but since I knew that Singal has a sizable fanbase at Kiwi Farms, I figured I could find access there and sure enough, one of the kiwi farmers even had a link to a transcript of the show, which I have now archived via Archive Today.

The transcript has not been corrected for auto-transcription errors. For instance the name Eliza Rae Shupe is consistently misspelled "Shoop." But I'm going to assume the transcript is roughly correct in content, if less so in spelling.

Fairly early on in the podcast Singal demonstrates the technique of both-sidesing Kiwi Farms vs. its critics. My highlight.

Jesse: Anyway, we've discussed before that we think in certain cases there's like a little bit of a moral panic about Kiwi Farms. On the other hand, they do dox people. They do like fixate on these targets and talk about them for sometimes thousands of pages. So it's a little bit disingenuous to host a messaging board – Where in the most extreme cases, everyone's like, this person should kill themselves. This person should kill themselves...

So Kiwi Farms does all these terrible psychopathic things, and yet Singal suggests that concerns about Kiwi Farms are nothing more "in certain cases" than a bullshit moral panic.

A really weird aspect of this podcast episode is the revelation that, in spite of being aware of Kiwi Farms for years, Singal and Herzog apparently only now realize that it has a far-right tilt. 

Jesse: So people sometimes say that Kiwi Farms only fixates on sort of left of center targets. And some other people say they like particularly fixate on trans targets. I think there's something to that. Now, there are some right wing people they get in beefs with. I will say, if you're going to fixate this much on Internet targets, there's definitely more worthy ones than the ones they pick. I think part of their ethos in some cases is like, oh, you want to be famous on the Internet? Here you go. And it can be very unpleasant. 

0:23:12 

 

Katie: Yeah. Okay, well, like, I just searched. I went to the site. I put it into my browser. I did all of the letters. 

Jesse: Katie Herzog, confirmed Kiwi Farms user. 

Katie: I searched for Chaya Rychik. She is the exact sort of person I would expect to have a thread on Kiwi Farms. Nothing. 

0:23:45 

 

Jesse: Well, I think Kiwi Farms probably agrees with her about, like, wokeness and blue-haired elementary school teachers. That doesn't surprise me. 

Katie: But that's my point. Like...
Katie: Can we not get a Kiwi Farms that is a little broader? Oh, wait, actually. Okay, so there's Libs of TikTok Derangement Syndrome.  

 

Jesse: That's the opposite. That's like a thread in favor of her.

(Pinkerite: yes there is a Libs of TikTok Derangement Syndrome thread at Kiwi Farms in which most of the commenters white-wash the actual harm that Libs of TikTok does. Singal was licking Elon Musk's boots not long ago. Musk is an enthusiastic supporter of Libs of TikTok.)

Katie: But that's what I want. I want a more egalitarian, a more democratic. 

Jesse: Why can't we get a liberal Joe Rogan? That's what you're saying. 

0:24:22 

 

Katie: Why can't we get... Trade it in a lab under DNC headquarters. I don't want to have to go to Rational Wiki to find out. 

Jesse: Oh, God. Rational Wiki makes Kiwi Farms look like... I don't know what. But they would never dock. 

Katie: Anyway, so I just wish they could be a little broader in scope. That's all I'm asking for, farmers. Come on. 

Jesse: Right. 

So Herzgal has no problem with the psychopathy of Kiwi Farms, they just wish the psychopathy was a little more broad-based. 

A Singal fan agrees

And somebody - subscribers or plutocratic funders or both - are paying for this podcast. What a fucking world. 

Later on in the transcript, Singal hah hah lampshades the fact that his life's work is pure shit:

0:42:31 

Katie: Okay, so what I'm curious about is, so Liz Fong Jones said that this person was making, that she's responding to a public accusation. So it just seems bizarre that Kiwi Farms, who are genuinely good detectives, they are very good at digging shit up, has never been able to find the accuser.

Jesse: So because I'm not looking...

Jesse: at all... I could devote the next three years of my life to looking at everything they've said about Liz Fong Jones on Kiwi Farms, which I am, thanks to a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

It is funny that Singal claimed I'm tenacious and his good buddy Razib Khan claimed I was obsessed with him, and meanwhile Singal spends his time digging up Kiwi Farms dirt on Liz Fong-Jones.

As with the equally repellent Nina Paley, Singal defends the real-world consequences of Kiwi Farms psychopathy on the grounds of "free speech." 

Jesse: I think you can understand from Liz Fong Jones' perspective why she'd want to pursue action against Kiwi Farms. And she's doing so totally within the laws of Australia. But you can also understand how chilling this is from a free speech and sort of basic internet discourse perspective.

Trans author Evan Urquhart had a good response to that argument:

Kiwi Farms’ whole reason for being has been to suppress the freedom of those they disagree with. Their users didn’t merely express themselves in hateful ways, but took action, often criminal action, to silence others. That’s why these online hooligans should never be allowed to wrap themselves in the free speech mantle. Free speech can thrive as long as Kiwi Farms can’t.

I think that Singal and Paley and other anti-trans grifters make money off of transphobia but want to maintain plausible deniability when the results of their grifting contributes to harm to actual human beings - for legal reasons if for no other.

To understand how insanely un-self-aware both Singal and Kiwi farmers are, Singal recounts, without comment, psychopathic Kiwi farmer ghouls unironically moaning about anybody stooping so low - and during Christmas. 

Katie: But there could also be, I mean, it's possible he got, he quit who fucking knows.

1:10:13

Jesse: Yeah. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is the guy, which I think he is, and that he was fired.

Jesse: News of this was posted to the front page of Kiwi Farms. A lot of Kiwi farmers were outraged that Liz Fong Jones would stoop this low, especially on Christmas and during Christmas.   

Someone on Bluesky created a custom feature that allows users to see if someone is a follower of Jesse Singal on Bluesky. 

All you have to do is go to this profile and subscribe. Then if someone is a follower of Singal a label will appear on their posts. You can also just subscribe to the Jesse Singal Followers block list. Probably a good idea since it's likely that a certain percentage of Singal's followers are Kiwi farmers.

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan team up against the darkly fascinating Pinkerite

I mostly posted this image because
I just discovered WWDITS
and it's my new favorite thing 
------------------------------------------

Now, as you might guess if you've followed this Pinkerite blog, inaccuracies and exaggerations are to be
expected from these two IDW grifters, and their Bluesky skeets are no exception.

I didn't see these skeets on Bluesky myself because both Jesse Singal and Razib Khan have blocked my Pinkerite account there. But one of my followers on Bluesky gave me a heads up (thank you, you) and I was able to confirm on Clearsky. 

These cowards would never attack me except from a safe space.

I suppose they are interested in me now because I recently noted that racists Claire Lehmann and Khan rushed to defend Jesse Singal who has the most-blocked account on Bluesky at 64,312 and counting.
 

(Update December 21: 77,011)

I do want to thank Singal for the inadvertent compliments. "Darkly fascinating internet micro celebrity" - go me. Alas he makes me sound far more glamorous than I am. But I had no idea the IDW gang considered me even a micro-level celebrity.

And as for "tenacious" - I wish. I like to think of Pinkerite as an aid to journalists, but I'm afraid I only do a half-assed job.

Few journalists make a crusade of an issue the way Jesse Singal does with trans healthcare, turning it into a controversy that was used by Republicans to help get Trump elected. He's even writing a book about trans healthcare as revealed by his Bluesky profile.

But when most journalists select a topic, they do some research, write an article or book, then move on. 

I like to think that Pinkerite gives them some useful background on various IDW grifters, since I write about even their less-outrageous activities and statements and I keep track of IDW alliances, as when Claire Lehmann and Razib Khan came to Singal's defense. Or Colin Wright admitting what an important influence the oafish James Lindsay was on his grifting career. Or Steve Sailer claiming he's been a big influence on Steven Pinker. Or Steven Pinker selecting a garbage article by Sailer to include in the long-forgotten volume, The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2004.

And now Singal and Khan teaming up to attack me.

But as you can see in the archives at the bottom of this blog, there are some years when I don't even manage one hundred posts on Pinkerite. I've never posted more than 209 posts in a year. Not even one post per day on average. So basically I write about the IDW gang only now and then. 

It's Jesse Singal who is truly tenacious.

As far as Razib Khan, well of course he's full of shit. But I am impressed he restrained himself from calling me "retarded." In the recent past that is his go-to word for anybody he disagrees with. 

That's the kind of activity that makes you a celebrity intellectual of the American right wing, as James "your mom" Lindsay demonstrated.

Now as far as "stalking" - you can't stalk someone merely by writing about their public statements. Stalking is an obvious libel here. 

As far as "obsessed" - sure I've written about Razib Khan now and then over the years, but only because he's spent almost two decades promoting race pseudoscience.

So you might call Razib Khan tenacious, too.

And there's an example of the Pinkerite mission - although in this case at my personal blog, before I started Pinkerite: thanks to me writing about Khan, Jamelle Bouie found my post about Khan's racist public commentary and referenced it while protesting the New York Times intention to hire Khan. (Wow almost ten years ago now.)

And it's thanks to my blogging about the IDW gang of grifters - before there was an official IDW - that I know that Singal and Khan have been allies for years. 

Both Singal and Khan have been devoted to their projects for years - Khan to race pseudoscience and Singal questioning trans self-determination.

Why does my tenacity - no greater than their own - in criticizing those who promote race pseudoscience and anti-trans campaigns seem to baffle them? What exactly am I doing that makes them call me crazy and wild-eyed and darkly fascinating?

It's probably the money. 

Khan and Singal get paid to promote their "obsessions" and I do not. 

I mean, yeah, I have Google ads here, but I rarely make more than like a buck per month. I make far more on my other website and I spend no more hours working on that one than I do on Pinkerite. I don't even ask for donations like the somewhat comparable, albeit far more successful blog, We Hunted the Mammoth.

I think that Singal and Khan would not devote their lives to hateful right-wing political campaigns except for the money, which is why they are grifters. 

And they cannot comprehend someone who would oppose right-wing political campaigns on principle. After all, where's the profit in a white, cis-gendered individual opposing race pseudoscience and transphobia? 

Could this be an example of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good?

But rather than tenacious, I prefer the word "relentless" - because I just never relent.

The Boot Boys ride for Steven Pinker!

Professional gutter racist Steve Sailer testifies to his influence on Steven Pinker
-------------------------------

So several members of Steven Pinker's fan club have rushed to defend their hero's honor against Boston Magazine's relatively mild critique of Pinker.

Jerry Coyne, the hereditarianism-loving grifter and coiner of the term "Boot Boys," comes harrumphing along with his grievance about the article's reference to cowboy boots:

A digression: Cowboy boots:

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch.

Yeah, but he got the idea from me (I don’t wear them because I’m short, though I am.)

Coyne defends Pinker's hereditarianism in the most hereditarian way possible: by claiming Pinker's critics are a bunch of Marxists.

In the end, or so I think, a lot of opposition to Pinker, whatever form it takes, derives from people who buy into blank-slateism. Of course very few people are pure blank-slaters, but there are degrees, and in general “progressives” tend to be on the side of seeing differences between people as due very largely to environmental influences. This derives from a Marxist view of people as generally malleable, so that any genetic effect on differences should be ignored, minimized, or even demonized. 

 

Pinker has spent much of his career emphasizing that a lot of what makes people different is due to their harboring different genes—genes that of course interact with different environments (language is a good example). And so he’s demonized.

Although I do appreciate that Coyne confirms Pinker's devotion to hereditarianism. 

Speaking of Pinker and Marx, a recent story in Current Affairs is titled: Steven Pinker Doesn’t Know Anything About Marxism.

The article is co-authored by Ben Burgis & Matt McManus. They don't mention Pinker's hereditarianism - but since they have both written for Quillette, I expect race pseudoscience is the least of their concerns. Their work for Quillette appears to be a kind of philosophy 101 for the racist masses who read Quillette. More recently McManus has published in Areo Magazine, which is a kind of Quillette lite, and was edited by Iona Italia, who is just as much an hereditarian as Quillette's Claire Lehmann.

In his post, Coyne provides a link to Jesse Singal's defense of Pinker. Coyne is perhaps returning the favor.

Jesse Singal is an infamous anti-trans podcaster who is also an apologist - at best - for the psychopathic Kiwi Farms. And like Coyne, Singal is a long-time defender of Pinker. I first became aware of him in the context of his article in the New York Times after Pinker was caught praising members of the far-right in the defense of race pseudoscience. P. Z Myers had an excellent response to Singal.

Singal's most recent defense of Pinker is mostly behind a pay wall, but I will address one of the paragraphs that is available for free:

I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

Since Singal provides no names for "adherents of sweeping anti-Pinker views" or those who believe that "people are more or less blank slates" it's impossible to independently evaluate his claims about these boogeymen.

But both Singal and Pinker are weasels. When Singal and his professional racist pal Razib Khan came after me on Bluesky there was no chance to address their vicious claims about me directly - they both blocked me. When Singal disparaged trans-person Jude Doyle, it was from the safety of his paywalled podcast. Pinker famously blocked anybody on Twitter who mentioned Jeffrey Epstein. In the Boston Magazine article Pinker defended his warm relationship with Epstein on the grounds that the convicted child molester was giving money to Harvard:

The only one from Pinker himself—to an Epstein assistant in March 2012, four years after the conviction—said he’d be “delighted to meet with him” when Epstein visited Harvard. “I probably shouldn’t have said yes,” Pinker says now, “but I was being polite—he was a donor to Harvard.”

I think that Pinker, Singal and Khan make money, directly or indirectly by saying things right-wing plutocrats want them to say, and so there is no reason why they would actually debate anybody about their positions. It's so much easier to just claim nameless opponents have "done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position." How would Singal know? He exists in gated right-wing spaces, just as Pinker does.

But no defense of Steven Pinker would be complete without Steve Sailer weighing in. Pinker's decade-long support for Sailer is one of those topics that Pinker refuses to address. He always uses his tired "guilt by association" dodge when journalists ask him why he promoted Sailer's career. But there's no advantage to Pinker to talk about Sailer, and so he doesn't and journalists never hold his feet to the fire. 

Sailer's piece,  Is Steven Pinker A Bad Guy Like Charles Murray? is a few sarcastic lines and then he just posts most of the Boston Magazine article.

I should mention that Sailer is a fan of Jesse Singal. And of course has a mutual-admiration society with Charles Murray.

Sailer was much wordier in his defense of Pinker  another time the mainstream press decided to peek under Pinker's racism rug, five years ago, and he made sure to double-down on his own extreme racism - my highlight:

Therefore, it was ironic but hardly surprising that The Guardian last week attempted to cancel Pinker by repeating Malcolm Gladwell’s complaint that Pinker had humiliated him in a 2009 book review in The New York Times by citing data I’d compiled debunking Gladwell’s knuckleheaded assertion that the NFL performance of college quarterback prospects “can’t be predicted.” The Guardian whoops:

…the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people.”

Other beliefs of mine include that Reno is west of Los Angeles, the Holocaust happened, and the sun comes up in the east...

But Sailer should save his time, because his warm feelings for Pinker and his history with Pinker say more about Pinker than any defenses Sailer could write.

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan express their deep concerns about human rights and dignity for trans people

Left side, top to bottom: Matt Walsh, Pamela Paul, Jesse Singal
-------------------------------------------

Some More News has an excellent installment about all the anti-trans ghouls and grifters out there. Musk, Rowling, Shrier, Pamela Paul, Matt Walsh, Harmeet K. Dhillon and Andy Ngo are mentioned by name. 

Jesse Singal is not mentioned by name, but his face is displayed a couple of times.

The episode points out that a constant theme of anti-trans grifter ghouls is that trans people were talked into becoming trans thanks to some pro-trans conspiracy, and the ghouls love to promote stories of the tiny minority of gender transitioners who detransitioned. The ghouls are very concerned about the possibility of regret by transitioners.

Minute 28:27: 

According to a 2021 meta analysis, less than one percent of participants in gender-affirming surgery regretted it. For context, the regret-rate for successful knee surgery is 2.9% Which you may recognize as more than 1%. Gender-affirming surgery has a lower regret-rate than almost any other elective surgery. 

Now Jesse Singal is best-known for his crusade against trans rights, while his long-time pal Razib Khan is better known for his promotion of race pseudoscience. 

And as of yesterday, his hatred of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

But don't worry, Khan also hates trans people, probably as much as Jesse Singal does. Khan was recently seen on Twitter, mocking the idea that trans rights are human rights. 

Khan likes to frame his contempt for Amnesty International as a concern about their form of advocacy - they don't make an argument in a tweet for why trans rights are human rights, you see, merely an assertion. 

I have not yet found Khan himself making an argument that trans rights are not human rights. Maybe because, if he laid out his hatred and bigotry explicitly, it would make him look even more like a gigantic asshole.

Not to be outdone, Jesse Singal, Khan's long-time pal tweeted:

Singal writes about Trump's anti-trans executive order, while citing fan of "Gender Wars" cards and Pinker protege Carol Hooven, and spewing bullshit about "left-of-center thinkers."

What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.

It's so funny that Singal pretends to care about treating trans people with dignity while being on very friendly terms with the psychopathic ghouls of Kiwi Farms and while attacking individual trans people from behind his paywall-blocked podcast like the disgusting political operative grifter/faux journalist he is.

Who the fuck does he think he's fooling, exactly?

Singal has justifiably become known for being a useful tool of the far-right and Republicans in their project to win votes by demonizing trans people, but he gets mad when people mention that. 

Meanwhile the Jesse Singal follower labeler on Bluesky is chugging along, receiving many positive reviews.

But back to Razib Khan, for he was recently seen promoting the complete Trump ratfucker tool Andy Ngo. I assume that Trump will partner with Ngo and Ngo's former (or current) lawyer, the ultra-evil Harmeet K. Dhillon to do more ratfucking, using antifa as an excuse to crack down on all dissidents, much like the Nazis used Marxists. These Republicans are absolute fascist filth.

Dhillon is discussed in the Some More News video at minute 39:32 with the point made that she's the Swiss Army tool for right-wing extremist causes.

But Khan does not neglect to stop for a minute to lick the boot - this time Marc Andreessen's buddy, Joe "natural aristocracy" Lonsdale. Khan knows that the only reason a mediocrity like him has any notoriety at all is because he's been a right-wing plutocratic bootlicker since at least kooky Holocaust denier Ron Unz.

The Federalist hires off-off Broadway playwright to opine on the IDW

Unfortunately Pinkerite has traveled in the same off-off Broadway theater circles as Quillette author Libby Emmons, seen here defending the IDW for the far right-wing Federalist. As her Federalist bio says:

Libby Emmons is a writer and theatre maker in Brooklyn, New York. She is co-founder of the Sticky short play series, and blogs the story of her life at li88yinc.com.

You don't have to have an impressive resume if you are willing to go to bat for the right. But something good came out of finding the article - Emmons gave me a heads-up on genuinely good work when she presumed to criticize an article about the IDW written by Justin Charity at The Ringer. Charity is a far superior writer to Emmons and with a far more impressive writerly resume too. I think his description of a recent Jesse Singal kerfuffle contains a perfect illustration of Singal's weaseliness, which seems to be a trait generally shared by the IDW and IDW-adjacent.

On Twitter, Singal spent the past weekend challenging a perceived resistance among marginalized people to argue with conservatives. Arguing against such reluctance, Singal cited Frederick Douglass as a counterexample. He expressed one conception of Douglass—as a black genius who debated his people to freedom—and then several black journalists, disagreeing quite strongly with Singal’s characterization, expressed alternative conceptions of Douglass, abolitionism, and activism in general. Vann R. Newkirk II, an Atlantic staff writer who has, unlike Singal, actually written about Douglass and other black liberation figures, stressed the general aversion among abolitionists to debating slaveholders and other “unpersuadables.” 

Singal, a proud rationalist, had an interesting debate on his hands. He might have directly engaged with black journalists at The Atlantic and The New York Times who might have had some worthwhile thoughts about Frederick Douglass, but instead he retreated from the debate, which he himself had launched in a live forum, only to reconfigure himself in the comfort of his own newsletter. It was all very meta and pathetic, and so poignantly counterproductive in demonstrating the power of rationalist confidence. “Be braver,” Singal had tweeted at one point. It was a fun debate while it lasted. 

No one is scared to debate Singal, Shapiro, or Sullivan; they are, in most cases, simply annoyed. No journalist, no activist, no person of any persuasion wants to argue with a bad listener; no one wants to match against yet another rationalist champion only to find him retreating immediately to backchannels, whining about how many people are retweeting his opponents when they could be celebrating him...

The continuing non-celebrity career of Razib Khan

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan enjoy the bootlicking together after 

Singal posted a photo of grifter Bari Weiss and her grifter wife Nellie Bowles.

Weiss herself has to lick the boot, which is why she gives interviews to Peter Thiel and lately, fascist Marc Andreessen. It's very likely that both Thiel and Andreessen fund The Free Press, considering that Andreessen already funds Nazi-friendly Substack and Thiel has spent his entire career since college funding right-wing media and has been accused of funding Quillette. Thiel even went so far as to have a meeting with international man of douchebaggery Emil Kirkegaard, as reported in the essential-reading "Race Science Inc." by the organization Hope not Hate.

The Free Press is so devoted to racism it employs and expresses admiration for the white supremacist Douglas Murray.

Khan and Singal have been allies for years and recently Singal appeared on Khan's podcast.

I assume Khan is team-licking with Singal on Bluesky in an attempt to get a gig with the Free Press, which is basically the American Quillette. To be fair, the Free Press is a good fit for Khan, who has made a career of promoting far-right extremism and race pseudoscience, which has been quite lucrative for him.

Holocaust denier Ron Unz paid for Khan's education, per the excellent 2017 Undark article Race, Science, and the Continuing Education of Razib Khan:

Around 2000, (Khan) joined a private email discussion group about human biodiversity organized by Sailer. (More mainstream academics, including Steven Pinker, were also in the group).

Not long after that, Khan helped a geneticist friend start a blog about science. They called it Gene Expression — GNXP, for short. Its writers discussed technical topics, as well as issues with a more political edge, like gender and racial differences.

A few years later, Khan went on the payroll of Ron Unz, a libertarian who ran for governor of California in 1994. Unz, who made a fortune in software development, offered Khan something that Unz describes as “a sort of fellowship or junior fellowship” to further his scientific career. Both Khan and Unz are vague about the reasons for the fellowship, but the gift was contingent on Khan leaving his job in software to focus on a scientific career. It was a big part of why he got on a graduate school track and ended up at UC Davis.

The article is from 2017 and since then, Khan has continued to be a promoter of race pseudoscience, working with Quillette and the Emil Kirkegaard-owned Aporia Magazine. I wrote an overview of Khan's career in 2022.

I haven't been talking about Khan much in the past year but when he teamed up with Jesse Singal to attack me last week he got my attention.

I have to laugh about Singal's calling me an internet microcelebrity. Singal and Razib Khan are allied with the much more famous Steven Pinker, but although Pinker was called a "celebrity intellectual" by the NYTimes, even he is barely known outside of the very online. 

I had lunch with a writer friend not long ago and I told her about this Pinkerite blog. I explained why I selected the name Pinkerite and her response was "who is Steven Pinker?" I went through a list of the names of other IDW-related people I've written about here, and the only name she recognized was Bari Weiss.

Although more often than not when I've mentioned the name Bari Weiss, most people hear Barry White, the music legend who died over twenty years ago.

One of the reasons this blog is so obscure is that except for Thiel, Musk and Trump, virtually all the people I write about on Pinkerite are not well known by the general public nor even by smart people who pay attention to politics and current events. 

So by microcelebrity I assume Singal means that he and his IDW friends have Googled their names and found this blog. And since someone, anyone, is writing about them, they feel like celebrities - which makes me therefore a microcelebrity.

Among Razib Khan's smears on Bluesky is the claim that I'm "scaring even woke journalists."

Which "woke journalists" could Khan possibly mean? Matt Yglesias? Yglesias is another name known among pundit-types and the very online, but almost nobody else. Although an acquaintance mentioned to me that he was a counselor at a camp Yglesias attended as a child.

Razib Khan is not well known by the general public, but that's worked out for him since it means that he gets jobs and support from the clueless now and then. In 2013 even Ta-Nehisi Coates promoted Khan's career.

But then people Google Khan. Like when the NYTimes canned him, or when people changed their mind about signing Khan's petition in defense of racist E. O. Wilson. 

And sometimes when people Google his name they find this blog, which is why Khan is so mad and making unsupported claims about me. 

But I'm not even a microcelebrity. I'm just an American citizen, keeping tabs on people taking money from fascist plutocrats to promote race pseudoscience and other rightwing bullshit.