Peter Thiel is not only a crackpot but a great big honking racist

 I've long noted that Peter Thiel is a crackpot.

A recent Atlantic profile about Thiel confirms he - along with the New Criterion crowd - is a huge racist. (My bold emphasis.)

In the last thursday in April, Thiel stood in a ballroom at the Metropolitan Club, one of New York’s finest Gilded Age buildings. Decorative marble fireplaces accented the intricate panel work in burgundy and gold, all beneath Renaissance-style ceiling murals. Thiel had come to receive an award from The New Criterion, a conservative magazine of literature and politics, and to bask in the attention of nearly 300 fans.

These were Thiel’s people, and he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

Thiel reprised his longtime critique of “the diversity myth.” He made a plausible point about the ideological monoculture of the DEI industry: “You don’t have real diversity,” he said, with “people who look different but talk and think alike.” Then he made a crack that seemed more revealing.

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

I was sorry the piece did not talk about Thiel's crackpot, Bible-quoting keynote speech for another gang of Thiel's people, the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference. 

Someone at Rational Wiki recently questioned the claim that Thiel "secretly supported Quillette" made by right-winger Charles C. Johnson and quoted in Max Chafkin's book on Thiel, "The Contrarian" on the grounds that Johnson is untrustworthy.

I don't know what Johnson could have gotten out of falsely claiming Thiel supported Quillette, since very few people have even heard of Quillette. And Johnson's claim that Thiel was working for the FBI appears to be confirmed in this Atlantic article:

Thiel received an invitation that day, and then again in January 2022, to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. No agenda was specified. Thiel had been fascinated by Putin’s czarlike presence in a room in Davos years before, all “champagne and caviar, and you had sort of this gaggle of, I don’t know, Mafia-like-looking oligarchs standing around him,” he recalled, but he did not make the trip.

Instead, he reported the contact to the FBI, for which Thiel had become a confidential human source code-named “Philosopher.” Thiel’s role as an FBI informant, first reported by Insider, dated back to May 2021. Charles Johnson, a tech investor, right-wing attention troll, and longtime associate of Thiel’s, told me he himself had become an FBI informant some time ago. Johnson introduced Thiel to FBI Special Agent Johnathan Buma.

A source with close knowledge of the relationship said Buma told Thiel that he did not want to know about Thiel’s contacts with U.S. elected officials or political figures, which were beyond the FBI’s investigative interests. Buma saw his interactions with Thiel, this source said, as strictly “a counterintelligence, anti-influence operation” directed at foreign governments.

Thiel responded to my questions about his FBI relationship with a terse “no comment.” A close associate, speaking with Thiel’s permission, said “it would be strange if Peter had never met with people from the deep state,” including “three-letter agencies, especially given the fact that he founded Palantir 20 years ago.”

Johnson told me he knows he has a reputation as a right-wing agitator, but said that he had fostered that image in order to gather information for the FBI and other government agencies. (He said he is now a supporter of President Joe Biden.) “I recognize that I’m an imperfect messenger,” he said. He told me a great many things about Thiel and others that I could not verify, but knowledgeable sources confirmed his role in recruiting Thiel for Buma. He and Thiel have since fallen out. “We are taking a permanent break from one another,” Thiel texted Johnson about a year ago. “Starting now.”

I think it's very plausible that Thiel has funded - and still is funding Quillette, since Thiel's New Criterion speech sounds exactly like something written by a Quillette stooge. 

♫ I'm Peter Thiel and I know about the Antichrist ♫

♫ I'm Peter Thiel and I know about the Antichrist ♫

Three years ago I wondered if Peter Thiel was a babbling lunatic.

This was based on hearing his keynote speech at the Standford Academic Freedom Conference, which I called Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. 

Peter Thiel had been on my radar since it was claimed that he had funded the racist shit-rag Quillette, which Bari Weiss herself called "...the publication most associated with (the IDW) movement."

But even I was shocked by how completely bonkers Thiel sounded in his keynote speech.

Here's a small excerpt from the transcript I created, where Thiel compares environmentalism to Charles Manson:

...You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component...

It's hard to know when to begin and end the excerpt because it is not a collection of discrete, inter-related thoughts, but rather a stream-of-consciousness ramble.

And by the end of the speech he introduced the Antichrist:

...Start it seems, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous and uh and that and uh that, you know, whatever the dangers are in the future, we need to never underestimate the danger of, you know, one world, totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard hard to see what it ends. But, you know, there's always. You know, I there's always sort of the, the frame where. First Thessalonians five, chapter 3. The the political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. And and I think you know what I what I want to suggest is that and and you get it when you have sort of a homogenized one world totalitarian state and and what I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would uh do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon, thank you very much.

So three years ago, I found it disturbing that one of the richest and most politically powerful men in the world was ranting about the Antichrist and even more disturbing that nobody else seemed to care. 

I mean, not even the militant atheists connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, who also gave speeches at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, had much to say about Thiel's Christian apocalypse spiel. The worst Steven Pinker had to say was that Thiel's keynote speech was "data-light and impressionistic." 

Jerry Coyne, another IDW militant atheist at the Conference, never said anything about Thiel at the time, although thanks to Bari Weiss' The Free Press touting religion recently he - three years later! - took note of Thiel's religiosity, but utterly ignores the Antichrist babble and makes Thiel sound almost mainstream in his critique.

Thiel's nuttiness finally started to breach mainstream's consciousness when he was interviewed by someone on Thiel's side on most issues: the New York Times' Ross Douthat.

But few people outside of intellectuals and the very online know who Ross Douthat is, nor who Peter Thiel is.

Then came South Park.

Pod Save America posted an episode about the South Park episode "Twisted Christian," explaining the various cultural references like the 6-7 phenomenon and pointing out that Thiel really did hint that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.

Kudos to the South Park team - it was absolutely inspired to give Peter Thiel a song and dance routine.

Between this and John Oliver's take-down of Bari Weiss, I feel like the mainstream is finally beginning to pay attention to issues I've been shouting about for the past seven years.

Has Peter Thiel funded Quillette?

Byline Times has an interesting article on Trump-supporter Peter Thiel's international right-wing connections, entitled PETER THIEL’S Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge University REVEALED.

The article revealed a fascinating tidbit that I hadn't known: Claire Lehmann sits on the advisory board of Toby Young's "Free Speech Union." 

But the biggest bombshell was the article's mention of a recently-published book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin, which claims that Thiel secretly funded Quillette.

Lehmann denies it:

Quillette founder Claire Lehmann has completely and unequivocally denied recent claims published in a new biography of the billionaire, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, by Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chafkin that “Thiel was secretly funding” Quillette around 2016.

Lehmann told Byline Times that Chafkin’s account is “wrong on multiple levels” and based on the claims of “a notorious internet troll and fraudster”. Peter Thiel’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

However, the social connections of key Quillette contributors to the “Thiel network” around Cambridge University points to an alignment of interests and ideology illuminating the extent to which several Quillette writers and editors operate within Peter Thiel’s sphere of influence. 

But I'd believe almost anybody before I'd believe Claire Lehmann, up to and including a "notorious internet troll and fraudster."

I don't like The Baffler, but they get credit for mentioning the issue when the Chafkin book was first published, in September:

Bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker is only the tip of the iceberg: one source told Chafkin that Thiel had secretly funded Quillette (Claire Lehmann, the publication’s founder, has said that Thiel’s start-up manual Zero to One, coauthored with Blake Masters, inspired her to create the magazine); he also funds a journal that questions the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change.

I'm kicking myself for missing this Thiel-Quillette claim for three months.

I've been wondering about Quillette's funding sources for years now. It was already obvious there was some connection between Thiel and the Intellectual Dark Web because crackpot Eric Weinstein works for Thiel, but I never found any information proving a direct funding connection.

Peter Thiel funding Quillette does seem inevitable and it would especially make sense because Quillette has been such a big supporter of right-wing grifter and Trump-aligned ratfucker Andy Ngo.

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists

Peter Thiel was credibly accused of funding right-wing, race pseudoscience-loving Quillette in a book about him, published last year.

Well there's no doubt now that Peter Thiel is a leading promoter of race pseudoscience. This November there will be an "invitation-only" (i. e. safe space) "Academic Freedom Conference" probably funded directly or indirectly by Thiel, at Thiel's alma mater, Stanford University. Thiel will be the keynote speaker.

It is a far-right-leaning and motley collection of some of the biggest supporters of sociobiological racism, not to mention a blatant public racist, Amy Wax.

Considering the speakers line-up and Thiel's status as a Republican donor, this is going to be the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for racists. 

Apparently there was a version in the UK last year: PETER THIEL’S Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge University REVEALED:

The parallels between Peter Thiel’s campaigning in the US and UK are revealing: Thiel’s chief of staff was involved in building up the UK ‘free speech’ network exactly while Thiel himself was ingratiating himself with the Trump administration and its white nationalist supporters.

This appears to suggest that the network’s ‘free speech’ agenda may be little more than a cover for deeper, partisan, anti-liberal political concerns. It is also consistent with Thiel’s broader interests in the US. While the context behind the Thiel connection to the Cambridge network is shrouded in mystery, the US equivalent is not.

Thiel has invested millions of dollars in support of Senate candidates campaigning on a free speech ticket. J D Vance, who reportedly received $10 million from Thiel to support his campaign, recently told a conference of the National Conservative movement that “professors are the enemy”, citing Richard Nixon. Vance has also promoted the racist Great Replacement theory which baselessly posits that white populations are being ‘replaced’ by people of colour due to immigration and integration. Another colleague of Thiel, Blake Masters, is running for the Senate in Arizona with, it is claimed, another $10 million from Thiel. His campaign is premised on the discredited conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 elections.

With Peter Thiel’s surrogates extending their influence in the UK through the fulcrum of Cambridge University, it seems that an alarming agenda is being smuggled in under cover of defending ‘free speech’.

Thiel has a long history of aligning with white supremacists.

My guess is that the general theme of Stanford's Thiel-a-thon will be the academic freedom to be a racist through taking money from Peter Thiel and Charles Koch.

This is not a comprehensive list of all the speakers, just the ones I am already at least somewhat familiar with:

Jonathan Haidt - long-time promoter of race pseudoscience,  including supporting the crackpot NHAI hypothesis, who doesn't understand what the term "heritability" means although he's sure those dastardly leftists are denying it. Like many promoters of race pseudoscience, Haidt likes to make predictions for the Triumph of Racist Claims:

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

Anna Krylov - who first offered a master class in how to invent panic about "cancellation" based on a badly curated collection of anecdotes including from Soviet Russia and the Catholic Church in the 17th century, combined with hysteria over renaming science prizes and existential anguish over the wording in advertisements. She then found her true home - right-wing racist Thiel-funded Quillette - where she admitted she was not cancelled for writing her seriously bullshit article about cancellation.

Jerry Coyne is not only Steven Pinker's #1 fanboy (you can witness him kvelling over Pinker's cowboy boots here if you have a strong stomach) he's an anti-Muslim bigot & misogynist and a huge fan of racists - like E. O. Wilson - and race pseudoscience.

Fun fact: I just discovered today that two of Coyne's anonymous cowardly followers attacked me on his blog, the first informing him of this blog's existence. Of course Coyne knows about this blog - it's critical of Coyne's bigotry and support for race pseudoscience, which is why Coyne won't let me write in the comments section of his blog posts (for example to defend myself) and why he blocks me on Twitter. Like all race pseudoscience promoters, Coyne prefers to remain inside the racist echo-chamber safe space and avoid all contrary opinions while, without any self-awareness or shame, accusing others of cowardice.

The post in question is Coyne's support for racist Emily Willoughby - like Steven Pinker, it seems that Coyne has never met a racist he didn't like. Naturally Coyne doesn't mention, while weeping over the "demonization" of the poor lil "behaviour geneticist," that she is currently on the board of the International Society for Intelligence Research, known for the many hard-core racists associated with it. Although to be fair, even racists have some standards and uninvited "weird paedophilia apologist" Emil O. W. Kirkegaard from this year's racist roundup.

And as if Coyne's odious "science" views aren't bad enough, he has a repulsive cranky-old-man persona on his blog, whining about new-fangled expressions of the kids these days like "tone-deaf" and "gig-workers."

Richard Lowery (not to be confused with right-wing Richard Lowry) can be found speaking to race pseudoscience-promoter Steve Hsu here promoting the GOP's favorite culture war talking points about "critical race theory."

Lee Jussim, Rutgers University psychologist and author at racist Quillette is a long-time hater of Pinkerite. I still can't figure out what the point of Jussim's career is besides being a supporter of race pseudoscience and muttering over and over "stereotypes are real."

Niall Ferguson is living proof that being a major creep will not get you kicked out of the right-wing plutocrat-supported wingnut welfare system. Ferguson is on the Hoover payroll and likes to spend his time plotting to destroy left-leaning college students. He's also married to IDW named member Ayaan Hirsi Ali and a fan of Trump's ratfucker Andy Ngo.

Tyler Cowen is a dedicated Koch-man. But just because he takes money from Koch doesn't mean he can't also take money from Peter Thiel.

Gad Saad is a right-wing clown who does oafish "satire" like this:

“Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing,” he muses on the topic of one of his recent online broadcasts. “By that logic I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate — to stop breathing.”

In case you needed more evidence right-wingers can't do humor.

Douglas Murray, a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, is a white supremacist. In the Current Affairs review of Murray's recent book "The War on the West:"

...there’s something refreshing about the way that Murray cuts away a lot of the bullshit and leans into an understanding of “the West” that just means white people. While different parts of the book occasionally run in the other direction, especially when Murray wants to mute critics of European imperialism by highlighting how many colonial subjects benefited by having their native cultures and practices transformed by European contact, he often can’t seem to help himself when it comes to giving into xenophobia and transparent ethno-chauvinism...

Greg Lukianoff is on the Koch payroll via the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But again, there's no law against double-dipping from two right-wing plutocrats.

Nadine Strossen is another Koch employee, via CATO, and a defender of race pseudoscience.

Ilya Shapiro is also a Koch stooge via CATO and associated, of course, with the far-right Federalist Society.

Joshua Katz, a Quillette cause and known for inappropriate conduct with students at Princeton.

Elizabeth Weiss was probably invited to speak at Racist CPAC as much for her being the third wife of disgraced sociobiology racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton as for her treatment of Native American remains. She's written for racist Quillette - of course. 

Because of her connection to Rushton, she is arguably the spiritual leader of this collection of white supremacists, racists and Trump-lovers. Here she tells sociobiology racist Michael Shermer that Rushton wasn't really a racist. Although he argued that Black people are a separate type of human and spoke at an American Renaissance conference explaining why Black people are a separate type of human.

And of course, Steven Pinker the leading mainstream "celebrity intellectual" defender of race pseudoscience. His long-time support for race pseudoscience was persistently ignored by the mainstream press until last year.

This blog is full of examples of Pinker supporting and promoting racists like Steve Sailer, going so far as to include a piece of dreck written by Sailer in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" of 2004. He continues to promote racist Razib Khan and racist rag Quillette. 

If he had not been invited to Racist CPAC I would have been very surprised.

I discuss the rest of the speakers here.

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.

Chat GPT spills the tea about Peter Thiel and the Intellectual Dark Web

Since ChatGPT told me that Bari Weiss received a quarter of a million dollars from Peter Thiel in 2017, it occurred to me that perhaps her 2018 article for the New York Times about the splendors of her fellow travellers, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, was a public announcement of who had agreed to be on the Peter Thiel payroll. In addition to all those associated with Quillette.

In the article there were twenty-five individuals named by Weiss as connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, including Steven Pinker, Kanye West, Milo Yiannapoulos, Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones. 

But the most significant of the IDW bunch are those who were photographed for the article, standing in the dark in the bushes. 

I guess the photographer wanted to make a point by posing these Intellectuals in the Dark, but drew the line at literally portraying them in a Web and so had to stick them in some bushes instead.

The eight bush skulkers include Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, Dave Rubin and Eric and Bret Weinstein.

So what does ChatGPT have to say about them?

NOTE:  this must be investigated further, since ChatGPT is known to be factually unreliable.

        Has Peter Thiel ever funded Sam Harris?

Yes, Peter Thiel has provided funding to Sam Harris in the past. In fact, Thiel was one of the early supporters of Harris' podcast and helped fund the creation of the Waking Up app, which was later renamed to the Sam Harris app. Thiel and Harris have also engaged in public conversations and have expressed mutual respect for each other's work in various fields.

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Supposedly Harris says he's done with the Intellectual Dark Web.

I came up empty on a Thiel funding source for Michael Shermer, but ChatGPT did have this info, which is not even available at SourceWatch.

Has the Skeptic magazine received funding from Donors Trust?

Yes, according to public records, Skeptic magazine has received funding from Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that provides support to a variety of conservative and libertarian organizations. Specifically, tax filings from Donors Trust show that they provided funding to the Skeptics Society, the organization that publishes Skeptic magazine, in both 2014 and 2015. It's worth noting that Donors Trust supports a wide range of organizations across the political spectrum, and the fact that an organization receives funding from Donors Trust does not necessarily imply any particular political alignment or agenda. 

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Donor's Trust is the infamous right-wing funding vehicle that also gives millions to racist monsters VDARE.

ChatGPT had nothing about Thiel or Donors Trust funding for Christina Hoff Sommers, but it's not a secret that she's taken money from Koch-funded organizations for decades. ChatGPT agreed:

Christina Hoff Sommers, a conservative writer and critic of contemporary feminism, has received funding from a number of conservative and libertarian organizations over the years, particularly those focused on policy, education, and advocacy. Some of the organizations that have provided support to Sommers     include:

• The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank that promotes free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)
• The Bradley Foundation, a conservative foundation that supports a range of causes, including education, civic engagement, and free markets.
• The Charles Koch Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds research and education programs on a variety of topics, including economics, political science, and civil liberties.
• The Independent Women's Forum (IWF), a conservative organization that advocates for policies and initiatives that promote economic freedom, limited government, and individual responsibility. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)
• The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that focuses on policy research in areas such as urban policy, energy, and education. (Pinkerite's note: funded by Koch)

Here's what ChatGPT had to say about Heather Heying:

Heather Heying has received funding from a number of conservative and libertarian organizations over the years, particularly those focused on science, education, and policy. Some of the organizations that have provided support to Heying include:

• The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank that promotes free speech and intellectual diversity on college campuses.
• The John William Pope Foundation, a conservative foundation that supports a range of causes, including education, healthcare, and public policy.
• The Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds research on science, spirituality, and human purpose.
• The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank that promotes intelligent design theory and critiques of evolutionary biology.
• The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that focuses on political philosophy, constitutionalism, and American exceptionalism.

I'm curious what The Discovery Institute hopes to get from Heying for its money, since it promotes intelligent design and critiques of evolutionary biology.

We do know that Heying and her husband Bret Weinstein have promoted junk science during the Covid pandemic. But that's Game Theory.

When I asked ChatGPT about Dave Rubin it said:

Rubin has expressed support for many conservative and libertarian ideas and causes, and he has collaborated with a number of individuals and organizations in these spheres. Some of the individuals and organizations that have expressed support for Rubin or his ideas include:

• Peter Thiel: As mentioned earlier, Thiel has expressed support for Rubin and his work, but there is no clear evidence that he has provided direct financial support to Rubin.
• PragerU: Rubin has collaborated with PragerU, a conservative educational organization that produces videos promoting conservative and libertarian ideas.
• Turning Point USA: Rubin has also worked with Turning Point USA, a conservative student organization that promotes conservative and libertarian ideas on college campuses.
• The Federalist Society: Rubin has expressed support for the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that promotes originalist interpretations of the US Constitution.
• Republican politicians: Rubin has expressed support for several Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul.

Eric Weinstein of course works for Thiel Capital, but I did not know he and Bret had been Thiel Fellows:

Bret and Eric Weinstein were both fellows at the Thiel Foundation, which provides funding to young entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. The Weinsteins have also been associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a loose network of public intellectuals who are known for challenging mainstream narratives on a range of topics. While the IDW is not a formal organization and does not receive direct funding, many of its members are supported by conservative and libertarian donors who share their views.

Curiously ChatGPT wouldn't say that Bret Weinstein was funded by the same organizations who fund his wife, Heather Heying, which makes no sense. It did say about Weinstein:

Weinstein has also been critical of what he calls "woke ideology" and the progressive movement, and has spoken out in support of free speech and academic freedom. These views have earned him support from some conservative and libertarian organizations and donors. For example, he has appeared as a guest speaker at events hosted by the National Review Institute, a conservative think tank, and has been praised by conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro was another person named in Weiss's NYTimes article as IDW.

I came up with bupkis for Joe Rogan.

So according to ChatGPT,  Sam Harris has taken money from Thiel, and Eric and Bret Weinstein were fellows at the Thiel Foundation, and all the others, except Joe Rogan have connections to lots of other far-right funders.

And since Thiel has funded Quillette we can infer these people have received Thielbucks due to Quillette authorship (my annotations in parentheses):

Quillette is an online magazine that publishes articles on a wide range of topics, including politics, culture, science, and technology. Some of the individuals who have written articles for Quillette include:

• Jordan Peterson: Canadian psychologist and author (IDW member per Weiss article)
• Claire Lehmann: Australian psychologist and founder of Quillette (Quillette is the primary publication of the IDW per the Weiss article)
• Sam Harris: American philosopher and author (see above)
• Christina Hoff Sommers: American philosopher and cultural critic (see above)
• Jonathan Haidt: American social psychologist and author 
• Heather Mac Donald: American political commentator and author
• Gad Saad: Canadian evolutionary psychologist and author
• Bret Weinstein: American biologist and evolutionary theorist (see above)
• Douglas Murray: British author and political commentator (named member of IDW)
• Andrew Doyle: British comedian and writer (or "comedian")
• Cathy Young: Russian-American journalist and author
• Debra Soh: Canadian sex researcher and science writer (named member of IDW)
• Conor Friedersdorf: American journalist and writer
• Peter Boghossian: American philosopher and professor
• Toby Young: British journalist and author (also was Quillette associate editor)
• Maajid Nawaz: British activist and writer
• Meghan Daum: American author and columnist
• Yascha Mounk: German-American political scientist and writer
• Helen Pluckrose: English author and editor of Areo Magazine
• James Lindsay: American author and mathematician
• Bruce Gilley: American political scientist and professor
• Claire Fox: British author and commentator
• Jamie Palmer: British writer and commentator (Quillette editor)
• Heather Heying: American evolutionary biologist and writer (see above)
• Ed Husain: British writer and commentator
• Coleman Hughes: American writer and podcaster
• Frances Widdowson: Canadian academic and writer

This is not an exhaustive list, as many other individuals have also written articles for Quillette.

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

It's important to note that Peter Thiel is a democracy-hating far-right funder of monsters like Donald Trump, and has been called both a psychopath and a sociopath. And he's a babbling, Bible-quoting crackpot, with billions to spend on his far-right agenda. 

And those people have taken his money.

Or as David Bertoli, one of the admirers of the Anna Krylov/Jerry Coyne grift might say:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” 

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - the tight-knit circle of Koch employees, Thiel flunkies and race pseudoscience promoters

Last week I did a quick survey of some of the speakers who will be in the upcoming Peter Thiel-led CPAC for racists, otherwise known as the Stanford Academic Freedom conference. 

The conference so dedicated to Academic Freedom that the keynote speaker will be Peter Thiel, who is not involved in academia except, I assume, to donate to it in order to garner influence for his right-wing democracy-hating political agenda.

So for the first round I looked at mostly people I recognized as promoters of race pseudoscience, and/or are on the plutocrat payroll, and I had written about many of them on this blog.

This survey of the remaining speakers, like the first survey, demonstrates what a shameless lie the "College Fix" promoted in its claim that the conference is a bipartisan endeavor. It is overwhelmingly slanted to the right.

Well let's have a look at the others:

Luana Maroja is a sociobiologist and a Koch-funded promoter of Koch's favorite claim, that there's not enough free speech for right-wingers on American campuses. Which probably explains why Breitbart loved her enough to spread what Reza Aslan said was a lie about a panel he did with Jamelle Bouie. Naturally Jerry Coyne and professional racist Steve Sailer are fans of hers.

Mimi St. Johns has a very close tie to Peter Thiel - she is currently the editor-in-chief of the far-right newspaper the Stanford Review, which Thiel founded in 1987. Thiel is still very involved with the Review: "While Thiel also makes financial contributions, he has hosted staff reunions at his home, and meets with the editors quarterly as a way to stay current with campus activities in general."

Dorian Abbot is an author for racist Quillette, funded by Thiel and also wrote an op-ed in Newsweek comparing affirmative action to Nazi Germany. His co-author was Iván Marinovic, one of the three Stanford Graduate School of Business Faculty Organizers. 

Fun fact - two of the speakers, Anna Krylov and Richard Lowery are also members of the conference Organizing Committee. The CPAC for racists is an extremely tight-knit group.

John Hasnas is a far-right winger on the Koch payroll via CATO and a contributor at the far-right Federalist Society.

I haven't found direct connections between  Peter Arcidiacono and race pseudoscience and/or right-wing plutocrats, although he seems to be popular with those types of people, probably because they feel his work can be used to oppose affirmative action. 

Solveig Gold is Joshua Katz's wife and predictably a right-winger. The New York Times ran a Better Homes and Gardens style profile about her last summer. 

Joseph H. Manson is a fan of some of the biggest crackpots and racists from the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette including Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Jonathan Katz (another speaker at the conference) and racist extremist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.

John Schendal Rose is an instructor at Duke University with a Master of Theological Studies. He was scheduled to teach a gender-segregated seminar in June 2020, The Moral Life and the Classical Tradition Seminar, "a week-long program for rising high school juniors and seniors as well as rising college freshmen interested in the ancient philosophical tradition and its influence in the Christian moral life." I hope he gets a chance to witness for Christ to Jerry Coyne, a militant atheist.

Speaker John H. Cochrane one of the three Faculty Organizers of the conference, is a Hoover man, like speaker Niall Ferguson and a member of the Koch network via CATO. He's written for National Review about his loathing of government funded healthcare, like a good right-wing libertarian would.

John M. Ellis works for right-wing plutocrats via the Sarah Scaife Foundation-funded National Association of Scholars, whining about political correctness ruining higher education. Rand-roids love him.

Erik Kaufmann is a Koch man via the Manhattan Institute.

Steven Koonin can be seen giving an interview to Ayn Rand fanatics in order to promote climate change denial.

Bjorn Lomborg is another climate change denier.

Jay Bhattacharya is identified as "a scholar connected to right-wing dark money" at Exposed by CMD and the article also mentions Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration which "recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

John Ioannidis is another Covid genius who "tried to convince President Donald Trump that locking down the country would be the real danger."

Richard Shweder is a right-winger who likes to whine about "identity politics" for the Koch-connected DonorsTrust-funded Heterodox Academy.

Hollis Robbins can be seen on Linked In promoting Koch man Tyler Cowen (also a speaker at the CPAC for racists) and she gave him an interview in 2019 here. She says something interesting in that interview:

"I don’t understand why founders don’t have more operas about them, why we don’t see operas and movies about Steve Jobs, about Peter Thiel, about Jeff Bezos. There’s the David Fincher film of the founding of Facebook, but that’s pretty much it. The founders, entrepreneurs today are titans."

So you can see why Thiel would like her. And she sounds pretty clueless since there have been several movies and documentaries about Steve Jobs. As far as Thiel, well, she may be interested to know that I have written a play which features a Thiel-like character (called Toby Peel) and it will receive its first public reading in a couple of weeks. But I don't think Thiel would like it. 

So what this looks like to me is that the Koch people have been cultivating Robbins, best known for working with Henry Louis Gates, for a few years, and her appearance at this conference is part of sealing the deal. But that's just my best guess.

Scott W. Atlas is a long-time Republican and Trump advisor best-known for spreading Covid-19 misinformation.

Michael W. McConnell is a Bush nominee, a Hoover Institute man and a contributor to the Federalist Society online site.

Eugene Volokh is a conservative/libertarian Koch man via Reason Magazine.

Frances Widdowson is an author at racist Quillette, who also happens to hate Black Lives Matter.

So there you have it. The whole political spectrum from libertarian to Republican to conservative to right-wing to Trump supporter to race pseudoscience supporter to full-on racist. 

And the keynote speaker is a democracy-hating, Trump-funding, racism-funding sociopath.

More disagreements in IDW land

The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), defined by, and introduced to the world by Bari Weiss, who is on the record as a fan of the stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik of "Libs of TikTok," is tied together mainly by a right-libertarian point of view and a predilection for race pseudoscience. 

But they do sometimes have their disagreements.

Two named members of the Intellectual Dark Web, Claire Lehmann and Sam Harris, left Twitter when Donald Trump returned. However, their businesses remain: Lehmann's Quillette, allegedly funded by babbling lunatic Peter Thiel among other plutocrats, and Harris' MakingSense. 

This fact was noted by ivermectin-promoting, game theory loving crackpot Bret Weinstein, also a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Meanwhile the Cato Institute's "Human Progress" has gotten around to critiquing Peter Thiel's crackpot, Bible-citing keynote speech for the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference (Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists) for not appreciating the last 50 years of Human Progress.

Steven Pinker, who Bari Weiss considers the exemplar of respectability on the IDW spectrum, linked to the "Human Progress" article from his Twitter account. 

It's a safe bet that Pinker will never leave Twitter based on a principled stand. 

"Impressionistic" is a very generous way to describe Thiel's babble, but considering  how Thiel funds organizations that Pinker counts on to support race pseudoscience and right-wing reaction, like Quillette, he can hardly be scathing and expect to remain a member in good standing of the plutocrat-supported IDW.

But some mild criticism is likely welcomed by Cato, since it is largely a Charles Koch vehicle. 

Although Koch and Thiel agree far more than they disagree, there must be a rivalry there, and Koch may not be displeased when Thiel gets some mild criticism. 

The article does not mention Thiel's bizarre Antichrist reference, complete with Bible citation, but then, one of the two authors of the piece is Gale L. Pooley, a senior fellow at the intelligent-design promoting Discovery Institute. Discovery used to employ far-right Trump flunky CRT/trans-panic mongering Christopher Rufo.

This section of the Human Progress piece caught my attention

Progress has been especially good for the poor – especially when considering time inequality. A person in China working eight hours a day to earn enough money to buy food in 1960, would only need to spend around 18 minutes to do the same in 2021. For the time it took to buy one meal in 1960, he or she would get 27 meals in 2021. The Chinese gained 7 hours and 42 minutes a day to do with as they please. Indians gained 6 hours and 30 minutes a day over the same period. Some 3 billion people now have much more time to learn and contribute to knowledge discovery and creation.

How absurd to include that, as if right-wing libertarian plutocrats cared about the poor.

Peter Thiel is infamous for his lack of human empathy, justifying apartheid as a good economic system. 

And Cato, well Cato's idea of "Human Progress" is to attempt to end taxation for the rich. A belief-system that now rules the Republican Party.

If the poor have benefitted from progress, it is not thanks to the plutocrat-forward policies of Cato and friends. Thanks to their policies, economic inequality has, after being relatively low since the end of WWII, skyrocketed starting with the Reagan administration.

Based on their policies, the endgame of Thiel, Koch, Musk and other right-wing plutocrats must be to create a world controlled by about one hundred obscenely wealthy men - a global feudalism.

Which is why they hate democracy so  much, as this video notes.

Another excellent YouTube video on the evil of a human society controlled by billionaires.

Wonkette and Bari Weiss' University of Martyrdom

Peter Boghossian, philosopher of white grievance
--------------------------------------------------------------

From Wonkette:

Intellectual Dark Web Dorks Explore Deep Questions At Bari Weiss' University Of Martyrdom

...let’s take a look at their page on the school’s website. Oh look, there is one of those former professors who huffily quit writing forbidden professorial things on a whiteboard: 

 

What’s he writing? What questions of the mind is he leading his students on a deep intellectual exploration of? What are they doing with their unfettered freedom of inquiry and civil discourse?
Let us just zoom in here:

 

“Non-black people cannot use the n-word.” 

 

Oh. Okay. The forbidden word so forbidden even the people complaining that it’s forbidden won’t even write it out when in a room full of people who also don’t understand why they can’t say the forbidden word.

The professor in question, as I unfortunately knew on sight, is Peter Boghossian.

This is what ChatGPT has to say about the University of Austin and Peter Thiel:

Does Peter thiel financially support the University of Austin?

Peter Thiel, a billionaire entrepreneur and investor, has been reported to be a financial supporter of the University of Austin, a new university that is being established in Austin, Texas. However, the extent and nature of his support are not entirely clear, and Thiel himself has not confirmed or denied his involvement.

In December 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Thiel had donated $10 million to the University of Austin, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. The report also stated that Thiel was one of the university's initial backers and had been involved in its planning stages.

However, Thiel has not made any public statements regarding his involvement with the University of Austin or his alleged donation. It's worth noting that Thiel has been known to support controversial causes and has faced criticism for his views on various issues, including higher education. Therefore, his reported support for the University of Austin has generated some debate and scrutiny.

Overall, the exact nature of Thiel's involvement with the University of Austin remains unclear, and there is no official confirmation from either Thiel or the university about his alleged donation.

 However, this must be investigated further, since ChatGPT is known to be factually unreliable.

We already know University of Austin has a Koch connection.

And the Majority Report has plenty to say!