The continuing alignment between Trump and the Intellectual Dark Web

 Bari Weiss cheering on racist Trump's race pseudo-science promoting Department of Education and its latest scheme against Black Americans.

While Trump continues to attack the 1619 project.

Trump recently threatened to nix federal funding for California schools that teach the 1619 Project, while the White House issued a governmentwide directive to stop what it called “un-American propaganda training sessions" about race.

"The only path to national unity is through our shared identity as Americans," Trump said. "That is why it is so urgent that we finally restore patriotic education to our schools."

Trump assails 'toxic propaganda' amid racial unrest

During her remarks, DeVos acknowledged that the federal government can't dictate school curriculum. The education secretary said during a conservative policy panel that she thinks a 1776 Unites curriculum "sounds really wonderful."

That project was launched this week by the group 1776 Unites, whose founder, Bob Woodson, has said "low income blacks are just collateral damage" in efforts of "radical leftists" seeking to "demean and destroy the civic institutions in this country."

The 1776 Unites project is described as a way to offer "a more complete and inspiring story of the history of African-Americans in the United States" and is a direct response to the 1619 Project.

DeVos of course is a fan of "biosocial criminology."

The Intellectual Dark Web is clearly hoping for a Trump re-election to make all their anti-Black dreams come true.

The IDW has turned out to be more rightwing, racist and disgusting than even I imagined.

The NYTimes 1619 Project and its critics

The New York Times is running a much-needed series on the history of African Americans since the introduction of slavery to North America in 1619. It begins:

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

One of the most important issues, and one that this blog has addressed a few times is the underreported and historically ignored theft of the wealth accumulated, often through heroic effort, by the formerly enslaved people. 

That issue is addressed in the 1619 series in the article  A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America. The opening paragraphs of the article add more to my understanding of how much African American economic failure to thrive is due to terrorism:

Elmore Bolling, whose brothers called him Buddy, was a kind of one-man economy in Lowndesboro, Ala. He leased a plantation, where he had a general store with a gas station out front and a catering business; he grew cotton, corn and sugar cane. He also owned a small fleet of trucks that ran livestock and made deliveries between Lowndesboro and Montgomery. At his peak, Bolling employed as many as 40 people, all of them black like him. 

One December day in 1947, a group of white men showed up along a stretch of Highway 80 just yards from Bolling’s home and store, where he lived with his wife, Bertha Mae, and their seven young children. The men confronted him on a section of road he had helped lay and shot him seven times — six times with a pistol and once with a shotgun blast to the back. His family rushed from the store to find him lying dead in a ditch. 

The shooters didn’t even cover their faces; they didn’t need to. Everyone knew who had done it and why. “He was too successful to be a Negro,” someone who knew Bolling told a newspaper at the time. When Bolling was killed, his family estimates he had as much as $40,000 in the bank and more than $5,000 in assets, about $500,000 in today’s dollars. But within months of his murder nearly all of it would be gone. White creditors and people posing as creditors took the money the family got from the sale of their trucks and cattle. They even staked claims on what was left of the family’s savings. The jobs that he provided were gone, too. Almost overnight the Bollings went from prosperity to poverty. Bertha Mae found work at a dry cleaner. The older children dropped out of school to help support the family. Within two years, the Bollings fled Lowndes County, fearing for their lives.

THIS is the history of African Americans that people like Charles Murray, Razib Khan, Sam Harris, Bo Winegard and the rest of the race science gang seek to ignore or deny in order to keep the race science project going - the project most explicitly designed to claim that African Americans are often poor or in jail because of innate evolutionarily endowed traits of lesser intelligence and greater criminality explained most bluntly by "conservative criminology" professor of the University of Cincinnati, John Paul Wright.

Quillette hasn't yet complained about the 1619 project, nor have any of the IDWs that I have seen, but others certainly have, like the once relevant Newt Gingrich. Molly Jong-Fast (daughter of author Erica Jong) had a good response.

Christian extremist and Trump-loving Erick Erickson had a predictably stupid tweet. NYTimes columnist Jamelle Bouie who wrote an excellent piece for the project, What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to Slavery had a good response.

Bouie also had a good response to Benjamin Weingarten, senior editor of The Federalist (where do they get their money from?) and Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer (author of one of the most important pieces of the Trump era, "The Cruelty is the Point") has a good response to the Koch-funded and founded Cato Institute employee Ilya Shapiro.

If anybody from Quillette or the IDW complains about the 1619 project, I will post it, of course.

The creator of the project is Nicole Hannah-Jones, and I'm proud to say I've been following her on Twitter via @Pinkerite1 since starting the account.

Trump, the IDW and investigating the 1619 project

People associated with the Intellectual Dark Web are on the record as hostile to the 1619 project.

The IDW is associated with many people who promote race science, from Charles Murray to Sam Harris to Steven Pinker to the many authors at Quillette.

I've been noting the hostility of race science promoters to the history of African Americans for years.

We see Sam Harris expressing that hostility in his debate with Ezra Klein (my highlights):

Ezra Klein

...(Charles) Murray does say he thinks that some combination of genetic and basically immutably environmental characteristics make it so we can’t do much about this and there just are big differences between the groups, and it’s just going to remain that way, and American politics need to rearrange itself around that reality. 

Yeah, I strongly disagree, and I disagree because of American history. That is why my fundamental criticism of that conversation was that you needed to deal more with the history of this conversation and the history of this country. 

Sam Harris
Okay, but even in this conversation you are unwilling to differentiate scientific fact and scientific data and reasonable extrapolations based on data, from past injustices in American history, these are totally separate things — 

Ezra Klein
No, we disagree on what a reasonable extrapolation from the data is.

Harris believes that scientific data should be considered "totally separate" from American history as an explanation for African American failure to thrive, post-Emancipation. The late Michael Brooks had an excellent response to Harris's position.

The attitude of race science towards African American history is perhaps most succinctly expressed by race science promoter Razib Khan, on his blog, when he took offense at Carl Zimmer in the New York Times pointing out that many African Americans have European genetic ancestry and that a significant number of white Americans have recent African ancestry.

Khan wrote (my highlight):

What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population. 

Yes, if we could create a context-free scenario that eliminated all knowledge of the one-drop rule and slavery and systemic racism and the collapse of indigenous populations due to European diseases and expansion we would be amazed and baffled and perplexed. That's what lack of information will do to you.

So why even consider this context-free scenario? Because if race science promoters could eliminate knowledge of African America history it would clear the way for an explanation based on genetic inferiority. And then contemporary anti-Black racism could be declared not the result of centuries of systemic racism but rather the fault of Black people themselves.

In Sam Harris's debate with Ezra Klein over Charles Murray, Harris linked to an article in Quillette, A Tale of Two Bell Curves, which demonstrates how extreme are race science beliefs in the genetic explanation of African American failure to thrive. Authors Ben and Bo Winegard claim, using race pseudo-science as justification, that the only explanation is genetics (my highlight):

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White (intelligence test) gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

When I asked Ben Winegard about this on Twitter, before he blocked my Pinkerite Twitter account, his response was to claim the Asian American and Jewish American experiences were comparable to the African American experience. He tweeted:

Asian Americans were treated abysmally. And I don't think we need to tarry over the historical treatment of Jewish people.

This bogus equivalence is only possible if you know nothing about the Black experience in North America since 1619 - or you are doing your best to deny the significance of that experience.

One of the things I discovered from doing this blog is how little I knew of the many attacks on African American communities since Emancipation. I did not know about the murder of Blacks and the destruction of "Black Wall Street" in the Tulsa massacre. And that was one of many ignored and under-discussed incidents of African American history.

James Lindsay is obsessed with suppressing 

knowledge of systemic racism.

Not all violence and looting of black wealth has happened on a grand scale, but it has occurred systematically and with impunity as one of the articles in the 1619 project documents:

Elmore Bolling, whose brothers called him Buddy, was a kind of one-man economy in Lowndesboro, Ala. He leased a plantation, where he had a general store with a gas station out front and a catering business; he grew cotton, corn and sugar cane. He also owned a small fleet of trucks that ran livestock and made deliveries between Lowndesboro and Montgomery. At his peak, Bolling employed as many as 40 people, all of them black like him. 

One December day in 1947, a group of white men showed up along a stretch of Highway 80 just yards from Bolling’s home and store, where he lived with his wife, Bertha Mae, and their seven young children. The men confronted him on a section of road he had helped lay and shot him seven times — six times with a pistol and once with a shotgun blast to the back. His family rushed from the store to find him lying dead in a ditch. 

The shooters didn’t even cover their faces; they didn’t need to. Everyone knew who had done it and why. “He was too successful to be a Negro,” someone who knew Bolling told a newspaper at the time. When Bolling was killed, his family estimates he had as much as $40,000 in the bank and more than $5,000 in assets, about $500,000 in today’s dollars. But within months of his murder nearly all of it would be gone. White creditors and people posing as creditors took the money the family got from the sale of their trucks and cattle. They even staked claims on what was left of the family’s savings. The jobs that he provided were gone, too. Almost overnight the Bollings went from prosperity to poverty. Bertha Mae found work at a dry cleaner. The older children dropped out of school to help support the family. Within two years, the Bollings fled Lowndes County, fearing for their lives.

This is the knowledge that the race science promoters of the Intellectual Dark Web want to suppress. And they have found an ally in Donald Trump.

Trump says Department of Education will investigate use of 1619 Project in schools

President Donald Trump is continuing to wage battle against interpretations of history which he claims are un-American.

In a Sunday morning tweet, the President said the US Department of Education would investigate whether California schools are using the New York Times' "1619 Project" in public school curriculum. The Pulitzer-Prize winning collection reframes American history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on America's shores. 

"Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!" he wrote on Twitter, citing a message from an unverified account saying it was being taught in schools there. 

The message came after the President on Friday night banned federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity training related to "white privilege" and "critical race theory."

Trump's Department of Education is headed by Betsy Devos, who is a fan of race science as evidenced by her citation of the work of "biosocial criminologists" John Paul Wright, Kevin Beaver, J. C. Barnes, Michelle A. Coyne and Mark Alden Morgan. She used their work to make claims about Black children.

In making the latter point, DeVos' commission cited several times a study in which researchers argued that the discipline discrepancies between black and white students are "likely produced by pre-existing behavioral problems of youth that are imported into the classroom, that cause classroom disruptions, and that trigger disciplinary measures by teachers and school officials...

...Early misbehavior is tied to later misbehavior and, in turn, that misbehavior is tied to school suspensions," the researchers concluded. "These findings highlight the importance of early problem behaviors and suggest that the use of suspensions by teachers and administrators may not have been as racially biased as some scholars have argued."

The paper's claim that there is no racial bias in the punishment of Black children seems extremely implausible. But I don't think it's impossible that there could be a bit more discipline problems with Black children, because Black children are more likely to come from poor homes and poverty is associated with bad behaviors.

And if you know African American history, which involved not only discrimination but terrorism and looting and practices like housing discrimination that continue right up to the present day, you know why Black children are more likely to come from poor homes.

The actual problem is that John Paul Wright and friends consider Black misbehavior not the result of socio-economic conditions but a sign there is something innately more criminal and less intelligent about Black people due to their own genetics.

As John Paul Wright bluntly explains in his chapter "Inconvenient Truths: Science, Race, and Crime" in Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research edited by Anthony Walsh and Kevin M. Beaver (my highlight):

Page 149: 

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

Page 150: 

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

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

Just like Bo and Ben Winegard in Quillette, John Paul Wright declares that there is no other explanation other than "evolutionary theory" for Black crime rates.

Wright has also written for Quillette and appeared as a guest on white supremacist Stefan Molyneux's channel.

The Intellectual Dark Web and Donald Trump want to suppress the 1619 project, because it runs contrary to the race science narrative that there is no other explanation for African American failure to thrive besides "evolutionary theory."

Jerry Coyne railing against the 1619 project again

If there is one thing that race pseudo-science promoters of the Intellectual Dark Web and their friends absolutely hate, it's people talking about Black American history. And that's because history is the most important weapon against the claim of hereditarians like Coyne, that the reason for African American failure to thrive post-Emancipation is due to their genetic inferiority.

So race science promoters will grab at any excuse to attack the 1619 project as Quillette, the leading media outlet for race pseudo-science, has done. Coyne expresses his love for Quillette's race war yet again. And he even admits that his argument is nit-picking bullshit.

Now some will argue that this is a trivial change, and to that I’d say: “Are you kidding? July 4, 1776 is an iconic date in American history, and the NYT wants to change it to August 20, 1619, so that the founding of America coincides with the arrival of the first slaves.”

It's a perfectly valid argument that 1619 was a founding moment in the creation of the United States of America. And nobody thinks it is meant to literally replace July 4, 1776. 

Coyne's is a stupid concrete-thinker argument, but stupid arguments are the only kind that addled-brained creeps like Jerry Coyne and his IDW friends can come up with. 

They don't give a damn that many articles in the 1619 project provide extremely important information and perspectives on the history of African Americans as I have discussed on this blog. They just want to stop those damn Black people from talking about their history.

I do have one gripe with Nikole Hannah-Jones and friends, and it's that they seem oblivious to the fact that the Intellectual Dark Web is an organized and extremely well-funded project of the Right to attack Black Americans through race science, and the 1619 project would of course be one of their targets. And they are attacking it endlessly. I don't think Hannah-Jones & company were sufficiently prepared for the attacks.

The Intellectual Dark Web and its friends like Jerry Coyne are at war with civil rights and human rights defenders.

Anybody who does anything in support of Black Americans must be constantly aware there is a war going on, and make preparations for the inevitable attacks from the Koch-funded  Charles Murray to the Mark Carnegie-funded Quillette to the Peter Thiel-funded Eric Weinstein, to the Michael O'Fallon-funded James Lindsay. 

And their leader is Donald Trump.

Trump blasts 1619 Project as DeVos praises alternative Black history curriculum

The mind of a racist part 4: Steve Sailer, VDARE & the strategy to deny African American history

As we have seen in The mind of a racist part 3, although Steve Sailer asks for donations at the Unz Review web site, Unz doesn't have a system in place to accept donations.

Sailer instead suggests a variety of direct options, from PayPal to Bitcoin. And he provides a link to his old web site and to VDARE. Sailer advises:

Please don’t forget to click my name at the VDARE site so the money goes to me...

VDARE has been kiboshed from use of Paypal for being, I dunno, EVIL. But you can give via credit cards, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, check, money order, or stock.

It's odd considering that Unz Review is - or perhaps once was, more respectable and less obviously evil than VDARE. Many of the same writers work for both, like Sailer, John Derbyshire (fired from The National Review for being too racist), Pat Buchanan, but Unz Review includes those who are not white supremacists like Ted Rall and Ron Paul. I would have thought Unz would be the ones to handle the money.

But as we've discussed, Ron Unz is a big contributor to VDARE too, so there may be no significant distinction, financially, between Unz Review and VDARE. Except that VDARE is a nonprofit, which has been controversial.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center profile, VDARE:

(was) established in 1999 by the Center for American Unity, a Virginia-based nonprofit foundation started by English immigrant Peter Brimelow, VDARE.com is an anti-immigration hate website "dedicated to preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century. 

Now run by the VDARE Foundation, the site is a place where relatively intellectually inclined leaders of the anti-immigrant movement share their opinions. VDARE.com also regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites.

Most recently Brimelow was in the news thanks to his connection to the Trump administration via Stephen Miller:

Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE, believes that diversity has weakened the United States, and that the increase in Spanish speakers is a “ferocious attack on the living standards of the American working class.” 

Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, is a self-described “white advocate” who has written that “newcomers are not the needy; they are the greedy.” 

Their websites were among the sources cited by Stephen Miller, the White House aide who is the driving force behind President Trump’s immigration policies, in emails and conversations with conservative allies at Breitbart News when he was a young Senate aide. A cache of those emails, obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, provides new insight into the ideas that have shaped Mr. Miller’s thinking and suggest he has maintained deeper intellectual ties to the world of white nationalism than previously known.

Is it any wonder why the IDW, Republicans and professional racists like Steve Sailer hate the SPLC?  I recommend you support them.

I have said many times that a strategy of race science proponents is to minimize or deny the history of African Americans, as IDW Sam Harris has done, explicitly, including not only the impact of the massacres and lynchings of the descendents of the Emancipated, but incidents of looting of black wealth, finally being discussed in the media, like the NYTimes 1619 Project.

I haven't yet seen the television series The Watchmen (I don't have HBO) but I've heard one or more of its episodes reference the Tulsa massacre, the mass murder and looting of "Black Wall Street." This is a very positive development. More people need to know about this kind of atrocity which happened far more than is recognized.

In his anti-1619 post in VDARE, Steve Sailer shows exactly what I mean by the race science attempt to erase African American history:

Basically, it’s The Bell Curve question once again: If we utterly rule out of consideration all the facts and logic in The Bell Curve, then how can we explain why only 7 blacks passed the Stuyvesant HS entrance exam in 2019, despite decades of massive spending to uplift black performance? 

As each year brings us further into the Post-1960s future, the answer for why blacks aren’t achieving more must lie far in the past, such as in 1619. 

But of course the answer can’t lie even further back than 1619, such as in 1618 or in the tens of thousands of years when, as geneticist David Reich has pointed out, humanity was split into two basic large populations: the Out-of-Africans and the Still-in-Africans. 

It just can’t, because looking further back than 1619 would diminish the guilt that could be imposed upon white Americans to give their money to black Americans.

It's amusing to see Sailer whining about giving money to black Americans. Where would Sailer be without the right-wing racist wingnut welfare infrastructure that supports him exactly because he attacks black Americans?

And his description is, naturally, a misrepresentation of the 1619 project. One of the best, and most relevant pieces is The Wealth Gap which details some of the ways that black wealth has been stolen since Empancipation and the insidiousness of redlining. A practice, it has been proven, is still going on in New York state.

Sailer has one recent anecdote about black students and Stuyvesant entrance exams, and so he declares the reason for African American failure to thrive is genetics, as claimed in The Bell Curve.

Sailer believes, apparently, perfect social, political and economic parity was achieved in the 1960s, contrary to all evidence.

And by the way, I think I triggered Steve Sailer into blocking me on Twitter by pointing out that the "out-of-Africans" were probably the losers of turf wars and also mated with Neanderthals and so are less pure homo sapiens than the "Still in Africans."

So why VDARE? The name comes from Virginia Dare, one of the "lost colony" residents of Roanoke Virginia, and a baby during the three years before the colony was lost.

As the New Yorker explains:

In the hands of its literary interpreters, the Roanoke colony became a reprieve from a conquered, mapped, and increasingly developed American landscape. It also became the literary property of post-Confederate nostalgia, the “lost colony” linked symbolically to the “lost cause.” In an 1866 novel called “Roanoke; or, ‘Where Is Utopia?’ ” Calvin H. Wiley, who had been superintendent of public schools in Confederate North Carolina, set the colony’s descendants in a place where “the wild and restless demon of Progress has not yet breathed … its scorching breath on the green foliage of nature,—filial reverence, parental tenderness, conjugal fidelity, neighbourly kindness, and patriotic integrity.” 

In 1875, an anonymous “M. M.” published a story in Our Living and Our Dead, a North Carolina magazine dedicated to Confederate nostalgia and anti-Northern fomentation, in which Indian magic had turned Virginia Dare into an enchanted white doe who haunted the coastal forests for a century and witnessed the Indians’ "extinction, and the wide occupation of their forfeited patrimony, by that superior race, the Anglo-Saxon, with their bondsmen, the sable African, the red man’s inferior.” M. M.’s Virginia Dare also prophesied the Civil War as a national disaster: “divided, brave brothers fall beneath the yoke of despotism.”

White supremacists like to turn their biggest failures into victory narratives.

Another contributor to both Unz Review and VDARE is Taki Theodoracopulos, who also has his own magazine. We'll look at that next.

John Oliver vs. CRT Panic

Excellent episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" in which he discusses the end-goal of the CRT panic, created out of thin air by Koch employee and Trump supporter Christopher Rufo.

Rufo is a former member of the Koch-connected and race pseudoscience-friendly FAIR board of advisors.

I have to do an update on FAIR soon because I think it's now even further right-wing than ever. They've added nuclear energy shill Michael Shellenberger and yet another Quillette author, Jacob Mchangama.

I think the presence of so many Quillette authors (and Quillette editor Jon Kay) and race pseudoscience promoters Andrew Sullivan, Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer is a signal that the purpose of FAIR and its CRT panic is not only the standard right-wing scheme to force the US government to fund religious schools via "school choice."

Race pseudoscience, which claims Black Americans are innately, genetically inferior - and therefore as stated in a Quillette review by Razib Khan - an existential threat to America - cannot survive if Black American history is well-known. The reason Black Americans have not thrived is due to the legacy of slavery itself, plus Jim Crow, plus redlining, plus terrorism like the Tulsa massacre, etc etc. The attempt to erase Black history is the attempt to declare that Black American failure to thrive is the result of bad genes.

And that's why FAIR is not only against CRT, it is against teaching Black history, period, especially the 1619 project.

Michael Shermer, an official member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" who has been a member of the FAIR board of advisors since the very beginning of the organization, is very much a supporter of race pseudoscience as I discussed in the post Michael Shermer and Equalitarianism and the White Citizens' Councils. He also likes to call critics of Steven Pinker "cockroaches." He's also an admirer of pedophila apologist Camille Paglia.

Here we see FAIR board member Michael Shermer "debunking" the 1619 project with far-right historian Mary Grabar, who supports anti-1619 Project legislation:

Mary Grabar, a fellow at the right-wing Alexander Hamilton Institute, has written an essay praising Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) for introducing the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.” This is the right-wing version of “cancel culture,” except it adds government repression to the mix, making it far worse.

Grabar endorses censorship because she dismisses the idea that teachers are competent professionals who can be trusted to analyze complex concepts: “few teachers have the ability or the time to teach beyond the materials given to them.”

Grabar compares the 1619 Project to Howard Zinn, about whom she wrote a book called Debunking Howard Zinn because “Howard Zinn was bad–a communist, a corrupt teacher, a fraudulent historian, and an anti-American agitator.”

Like the 1619 Project, legislators have tried to ban Zinn from schools. Grabar complains that “When in 2017 Arkansas State representative Kim Hendren, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of Zinn’s book in state-funded classrooms,” the Zinn Education Project “framed the attempt as censorship.” Yes, how shocking, to describe legislation literally banning a book from public school as censorship.

Funny how often "free speech" advocates on the right end up supporting censorship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could this be an example of unintended consequences? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bari Weiss and her allies

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Free Press - the right-wing racist Bari Weiss grift

Bari Weiss calling her media outlet "The Free Press" is about as accurate as Donald Trump calling his media outlet "Truth Social." But many people are stupid and willing believers of right-wing grifters and fascist traitors.

I recently predicted in a comment on Threads that NPR's former editor Uri Berliner will soon reappear as either an employee of Weiss; running a right-wing plutocrat-funded Substack; or as a member of a right-wing think tank. So far my comment has received 223 likes. People are finally beginning to recognize the right-wing grift that was practiced by Weiss herself.

Weiss threw a fit and quit the New York Times, claiming it was too liberal and Uri Berliner quit NPR for the same reason. Weiss quit not long after she had a chance to promote her good buddies as "The Intellectual Dark Web." 

In 2020 I discovered Quillette's former editor Toby Young (recently seen on the racist Substack Aporia) complaining that the big article Weiss was planning about him and other far-right racists - no doubt another excuse to complain about liberals and the left - was not going to be published since Weiss had quit.

I suspect that the NYTimes refused to run a second "Glory of the IDW & friends" article and that is one of the reasons Weiss quit. 

Weiss has done very well for herself since then - financially, if not reputationally - by making friends with a bunch of right-wing activist billionaires, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and most notoriously, that corrupter of Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court, Harlan Crow, Weiss's "Sugar Daddy." 

"The Free Press" has a soft spot for filthy, treasonous, would-be dictator Trump, as discussed in this New York Magazine article.

Berliner hasn't yet revealed his new career as a right-wing grifter, but I'm keeping a look out. I took a look at "The Free Press" writers list to see if he is there yet, but did not see him. But as you might have guessed, the list is full of right-wing ghouls, grifters and racists, many of whom have written for far-right racist Quillette:

• Francesca Block - right-winger who claims on Twitter that her working for right-wing propaganda outlet "The Free Press" means journalism is not dead. I assume she was hired on the basis of her work for the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, writing articles like "Meet the American millionaire Marxists funding anti-Israel rallies."

• Nellie Bowles - wife of Bari Weiss. She's a big fan of stochastic terrorism-promoting psychopathic LibsofTikTok. 

• Katherine Boyle is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is a leader of techno-fascism. So I should add Marc Andreessen to the list of Bari Weiss's right-wing billionaire pals.

• Margi Conklin - hyper-natalist Nazi-sympathizer Elon Musk better not find out about Conklin's refusal to have children. Conklin is managing editor of "The Free Press" and doesn't appear to have written anything for it yet. Unfortunately for Margi, her husband Christopher Yates has nice things to say about NPR - the current target of the Uri Berliner-lead attempt to defund public radio. Margi's bosses better not find out!

• Matti Friedman - appears to write exclusively about Israel, and was accused by the Associated Press of lying when Friedman claimed the AP was biased against Israel. Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him for this round of Israel-Gaza hostilities. Attacking critics of Israel is Bari Weiss's oldest and possibly favorite public cause.

• Martin Gurri - right-wing ghoul, works for the Koch-funded and -controlled think tank the Mercatus Center, author at the disgraceful, sued-for-libel City Journal and denier of systemic racism (of course.)

• Rob Henderson - right-wing racist ghoul who loves Peter Thiel oh so much, has written for Quillette. Pals around with neo-Nazi Richard Hanania.

• Coleman Hughes - a reliable source of attacks on all Black-related issues such as reparations and the 1619 Project and is a defender of race pseudoscience in Quillette. 

• Eli Lake - claims to be anti-Trump but often defends Trump and others on the far right. Promotes Quillette on Twitter.

• Walter Kirn - business partner of disgraced journalist  and infamous misogynist Matt Taibbi.

• Douglas Murray - British white supremacist, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. I've mentioned him quite a few times on this blog. Current Affairs writes: "...as earlier critics of his work have noted, he packages white supremacist and xenophobic ideas in a way that makes them more palatable to the mainstream." Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him. Murray has written for Quillette, of course.

• Joe Nocera - token liberal, but maybe he's becoming right-wing now for that easy post-retirement grifter income.

• Vinay Prasad - anti-vax crackpot - "In October 2021, Prasad prompted social media controversy when he published a blog post comparing the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response to the beginnings of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich."

• Olivia Reingold - the Trump-loving Republican Security Council are big fans. Reingold can be seen on Twitter promoting the "Twitter files" lies and defending hiring far-right racist piece of shit political hack Ben Shapiro a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Reingold claimed hiring Shapiro would "legitimize" Politico. To understand what a far-right ghoul Reingold is, it helps to learn more about Shapiro at the always excellent Some More News. 

• Peter Savodnik has written for racist Quillette, taking up the standard right-wing racist political line that systemic racism must not really exist because "we certainly can’t experience systemic racism, not in the way that “experience” is understood by philosophers or, for that matter, judges." I have no doubt that Savodnik is, like Quillette and its founding editor Claire Lehmann, an "hereditarian."

• Abigail Shrier - right-wing ultra-ghoulish trans-phobic political operative. So perfect for the Bari Weiss grift. Quillette author, naturally.

• Rupa Subramanya - right-wing Canadian idiot, big fan of Julian Assange and Elon Musk, "slave to (her) cat." Hates Justin Trudeau, of course.

• Suzy Weiss - sister of Bari Weiss, so unsurprisingly a right-wing grifter, enjoying that sweet nepotism.

• Oliver Wiseman - defender of that weasel Steven Pinker for the far-right Libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education. That says it all.

• Leighton Woodhouse - right-wing ally of far-right nuclear power shill and climate change denier Michael Shellenberger

• Emily Yoffe - odious right-wing grifter who has written for the equally odious "Persuasion" and  prefers to blame drunken women for rape.

So there you have it - all the far-right favorites: racism, neo-Nazism, Trumpism, transphobia, anti-vax crackpottery, misogyny, climate change-denialism, stochastic terrorism and worship of far-right activist billionaire sugar daddies. 

What a toxic brew.