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Thursday, December 24, 2020

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.



Thursday, May 13, 2021

Is "man/boy love" what the IDW means by "Western Civilization"?

Pinkerite has previously noted that Camille Paglia is the Intellectual Dark Web's idea of a feminist and I suggested it was likely because she's a "feminist" who hates women. There is no clearer expression of Paglia's pure contempt for women as helpless losers than her statement that:

If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

Sexual Personae (1990)

This is why the IDW loves her. Because they agree with her - and in the case of Quillette's founder Claire Lehmann, with the above statement, explicitly.

Steven Pinker in "The Blank Slate, " published in 2002, praised Paglia as a real feminist in contrast to Gloria Steinem. As the NewYork Magazine review of The Blank Slate notes:

Pinker musters his vast armies of intellectual allies (these range from Kant to the editors of The Onion) and goes back into the past in search of enemies. He air-drops Camille Paglia into a dispute over rape with Susan Brownmiller...

But we shouldn't let Paglia's misogyny prevent us from noting her support for child rape. 

Here is the web site of the North American Man/Boy Love Association proudly displaying her support for their cause

In case you don't want to give the NAMBLA site more hits, here is what it says:

These days, especially in America, boy-love is not only scandalous and criminal, but somehow in bad taste. On the evening news, one sees handcuffed teachers, priests and Boy Scout leaders hustled into police vans. Therapists call them maladjusted, emotionally immature. But beauty has its own laws, inconsistent with Christian morality. As a woman, I feel free to protest that men today are pilloried for something that was rational and honorable in Greece at the height of its civilization.

~ Camille Paglia, activist and author

          in Sexual Personae (New York,Vintage Books1991).

Quillette author Chloe Valdary has recently been singing the praises of Camille Paglia and even gave a heads-up about her to Trump-adoring Koch employee Christopher Rufo



Dear Camille:
For many of us children of the '60s, the recent death of Allen Ginsberg was a major loss. But some critics contend that Ginsberg's legacy is stained by his support for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. What are your feelings about Ginsberg? What do you think of his pro-NAMBLA stand? 
San Francisco hippie

Dear Hippie:

Allen Ginsberg, along with Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown...

...As far as Ginsberg's pro-NAMBLA stand goes, this is one of the things I most admire him for. I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In "Sexual Personae," I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization. Donatello's historically pivotal bronze sculpture, "David" (1430), was my main exhibit -- a languidly flirtatious work that would get the artist arrested for kiddie porn these days. In "Vamps & Tramps," I said that Western moralism and hypocrisy have driven the matter underground and overseas, where impoverished Third World boys now supply the sex trade.

Allen Ginsberg was the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality. Like the expansive, sensual, democratic Whitman but unlike the twisted, dishonest, pretentious Foucault, he saw the continuity between great nature and the human body, bathed in waves of cosmic energy. Seen from this pagan perspective, Ginsberg's celebration of boy-love was pure and sinless, demonstrating the limitations of Judeo-Christian paradigms of sexuality.


The last line is especially amusing considering Valdary tweets that Paglia "gives an incredible defense of religion." Which religion is Valdary talking about, paganism? From Paglia's point of view, Judeo-Christianity is limited by its refusal to sanction male pedophilia (except of course for the decades of allowing rapist priests to run wild.)

But more importantly, it's clear that Paglia is not merely an apologist for child rape, she considers it admirable and states flat out: "I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization."

And she doesn't have a problem with the Third World sex trade. Rather, she seems to feel that if only "moralism and hypocrisy" hadn't driven the underage sex trade underground here, pedophiles wouldn't have to travel so far to get their boy-raping done. 

Paglia published this in 1997. Pinker was praising her as an "equity feminist" in 2002

Steven Pinker is ready to jump down the throat of Taylor Swift for the misuse of the word "literally" but Paglia's support of child rape does not faze him in the least. Pinker praises her. He considers Paglia an ally.





I haven't been able to find Christopher Rufo's opinion of Camille Paglia, but his employer Charles Koch apparently adores her because Koch's City Journal promotes Paglia without mentioning her love of "man/boy love." I doubt Rufo would speak out against Paglia's admiration for male pedophilia as long as his pay-master forbids it.

So what is the deal with people like Steven Pinker and Chloe Valdary and other members of the Intellectual Dark Web? Do they really not care that Paglia is a vocal defender of child rape? Do they think supporting child rape is no big deal? Do they agree with Paglia that child-rape is a critical building block of their beloved "Western Civilization"?

Are they really that evil?

Monday, May 31, 2021

Adam Rutherford, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Quillette


Thomas Chatterton Williams is best friends with Bari Weiss, so it's no surprise that he's also friendly with her best friends, the IDW-Quillette industrial complex.


Here he is agreeing with Caliper Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, the most race pseudo-science friendly publication since American Renaissance.

Where Williams aligns with the Quillette gang the most, it seems, is on the issue of reparations. Quillette promoted the career of race pseudo-science apologist Coleman Hughes until he ended up being famous as the Black guy who opposed slave reparations in Congress.


We also see Williams snarking about Ta-Nehisi Coates with Quillette author Chloe S. Valdary who also happens to be a fan of man-boy love lover Camille Paglia.

Valdary runs a project, Theory of Enchantment, that appears to have no visible means of funding, so it's likely supported by the standard right-wing plutocratic money that funds so many people in the IDW/Quillette industrial complex.






 





So Thomas Chatterton Williams is pretty cozy with Quillette people, but his friendly colleague Adam Rutherford is definitely not. You can see Rutherford's contempt for Quillette when he mentions it during his interview with Williams.

Rutherford the moment he begins to say "Quillette."


Since he is a critic of race science, and doesn't worship dead famous men as gods, Rutherford is a natural enemy of Quillette. Recently Quillette ran an article by Sean Welsh complaining that Rutherford was not sufficiently respectful of Francis Galton's Great Man of Science status enough to prevent Rutherford from mentioning Galton's support for eugenics. 

Of course Quillette is pretty OK with eugenics, its London editor is Toby Young, known for his support for eugenics


In spite of all that, I was surprised to see the beginning of this Twitter exchange between Rutherford and Claire Lehmann. I was just saying how extremely diplomatic Adam Rutherford usually is, so he must really despise Quillette to respond that way.

Please note that Lehmann starts the Twitter thread below by retweeting race-obsessive creep and friend of Steven Pinker, Razib Khan.



In that last tweet we see Lehmann griping because Rutherford gave a good review to Angela Saini's book "Superior: The Return of Race Science." Lehmann herself made sure to give the task of reviewing the book to notorious racist Bo Winegard and race pseudo-science extremist Noah Carl

But Rutherford almost immediately switches back to his customary diplomacy, conceding a point which I think he should not have conceded.



I had to laugh at Lehmann trying to make Rutherford's reasonable request for a response to a point into "men who have the gall to tell me what to do." 

Dear baby Jesus she is such a clown. As Seth Rogen recently discovered.




I understand why Rutherford usually tries to be nice to the race pseudo-science gang. His job is science communicator. He's not interested in checking to see if Thomas Chatterton Williams is utterly lacking in intellectual integrity, one moment acting as though he has a gotcha moment proving that race is biological on August 12, then on August 18 agreeing with Adam Rutherford that race is not biological.

That's why Pinkerite is here, to point out what absolute weasels people associated with the IDW/Quillette industrial complex are, and I feel no need to be diplomatic about it. 

Although I don't think I could ever be as perfectly shameless as Steven Pinker or Claire Lehmann.  




I like to think of myself as an American cultural critic and author, like Thomas Chatterton Williams.


Except of course I don't take money to be an activist for democracy-hating Charles Koch.

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Steven Pinker and the race pseudoscience network

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this recent video, at minute 1:10 Hooven says:
...(Pinker's) also interested in, obviously, at lot of the kinds of issues that I'm interested in, The Blank Slate, is, you know, his early book, had a big impact on me and my thinking - how I thought about sex differences...

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



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


"The Blank Slate" was Pinker's evolutionary psychology manifesto, so perfectly reviewed by Louis Menand in the New Yorker when it was released in 2002:
Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals." 
My theory for why Pinker tries to "have it both ways" is because he wants plausible deniability for his actual beliefs about Black people.

The New Yorker review mentions Judith Rich Harris, but the review does not mention how instrumental Pinker was in promoting the career of Harris
Moreover, when her great encourager Steven Pinker and I each nominated her paper for the annual award for “outstanding paper on general psychology,” the judges selected her as co-recipient of the—I am not making this up—George A. Miller Award. (To his credit, Miller later termed the irony “delicious.”)
Harris is so popular among believers in sociobiology that a leading promoter of "biosocial criminology," Kevin Beaver, is the Judith Rich Harris Professor of Criminology at Florida State University.


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

Page 149:
...Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially. 
Page 150:
From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality. 
The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.
I have no doubt Pinker holds similar beliefs. He has consistently promoted and supported those who hold these beliefs (Razib Khan, Bo Winegard, Linda Gottfredson, Steve Sailer) and his beliefs echo those of racist Amy Wax.

Unfortunately any time Pinker is interviewed, the interviewer treats him with kid gloves, due to the rarely broken gentlemen's agreement and refuses to make Pinker express exactly what he believes, as in this interview:
The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism...
So if the problem isn't poverty and racism... what exactly is the problem? Pinker is too much the weasel to come right out and say it.

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, January 12, 2023

That sleazy Harper's Letter, almost three years later, let's review


Basically, anywhere there is an obscenely wealthy plutocrat funding right-wing/Libertarian political causes, there you will likely find Bari Weiss


How bad was the infamous Harper's Letter?

Consider first, that it was created by Thomas Chatterton Williams who, I don't believe coincidentally, was put on wingnut welfare via the Koch-funded AEI a few months later.

I once admired Williams, but by the time of his embarrassing chateau incident (he declared on Twitter that he kicked a friend out of his home in France for criticizing Bari Weiss) I had realized he was in deep with the right-wing Libertarian ghouls in and around the Intellectual Dark Web. 

That was bad enough, and then the New Yorker's Ian Chotiner interviewed Williams and revealed what an extreme intellectual lightweight he is. 

Williams' friendship with Bari Weiss is key. She is a central figure in the Intellectual Dark Web, a member of the far-right leaning FAIR, an organization based on the cynical, sleazy right-wing campaign against "critical race theory" and more recently a supporter and defender of far-right homophobic treasonousstochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok, funded by Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon, while aiding and abetting far-right goon Elon Musk.

Here is Weiss in June 2020, promoting her people: Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill); another Koch employee Kmele Foster (@kmele) a devotee of Ayn Randstochastic terrorist James Lindsay (@ConceptualJames), a Trump supporter and partner of far-right religious extremist Michael O'Fallon, Lindsay was banned from the old Twitter for being a neo-Nazi; and IDW founder and crackpot Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein), employee of scary weirdo Peter Thiel

Basically, anywhere there is an obscenely wealthy plutocrat funding right-wing/Libertarian political causes, there you will likely find Bari Weiss.


At the time of the Harper's Letter, Tom Scocca in Slate discussed how sleazy the stunt was:

What were the Harper’s signatories trying to accomplish? For a document announcing an emergency, their letter (addressed, as the writer Luppe Luppen pointed out, to no one) was studiously vague about exactly what it meant to warn the reader against. It presented a nonspecific and mostly pluralized litany of complaints:

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

At least one item—”a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed study”—did seem to have an identifiable antecedent: David Shor, a researcher at the consulting company Civis Analytics, tweeted out a study concluding that voter backlash against violent protest in 1968 had tipped the presidential election to Richard Nixon and was fired after people denounced the tweet. There seems to be fairly broad agreement, among people who would even know about this incident, that Civis was wrong to fire him, and the incident does look like a classic example of a company sacrificing an innocent for “panicked damage control.” But this pattern of targeted pressure and overreaction is not a new crisis. It has been established for years by now, in right-wing and left-wing outrage campaigns alike, and the fault lies with the institutions that still haven’t figured out how it works, not with the generalized, newly ascendant cultural revolution that the Harper’s letter or Trump wishes to raise the alarm about.   

Yet, rather than defending Shor and criticizing Civis by name, the letter anonymized his case and stuck it next to a complaint about powerful people losing their jobs “for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes”—a rickety construction that leaves the reader wondering if it’s supposed to cover the times that aren’t just clumsy mistakes, or how one is to decide which mistakes are more than just clumsy. Also, which “journalists are barred from writing on certain topics”? In June, two Black journalists were prohibited from covering the Black Lives Matter protests by the owner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but the letter admonishes the reader that “resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion,” while the Post-Gazette is in the hands of a passionate Trumpist.

But it wasn't only sleazy in its hypocrisy, but also in the sense of using phony bipartisanship, a favorite Koch tactic, by recruiting well-known people on the left who should have known better: Katha Pollitt, Dahlia Lithwick, Jeet Heer and Gloria Steinem.

Here is a list of all the signers of the Harper's letter: the Quillette contributors, the transphobes, right-wingers, Koch employees and the feckless dummies of the center and left.
  1. Elliot Ackerman |  journalist
  2. Saladin Ambar |  academic
  3. Martin Amis | Islamophobe novelist
  4. Anne Applebaum | journalist and defender of Roman Polanski
  5. Marie Arana | author
  6. Margaret Atwood | sort-of-feminist novelist
  7. John Banville | author
  8. Mia Bay | historian
  9. Louis Begley | novelist
  10. Roger Berkowitz | Bard College and author at right-wing racist Quillette
  11. Paul Berman, writer | author at Quillette
  12. Sheri Berman | Barnard College
  13. Reginald Dwayne Betts | poet
  14. Neil Blair | agent of transphobic J.K. Rowling
  15. David W. Blight | Yale University historian - should have known better
  16. Jennifer Finney Boylan | transgender author - rescinded signature (although it's still listed at Harpers) when she realized what this stunt was really about, when she saw that J.K. Rowling had signed it. More recently she wrote a piece about Rowling.
  17. David Bromwich | Yale University
  18. David Brooks | annoying center-right columnist
  19. Ian Buruma  | Bard College
  20. Lea Carpenter | writer
  21. Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus) - should have known better
  22. Nicholas A. Christakis | Yale University, right-wing, defender of Razib Khan
  23. Roger Cohen | center-right journalist
  24. Ambassador Frances D. Cook | career politician
  25. Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project | should have known better
  26. Kamel Daoud | journalist
  27. Meghan Daum, writer | former liberal, current member of the IDW/Quillette gang
  28. Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis | should have known better
  29. Jeffrey Eugenides | writer
  30. Dexter Filkins | journalist
  31. Federico Finchelstein | The New School
  32. Caitlin Flanagan | anti-feminist
  33. Richard T. Ford | Stanford Law School
  34. Kmele Foster - Koch employee, Ayn Rand fan, promoted by Bari Weiss
  35. David Frum | former Bush speechwriter
  36. Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University | Quillette authorReason Magazine contributor
  37. Atul Gawande | Harvard University, Biden administration
  38. Todd Gitlin | Columbia University
  39. Kim Ghattas | journalist
  40. Malcolm Gladwell | Koch funded-Reason Magazine contributor
  41. Michelle Goldberg, columnist - should have known better
  42. Rebecca Goldstein | married to Steven Pinker
  43. Anthony Grafton | Princeton University
  44. David Greenberg | Rutgers University
  45. Linda Greenhouse - should have known better
  46. Rinne B. Groff | playwright
  47. Sarah Haider | Quillette cause
  48. Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern - long-time promoter of race pseudoscience
  49. Roya Hakakian | writer
  50. Shadi Hamid | Brookings Institution
  51. Jeet Heer, The Nation - should have known better
  52. Katie Herzog, podcast host |  defender of Andy Ngo, fan of QuilletteReason Magazine
  53. Susannah Heschel | Dartmouth College
  54. Adam Hochschild | author
  55. Arlie Russell Hochschild | author
  56. Eva Hoffman | writer
  57. Coleman Hughes | writer for (Koch-funded) Manhattan Institute, author at Quillette
  58. Hussein Ibish | Arab Gulf States Institute
  59. Michael Ignatieff | politician
  60. Zaid Jilani, journalist | member of the IDW/Quillette gang including FAIRforall, Quillette author
  61. Bill T. Jones | New York Live Arts
  62. Wendy Kaminer | advisory council member of Koch-funded FIREReason Magazine contributor
  63. Matthew Karp, Princeton University | far-left
  64. Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative | the chess guy
  65. Daniel Kehlmann  | writer
  66. Randall Kennedy | law professor
  67. Khaled Khalifa | writer
  68. Parag Khanna | author
  69. Laura Kipnis | Northwestern UniversityReason Magazine contributor
  70. Frances Kissling | Catholics for a Free Choice
  71. Enrique Krauze | historian
  72. Anthony Kronman | Yale University
  73. Joy Ladin | Yeshiva University
  74. Nicholas Lemann | Columbia University
  75. Mark Lilla | Columbia University
  76. Susie Linfield | New York University
  77. Damon Linker | works for Libertarian Niskanen center, dictator appeaser
  78. Dahlia Lithwick, Slate - should have known better
  79. Steven Lukes | New York University
  80. John R. MacArthur | Harper's publisher
  81. Susan Madrak | writer - should have known better
  82. Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer for right-wing Unheard, friend of Quillette
  83. Greil Marcus | music journalist
  84. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center - should have known better
  85. Kati Marton | author
  86. Debra Mashek worked for DonorsTrust -funded Heterodox Academy
  87. Deirdre McCloskey | LibertarianReason Magazine contributor
  88. John McWhorter | Reason Magazine contributor
  89. Uday Mehta | City University of New York
  90. Andrew Moravcsik | Princeton University
  91. Yascha Mounk |  Persuasion - appears to be another media outlet for the IDW, with several Harper's Letter signers including McWhorter, Yoffe, Haidt and Pinker.
  92. Samuel Moyn | Yale University
  93. Meera Nanda | writer and teacher
  94. Cary Nelson | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  95. Olivia Nuzzi | New York Magazine
  96. Mark Oppenheimer | Yale University
  97. Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer - should have known better
  98. George Packer | writer
  99. Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita) - should have known better
  100. Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – should have known better
  101. Orlando Patterson | Harvard University
  102. Steven Pinker - ugh
  103. Letty Cottin Pogrebin - should have known better
  104. Katha Pollitt, writer - should have known better
  105. Claire Bond Potter, The New School - should have known better
  106. Taufiq Rahim | New America
  107. Zia Haider Rahman | writer
  108. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen | University of Wisconsin
  109. Jonathan Rauch | Brookings Institution/The AtlanticReason Magazine contributorQuillette contributor
  110. Neil Roberts | political theorist
  111. Melvin Rogers | Brown University
  112. Kat Rosenfield | Reason Magazine contributor
  113. Loretta J. Ross | Smith College
  114. J.K. Rowling | children's book author, infamous transphobe
  115. Salman Rushdie, New York University
  116. Karim Sadjadpour | Carnegie Endowment
  117. Daryl Michael Scott | Howard University
  118. Diana Senechal | teacher and writer
  119. Jennifer Senior | columnist
  120. Judith Shulevitz | writer
  121. Jesse Singal, journalist | infamous transphobeReason Magazine contributor
  122. Anne-Marie Slaughter | lawyer
  123. Andrew Solomon | writer
  124. Deborah Solomon | critic and biographer
  125. Allison Stanger, Middlebury College | became a political cause of the race pseudoscience right for her support for infamous race pseudoscience racist Charles Murray
  126. Paul Starr | American Prospect/Princeton University
  127. Wendell Steavenson | writer
  128. Gloria Steinem - should have known better
  129. Nadine Strossen | defender of race pseudoscienceReason Magazine contributor
  130. Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., | Harvard Law School
  131. Kian Tajbakhsh | Columbia University
  132. Zephyr Teachout | Fordham University
  133. Cynthia Tucker | University of South Alabama
  134. Adaner Usmani | Harvard University
  135. Chloe Valdary - part of the Quillette/IDW world
  136. Helen Vendler | Harvard University
  137. Judy B. Walzer | academic
  138. Michael Walzer | academic
  139. Eric K. Washington | historian
  140. Caroline Weber | historian
  141. Randi Weingarten | American Federation of Teachers
  142. Bari Weiss - I would bet she was one of the instigators of this stunt
  143. Cornel West | public intellectual
  144. Sean Wilentz | Princeton University
  145. Garry Wills | historian
  146. Thomas Chatterton Williams | Koch employee, creator of the Harper's Letter stunt
  147. Robert F. Worth | journalist and author
  148. Molly Worthen | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  149. Matthew Yglesias | political operative at Libertarian think tank, friend of Razib Khan
  150. Emily Yoffe, journalist | right-leaning "cancel culture" hystericReason Magazine contributor
  151. Cathy Young, journalist | Koch-funded career, pioneer of stochastic terrorism IMO
  152. Fareed Zakaria | political commentator

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