Jesse Singal is still a lazy half-wit "journalist"

No surprise to see that one of the fans of lazy half-wit "journalist" Jesse Singal is right-wing Koch brothers hack Cathy Young.

I was amused to read the comments in this thread, although not because the commenters were deliberately funny. Much like Singal himself, his Twitter followers are, try as they might, wit-less.

Almost none of them seems capable of actually reading what I've written about Pinker and his evo-psycho bro followers, or understanding it. But then, you really can't expect intellectual rigor from people who are impressed by Steven Pinker.

It actually has been a super year for Jesse Singal - he's under-qualified to be a journalist and yet he gets paid to write. He should count his blessings. 

But maybe that's why he cultivates hacks like Cathy Young - maybe someday Singal will give up journalism, which he really isn't suited for, and get Cathy Young to help him get a career that does suit him - wingnut welfare. 

Because it's possible that one of these days his editors will get tired of his habit of turning himself into the story:

• Jesse Singal, please leave me alone
• Journalist Jesse Singal says he ‘goofed’ on interpreting trans study
• New York Magazine's Jesse Singal commits fraud
• My Jesse Singal story

With any luck Singal will screen cap this too and post it on Twitter and we can keep it going - I'm happy to keep adding to the "stories about Jesse Singal" collection.

Jesse Singal demonstrates once again he's a terrible journalist

Well that didn't take long for Jesse Singal to keep this going. I'm beginning to think that Singal is not only a really bad excuse for a journalist but a raging narcissist. Which would explain why so many hits on his name are people writing about him, rather than the other way around.

Anybody with a basic comprehension of the English language would understand that the reason I posted the link to the Change.org petition had nothing to do with any claims about Singal being alt-right. I never even used the term alt-right in the blog post.

Right before the list which included the link to the change.org petition I wrote:

Because it's possible that one of these days his editors will get tired of his habit of turning himself into the story:

How is it possible that Jesse Singal can be a journalist while having a reading comprehension issue?

Singal initially came to my attention because of his carelessness with facts - a trait you would think would disqualify someone from earning a living as a journalist. As PZ Myers noted about Singal's defense of Pinker:

Even when they vaguely puzzle out this point, Pinker supporters don’t understand it. What does Jesse Singal say in the New York Times? 

(Myers quoting Singal) 

The clip was deeply misleading. If you watch the whole eight-minute video from which it was culled, it’s clear that Mr. Pinker’s entire point is that the alt-right’s beliefs are false and illogical — but that the left needs to do a better job fighting against them.  

(end quote)

No. He clearly says that the alt-right’s beliefs are the fault of the “PC” Left, which says nothing about making better arguments to oppose them, and is a falsehood. His talk was about doling out the blame to the Left, not about fighting the alt-right. If you listen to the whole 8-minute video, what you hear is Pinker first saying that you can’t voice certain facts on campus, then stating those facts (self-refutation, anyone?), then explaining that his facts are more complex than he let on, which is what the college professors he’s blaming already do. But then this kind of disingenuous denial of reality, of focusing superficially on he said/she said note-taking, is exactly what the New York Times specializes in.

I said this at the time and today's exchange has only confirmed it: Jesse Singal is a lazy sloppy journalist and that trait is just as apparent in his tweets. 

Jesse Singal, Pinkerite, defends Pinker in the NYTimes

UPDATE: it turns out that Jesse Singal is a member of the evo-psycho club

The irony is that many of the people who admire Pinker consider themselves New Atheists and skeptics, yet it doesn't seem to bother them at all that not only does Pinker make extremist claims sans evidence, but also proclaims his opinions to be "the truth."

And if you point out that Pinker has a long history of making common cause with the right, and then the alt-right, they will push back on his behalf immediately. Yesterday's NYTimes published an op-ed by Jesse Singal, Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A.

I wrote an op-ed response and sent it into the NYTimes but I don't know if they will publish it or not. 

PZ Myers was mentioned by name in Singal's piece:

Steven Pinker has long been a darling of the white supremacist ‘alt-right,’” noted the lefty journalist Ben Norton. “And he returns the favor.” Others reacted to the rumor with simple exasperation: “Christ on a crutch,” said the liberal commentator and biologist PZ Myers, who also wrote a blog post denouncing Mr. Pinker for this supposed alliance.

Myers responded on his blog, Steven Pinker and the New York Times are making us dumber and makes one of the same points I did in my as-yet unpublished op-ed:

Even when they vaguely puzzle out this point, Pinker supporters don’t understand it. What does Jesse Singal say in the New York Times?

The clip was deeply misleading. If you watch the whole eight-minute video from which it was culled, it’s clear that Mr. Pinker’s entire point is that the alt-right’s beliefs are false and illogical — but that the left needs to do a better job fighting against them.

No. He clearly says that the alt-right’s beliefs are the fault of the “PC” Left, which says nothing about making better arguments to oppose them, and is a falsehood. His talk was about doling out the blame to the Left, not about fighting the alt-right. If you listen to the whole 8-minute video, what you hear is Pinker first saying that you can’t voice certain facts on campus, then stating those facts (self-refutation, anyone?), then explaining that his facts are more complex than he let on, which is what the college professors he’s blaming already do. But then this kind of disingenuous denial of reality, of focusing superficially on he said/she said note-taking, is exactly what the New York Times specializes in.

Jesse Singal is a lazy sloppy journalist and that trait is just as apparent in his tweets. Here he is uncritically repeating Pinker's claim that all he is saying is "the biological contribution to gender differences is greater than zero" along with the claim that there are "people" who react to that as if it was alt-right.

Naturally neither Singal nor Pinker provide any evidence there are people doing that. But even more importantly, "greater than zero" is hardly the extent of what Pinker believes. He believes that biological differences are the cause of a variety of social phenomenon. Which is why he defended Larry Summers.

Pinker lies on the anti-PC video about the source of the Larry Summers controversy, in the same way.

He portrays the Larry Summers controversy as though Summers was punished by simply stating that men and women are different. The actual controversy was that Summers, while the president of Harvard and thus having some power over hiring decisions, suggested at a conference on diversity in STEM that the foremost reason women had less successful careers in STEM than men was because their brains were by nature less capable of STEM subjects than the brains of men.

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

So what exactly were the dire repercussions of Larry Summers proclaiming "the truth"? A few years later Summers went to work for the Obama administration. Apparently the university/media cabal dedicated to withholding the truth is not nearly as powerful as Steven Pinker would have you believe.

It's because of lazy, careless journalists like Singal that Pinker has been getting away with making common cause with professional rightwing racists all these years.

Jesse Singal gets on board the wingnut welfare gravy train

More of my thoughts on Jesse Singal


When I last mentioned Jesse Singal, the transphobic, Steven Pinker fan-boy on this blog, it was about his passive-aggressive tweets against me. Since then he's covered himself in more shame with his transphobic articles.

Being anti-trans is of course a hallmark of the alt-right-pretending-to-be-centrist flagship of the "intellectual dark web", Quillette. Being pro-Pinker - and that means pro-hereditarian, pro-evolutionary psychology, is also a hallmark of Quillette. And then too, Singal is a buddy of Pinker's favorite out proponent of race science, Razib Khan, also an author at Quillette.

So it wasn't especially prophetic of me, when back in April I said:

But maybe that's why he cultivates hacks like Cathy Young - maybe someday Singal will give up journalism, which he really isn't suited for, and get Cathy Young to help him get a career that does suit him - wingnut welfare. 

My mistake was thinking that "someday" Singal would get on board the wingnut welfare gravy train, instead of "very soon" - as of July 9, Jesse Singal is a contributor to Reason Magazine.

You can't go broke supporting a position that the Koch brothers also support.

Apparently Cathy Young (also an author at Quillette) is not afraid of being sued for defamation.

Cathy Young, Jesse Singal & Gamergate

Cathy Young wearing a pro-Gamergate
T-shirt from Know Your Memes

I am actually pretty glad I'm not better-known, contrary to Cathy Young's claim last week that I'm trying to "get in the spotlight somehow." If I was better known I might become the target of a vicious misogynist mob, and if I was, Cathy Young would no doubt cheer them on.

I admit before she and Jesse Singal teamed up to personally attack me last week, I hadn't really paid much attention to what Young was up to, especially since she wasn't included in the Intellectual Dark Web article written by Bari Weiss. A fact for which Young expressed what sounds like sour grapes to me, here.

I was more aware of Cathy Young's ideological twin and fellow Reason Magazine contributor, Christina Hoff Sommers, who was mentioned in the Weiss article and who was also a friend of Milo Yiannopoulos and a booster of the men's rights movement.

Up until this week I had only mentioned Cathy Young, in passing, four times in the entire almost 12-year history of this blog.

I blogged about the May 2015 article in Boston Magazine which gives detailed information about the horrific evil of Eron Gjoni, the man who started Gamergate by harassing and doxxing his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn. An excerpt:

He chooses his words deliberately, spending much of our time together describing the month after his breakup with Quinn: how he extracted details from her Facebook, text, and email accounts; how he tracked her movements and shadowed her conversations. The process he described to me sounded as if he were gathering the pieces of a horrible machine, with each component designed to be as damaging to Quinn as possible. Eventually, the machine would have a name: “The Zoe Post,” a 9,425-word screed he published in August.

Then later:

From the start, it seems, Gjoni wanted to make certain that his blog about Quinn would connect with a large base of people in the gaming community, some of whom he already knew were passionately predisposed to attacking women in the industry. 

As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.” 

One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent. 

As he wrote, Gjoni kept pressing Quinn for information. About a week after their final breakup in San Francisco, Quinn finally stopped responding to Gjoni’s barrage of texts, Facebook messages, emails, and calls. He interpreted this not as a surrender or a retreat from his unwanted advances but instead, paradoxically, as a kind of attack. As he wrote at the time and later posted online, “GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. SHE’S AVOIDED ME EVER SINCE THIS CONVERSATION BECAUSE SHE IS PARANOID I MIGHT GO PUBLIC.” From this circular reasoning emerged a twisted justification: By withholding information, Quinn was somehow forcing Gjoni to “go public.” Eventually, Gjoni would come to see himself as the victim. “I was panicking at the thought of not publishing [‘The Zoe Post’],” he told me. “I didn’t care what the outcome was for Zoe.” 

After crafting the post for weeks, Gjoni shared his polished draft with about a dozen friends—mostly female game developers—as well as his mother, and asked them to weigh in on whether he should unleash it. He says about 10 of them gave him the green light. His mother, he claims, reluctantly approved, but was “very worried that I was going into it overly emotional.” One Gjoni friend I spoke with, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, said, “I felt it was healthy to get it out there…. What harm would it do to get his feelings out?” 

Others who later read the post saw something much more deliberate and malicious. Jesse Singal, an editor at NYMag.com, said it clearly “followed a script” of “these sad, specific ideas that a segment of the gaming community has about women being duplicitous and breaking men’s hearts.” Slate’s Arthur Chu told me, “He’s an articulate, well-spoken guy who knows how to put together something on the Internet. That’s the kind of weapon guys like that have…the ‘crazy bitch’ story. It’s a very potent trope to use…. It’s a very nasty, very calculating train of thought, and it worked.”

The "Zoe post" was not only incredibly vicious it was well thought-out and vetted -  Gjoni even got his mom and female friends to review it. This wasn't a moment's act of passion, this was a crowd-sourced project. It's astounding how so many people knew Gjoni was stalking his ex-girlfriend and planning on a massive invasion of her privacy and didn't talk him out of it.

And Gjoni knew exactly what the effect would be of his vicious attack, because Zoe Quinn had already been harassed online, as documented by an article in the New Yorker, simply for publishing a video game the harassers didn't like.

I was very interested to see that Young and Singal were on opposite sides of Gamergate, as I highlighted in the passage above. Cathy Young was such an enthusiastic supporter of Gamergate that she celebrated the second anniversary of the "Zoe Post" with this tweet, alerting her followers to the interview she had done with Gjoni.

She published it in something called Heat St. which appears to be no more, but I found it on the Wayback Machine, and reposted the interview here for ease of access.

It's clear that Cathy Young thinks Eron Gjoni is just swell:

The man who started it all has kept a relatively low profile. Gjoni, who was born in Albania and came to the United States with his family at the age of six, still lives in Boston where he and Quinn met. He is working on creating an artificially intelligent animation program that he hopes will be eventually be used by people who don’t have access to a major studio. He is on Twitter, where his posts often show a wry, quirky humor. (His profile quote is, “A good pun is its own reword.”)

This was published after the Boston Magazine article which Young mentions in an attempt to suggest it was unfair to Gjoni:

CY: Speaking of which, are there journalists who have given you a fair shake? 

EG: I think the closest was that journalist from Vice [Mike Pearl], and it was the closest because he ignored what I said completely and just talked about my views on [GamerGate mascot] Vivian James. 

CY: Zachary Jason’s piece for Boston Magazine insinuated that you’re still obsessed with Zoe Quinn because you suggested meeting at the place where you and she had first hung out. And the real reason was… 

EG: It’s because I’m vegan. He suggested lunch, and I said, “Cool, let’s go to a vegan place.” There are no vegan places [in Boston] where I have not been with her.

She also gets Gjoni to admit that if he could do it over again, he would stalk and endanger and invade the privacy of Zoe Quinn all over again:

Cathy Young: Let’s say that tomorrow someone comes to you with a time machine and you can go back to August 2014 and decide whether or not to do it all over again. Would you do it, and would you do anything differently? 

Eron Gjoni: It would be harder to do it. I would still do it, but it’s like—oh, this is going to suck. (Laughs) I suppose I’d take out the “burgers and fries” joke. I wasn’t sure about it, but people who were looking it over at the time said it was too funny to take out [and] like, “All right, I’ll trust you on it.”

Cathy Young doesn't only think Eron Gjoni is swell, she was pals, like Christina Hoff Sommers, with Milo Yiannopoulos  bonding over GamerGate. All three can be seen together in this Youtube video on Yiannopoulos's channel under the title Milo, Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young explain journalism to the SPJ.

The Guardian wrote of Yiannopoulos' connection to GamerGate:

Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos in particular seemed such a desperate opportunist that we never predicted his rise to prominence, having explicitly stereotyped gamers in the past as “overweight” and “embarrassing”. A disgraced journalist and entrepreneur who had to close his tech site The Kernel due to unpaid debts, leaving staff uncertain if they would ever be paid, he’d then spent the next few years spouting insincere hateful ideas to a burgeoning Twitter audience who responded to his anti-feminist, anti-establishment invectives. He was eventually banned from the platform after finally abusing a woman who was apparently just famous enough for Twitter to respond.

It was apparent to me that there was something off about Yiannopoulos the first time I heard him, but Young and Sommers were either too dull or just didn't want to understand what a psychopath he truly is.

Young has defended Gamergate many times.

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - The Observer

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - Reason Magazine

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - Reason Magazine again

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - RealClearPolitics

By 2017 Cathy Young was still pro-GamerGate, even if she criticized Yiannopoulos.

This is not to rehash GamerGate but to say that I still think Milo was basically on the right side of it. (I also think he did it far more harm than good.)

Young might have been on the opposite side of GamerGate from Jesse Singal, but a year before the second anniversary of the Zoe Post, Young was able to use Singal's complaints about the UN report on cyberharassment as an excuse to attack Anita Sarkeesian as a "professional victim."

Sarkeesian was another target of the GamerGate mob who had to cancel a talk at Utah State after receiving threats.

Since GamerGate, Young and Singal seem to have bonded over their antagonism towards transgenderism. In February 2016, months before she celebrated the second anniversary of GamerGate Young defended Singal against "political correctness" over an article of his which had antagonized the transgender community.

Singal has been criticized often for his articles on transgenderism and I do find it odd how often he writes on that topic. I will be exploring Singal and Young's apparent obsession over transgenderism at some point in the future. We already know that another of Young's right-wing employers, Quillette has a hostile editorial line towards transgenderism.

Singal left Twitter for a very short time. When he came back he and Young had become a kind of team, something noticed in December 2017 by another Twitterer.

Anita Sarkeesian was driven from her home because of GamerGate. So was Brianna Wu. So was Zoe Quinn.

Meanwhile, Cathy Young expresses far more concern for Jesse Singal's very brief Twitter hiatus than she ever did for any of the women driven from their homes by the misogynist mob that Cathy Young celebrated, supported, encouraged and defended. And Jesse Singal seems to have no problem with Cathy Young's viciousness.

And talk they did. I think Young helped get Singal a gig at the Koch brothers' Reason Magazine. He's published two articles there so far, one suggests the #MeToo movement has gone too far, and the other is the absolute non-issue "Is it Racist to Refer to Space Colonization." I'm sure sooner or later he will publish something about transgenderism.

Cathy Young really should seek counseling for her internalized misogyny, although if she did get help, it could threaten her career of siding with monstrous men against women. And after all, constant attacks against other women is what the Koch brothers pay her for.

BOTH

Jesse Singal, member of the evo-psycho club

I just assumed Jesse Singal who wrote a NYTimes piece defending Steven Pinker while white-washing Pinker's actual views was a disinterested writer on the subject of Steven Pinker and accidentally misstated what Pinker actually said in the infamous PC video.

Turns out Jesse Singal is a member of the evo-psycho club and so soft-pedaling Pinker's actual statements was most likely deliberate, not a matter of carelessness as I initially thought.

Here is Singal interviewing Pinker in 2014.

Here he is defending the Damore Google memo - which of course simply regurgitates all Pinker's evolutionary psychology beliefs.

Here he is attacking liberals as anti-science.

Here he is defending evolutionary psychology, quoting ultra-evo-psycho proponent Jerry Coyne.

Here are some friendly exchanges he's had with Razib Khan on Twitter. No wonder it doesn't bother Jesse Singal that Steven Pinker works with Razib Khan.

October 2017

A year ago:

February 2016

Jesse Singal's continuing journey to the right

Anti- "identity politics" and yet considers it
necessary to declare her ethnic identity
on her Twitter profile.

I have documented Quillette's opposition to feminism and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann's misogyny on this blog often.

Quillette is a scheme to rebrand right-wing views like those of Lehmann's former (or maybe continuing) employer Rebel Media as "centrist" and so it aligns itself with fake liberals like Helen Pluckrose and Iona Italia.

Italia likes to denounce identity politics, although she proudly proclaims her religio-ethnic identity on her Twitter profile. 

Helen Pluckrose publicly proclaimed she isn't a feminist. And she's part of the Quillette-supported free speech grifter gang.

And it was Italia retweeting my tweet to her behind the safety of a block (because like all those who gather round right-wing safe space Quillette, she is a snowflake who cannot tolerate criticism) which got Jesse Singal and Cathy Young to team up to attack me, although I hadn't had anything to do with either of them for months leading up to the attack.

It's no surprise to find Pluckrose and Italia promoting Jesse Singal in their podcast. Singal is rapidly becoming a second-string member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" along with Cathy Young. 

One of the editorial positions of Quillette, in addition to anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-socialist and pro "race science" (which claims to have proven scientifically that black people are intellectually and morally inferior to other races) and a constant trumped-up panic over free speech in American colleges is a hostility to transgenderism. 

I found someone I knew from the NY theater scene, Libby Emmons, pushing hateful anti-trans rhetoric in Quillette with a typical reactionary screed:

It is no anomaly that the movement is hitting its cultural stride in the debate over pronouns. The first step in changing how we think about our bodies and what it means to be human is to change how we speak about these things. Transgender speech codes demand that we renounce our bodies’ basis in biology, and instead consider them constructs of arbitrary (and somehow unjust) societal expectations. We are not to think about ‘mother’ and ‘father’ as reproductive terms, but as culturally specified relationships. This aggressive effort to change and police the use of language, and to redefine terms like ‘male’ and ‘female’ to deny the sexual difference characteristic of all mammals, is designed to uncouple mind from body and humans from evolutionary and reproductive logic. Instead, an ideology of emotion is to be given dominion over biological reality.

Ah yes, the all-important pronoun issue. The thing that brought crackpot Jordan Peterson to everyone's attention. Quillette adores Peterson, of course.

Quillette appears to publish virtually any reactionary screed that matches its editorial positions, even an anti-trans rant by Emmons who has zero expertise, per her Quillette bio: a writer and theatre maker in New York. She is co-founder of the Sticky series & newly formed Puss Collective, & blogs at li88yinc.com. 

Jesse Singal is now infamous for his hostility to transgenderism, making him a perfect match for Quillette. It's surprising he hasn't published in Quillette yet, especially since he's started publishing in the Koch brothers-supported Reason.

Iona Italia and Helen Pluckrose are either complete idiotic dupes or are fully aware they are playing roles in the belief that pretending to be liberals makes them more effective at attacking feminists and liberals. Either way they are contemptible individuals.

Cathy Young has Jesse Singal's back

Oh the endless hypocrisy of Cathy Young, and her concern for unfair attacks via social media.

In June, The Atlantic published a cover story by science journalist Jesse Singal on children and adolescents who identify as transgender but then return to the gender identity consistent with their birth sex — sometimes after undergoing appearance-changing and potentially health-damaging treatments. The backlash on social media and in left-of-center publications was fierce; the author and the magazine alike were vilified and accused of promoting bigotry.

Cathy Young is always so concerned about poor Jesse Singal and his relation to social media, yet she publicly celebrated the moment when a campaign of vicious, misogynist harassment began, with the extreme invasion of one woman's privacy by her obsessive ex-boyfriend when he posted her private information and correspondence online with the explicit goal of provoking social media harassment.

Naturally Young and Singal had no problem attacking me on social media in a vicious way.

The people who are part of the Reason Magazine-Quillette axis are absolutely shameless in their hypocrisy.

Journalists have been failing us for a long time concerning evolutionary psychology

Evo-psycho bro Jesse Singal, writer at New York Magazine, given a platform to white-wash the public statements of Steven Pinker in the New York Times, thinks he has a gotcha for those who criticize evolutionary psychology:

He's talking about Barbara Ehrenreich, leftwing writer and author of Nickel and Dimed a good piece of work.

Although I like some of her work I have issues with Ehrenreich. She's a Berniebro. She has idiotic ideas about the reason smoking was banned in New York City parks. And she used to hang out with my ex-husband when they both lived in Key West. Before he was busted for driving a Winnebago full of vacuumed-sealed bricks of marijuana through the Florida panhandle and did time in prison, a fate he had been tempting virtually all his adult life.

Anyway, unfortunately for Singal, Ehrenreich doesn't agree with him about evolutionary psychology and The Bell Curve. This is not the first time I've asked concerning the output of an evo-psycho bro: do they read the work they cite? He links to an article Ehrenreich wrote in The Nation, twenty-one years ago. Please note the darker yellow section I highlighted.

So no, Singal, she's not on your side. She called The Bell Curve "pseudo-biology."

The failure on the part of journalists to seriously engage with the claims of evolutionary psychology is a constant. The failure is either because the journalist is already in the tank for evolutionary psychology, in the case of Singal, or they are intimidated by all the science talk.

 I wrote on this blog in 2011:

Now it's not surprising that Pinker has a hissyfit over the New Yorker review of his most recent book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined." - Pinker is not accustomed to analysis by someone who is not baffled by his bullshit - and legions in the media are. Pinker is accustomed to being lionized and revered.

Here is a link to the New Yorker's review of Better Angels by Elizabeth Kolbert. It's almost as perfect a take-down of Pinker's idiocies as Louis Menand's review of The Blank Slate.

Back in 1994 Stephen Jay Gould, in his thorough review of The Bell Curve, discussed the problem:

The Bell Curve is even more disingenuous in its argument than in its obfuscation about race. The book is a rhetorical masterpiece of scientism, and it benefits from the particular kind of fear that numbers impose on nonprofessional commentators. It runs to 845 pages, including more than a hundred pages of appendixes filled with figures. So their text looks complicated, and reviewers shy away with a knee–jerk claim that, while they suspect fallacies of argument, they really cannot judge. In the same issue of The New Republic as Murray and Herrnstein's article, Mickey Kaus writes, "As a lay reader of 'The Bell Curve,' I am unable to judge fairly," and Leon Wieseltier adds, "Murray, too, is hiding the hardness of his politics behind the hardness of his science. And his science, for all I know, is soft.... Or so I imagine. I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics." And Peter Passell, in the Times: "But this reviewer is not a biologist, and will leave the argument to experts." 

The book is in fact extraordinarily one–dimensional. It makes no attempt to survey the range of available data, and pays astonishingly little attention to the rich and informative history of its contentious subject. (One can only recall Santayana's dictum now a cliché of intellectual life: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.") Virtually all the analysis rests on a single technique applied to a single set of data—probably done in one computer run. (I do agree that the authors have used more appropriate technique and the best source of information. Still, claims as broad as those advanced in The Bell Curve simply cannot be properly defended—that is, either supported or denied—by such a restricted approach.) The blatant errors and inadequacies of The Bell Curve could be picked up by lay reviewers if only they would not let themselves be frightened by numbers—for Herrnstein and Murray do write clearly, and their mistakes are both patent and accessible. 

I think this explains, at least partially, how Pinker has gotten away with supporting the careers of professional racists for over twenty years. There is a direct connection from The Pioneer Fund to J. Phillippe Rushton (who served as its president) to Steven Pinker who consistently promotes the work of Rushton and to the next generation, the proponents of "human bio-diversity" being groomed by Quillette, the Winegard bros.

And yet you still find journalists like Singal parroting the right-wing line that the only problem with evolutionary psychology is political correctness.

So what's Steven Pinker's alt-right gang up to now?

I've pointed out on this blog that the apparent aim of alt-right Claire Lehmann's Quillette is to rebrand Ezra Levant's alt-right views: anti-black, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-Left as "centrist."

Here we see Razib Khan promoting the idea that Christina Hoff Sommers and Steven Pinker are "centrists."

To be honest these forays by centrists (Sommers is a registered Democrat with libertarian leanings, similar to Steven Pinker) into the academy are starting to remind me of those ridiculous “debates” that Jews had to have with professional anti-Jews (mostly apostates) in the courts of medieval European monarchs. There were the outward forms of debate, but everyone knew what it was about (since Sommers and Pinker are from Jewish backgrounds perhaps that’s apposite).

In Sommer's case very right-leaning since her primary employer appears to be the Koch brothers via her perch at the American Enterprise Institute. 

Or as this Twitterer observed a couple of years ago:

And Steven Pinker constantly attacks the left, as when he claimed that academia and the media are "radicalizing" the alt-right when it's actually he who is doing just that. Not to mention his good buddies, professional racists Razib Khan and Steve Sailer, who are also pals together as seen recently on Twitter.

I predict that Pinker will continue to lean ever further right, his hereditarian views are much too popular with the right and alt-right to avoid such a fate. 

And Pinker loves anybody who proclaims him brilliant and who promotes his bullshit Blank Slate theories.

Pinker doesn't do a very good job hiding where his real sympathies lie.

As a recent review of Pinker's most recent, "Enlightenment Now" by David A. Bell in The Nation noted:

But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all else fails, a contempt for “intellectuals” straight out of Breitbart.

No big surprise there. Both of Pinker's good buddies Khan and Sailer were identified as leaders of the alt-right in Breitbart by none of than Milo Yiannopoulos.

And they have allies at the New York Times. In addition to Jesse Singal, Pinker fanboy and Razib Khan's buddy, there's Bari Weiss, who wrote a column decrying rude college students as the work of the Left and "Official Antifa" which turned out to be a hoax site. As reported in Mediaite:

New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss — a self-described Iraq War-supporting “outspoken Zionist” — took a narrative from the alt-right in her newest column, and used Tweets from a phony account in order to do it. 

The op-ed, which suggests the political left is intolerant and does not believe in free speech on campus “at all,” used two tweets from a fake “Antifa” account run by online trolls to prove that young leftists were attacking new-right personality Dave Rubin for being anti-LGBTQ, despite the fact that he is gay. 

Weiss wrote the following regarding Rubin’s experience with college activists:

“[Leftists] seem to believe that the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst. Among them: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is married to a man, yet is denounced as an ‘Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist’ and a ‘fascist lieutenant’ for criticizing identity politics.” 

Upon clicking on the links attached to the terms “Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist” and “fascist lieutenant,” readers will find the parody account @OfficialAntifa is behind the claims — not an actual youth leftist organization.

I think it's pretty obvious that the right-wing and alt-right media have decided a good strategy is to promote right-wingers like James Damore and Christian Hoff Sommers at colleges, and when some of the more obnoxious students - or in Damore's case, not even students, just rando outsiders - make a fuss, use this to claim "the left" is intolerant and anti-free speech. My guess is that Weiss didn't realize "OfficialAntifa" was fake because not only is she a lazy, awful journalist, just like Jesse Singal, but in the alt-right online circles she travels in, there's little concern over whether "Official Antifa" is real or not - if they can get away with using fake news to smear their enemies, they'll do it. 

Naturally Weiss identifies Sommers as a "feminist" in spite of the fact that Sommers' entire career has been devoted to attacking feminists. 

And Steven Pinker makes common cause with these freaks. Anybody who knew anything about Sommers' career could have predicted she would be leading the backlash to #metoo. That's what the fucking Koch brothers pay her for.

Steven Pinker & hereditarianism: the disconnect

Steven Pinker, who has no problem claiming "respectable media" is guilty of radicalizing the alt-right by suppressing "the truth" is in return adored by respectable media.

I've already discussed Jesse Singal in the New York Times white-washing Pinker's remarks. Remarks that were video-taped and so anybody who bothers to look could see that Singal misrepresented what Pinker had said. But luckily for Singal and Pinker few people bother to check, so certain they are of Pinker's innate goodness.

Pinker is currently promoting his latest book, Enlightenment Now and this is fairly typical of the press's approach to Steven Pinker - this is Andrew Anthony in the British left-wing newspaper The Guardian:

Pinker’s trademark mop of silver curls, more like that of an ageing hard rock guitarist than an Ivy League academic, a pair of twinkling blue eyes and a ready expression of amusement beam out from my screen.

I was hoping the New Yorker would have reviewed Enlightenment Now by this point, so I could get a less worshipful perspective on Pinker from the press, but so far they haven't published anything. 

The liberal press loves Pinker and of course the racist right loves Pinker - although unlike Pinker, at least American Renaissance acknowledges the existence of The Pioneer Fund. I have yet to find any evidence that Pinker has ever acknowledged the connection between the Pioneer Fund and the Bell Curve.

Considering how often Pinker accuses critics of hereditarianism of being influenced by liberal politics, it is absolutely remarkable that Pinker wouldn't at least mention the Pioneer Fund if only to explain why it doesn't matter that some claims made in the Bell Curve are based on work funded by actual white supremacists.

So why doesn't Pinker mention the Pioneer Fund? Well for one thing the fawning press doesn't trouble him by asking such unpleasant questions, too entranced by Pinker's twinkling blue eyes to even think straight, much less do the hard work of digging into Pinker's background.

As I mentioned in this series, journalists have been failing us for a long time concerning evolutionary psychology.

While the press has been doing its best to avoid noticing how squirelly Pinker is about hereditarianism occasionally reviewers can't help but notice it.

This admiring review of The Blank Slate in The Guardian gets at the essential incoherence of Pinker on hereditarianism:

And so, having claimed there is genetic evidence that intelligence is a heritable condition, and having asserted that races are little more than large, inbred families, Pinker himself ducks the issue that generates most anger. In parentheses on page 144, he states: "My own view, incidentally, is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference – the black-white IQ gap in the US – the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation." 

Good. I believe he is right. But why does he go on to say that Steven Rose is wrong to believe that IQ tests tell you nothing useful, or that race is a doubtful biological category? And why, after arguing the science of this question for many decades, do we all still "believe" rather than "know" one way or the other?

His admirers on the racist right have also noticed a disconnect. In the American Renaissance review of Blank Slate, available via the Wayback Machine, Samuel Francis writing in 2003 ponders:

Prof. Pinker is firm and clear about the “inherent” or “innate” characteristics and behavior of human beings—human nature — that exist before anyone has a chance to scribble on the blank slate. Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.

He endorses the environmentalist theories of the origins of civilization of Jared Diamond and Thomas Sowell as opposed to racial ones, and tells us that “My own view … is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference—the black-white IQ gap in the United States—the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation.” Yet, six pages later, he tells us that “… there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variations in life outcomes such as income and social status.” Combined with the different scores of blacks and whites on IQ tests, of course, this implies that the “most discussed racial difference” has a significantly genetic and not an environmentalist explanation...

Pinker's admirers on both the left and the racist right sense that something is not quite right here. This is echoed by reviews in The New Yorker, the only media outlet not completely baffled by Pinker's bullshit. I'll talk about that next.

As anyone could have predicted Steven Pinker and Pinkerite Jesse Singal go the full Quillette

Look it's the gang from Unz.

Given Singal's well-known transphobia, and given that bashing trans people is one of Quillette's favorite activities - it was not only inevitable but I wonder what took him so long to start working with Quillette.

Quillette and Steven Pinker have long had a mutual admiration society, but this is the first time I am aware that Pinker has a byline in Quillette.

The text in the Pinker diagram will be updated to reflect his intensified connection to "race realism."

Infamous eugenics proponent Toby Young lists members of the race realism gang.

Young celebrates Pinker going the full Quillette.

Cathy Young, Koch brothers handmaiden, on the attack

It looks like I've hit a nerve of the B-list of the "Intellectual Dark Web." 

Cathy Young's snobbish attack on my career as a playwright demonstrates how astoundingly un-self-aware she is. She appears to actually believe that she's made a professional career as a writer, focused mainly on her own bitter anti-feminism, due to her superior literary skills rather than the fact that she - like so many other rightwing pundits including, now, Jesse Singal - has had a career underwritten by the Koch brothers.

Khan references the Undark magazine article for which I was interviewed (because I've been following the racist career of Khan since I started this blog) and it's a good article - I highly recommend it: Race, Science and Razib Khan.

What's really interesting is how the Quillette gang has a meltdown because I simply put facts into a graphic with my Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections chart. Apparently they have a weird phobia about graphics, since it doesn't bother them that Bari Weiss grouped Steven Pinker in with members of the "intellectual dark web" like Alex Jones:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

So I guess when I finish my project of turning the Bari Weiss article about a "web" into a web-like graphic, their heads will explode.

Cathy Young and the sample size of one

Right-wingers like Cathy Young like to claim I am crazy for pointing out that Steven Pinker has promoted the careers of Razib Khan and Steve Sailer who have written for white supremacist media. My providing indisputable evidence for all of it doesn't seem to matter - just mentioning the facts in a public forum makes me a "psycho" to Cathy Young.

Yet it doesn't seem to bother Cathy Young so much when Bari Weiss groups Steven Pinker in with Alex Jones.

We know Cathy Young doesn't like Alex Jones because she compared his views to those of a transgender person:

Young doesn't come right out and say that Zinnia Jones represents the views of all trans people, but what else could she mean? Even Young must have been aware that Zinnia Jones was unknown to most progressives, let alone "the average person." But Young goes right ahead, anyway, and portrays Zinnia Jones' statement as something that progressives need to understand concerning the average person, and compares that to Alex Jones, who was already world famous by the time Young tweeted the comparison in July 2017.

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised when Young smeared me although she proclaimed me a loser nobody. To Cathy Young it seems it's important to smear a nobody because the nobody disagreed with Cathy Young's views and "sniped at" her - ignoring the fact that 80% of Twitter is somebody sniping at someone else. 

Jesse Singal wrote that conservatives aren't really as sensitive to threats as has been claimed. But Cathy Young certainly seems to find threats everywhere, even among those of us who are obscure. A tweet by a nobody is just as significant to Cathy Young as the well-publicized ravings of a world-famous demagogue who promoted dangerous and consequential conspiracy theories.

And if Zinnia Jones is good enough to be a sample size of one to represent the views of trans people, why can't Cathy Young alone serve to represent the workings of the conservative mind?

Hereditarians declare victory in spite of what David Reich actually said

I found it amusing to read Razib Khan suggesting that the work of David Reich is support for  Khan's own beliefs. In The National Review he writes:

Who We Are and How We Got Here then addresses the reality that large numbers of public intellectuals are extremely hostile to the idea that humans can be grouped together into distinct population clusters. In other words, since race is a pernicious social construction, population geneticists need to tread very carefully. Reich is frank that the time may have come to break the alliance geneticists have made with academics who declare that all differences between groups are trivial. He suggests that science is advancing at such a rate that we will soon understand the genetic basis of complex behaviors in exquisite detail — and that researchers should be prepared for the possibility that some findings will be discomfiting to contemporary sensibilities.

As always with hereditarians, Khan lies about "large numbers of public intellectuals" but then that's the purpose of straw men. Few people deny that there are ethnic differences but in order to paint the Enemy as anti-evolution hereditarians constantly conflate ethnicity and race. The only question is, are they too stupid or careless to realize that's what they are doing, or are they just weasels?

In any case, what Reich said in his NYTimes op-ed piece last Sunday is the opposite of what hereditarians like Khan believe:

At a meeting a few years later, Dr. Watson said to me and my fellow geneticist Beth Shapiro something to the effect of “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” He asserted that Jews were high achievers because of genetic advantages conferred by thousands of years of natural selection to be scholars, and that East Asian students tended to be conformist because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society. (Contacted recently, Dr. Watson denied having made these statements, maintaining that they do not represent his views; Dr. Shapiro said that her recollection matched mine.) 

What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes. They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.

Razib Khan is on the record supporting both Watson and Wade:

• https://www.unz.com/gnxp/is-james-watson-a-racist/
• http://www.unz.com/gnxp/off-topic-comments-and-nick-wades-book/

And Steven Pinker is on the record supporting the notion that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than everybody else.

But obviously The National Review wants plausible deniability for its long history of racism and hereditarians like Khan are happy to provide it.

And Reich agrees with what I've said about addressing hereditarian views: Reich wants scientists to fight against the Pinkers and Khans of the world:

This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.

The reason that scientists aren't fighting against hereditarian views is because most of them have dismissed them as nonsense. And scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson would rather not focus on it.

But racists are motivated to promote the views of Khan and Pinker and so they do. And as I have documented, Pinker uses his celebrity to promote the views of scientific racists, while deflecting from this practice by claiming the media and universities are the real culprits, with plenty of help from "journalists" like Jesse Singal who lie on Pinker's behalf.

Thanks for the shout-out, PZ Myers

Thank you PZ Myers for giving me a shout-out on your blog: Dig into the racist circle jerk which is such a great title. Thank you for recommending my "ugly knitting" LOL.

For your reading convenience, the threads of this ugly racist sweater are connected by the tag "evo-psycho bros."

And also thanks PZ for elaborating on the racist angle concerning quarterbacks. I confess I didn't actually investigate the content of Sailer's discussion of quarterbacking, as I don't feel I am well-informed enough about football to fully understand the issues involved.

I should say to visitors that I am not a journalist nor a scientist, but a playwright with a day job as a web developer/technical writer. But I have an interest in anthropology and have been following the career of Razib Khan for over twelve years on this blog.

Thanks to my interest in anthropology - specifically the work of Marvin Harris and his book Cultural Materialism The Struggle for a Science of Culture - I became acquainted not only with Harris's "research strategy" of cultural materialism but also alternative research strategies including sociobiology - the former name for "evolutionary psychology." I first heard of Steven Pinker thanks to paying attention to the promotion of evolutionary psychology from the late 1990s to now. 

And by the way, if you haven't read this excellent review in The New Yorker of Pinker's Blank Slate, What Comes Naturally, I recommend you do. In my experience only the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer) out of all mainstream media outlets is not too baffled by Pinker's bullshit to clearly analyze Pinker's claims. 

I highly recommend all of Marvin Harris's work, and you can get an excellent comparison of three research strategies including cultural materialism and sociobiology online for free: R. Brian Ferguson was a student of Marvin Harris and wrote this excellent Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war. His discussion of the work of Napoleon Chagnon is especially interesting. 

I still find it shocking that Steven Pinker has gotten away with promoting the career of straight-up racists including a prominent member of the alt-right, Steve Sailer all these years. Although you can see how he has gotten away with it when you read the white-washing Pinker's own statements were given by New York Magazine's Jesse Singal, particularly the part were Pinker blames universities and the media for radicalizing the alt-right, and which PZ rightly harshly criticized.

Journalists have dropped the ball on this issue. And so have scientists. 

PZ Myers is one of the few scientists who regularly criticizes evolutionary psychology and its proponents. 

The real issue of radicalizing the alt-right is not that the "truth" of female and black intellectual inferiority is being suppressed as Pinker claims, it's that there is a whole sociobiology cottage industry providing specious theories on the genetic intellectual inferiority of women and especially of African-Americans. Many scientists, it seems, consider the whole "human biodiversity" thing to be so ridiculous that they don't even take the time to criticize it. And so "scientific" racism is promoted, not only by obvious racist media like American Renaissance and VDARE, but by outlets like Quillette, respectable enough to publish Justin Trudeau's ghostwriter Jonathan Kay. Quillette may not come out and say, like Steve Sailer did, that blacks are intellectually inferior to all other "races" (although he'll give them basketball and jazz and rap) but they use the exact same fundamental sources: J. Phillippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. And Steven Pinker has consistently promoted not only Quillette but the work of Rushton and Jensen. 

Pinker's buddy Razib Khan was denied a post at the New York Times when Jamelle Bouie publicized the work of myself and others tracking his racialist career. But as Khan pointed out in this Undark piece:

Other scientists, he insisted, believe the same things. They just won’t admit it. “I’m sick of being the only fucking person that says anything,” said Khan. “I know I make people uncomfortable, but a lot of times I say what they’re thinking.”

There needs to be much more attention paid to the premises underlying evolutionary psychology, by journalists and scientists. Ignoring the evolutionary psychology industry is not going to make it go away. As we've seen with the election of Donald Trump, there's nothing so ridiculous and obviously false that some people won't believe it. Especially when their racist inclinations make them want to believe it.

Why is Cathy Young still obsessed with Zoe Quinn & Anita Sarkeesian?

When Cathy Young blocked me on Twitter she complained that "She's obsessed w/critics of progressive ideology & follows them around, smears them as "alt-right" 

Now given how much Cathy Young is obsessed with smearing women via Gamergate it's odd that she would point at others who are "obsessed" but really it's not so odd when you consider that Young, who makes a living as a public intellectual, is a thin-skinned hypocrite. 

And of course by "follows them around" she means I occasionally look at their Twitter feeds and make critical comments. This kind of activity is probably 30% of all Twitter activity and engaged in, of course, shamelessly & hypocritically by Young herself.

Young clashes with left-wing Noah Berlatsky frequently. Their recent exchange demonstrates I'm not the only one who thinks Cathy Young is alt-right as well as demonstrating Young's ongoing dislike of Anita Sarkeesian.

The Wikipedia page on the alt-right notes:

The alt-right, or alternative right, is a loosely-connected and somewhat ill-defined[1] grouping of white supremacists/white nationalists, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, neo-Confederates, Holocaust deniers, and other far-right[2][3][4] fringe hate groups.[5][6]
Alt-right beliefs have been described as isolationist, protectionist, antisemitic and white supremacist,[7][8][9] frequently overlapping with neo-Nazism,[10][11][12][13] identitarianism,[14] nativism and Islamophobia,[15][16][17][18][19] antifeminism, misogyny and homophobia,[10][20][21][22][13] right-wing populism[23][24] and the neoreactionary movement.[7][25]

So opinions vary on what exactly counts as the alt-right. Apparently Cathy Young is of the opinion that she is the final arbiter of who is and isn't alt-right.

In an interesting twist, Cathy Young herself is cited in the same Wiki article on the alt-right:

The alt-right has been said to include elements of white nationalism,[10][11][23] white supremacism,[8][9][66] antisemitism,[10][11][12] right-wing populism,[23] nativism[15] and the neoreactionary movement.[25] Andrew Marantz includes "neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists".[28] Newsday columnist Cathy Young noted the alt-right's strong opposition to both legal and illegal immigration and its hard-line stance on the European migrant crisis.[67] 

Now I haven't looked into Cathy Young's position on immigration, but it's absolutely clear that she is a masculinist, anti-feminist and misogynist. The Wikipedia entry on her notes:

Young has defended the social media campaign Women Against Feminism.[6]

and

frequently agreeing with men's rights activists

The entry doesn't discuss her personal involvement in Gamergate but rather quotes her opinion of it.

Describing the Gamergate controversy in relation to feminism, Young has stated that she believes that Gamergate is a backlash against feminism, but "it's a backlash against a particular kind of feminism, one that has a tendency to look obsessively for offences, read ideology into everything, and demonize male sexuality under the pretext of stamping out 'the objectification of women'."[7]

It isn't clear how many of the beliefs ascribed to the alt-right one must have in order to be alt-right - nobody knows. But given how ferociously Cathy Young hates feminism, I'd say that qualifies her.

It isn't clear who Young means when she claims I smear "them" - I've previously discussed how Young falsely claimed I've called Steven Pinker a white supremacist. It's possible that yet again she is claiming something false about me, perhaps suggesting I've called Steven Pinker a member of the alt-right. I haven't done any such thing, although I have pointed out that he has connections that would fairly, by most definitions, be called alt-right. And of course there was Pinker's infamous remarks about the alt-right, defended by Cathy Young's buddy Jesse Singal. The remarks were given as part of a Spiked Magazine Unsafe Space series - Spiked Magazine is, like Cathy Young and Steven Pinker, relentlessly anti-feminist. Although Pinker and Young like to try to brand Young's anti-feminism as "equity feminism" - a favorite term of Koch brothers hacks.

Now whether I'm right or not about Cathy Young being alt-right or Steven Pinker having alt-right connections, the fact remains that Cathy Young supported a mob-rule phenomenon, Gamergate, which put women's lives in danger and she still attacks the very same women who were the targets.

The worst that Cathy Young has to endure from me is the possibility of being mislabeled alt-right when she's simply a far-right Koch brothers hack libertarian.

Neither Zoe Quinn nor Anita Sarkeesian have done anything to justify Cathy Young's bitter hatred and obsession with them - Quinn was the target of an unhinged ex-boyfriend, and Sarkeesian has made videos criticizing the sexist attitudes in video games.

 But far from admitting she was wrong about her support of Gamergate in which women's lives were threatened Young is doubling down on her support right up to the present time.

Here's Cathy Young, just a few days ago, once again defending Eron Gjoni and smearing Zoe Quinn.

Why does Cathy Young hate these women so much? Why can't Cathy Young admit that Eron Gjoni is a horrible person who committed a calculated violation of another person's privacy for the purpose of throwing her to a misogynist mob?

Why can't Cathy Young let Gamergate go, even though her support of Gamergate reflects so badly on her?

Shameless, thin-skinned hypocrite Cathy Young attacking Zoe Quinn yet again.