I keep getting told by ignorant regressives that our universities exclude radical and conservative ideas — that somehow, these institutions that value the free exchange of ideas so much that they have this thing called “tenure” to protect people who say stuff offensive to conventionality are actually dedicated to concealing the True Facts, whatever they may be, that can only be seen by Classical Liberals and Libertarians who have the clear sight.

It’s all nonsense. I’ve been to creationist talks on college campuses — it’s fairly routine, and that bullshit is about as openly counterfactual as you can get. Milo Yiannopoulos spoke at the University of Minnesota last year, and that bozo is creepy and wrong, but he got to babble in a university facility. Heck, I’ve spoken on university campuses all around the country, and you all know what a wacko I am. It takes being truly violent or hateful to get yourself booted off of a campus.

So I am not surprised that University College London hosted a eugenics conference now. In the 21st century. In one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Even though they’re mainly reduced to preaching at churches nowadays, the Discovery Institute is still having an event at Seattle Pacific University in March. This shit is still dribbling out everywhere, and they love to borrow the respectability of a university building to dress up their turds.

But this UCL conference also exhibits another interesting phenomenon. It features a whole sewage pit full of well known racists.

A central figure in the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is the white nationalist, extremist Richard Lynn, who has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of incompetent cultures.” Lynn, who is President of the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), spoke at the conference 2015 and 2016, along with four of the six members of the UISR’s Academic Advisory Council.

Lynn’s UISR runs the journal Mankind Quarterly, whose founders include a leading member of Mussolini’s eugenics taskforce, and whose board once boasted Nazi Joseph Mengele’s personal mentor.

Six members of the current board, including editor-in-chief Gerhard Meisenberg, spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 conferences, while a further 16 LCI speakers have written for the journal in recent years. In total, 82% of those who spoke at both 2015 and 2016 conferences are directly associated with either UISR or Mankind Quarterly.

The UISR is bankrolled by Lynn and Meisenberg’s Pioneer Fund, a Southern Poverty Law Centre-listed hate group founded by Nazi sympathisers with the purpose of promoting “racial betterment”.

Beneficiaries of the fund include a magazine devoted to a “penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question,” and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, whose conferences have hosted prominent far-right figures Richard Spencer (an white supremancist who gained prominence after Trump’s election), Nick Griffin (ex-leader of the British National Party), and David Duke (another white supremacist, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).

Helmuth Nyborg, a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council, gave a lecture at last year’s American Renaissance conference which argued that Denmark’s gene pool would suffer from immigration from the Middle East. Nyborg spoke at the LCI in both 2015 and 2016. He has written numerous articles for Mankind Quarterly as well as a book for the UISR memorializing the former head of the Pioneer Fund, white nationalist J. P. Rushton.

James Thompson, the honorary UCL academic who acts as the host of the conference, is a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council. His political leanings are betrayed by his public Twitter account, where he follows prominent white supremacists including Richard Spencer (who follows him back), Virginia Dare, American Renaissance, Brett Stevens, the Traditional Britain Group, Charles Murray and Jared Taylor.

But that isn’t the interesting part. Those people are boringly familiar, the same mob of contemptible racist jerks who show up all the time and get far more attention than they deserve. What’s interesting is yet another example of kook magnetism. People who have vile views about the personhood of different racial groups also seem to attract people who have vile views about consent and sex. Why do these racist fronts always seem to have a few people with abominable ideas about pedophilia?

Another major organiser of the LCI is Emil Kirkegaard, who has attended all four conferences and even designed the website. Although he refers to himself as a “polymath” and Thompson describes him as a “very bright young guy”, Kirkegaard is not an academic. His highest qualification is a Bachelor’s in linguistics.

Having dropped out of his Masters degree, instead preferring to be “self-taught in various subjects”, Kirkegaard now runs OpenPsych, a platform for non-peer reviewed psychology papers, along with Davide Piffer of Mankind Quarterly. Piffer is a fellow LCI-speaker, and was praised by Richard Lynn as having done “brilliant work identifying the genes responsible for race differences in intelligence.”

Authors on OpenPsych include Kevin MacDonald, described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favourite academic”, who praised Anders Breivik as a “serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy.”

I know, any article about these kinds of conferences is just an unrelenting geyser of name dropping of awful people, and it’s hard to stop listing the appalling associations, but lets just take a look at Kirkegaard. He’s one of those anti-semitic ‘white genocide’ lunatics, but that’s not even the worst part of his character: he has a way to justify raping children. I’ll put it below the fold; you may not want to continue at this point.

[Read more…]

Just watch this clip.

He starts out by explaining that the alt-right are highly literate, highly intelligent people who have been radicalized by exposure to true statements that have never been voiced on college campuses. You see, once Leftist dogma has been exposed as a falsehood, these bright young people just take the red pill and veer way off in the opposite direction.

You might be wondering, as I was, what were these True Facts that have triggered the defection of these brilliant students from progressive causes? Give me specific examples! He obliges.

• Capitalist societies are better than communist ones. How odd. I don’t see anyone insisting on that: instead, I see a lot of academics who point out the flaws in capitalism, which, apparently, are lies and don’t exist. Then he makes it worse by using as more specific examples the difference between North and South Korea (I’ve never met anyone who thinks North Korea is a better place to live than South Korea.) or between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. You will rarely encounter a more pure and absolutely dishonest straw man.

  How about if the comparison is between, say, a ragingly capitalist country like the USA, and a socialist democracy like Sweden? It gets a bit less obvious.

• Men & women are not identical in their life priorities or sexuality. Again, who is arguing that men and women are identical? He says there is someone on the Harvard campus who argues this, but doesn’t bother to name names. Generally what I’ve seen on the left is approval and encouragement of differences — that men and women are different, but that the bigger differences are between individuals, and that those differences should be respected. We do object to being compelled to fit into the straitjacket of just two stereotypical gender roles. We also don’t think you can go from a karyotype to a flawless description of life priorities or sexuality.

• Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. Oh, yeah, he went there. Look at crime statistics and all those violent black criminals! We’re done, that’s all the analysis you need to do (and, by the way, those leftist college professors do not deny the statistics at all). But why do black communities have higher crime rates? It wouldn’t have anything to do with poverty, or discriminatory policing, or the existence of laws that basically criminalize being poor, would it?

  And of course he brings up that always-useful distinction, that Islamic people are more likely to be suicide bombers, as if that were the sole kind of violence that one ethnic group can perpetrate on another. How many Muslims have been killed by Christians? This is not to excuse either kind of violence, but to point out that playing selective games with the statistics to ignore institutionalized violence is profoundly dishonest.

I’m just going to have to say it outright: Pinker is lying here. These are all ideas that are routinely discussed at universities. The leftist positions he is caricaturing are far less dogmatic than he is claiming, and the alt-right positions far more so. There is no censorship that prevents addressing them; there is an expectation of greater, more evidence-based rigor in any discussion of such complex social, economic, and historical issues, and trying to pull the kind of misrepresentations and naive assertion of stereotypes that Pinker is babbling about here will get your arguments slapped down hard. I am shocked that a Harvard professor would promote such ignorance and falsehoods.

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Here’s a longer clip in which Pinker goes on to say the same sort of things that are routinely said in classrooms, all while doubling down and saying the “politically-correct left” is not allowing them to be said. He is completely un-self-aware. I guess it only counts if a politically incorrect person like Pinker says them as if they were his own novel idea, rather than the mundane substance of typical classroom discussions.