Look at that fish!

It’s beautiful. That’s the only thing I care about in this photo — I want someone to buy me a fishing junket to Alaska. My dad managed to make a few salmon fishing trips in his last years, and I think they made him happy.

By the way, the guy on the right is a supreme court judge. He got flown on a private plane to this fishing camp, with a billionaire, Paul Singer, footing the $100,000 bill. It paid for Singer to do that, since he had several cases before the court, and got favorable rulings. That fish is a bribe.

It’s looking like Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society goon, is hooking up each Supreme Court appointee with their very own billionaire sugar daddy. Clarence Thomas got one, Sam Alito got one, I wonder whose patronage each of the other judges got? Somebody had to have paid off Kavanaugh’s loans. I’d like to know who. Let us know who bought each member of the Supreme Court.

Still, that is a magnificent King Salmon. That’s the price of a corrupt judge? OK, maybe some ethics rules would be good.

I have an unfortunate history with CFI and The Skeptical Inquirer. I ought to be aligned with the principles of skepticism, but too often organized skepticism has been this stodgy, hidebound dinosaur that is more interested in conserving the privileges of a narrow group of people than in actually implementing productive change. So I abandoned it, writing this in 2011.

[Diversity] has long been an issue with the skeptical movement. I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, a very good magazine with well-written and substantive articles on skeptical issues, but I let my subscription lapse. It was a strange thing that prompted it; several years ago, there was an issue lauding the leaders of the skeptical movement, and it had a nice line drawing of four or five of these Big Names on the cover: and every one was white, male, and over 70 years old. I looked at it, and I wasn’t mad or outraged — every one of them was a smart guy who deserved recognition — but I saw it, sighed, and felt that not only was this incredibly boring, but that organized skepticism was dead if it was going to turn into a gerontocracy. I didn’t let my subscription lapse in protest, but out of lack of motivation.

Then, a few years ago, they fired Kavin Senapathy, a huge self-own. I commented on that:

That refusal to deal with the biggest social struggles of our time is what has always left me infuriated with the skeptic movement — oh, sure, let’s debunk ghosts and chupacabras and UFOs, but racist and misogynist beliefs are just too hard. They love the magic tricks and tests of dowsing, but eugenics? No one in organized skepticism seems to be smart enough to cope with that.

Merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation didn’t help, and actually made it worse.

Kavin revealed some rather obvious inside information:

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

You get the idea. It’s the whitest, most oblivious skeptical organization, although Shermer’s group is competing well with that status. Worse, they aren’t at all interested in broadening their perspectives and getting better. I publicly announced my departure from the organized skepticism movement over these sorts of differences years ago.

Well, now we have achieved the merger of skepticism with the aggrieved privileged conservative crowd. The Skeptical Inquirer has published an article by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja titled The Ideological Subversion of Biology, which is full of bogus nonsense about how the Progressive Left is strangling science. It’s the same silly crap as that loony In Defense of Merit in Science paper that Coyne coauthored a while ago, and it’s a perfect fit for the Inquirer.

The title is an interesting choice — it’s a blatant call-back to anti-communist hysteria, and will strike a chord with Republicans and MAGAts all across the country. Once upon a time, it was the kind of thing the John Birch Society or Lyndon LaRouche would publish.

It’s really bad. Jerry Coyne has successfully transitioned from respected senior scientist to angry, bitter crank finding common cause with the worst right-wing academic grifters. It’s sad to see.

I’m working on a response to it. Coyne has written a long gish gallop of a paper, so it’s going to take a while, and another thing that’s not helping is that I’m flying off to a 4-day conference this weekend. I’ve also written to the Skeptical Inquirer asking if they’d be interested in publishing a response — I kind of doubt that they will, given their ideological predilections and the fact that they published a load of nonsense in the first place.

Stay tuned. With a few long days at the computer, I might finish a response before my flight on Sunday.

Traffickers are overloading boats to enable people to flee terrible conditions in North Africa and the Middle East, with disastrous results.

In the early hours of Wednesday, 14 June, an old fishing vessel carrying up to 750 people capsized and sank 47 miles off the Greek coast.

So far 79 people have been confirmed as dead. Only 104 had been rescued by the time the search was called off, so it’s possible that more than 600 people have been lost in total. Survivors report that the boat sank “in minutes” in a place where the sea is four kilometres deep. It is unlikely the bodies, including up to 100 children, will ever be found.

The battered fishing vessel left from Tobruk, eastern Libya, and was heading for Italy despite Greece being a closer destination. The reason why is clear. In the past three years, Greece has enacted an increasingly harsh policy of pushbacks, making it almost impossible for asylum-seekers to arrive safely on Greek territory.

Many of the victims were Pakistani. You’ve got to wonder how bad life is in Pakistan that they would risk drowning or Greece, where the survivors have now been thrown into barren warehouses under armed guard. They must have been hoping to reach civilized Great Britain, that land of prosperity and liberty that would treat them with dignity and respect.

I’m joking, of course.

If any of the survivors of the shipwreck make it to Calais, and brave another crossing over the English Channel, their reception will be no better than in Greece. Starting later this month, the Home Office plans to house people seeking asylum in the UK onboard a barge that has been likened to a floating prison by multiple organisations, including MSF UK.

The Bibby Stockholm is a barge that has been designed for 220 people. Is currently being refitted in Falmouth to accommodate 500 asylum seekers. It has been the target of an ongoing resistance campaign led by local groups, with regular protests and actions linking up to the #NoFloatingPrisons campaign launched by my refugee support organisation Reclaim The Sea.

Prison hulks are a long and dishonorable tradition in English history. Respect history!

Don’t forget or forgive America, either — we’re pretty casual about wrecking countries outside our borders, creating the refugees that are fleeing to their oppressors.

I couldn’t get past the opening paragraphs of this article.

While thousands of Ukrainians were fleeing their submerged homes after a catastrophic dam explosion last week, high-society Russians gathered for a glitzy restaurant festival in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, just 500 miles away from the devastating flooding.

The event, called Gastreet, saw some 5,000 citizens pay up to $2,000 dollars for the opportunity to listen to some of Russia’s top businessmen, restaurant owners, and influencers over the course of five days. The event also included concerts, lavish nightlife experiences, and gourmet dinners.

If there’s one thing that was made clear at the Sochi resort, it’s that no amount of Western sanctions, Kremlin restrictions, or spillover violence within Russia can stop the country’s rich and famous from living large—despite the raging war in neighboring Ukraine.

Ummm, yes? Is this news? Do you think this is a Russian phenomenon? People are starving in the US, and we still have our Met Galas. America continues to bomb Afghanistan with drones, it’s just too boring to make the news, while influencers get paid to pose with beer brands. Our public schools continue to get almost daily visits from fanatics with assault rifles, while a reality show called Bridezillas has been running on cable for almost 20 years.

Any time you have colossal economic disparities, you’re going to get these kinds of contrasts. Neither the oligarchs of Russia nor the investment bankers of America are going to feel any pain, and they’re all going to frolic in the wreckage of other people’s suffering.

The way conservatives have promoted stupid ideas on social issues to become the dominant narrative in the news is simple and interesting…and horrifying.

• Start with a cranky, bigoted idea that few people like.
• Create a group with a catchy name that does sound like something they’d like: Moms for Liberty, for instance, or The American College of Pediatricians. They sound sensible and reasonable, right?
• Find your few fellow like-minded cranks and bigots, and get them to sign up for your group. All it takes is a few to seed your cause.
• It used to be that you’d fire up your fax machine, but nowadays it’s even easier: get on Facebook. Facebook lets any ol’ crap get through.
• Start spamming the media with press alerts. Eventually, some gullible newspaper or television network — like Fox News — will invite you on. You’ll find more cranks and bigots.
• Eventually, a billionaire — a demographic that’s particularly rich in idiots — will find you and throw money at you, and you’re a success.

It’s been happening. The anti-choice movement in this country is driven by a small number of cranky zealots who have mastered this recipe, as illustrated by The American College of Pediatricians.

A small group of conservative doctors has sought to shape the nation’s most contentious policies on abortion and transgender rights by promoting views rejected by the medical establishment as scientific fact, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post that describe the group’s internal strategies.

The records show that after long struggling to attract members, the American College of Pediatricians gained outsize political influence in recent years, primarily by using conservative media as a megaphone in its quest to position the group as a reputable source of information.

The organization has successfully lobbied since 2021 for laws in more than a half-dozen states that ban gender-affirming care for transgender youths, with its representatives testifying before state legislatures against the guidelines recommended by mainstream medical groups, according to its records. It gained further national prominence this year as one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit to limit access to mifepristone, a key abortion drug.

They’re a tiny group, barely qualified to pontificate on the subjects they promote, and is dominated by ideological opposition to abortion, birth control, homosexuality, and trans care. That’s the glue that holds them together, rather than an honest medical consensus.

Records from early 2022 show membership of the American College of Pediatricians at about 700 people — just over 60 percent of whom self-identified as possessing medical degrees, including some holding prominent positions as hospital chiefs and a state health commissioner. The group, citing privacy, would not comment on the size or makeup of its membership.

It’s a religious organization.

Joseph Zanga, founder of the American College of Pediatricians, who had led the American Academy of Pediatrics in the late 1990s, described the splinter organization as “a Judeo-Christian, traditional-values organization” in a 2003 interview with the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, which promoted conversion therapy. His organization’s core beliefs are “that life begins at conception, and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors in the adoption and raising of children,” he said at the time. Zanga declined a Post request for an interview.

They followed the Right-Wing Recipe, though, and got picked up by the worst of the worst of media, convincing audiences that they are legitimate and credible, when they are not.

The group found an eager audience through conservative media, including the Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham shows on Fox News, the documents detail. Since 2016, the American College of Pediatricians has been mentioned in more than 200 articles published by conservative news sites such as Breitbart, Daily Wire, the Epoch Times, the Washington Examiner, the Blaze and the Gateway Pundit, according to a Post analysis. Its profile has continued to rise. The volume of articles mentioning the group during the first four months of 2023 was five times that of the same period in 2020, according to GDELT’s online news database.

“They’re part of a coordinated, politically motivated anti-science ecosystem,” said Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine and an expert in misinformation.

One more element to add to the formula: when their strategems are revealed and exposed, it is an attack on them, and they can then deploy the “silent majority” gambit.

“There’s a silent majority out there that stands with us,” she said. “This act has awoken a sleeping giant.”

The numbers may say they’re a loud minority, but they can always claim that the majority of Americans are with them, they just don’t say it aloud. This was also a popular excuse from the early days of the internet: “the lurkers support me in email,” even when they didn’t, but how could you check?

Tenure is under attack in conservative states. Republicans want to take a career that is already difficult to enter, demands extreme flexibility in where you can live, and doesn’t pay particularly well, and they want to make it even more unattractive, and they are finding that increased uncertainty means their university positions are harder to fill.

But I’m not going to try to defend tenure here. Instead, I was floored by this one comment:

Tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job, Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, said upon passage of the bill. These professors claim ‘academic freedom’ and hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda of societal division.

That’s not their agenda, so that’s a lie. More shocking, though, is the implicit notion that no one should have a guarantee of a job. We live in a society where everyone is totally dependent on a reliable source of income for food, housing, and health care, but you are not promised the means to obtain that income. They want your life to be precarious, because then they can control you. That threat of potentially losing the job you need to live is a powerful tool of manipulation, it’s the knife at your throat they can use to force you to accept lower pay, or terrible working conditions, or long hours.

Why shouldn’t truck drivers and welders and fruit pickers and make-up artists and poets and electricians and house movers be guaranteed a job? These are all positions that are in demand (oh, sorry, except for poets — but that just says there ought to be a way for people to live while doing art), so why can’t we, as a nation, agree that this pool of ability ought to be reasonably maintained by paying the people willing to do it? Let them have the power to demand the right to live because they’re willing to do the work.

I know, this is what unions are for. Republicans hate unions, too. Republicans want your life precarious so they can extract maximal profit from you.

This is a little bit personal. When I was growing up, my father was a mechanic, a skilled job that I couldn’t do, you probably couldn’t do, and that required a lot of hard labor to do. Employers played games with him all of his life, though. Boeing was the dominant employer in the region, and they’d constantly fine-tune their work force, letting people go on short notice, and then later re-hire them, only to fire them a little later. Life under that regimen was like being a yo-yo, and it wasn’t easy having to scramble to find a new job every 6 months to a year, and maybe accepting a lesser job that didn’t suit your abilities because you’ve got kids to feed. It kept the workers hungry and willing to compromise on pay, though!

That’s what Republicans want for everyone. Professors should all be forced into adjunct positions with semester by semester contracts; they should be doing academic piecework, cobbling together a curriculum and doing research in spaces they have to periodically take down and reassemble. That’s what they want for everyone, if we’re all living hand-to-mouth and at the mercy of our employers, that’s great for profit-taking. In the short term, anyway. It might compromise quality in the long run, but by then the managers will have extracted the wealth that pays for their mansions and boats and expensive cars, and that’s what matters.

It does me good to see one of those hateful anti-woke organizations falling apart, but it’s also dismaying to see how easily radical conservative groups can suck money out of the pockets of the obscenely rich. I guess if you’re extremely wealthy you can easily throw a million dollars here, a half million there, as long as the recipient panders to the bigotry that comes naturally to bloated capitalist nepo babies. Here’s a long story about how a few IDW types built a short-lived organization on connections to the rich. It features Bari Weiss, of course.

Weiss had already been talking with a few of her friends about creating a new anti-woke organization. One was Melissa Chen, a writer and the managing director at Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that takes books about concepts such as liberty and reason and translates them into Arabic, to make them more accessible; she later described herself as a conservative who was forming her trajectory in “the anti-woke space.” Another was Peter Boghossian, a former professor best known for getting absurd papers about subjects such as dogs perpetuating rape culture at dog parks published in feminist and postmodern academic journals to expose what he saw as corruption in scholarship, and who has earned some prominence as a public intellectual defending free speech and opposing illiberalism. Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

OK. The recipe begins with Weiss, Chen, Boghossian, and Ferguson, creating a rather shitty roux that has no taint of progressive values. Then they invented a label and an ambitious agenda.

Eventually, they settled on a name and a strategy. The organization would be called fair: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. The name was an initial act of defiance, implicitly painting the group’s opponents, self-described “anti-racists,” as the real racists. The founders’ dream was for the group to replace the A.C.L.U. as America’s new defender of civil liberties—a mission they believed the A.C.L.U. had abandoned. The vision involved a three-pronged approach: legal advocacy, via letters and lawsuits; grassroots advocacy, via a network of volunteers; and education about the issues, spread through projects such as explainer videos and training programs.

Wait, wait, wait — FAIR already exists; it’s a progressive media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. It’s been around since 1986. I have to assume that the confusion was intentional, and that we’re off to a sleazy start.

The American Civil Liberties Union has been around since 1920. It’s a distinguished organization that has fought for our constitutional rights, including free speech, and these bozos want to replace it with an ideologically biased group of bitter reactionaries? I don’t think so. So they added more extremists.

Weiss and the other founders recruited an informal board of advisers—a mix of podcasters, journalists, academics, and lawyers. Among them were the media personality Megyn Kelly, the writer Andrew Sullivan, and the anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo.

Kelly, Sullivan, and dear god, Rufo? Can this recipe possibly get any more ugly and unpalatable? Sure can. They needed some rich sugar daddies, and they got ’em.

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Suzy Edelman, another donor, who gave fair a million dollars in 2021, wrote in an e-mail to Weiss, “It’s your courage that inspired me to join the movement—not just to reform what’s been captured, but to build new, wonderful things.” I know Weiss a little bit—we’ve hung out in professional settings a few times over the years. When fair was founded, she had just left the New York Times in a very public way, and she was focussed on launching new organizations. “I think we are in a moment of profound change in American life, in which many old institutions are crumbling or have lost trust,” she told me recently.

You should begin to realize that what we’ve got here is a tiny, cozy in-group of destructive, bigoted assholes who have captivated a few bigoted asshole multi-millionaires who were willing to toss them big pots of money. This is the root of our current American problem: we have a surplus of spoiled rich people who know very little but are philosophically committed to the idea that their vast wealth was hard-earned, or they wouldn’t have it. It’s easy to milk them of cash by pointing at some poor people and saying that they’re out to get you.

That’s what this whole story is about, petty bigots with buckets of inherited wealth, and grifters like Weiss who know exactly how to part them from their money. Just repeat “woke, woke, woke” at them and rely on their contempt for others to trigger donations.

Fortunately, the wheels started to come off Weiss’s FAIR gravy train pretty quickly. The thing is, grifters know how to get money, but they aren’t very effective at using it. The organization started to disintegrate in disputes over how nasty and mean they ought to be, and all they would do is talk, talk, talk.

Rob Schläpfer, a volunteer state coördinator in Oregon, told me that he worked on a plan to mobilize parents to attend school-board meetings, but it “didn’t go anywhere. I was just spinning my wheels.” He found it hard to get direction from the national office about what to focus on, or how his chapter’s work should fit into fair’s mission. As time went on, other volunteer chapter leaders around the country started calling and texting Schläpfer to vent their frustrations. “fair was basically virtue-signalling for the anti-woke,” he said. “It was not an organization designed to actually do anything.”

Oh, good. Please continue bleeding money that accomplishes nothing.

Then the initial crop of assholes started to jump ship.

There seemed to be a genuine philosophical conflict within the fair community. In September of 2021, two members of the advisory board, Rufo and the libertarian podcaster Kmele Foster, started squabbling on Twitter about Rufo’s methods for opposing critical race theory in K-12 schools, which Foster described as inviting “all kinds of reactionary hysteria.” Rufo resigned from the advisory board soon afterward. “The question with FAIR that I had was: what are the substantive wins the organization has accomplished? And it was very hard for anyone to explain this,” Rufo wrote to me in an e-mail. fair’s high-profile advisers were “transgressive enough to generate attention, but not transgressive enough to achieve results. It’s almost worse than doing nothing, as it creates the illusion of action and absorbs political energy that would be better spent elsewhere.”

Worst of all, the money was dissatisfied.

Behind the scenes, there was deeper trouble. Suzy Edelman, one of the donors who gave a million dollars in 2021, had started asking questions about whether her gift had been used appropriately, requesting fair’s receipts and copies of the contracts that it used for volunteers and staff. For months, Edelman had also been questioning fair’s approach, particularly on gender issues. “Sex-based rights matter. Single sex spaces for women and girls must be protected. Transgenderism is a fiction designed to destroy,” she had written in an e-mail. She noted that fair had positioned its programs as an “alternative” to mainstream D.E.I., or diversity, equity, and inclusion, training, but, she said, “You can’t ‘DEI-lite’ this issue.” (A spokesperson for Edelman maintained that her concerns about fair were not related to its politics, only its “governance and use of charitable funds.”)

Weiss and Bartning exchanged terse e-mails about Edelman in August. “I am quite nervous that she has gotten to the Crows, which would be really damaging to me personally,” Weiss wrote, referring to Harlan Crow.

Oh, dear. Grifters hate to lose a mark, especially a rich, gullible sucker like Crow. Poor Bari! If she gets a reputation for being an ineffectual, obvious money-waster, the rich people won’t talk to her.

Hmmm. Have any of Bari Weiss’s schemes ever accomplished anything? We should be pleased that she’s at the poisonous core of so many PR campaigns for the Right.

The lesson here is that “anti-woke” is a recipe for incompetence and failure — it’s just that it inspires so much suffering in its inevitable decay.

Comrades, I am pleased to report another glorious victory over the running dog lackeys of the regressive Right: Cracker Barrel has been conquered. It is now ours.

As people across the country continue to celebrate Pride Month, one restaurant in particular let it be known that they’re in full support of the month-long commemoration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride.

Earlier this week, Cracker Barrel took some of its customers by surprise when the restaurant shared a photo on its social media accounts of a rocking chair sporting rainbow colors.

The image included the following caption: “We are excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests. Everyone is always welcome at our table (and our rocker). Happy Pride!”

You will also be relieved to know that this triumph does not mean the socialist vanguard is required to shop at Cracker Barrel, just as you are not required to drink Budweiser. This is a victory for the freedom to choose.

Here’s a list of 200+ things that Fox News has labeled “woke”. It includes everything, the Federal Reserve and CIA and capitalism and corporations and Chick-Fil-A and the IRS and NASCAR.

Fox News might have a little problem — they can’t define it, but they’re seeing “woke” everywhere they look.