Maybe it’s not fair to equate all of MAGA with racism; it may be a deeper issue. Maybe they are all just deeply, profoundly, irrationally stupid. RFK jr was demonstrating both racism and stupidity in Michigan, campaigning for Mike Rogers against Abdul El-Sayed, where, rather than addressing politics and policy, he instead launched a bigoted rant against all Muslims, and to do so he had to ignore all the facts and evidence.

Jeez. I’ve long despised RFK jr for his bad science, but now I have to hate him even more for his over-the-top racism. His claims are garbage through and through. You can’t equate Muslim with Arab; most Muslims are not Arabs. The claim that Muslims (or Arabs, it’s not clear who he is insulting) haven’t won any Western-defined prizes for great science and literature isn’t true, and the Associated Press has compiled a long list of examples. Telling us that they haven’t won prizes established by Western and colonial nations is not only false, but that Muslims have competed in a rigged game and succeeded is evidence that they have great ability. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, and you’re claiming that this relatively marginal organization has destroyed the Muslim intellectual tradition in less than a century? Remarkable.

It’s minor but amusing that he said Muslims only do one of two things, and then he listed three. I guess RFK jr doesn’t do math, just like he doesn’t do science or history. This could be the basis of a comedy skit, but Monty Python has already done it. It also wouldn’t be funny, since hatred and war and victimization are the foundational principles of the modern Republican party.

Those remarks ought to completely destroy his career, but I fear they won’t. The Zionists and the Republican party in general apparently agree with him.

It’s about time.

A Minnesota prosecutor on Wednesday charged conservative provocateur James O’Keefe and influencer Cam Higby with felony counts of unlawful voting and identity theft after they misrepresented themselves at polling places in August using the names of registered voters.
…
The pair of influencers disguised themselves and recorded themselves going undercover using hidden cameras at the polling places. They posted videos capturing their interactions on social media in August. O’Keefe said in a post on X that they dressed in “Muslim garb” — including, for one of them, a full-face veil known as a niqab — and their goal was to “expose the sheer lunacy of Minnesota’s ‘vouching’ system.”
…
Police interviewed the registered voters whose names O’Keefe and Higby used, said Moriarty, who added that they also used names of deceased voters. Asked where they obtained those names, Moriarty said “We don’t know that.”

Once again, every accusation by a Republican is a confession.

This is a statue that graces our central campus mall.

I mention it since today is Indigenous People’s Day. We aren’t getting the day off, though, so we’ll all have to celebrate it privately.

I have not said anything about the tragic story of Jason Arday, who was accused of plagiarism and after being hounded over it, was found dead later. I have zero tolerance for plagiarism, but an official Cambridge panel cleared his PhD thesis of claims of deliberate plagiarism, so it should have been over then (unintentional plagiarism is still an issue, but ask Doris Kearns Godwin or Stephen Ambrose about that).

What the Kearns and Ambrose cases didn’t have was a thick overlay of racism. Arday had been aggressively harrassed for a long time by a guy named Nathan Cofnas, before the accusations had filtered into British journalism, which treated them much much more seriously and marshaled the public to question the legitimacy of Arday’s work. I don’t know enough about Arday’s discipline to say whether more investigation was necessary, but I am familiar with Cofnas, that fine specimen of Caucasian superiority shown on the right, and I can tell you that if anyone should have been exiled from academe, it was that fucking Nazi.

Cofnas calls himself a “race realist” and promotes “scientific racism”. He got a PhD in philosophy from Oxford in 2020 for a thesis that sounds like evo-psych muddled up with naive philosophy, arguing that morality is rooted in biological predispositions. I’ve got a copy, but haven’t been able to get through the whole thing, and am unfortunately incapable of throwing a pdf against the wall. He promptly got a job at Emmanuel College, and was promptly fired for grossly racist remarks disparaging black people, generically. He was picked up by Ghent University, why I don’t know, racism shouldn’t be a trait on one’s CV that makes them readily hireable. He’s currently suspended from Ghent because he chose to use his academic freedom to launch his campaign against Arday, because he’s black, and Cofnas does not believe black people should be able to do anything outside of sports and entertainment.

He’s now doing the rounds of racist and right-wing podcasts, and recently appeared with Glenn Loury (a black man) and John McWhorter (a black man) to babble about how he’s not really a racist, but because he’s also a spectacularly stupid person, he couldn’t help but fumble his story.

Incredible segment from this discussion between Nathan Cofnas and Glenn Loury & John McWhorter where Cofnas starts to explain how the Nazis were right about racial differences, then catches himself and pivots to how the Nazis were right about the conspiring elites. pic.twitter.com/fsHE9LdlRd

— Sasha Gusev (@SashaGusevPosts) September 20, 2026

There’s this bit where he’s talking about a science paper about the evidence for directional selection in West Asian peoples, and he let’s slip a few bad beliefs that he desperately tries to talk himself out of the hole he dug.

The Nazis are saying, look, we were right all along. Now they aren’t right, they…they were…they were right that there are…well, they don’t, they say there are like essential fundamental differences between races, which is not true, but there…they said that the left wing establishment that said that all races are exactly the same, uhh, now it’s obvious that the establishment was lying and the establishment has no credibility, which means the Nazis have much more credibility to many people.

No, the left wing establishment, whatever that is, does not argue that all races are exactly the same; which he calls race communism. How could they, when we acknowledge that all individuals are different? And when there are obvious differences in the distribution of physical traits in different populations? Yet somehow this jumped up racist philbro with no comprehension of what population geneticists actually say is happy to claim that now Nazis are more credible.

Let’s hope that Ghent University makes the sensible decision to give this bigoted clown the boot.

How dreadful that an organization of polite, well-dressed people are experiencing a disruptive division. They’re such thoughtful people!

For a gathering of people devoted to denouncing the inferiority of blacks and sounding the alarm about civilization-threatening Muslims, the biannual conferences thrown by the New Century Foundation, publisher of the racist newsletter American Renaissance, are decidedly genteel affairs. Men dress in suits and ties, women in formal business attire, and there are no uniformed skinheads or Klansmen to be seen. Large plasma television screens, Starbucks coffee spreads and fancy linens adorn the hotel meeting hall. Epithets have no place here.

The article continues with an anecdote about a speaker, David Duke, saying There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit (you know who he’s talking about!), prompting a member of the audience to rise up and shout, You fucking Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting!, before walking out. It’s a schism between the people who hate brown people and Muslims, and the people who hate brown people, Muslims, and Jews. They’re all fucking Nazis.

This extraordinary incident marked the beginning of an open rift between those on the radical right who see blacks, Hispanics and Muslims as the primary enemy, and those who say “the Jews” are ultimately behind every evil — a split that has usually stayed just below the surface but now threatens a leading institution of American extremism. While in the past he has managed to bridge this divide mainly by ignoring it, American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor now must finally come to terms with the split. His dilemma boils down to this: Throw out the anti-Semites and try to build a larger movement with electoral possibilities like those increasingly seen in Britain and Germany; or openly join hands with the very energetic neo-Nazis even though that means the loss of any remaining shred of respectability.

I suggest that we throw out the whole deplorable, bigoted mishegoss of American Renaissance. It’s a battle between two giants of racism, David Duke and Jared Taylor, both of them contemptible and repulsive, and we’re supposed to care which one wins the struggle for dominance? Sure, Taylor is less aggressively anti-semitic, but that doesn’t matter in the long run — if the organization is shaped in his image, it will still be white nationalist, and eventually it will be purebred Nazi. There isn’t a meaningful hair of difference between the two.

A military police officer turned researcher got a job as a corrections. No one will be surprised that she discovers that prisons are a hotbed of ugly attitudes and hateful beliefs.

In my observation, the sex offenders seemed to express the most frequent adoration and fealty for Trump.

They had violated the most fundamental boundaries of human empathy, and they appeared to find something familiar in a politician who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” who had been found liable for sexual abuse in the E. Jean Carroll case, who treated women’s bodies as territory to be conquered. They would gather closest to the TV when he spoke, nodding along when he denied accusations, claimed victimhood, attacked his accusers. The people convicted of predatory crimes identified with rhetoric that mirrored their own rationalizations.

Not surprised by that at all. What is more troubling is that his fellow corrections officers were almost as bad. The rot was a product of the environment, that even the people with more tolerant and thoughtful beliefs would intentionally suppress themselves while the wicked would rage. The description made me think of another place.

The break room had its own speech rules. Conservative officers announced their politics daily and loudly, with no apparent thought that anyone might disagree. The rest of us kept our mouths shut until we sussed out who was in our lane. I privately thought of that second group as the “low-key lefties.” There were not many of us, and some had come to the job from social work. For months I believed my coworkers were almost universally conservative. I was wrong, in an instructive way: the visible politics of the facility was universally conservative, because only one kind of politics could be said out loud there. The environment shaped more than conduct: it decided which beliefs could be spoken, and the beliefs it permitted were the ones that matched how the place already ran.

Sound familiar? Flip the script and that sounds a bit like more progressive environments where conservatives are squelched and liberals express themselves freely. It sounds a bit like here.

And that’s good. The alternative is a den of lies and hatred, like the discussions going on among corrections officers.

The daily subjects rarely varied: their love of Donald Trump, the evils of socialism, the evil ex-wives, the adult children who no longer called. They lamented, often, that the days were gone when an officer could settle things with an inmate with his fists and face no consequences. And trans people. Not a day passed without a long transphobic rant, though trans people were maybe one percent of the incarcerated population, and the officers doing the ranting could go weeks without interacting with one. The centerpiece was a claim repeated as established fact and never once sourced: that the state was spending millions of dollars per trans inmate on gender reassignment healthcare. Years later, records requests filed by hostile conservative media put a real number on it: through mid-2024, Washington’s prison system had spent $592,577.67 total on gender-affirming healthcare, across 44 incarcerated people. That works out to roughly $13,000 per person, around one percent of the break room’s per-person claim, and the sourcing matters: even the outlets working hardest to inflame the issue could not document anything close to the figure repeated daily in that room. I later recognized the same ratio on cable news: a group that is roughly one percent of the country, discussed nightly at a frequency that suggested it was half.

Yuck. I would like to hang out in a place that is the opposite of that.

For the rest of the world, the author makes a suggestion.

None of this is fate, and the fixes are not mysterious. Stop using prisons as the country’s largest mental health facilities, so the people warehoused for illness get a hospital instead of a tier. Change what the correctional officer’s job selects for, through staffing levels, training, and real mental health support, so the rational adaptation stops being callousness. Treat empathy as what the research shows it to be, a teachable skill: a meta-analysis of eighteen randomized controlled trials found that empathy training works, with a medium effect size, across ages and settings. And hold the algorithms accountable for what they amplify. Each of those deserves its own article and its own model legislation, and that is work this publication exists to do.

The other day, while I was browsing, I was interrupted by an ad for PragerU. I despise PragerU, the totally fake university that specializes in fake history and fake science, led by that smarmy old fraud, Dennis Prager. What caught my ear, though, is that this ad featured Gad Saad desperately pushing his new book, Suicidal Empathy.

I have not read the book. I will never read the book. Gad Saad is a pathetic figure, a pick-me guy for the right wing, who is a professor of marketing who rides the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. I’ve written about him a few times before, in particular his efforts to deny the existence of toxic masculinity while simultaneously exemplifying the attitudes and stereotypes that represent toxicity. Like any good evo psych wanker, he justifies treating women poorly by mentioning animals with aggressive, violent mating strategies, as if they apply to us.

Even Larry Moran, who doesn’t normally dip into culture war issues, ripped Gad Saad a new one. Saad is just a sad embarrassment of a man who desperately wants to be legitimized by more successful evo-psych grifters, but doesn’t quite have the smarts to assemble a coherent, logical argument.

I got the gist of his thesis from the ad. He’s trying to thread a needle here: he can’t quite say that empathy is bad, because he wants you to empathize with him, but at the same time he wants you to know that the empathy practiced by Leftists is undeniably evil and wicked. Empathy that leads you to regard Muslims as human beings is “suicidal,” after all. And don’t get him started on women and “effeminate” men!

The book is reviewed in Jacobin, and the review confirms everything I’d expect of Saad.

For those of you who don’t know who he is — likely a larger group than he’d be willing to admit — Saad is a Canadian professor at Concordia University who has spent the last few years as a major figure in anti-woke online spaces. Long regarded as a poor man’s Jordan Peterson, Saad has since grown in stature through his indomitable quest to kiss every square inch of Elon Musk’s ass. Elon has returned the favor by beating the drum for Saad’s ideas through a manic series of Tweets, frenetic even by his standards.

Reviews of Saad’s recent book, even by the ideologically sympathetic, suggest even his natural fan base is tuning out. Center-right outlet Quillette resented Saad’s “narcissistic ramblings,” while a scathing review in UnHerd described Suicidal Empathy as peddling “fake science” and relying “on a relentless drumbeat of fear-mongering regarding rape and crime.” That even his ideological friends are tiring of this shtick is a testament to how mind-numbingly boring Suicidal Empathy is.

Uh-oh–when an evolutionary psychologist loses the affection of Quillette, you know he’s on the way out. He relies on caricatures of left wing perspectives that he exaggerates into absurdity, so it’s no surprise that his arguments fall apart, even if you sympathize with his views. He has to distort everything to make his case.

Nominally the book is about the rise of “suicidal empathy.” Undeniably a catchy neologism, Saad defines suicidal empathy as a “dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue.” While he acknowledges that empathy is valuable in some contexts, in the hands of woke progressives it has become an existentially damaging force. The “suicidally empathetic person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not so fortunate. They feel guilty that they were born with white skin and hence suffer from ‘Dermatological Original Sin.’ By committing Civilization Seppuku, they can demonstrate their noble virtues as a form of pious self-hatred.”

This dysfunctional empathy, often emotionally adjacent to liberal narcissism via the drive to applaud oneself as more noble and altruistic, is at the root of virtually every progressive stance ever taken. For Saad, “epistemological empathy” is invoked in academia to silence those committed to a “deontological” quest for the truth. Toleration for Muslims is a form of “Islamophilic empathy.” Empathy for criminals leads us to care “more about the rights of rapists and felons than their victims.” Climate activism is “misguided empathy” from those who want to “protect Mother Earth from being raped by capitalism.” Socialism itself — which Saad points out is preferred by women, a point against it — is rooted in “misguided empathy.”

He’s playing a simple-minded game. If you don’t think black people should be discriminated against for the color of the skin, well, that must mean you hate and are ashamed of white people. If you think we should protect ecologies from raging industrialism, by golly, you really hate capitalism. And if you like socialism, you’re a woman, you pussy.

Now you can understand why I won’t read his book. The banality is exhausting. I’ve seen a few of his videos and read a few of his articles, and know that he’s simply a knee-jerk bigot. Hard pass.

To be fair, though, I should at least quote some of Gad Saad’s own words.

In other words, women are more likely than men to violate the deontological principles that define academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the pursuit and defense of truth, in the service of a consequentialist ethos rooted in misguided empathy. The rapid feminization of academia has been astonishing to watch. I have recently attended departmental meetings where it was unclear to me that it was not a kindergarten classroom in terms of the incessant focus on emotional safety and empathetic understanding.

Does that sound like a man anyone, especially any woman, would want to spend 5 minutes in conversation with? Does he even sound like he’s aware of the bigotry implicit in his words?

I’ve been in many departmental meetings, and yes, the safety and well-being of our students comes up fairly often — because it matters. If you were a student, would you want a professor who rolls his eyes at the thought of trying to understand you?

Over the last several years, a man named Darren Beattie has been busy on Xitter promoting a crude, ignorant form of eugenics (even “sophisticated” versions of eugenics are deplorable and wrong, but Darren favors the ugliest kind.)

Population control? If only! Higher quality humans are subsidizing the fertility of lower quality humans.

When a population gets feral, a little snip snip keeps things in control. Could offer incentives (Air Jordans, etc.).

Pay smart people to have more kids, disincentivize stupid people from having kids. So simple but molds destiny on deep intergenerational level.

In September 2023, he responded to news about migrants from Africa who rioted in Israel by suggesting that the Israeli government “literally just round them up and drop them in the ocean.”

Let the ‘human rights groups’ whine… drop them in the ocean too!

It isn’t “politically correct to say, but low-iq, low-impulse control populations lack higher reasoning and moral faculties. They require strict corporal punishment and threat of violence to function properly within a society. Instead of anarcho-tyranny, we need Singapore for the dumb and violent, and Sweden for the more elevated.”

The same low-IQ trash who watch the fast and furious franchise. Beginning to wish the whole population reduction conspiracy were true.

Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.

You may say “So what? Trolls like that are a dime-a-dozen on Xitter” or maybe “Typical mindless bot.” Except…he actually has an official position in the Trump administration.

He was a speechwriter (!!!) for Trump in his first administration, but got fired when people noticed that he was attending white nationalist conferences. It was a simpler time, when a few people in the White House could be slightly embarrassed by overt racists.

Don’t worry that Darren might have gone hungry — he was quickly hired by Matt Gaetz as a speechwriter.

And then Trump won his second presidential race, all concern for propriety vanished, and Marco Rubio snatched up this eloquent writer and promoted him to Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and Trump made him acting president of the United States Institute of Peace. “Diplomacy” and “Peace” are not words I would apply to him, but Trump and Rubio think different.

Beattie has since been replaced as Under Secretary of State by Sarah Rogers, a former lawyer who worked for Philip Morris to protect them from litigation, and then worked for a law firm specializing in clients like the National Rifle Association, tobacco companies, and venture capitalists in AI. She seems to be much more muted and diplomatic than her predecessor, but I still wouldn’t trust her.

He’s still president of the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. I don’t know what he does there. Go out for lunch with Stephen Miller?

If you want to know more about the Republican agenda, talk to Darren Beattie.