I am quite enjoying the chaos on the right

Sometimes I do regret leaving Twitter — I have to get all the gossipy infighting second hand.

For instance, you may recall the depths to which Nick Fuentes sank after the Supreme Court gutted Roe v. Wade:

Your body, my choice. Forever.

What, you may wonder has happened to little Nicky ever since?

I will now have to uproot my life and relocate. While I can handle whatever comes to my front door, it is irresponsible to expect my neighbors with young families to share that burden.
In the mean I will have to contract 24 hour security to protect myself and my property.


If anybody would like to contribute to defray the cost ($13,000/week) of private security and rebuilding my studio, here is a donation link.
I can only accept cryptocurrency because I am banned from banking services and CC processing. Thank you.

His choice, he needs to learn to live with it. It’s a fitting fate for a hateful racist and misogynist.

In addition, that freaky obsessive Laura Loomer is jealously trying to defend her ‘boyfriend,’ Trump, from that wicked interloper, Elon Musk.

The elephant in the room is that @elonmusk, who is not MAGA and never has been, is a total fucking drag on the Trump transition. @realDonaldTrump
He’s a stage 5 clinger who over stayed his welcome at Mar a Lago in an effort to become Trump’s side piece and be the point man for all his accomplices in big Tech to slither into Mar a Lago.

I will give her this…it takes one to know one.

Elon Musk: Loomer is trolling for attention. Ignore.
Laura Loomer: Telling the truth isn’t trolling.
Read the room! @elonmusk
You bought your way into MAGA 5 minutes ago after Trump almost had his head blown off in Butler. Remember when you voted for Biden and propped up @GovRonDeSantis and you said Trump was too old?
We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi JinPing.

Delicious. It all reminds me of junior high school. And this is how the American presidency operates?

My wife will be so happy to learn that I’m gay now

After all, the heterosexual men are terrible in bed.

“I’m not going to have gay sex,” Luke Moody said of sex that gives his wife an orgasm but not a pregnancy.

That stupid man-child. That poor woman. He thinks that any non-procreative sex is “gay”.

“As soon as we’re together, it’s like no birth control, no nothing, because I’m not going to have gay sex. Gay sex is more than just another man and a man, it’s just the idea of looking at sex as such a materialistic thing and just like, ‘Oh well, we just have an orgasm, and that’s fun or whatever.’”

MAGA is a particularly delusional cult.

They let just anyone in

The Royal Society is one of the oldest, most respected, and most exclusive scientific societies in the world. Imagine my surprise to learn that Elon Musk is a member.

This brings us, then, to the case of Elon Musk, who was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 on the basis of his technological achievements, notably in space travel and electrical vehicle development. Unfortunately, since that time, his interests have extended to using social media for political propaganda, while at the same time battling what he sees as “woke mind virus” and attacks on free speech. Whereas previously he seemed to agree with mainstream scientific opinion on issues such as climate change and medicine, over the past year or two, he’s started promoting alternative ideas.

They thought Elon Musk was inventing new technology with his mighty brain, rather than simply buying large teams of engineers with his mighty bank account? Tsk.

That account comes from a former FRS who has resigned at this tainting of the society. She is asking that he be stricken from the rolls, and lists multiple reasons why he brings shame on a distinguished scientific organization.

Scientific misconduct
Ethics & management of Neuralink
Promoting vaccine hesitation
Downplaying the climate emergency
Spreading deep fakes and misinformation on X

The Royal Society has done nothing; I guess once enrolled, forever enrolled, and no amount of anti-science ignorance or the promotion of atrocities will change that (that’s to be expected, given the history of the British Empire.) The society did contact a lawyer to make sure it was OK to keep a known professional troll in their ranks.

I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk’s behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. That’s just how lawyers work. They’re paid to rescue people from ethical impulses that may get them into trouble. And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn’t breached the Code of Conduct. If you want to see if you agree, you can find the Code of Conduct here.

The Society has promised to look more deeply at the Musk case, but don’t expect much.

I’ve been told that in the light of the evolving situation, the Royal Society Council will look again at the case of Elon Musk. In conversations I have had with them, they emphasise that they must adhere to their own procedures, which are specified in the Statutes, and which involve a whole series of stages of legal scrutiny, committee evaluation, discussion with the Fellow in question, and ultimately a vote from the Fellowship, before a Fellow or Foreign Member could be expelled. While I agree that if you have a set of rules you should stick to them, I find the fact that nobody has been expelled for over 150 years telling. It does suggest that the Statutes are worded so that it is virtually impossible to do anything about Fellows who breach the Code of Conduct. In effect the Statutes serve a purpose of protecting the Royal Society from ever having to take action against one of its Fellows.

Sounds like most other human cliques.

Transphobia rots your brain

CSICon is currently taking place in Las Vegas, with a great speaker lineup: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, Michael Mann, Massimo Pigliucci, Steve Novella, etc. For some reason, they also included Jerry Coyne, who has become a right-wing crank over the years, and who is quite annoyed that Novella discussed the myth of the gender binary — and chose to talk about Sex and Race: Handling the Ideological Hot Potatoes. His abstract for the talk says he was arguing that race is a valid category because you can distinguish “race” genetically, which tells me that he doesn’t understand the argument. Individuals are unique and carry the record of their ancestry, but that ignores the fact that people use race as a catch-all for lumping people into stereotypes, which are not valid.

But I haven’t heard his talk, nor am I interested in hearing it. He did give a kind of “rebuttal” to Novella’s talk, though, summarized in one simple list. The list is a collection of his misconceptions and says far more about him than any argument us “woke” people would actually make. Further, it is embarrassingly stupid — irrelevant, confused, and not even wrong. It reminds me of the kinds of arguments creationists make that just reveal that they understand nothing about evolution.

Here’s Coyne’s list In Defense of the Binary Nature of Sex, which does nothing of the kind.

IN DEFENSE OF THE BINARY NATURE OF SEX
Argument is completely limited to humans; is the binary of reproductive systems also “delusional” in other animals (e.g., foxes, ducks) or in plants?
No evidence of any “brain modules” for gender identity.
Do people who are temporally binary, with gender fluctuating over time, change sex each time they change gender?
Fluctuations in referrals for gender dysphoria over time (20-fold in last ten years in UK)
Are “pure” members of one sex (with the corresponding genitals, chromosomes, gametes and chromosomes), but who feel they’re not of their natal sex, actually of the other sex?
People have incorrect feelings about their nature all the time (yes, in their brains), but this doesn’t mean that their self-image should be taken as biological reality.
And what do we do with people who sincerely feel that they’re other animals? Are they Indeed animals likes horses and cats?

Let’s take them on one at a time, shall we?

Argument is completely limited to humans; is the binary of reproductive systems also “delusional” in other animals (e.g., foxes, ducks) or in plants?

Who says the argument is completely limited to humans? It’s not. It’s just that we are far better at distinguishing subtle variations in our own species. Sexual development and differentiation in animals uses the same complex cascade of molecular interactions as it does in humans. There are differences in sexual morphology and behavior in individual animals that will leap out at you if you actually scrutinize them carefully. Even in spiders, which are only distantly related to humans. They exhibit different degrees of social behavior, aggression, cooperation, and yes, sexual activity. I’ve had spiders who exhibit no interest in sex at all; I raise them to adulthood, and can’t persuade them to reproduce even as their siblings readily mate at every opportunity. Every coupling is different. This is in a species that cannot communicate to us and every interpretation of their activity is subjective. What kind of biologist would look at the range of sexual interactions in any species and decide that they must be shoehorned into just two types?

As for plants — they don’t exhibit much in the way of behavior, expression, or culture, but they do have a complex range of sexes. How do you tell if a carrot is uncomfortable with its expected biological role?

No evidence of any “brain modules” for gender identity.

Jerry Coyne knows nothing about neuroscience. We know there are differences in the brain that are correlates of differences in behavior and thinking; I’m pretty sure Coyne wouldn’t be claiming that brains are like featureless potatoes with patterns of activity that arise without differences in morphology or connectivity of pharmacology. Modules are abstractions that are used to model the functionality of different parts of the brain.

Many complex networks are composed of “modules” that form an interconnected network. We sought to elucidate the nature of the brain’s modular function by testing the autonomy of the brain’s modules and the potential mechanisms underlying their interactions. By studying the brain as a large-scale complex network and measuring activity across the network during 77 cognitive tasks, we demonstrate that, despite connectivity between modules, each module appears to execute a discrete cognitive function relatively autonomously from the other modules. Moreover, brain regions with diverse connectivity across the modules appear to play a role in enabling modules to interact while remaining mostly autonomous. This generates the counterintuitive idea that regions with diverse connectivity across modules are necessary for modular biological networks.

The brain is a network with spatial and functional segregation of elements that we can call “modules”; trans people will have modules that differ from cis people, and people who prefer coffee to tea have their own kinds of modules. All Coyne is doing here is denying the existence of differences between brains, which I would hope most people would recognize is ignorant and absurd.

(Note that there are differences in interpretation in the neuroscience community; we can argue about modules vs. modes, but good grief, denying that there are neurological differences is like trying to claim that population structure doesn’t exist.)

Do people who are temporally binary, with gender fluctuating over time, change sex each time they change gender?

Sure, why not? Why can’t both sex and gender be fluid? Coyne just wants to force-fit everything into only one of two possible categories, but biology is more complex than that. His narrow-mindedness is not evidence of much of anything.

Fluctuations in referrals for gender dysphoria over time (20-fold in last ten years in UK)

Jesus christ, really? Culture and evironment affect everything, that varying rates of referrals is a product of the way that societies fluctuate in their tolerance of sex and gender differences. That he doesn’t recognize this is just a sign that he has a painfully simple-minded notion of how sex functions as more than just a mechanism for reproduction.

Are “pure” members of one sex (with the corresponding genitals, chromosomes, gametes and chromosomes), but who feel they’re not of their natal sex, actually of the other sex?

I’m glad I didn’t hear his talk, because I wonder if he also talked about “pure” members of one race. There’s no such thing as being “purely” a member of one complex multidimensional and weakly defined category. We are all part of a continuum along many dimensions. This point makes no sense unless you’re thoroughly soaking in the preconception that there can be only two sexes and everyone must fit into one or another in all particulars.

People have incorrect feelings about their nature all the time (yes, in their brains), but this doesn’t mean that their self-image should be taken as biological reality.

I am grossly materialistic. Self-image is part of one’s biology. If it’s in our brains, how can it not be a reflection of biological reality? I’m sorry if plasticity isn’t in Jerry Coyne’s vocabulary. I’m pretty confident that dualism isn’t part of his worldview.

And what do we do with people who sincerely feel that they’re other animals? Are they Indeed animals likes horses and cats?

I kew that was coming. And what about the people who sincerely feel that they are attack helicopters?

No, people can’t change species. They’re still people. Being a person, though, encompasses a wide range of possibilities. Trans people fully understand their biological realities and don’t imagine that genitalia are magical products of desire.

As for what we do with people who have ideas that are less rigid than Coyne’s dumb-ass cis-normativity…do we have to do anything, or can we just let them live in peace?

The FDA hates sunshine and exercise?

Remember this: Trump wants to put RFK Jr. in charge of America’s public health policy.

FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, | have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.

There’s a bunch of both dangerous (opposed by the FDA) and innocuous (not opposed, and sometimes endorsed, by the FDA) things in that list, and a not-so-subtle paranoid conspiracy theory behind it all, but what I find particularly worrisome is the threat at the end. If you aren’t in favor of raw milk, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and random psychedelics, pack your bags, you’re going on Donald Trump’s list of undesirables.

At least I hate the Sacklers and Martin Shkreli as much as anyone, and I’m on the side of sunshine and exercise. In fact, I just had my morning vitamins and am going to go on a walk.

Only a fool would be fooled by Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor is a notorious racist and extremist, recognized as a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Only an extremely naive person could read any of his articles, which are generally pleasantly written and express less obvious hate than an extremely patronizing condescension. For example, did you know that he actually likes black people? Sure does. He says so.

Like some other writers for this website, I have a reputation for writing rude things about blacks. I have written rude things about whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, but being rude about blacks is one of our era’s unforgivable sins. Of course, what I write about blacks is true, but as Mark Twain pointed out, nothing astonishes people more than to tell them the truth. Deep down, everyone knows the truth about blacks, but a vital requirement for respectability is to pretend you don’t.

The fact is, there are things to like about blacks—and I like them. They mostly have to do with lack of inhibition, a kind of cheerful spontaneity you don’t often find in whites. I have a half-Asian friend—a connoisseur of stereotypes—who thinks blacks and whites differ in that respect even more than they do in average IQ. As he puts it, whites act like Asians who have had a few drinks and blacks act like whites who have had a few drinks.

That’s enough. You can read the rest of his article, where he mentions how they complimented his hat and speak an interesting dialect and are so trusting and child-like if you want, but you’ll recognize the game — he thinks that diminishing people into shallow stereotypes is flattering them.

I trust that readers here are not idiots and wouldn’t for an instant regard Jared Taylor’s condescension as anything but demeaning. Which means, obviously, that Amy Wax is not a reader here. Amy Wax is a professor at UPenn who has been regularly making racist comments to her students, insulting the Asian and Black students at her university, who have been lobbying for years to see her fired. She is such a dumb bigot that she invited Jared Taylor to speak to her classes…for some unfathomable purpose. Was she looking for training in treating her minority students more repulsively?

She has already applied that talent for condescension to Asian students, in addition to black students.

I confess I find Asian support for these [liberal] policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Just like Jared Taylor, she’s a master at deploying stereotypes like backhanded compliments.

She hasn’t been fired yet, but she has been slapped down a bit.

Wax — who has called into question the academic ability of Black students, invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to her classroom, and said the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration — will be suspended for one year at half pay with benefits intact. She also will face a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn.

But she will not be fired or lose her tenure.

It’s good to have tenure, isn’t it? You can even survive a blistering attack like this one, from the administration.

Wax’s conduct, according to [former U President] Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.”

Wax also, both in and out of the classroom, repeatedly and in public made “discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify,” the letter said.

For that, her punishment is half-pay for a year and a loss of summer salary — I bet her half-pay is more than my full pay, and I don’t get summer salary, either, and unlike Awful Amy, I can’t make it up through my connections to the Hoover Institute, or by hitting the lucrative right-wing lecture circuit.

Just wait, she’s going to be declared a martyr by the “free speech” poltroons. Not bad for someone unable to recognize how vile Jared Taylor is.

Incest is a touchy subject for Ken Ham

Ken Ham was motivated to respond to YouTuber because, apparently, her message was inconsistent.

Our social media team recently asked me to respond to a young lady who has a YouTube channel that featured a video criticizing young-earth creationists and our (in her view) ridiculous beliefs. Now, we see many (many) such videos (there are whole channels dedicated to mocking us!) and don’t always respond, but I decided to respond to this one to point out the inconsistency in her thinking.

See if you can catch her inconsistency in the clip at the beginning of my response:

What horrible, outrageous thing did Gutsick Gibbon say? Ham pulls out a very short excerpt, about 20 seconds long, that is the basis for his 4½ minute complaint. Here’s all she is given a chance to say.

Young earth creationists are religious folk who typically come from evangelical backgrounds…basically anyone who believes that the Earth was created in more or less present state by god…approximately 6000 years ago.
If you never heard of this before, you might be saying “oh my god, what about the inbreeding?”

That’s it. That’s all Answers in Genesis can tolerate putting on their website. That first bit is totally accurate; Ken Ham might have been literally quoted saying something similar, that he is an evangelical Christian who believes that the world was created 6000 years ago by his god.

But then she says “oh my god,” which he bleeps out. He’s going to repeat that even shorter clip multiple times.

There is no inconsistency. She correctly defines Ham’s own religious belief, and happens to use a common English phrase. Ham’s objection is that, he claims, evolution and materialism are religious beliefs, too, which is irrelevant. If I were to point out that a PB&J sandwich that he is holding is a sandwich, it doesn’t refute my statement to say that my taco is also a sandwich — because Gutsick Gibbon isn’t making a case here that science is not a religion (it isn’t, but again, she’s not saying that.)

What really irks Ken Ham is that mention of the inbreeding problem. This has long been a point of irritation for him; in both the creation “museum” and fake boat gift shops, he sells stuff bragging about the fact that Adam & Eve’s kids had sex with each other, and that it wasn’t a problem because they were perfect genetic beings. He doesn’t like incest mentioned because he thinks he has an irrefutable answer to it. Never mind that he also likes to claim that they were heterozygous at every locus and that Noah’s family carried every possible allelic variant, or that what he’s arguing for is a kind of moral relativism, where sex with your brother or sister is OK if you’re not going to propagate defective children (I’ve always wanted to ask him if it’s fine to have sex with a sibling if you use contraceptives, then?)

What is inconsistent is that he then uses this offense against his faith to rant about how atheists don’t have any morality and they believe they’re just animals and animals can do anything they want. She’s ridiculous, says the man who thinks that having a silly theme park makes him qualified to judge other’s lives.

He also doesn’t link to Gutsick Gibbon’s YouTube channel, where his followers might be able to discover that she had more to say than the only 20 seconds Ken Ham was brave enough to include.

Bari Weiss is freakin’ weird

Bari Weiss founded this journamalism website, The Free Press, back in 2022. I guess it is “free” — it’s bleeding money, and they’re desperately seeking investors, and you can predict that they’ll get money from some billionaires somewhere, so they’ll continue to be “free,” although they’ll also be “owned” at the same time by, probably, some pro-Trump fanatical Zionist, because that’s what Weiss is. What will be published won’t be what I would consider journalism — we need a new word. Journanalism? Jourge? Jourbarism?

Anyway, Weiss went on Twitter (heh, she still uses Twitter) to plug the latest article on her glorified blog, titled The People Who Rage Against the Machine, which I’m sure Tom Morello appreciates. It’s an account by Suzy Weiss (any relation? I don’t know, don’t care) of a hyper-weird, tiny meeting of 50 people, by invitation only, called “The Machine and (Human) Nature” retreat. The headline says An emergent coalition of Catholics, preppers, localists, Luddites, and farmers is determined to resist modernity. They call themselves Doomer Optimists.

It’s illustrated with this photograph:

Even if you’re not convinced that thermonuclear war, or widespread political violence, or an AI overlord is coming for us in the near future, you can probably recognize what the Doomer Optimists are seeing. The signs of decline are everywhere.

Are you confused yet? What is the point of this article? Does the author have a perspective on this strange cult-like ideology?

She does not. Except maybe that she thinks it’s cool.

Now try to actually read the thing.

If the American political scene is divided between the liberal establishment—the domain of Dick and Liz Cheney, and Kamala Harris—and the renegade rebel alliance—which includes Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard—this conference represents the intelligentsia, or the culturati, of the renegades. They code right—although it’s noted at the conference that the left-right political divide is a “foreign French import,” and doesn’t apply—but only because the left is the establishment now, and they are antiestablishment. They see themselves as the vanguard of whatever comes after the establishment finally collapses under its own weight, and they call themselves by a paradoxical name.

“We’re excited to have the Doomer Optimist scene here,” McNiel, 42, said, on the first day of the conference. “Whatever it is.”

That’s…that’s incoherent. Dick Cheney is the liberal establishment? Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are the rebel alliance? What kind of cartoon world is she living in?

This is a self-selected gang of raw milk drinking, goat-farming, conservatives patting themselves on the back over their iconoclasm, that is, their wildly backwards reactionary freakishness, and Weiss is calling them the intelligentsia? Keep those insightful articles coming, The Free Press!

Worse, Bari Weiss has a rather inflated perception of her own cleverness. She also retweeted this cartoon.

That’s jerbalism for you.

The grill is blue, therefore the racism is true

Creationist logic is soaking into the general discourse, I’m sorry to say. As we’ve all heard, Donald Trump declared that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and some people have been desperately trying to validate that. Among their ranks we have Chris Rufo, the professional racist, destroyer of universities, and flailing idiot trained in the heart of the Discovery Institute, who attempts to mimic skeptical reasoning in a post titled…

The Cat Eaters of Ohio
The establishment media called it a racist myth, but is it?

Yes. Yes it is.

He’s going to get to the bottom of this story.

So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.

“Not exactly” is doing a lot of work here. To translate, he’s saying “not even close to what Trump described,” which he interprets as reasonable doubt that any rebuttals are valid.

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”

I watched the video. It’s true, there are live cats on camera, and there is a barbecue grill, and there is something unidentifiable cooking on the grill, and there is a man vocally accusing them of grilling cats. That’s it. One ambiguous video yanked off of TikTok. That’s Rufo’s evidence.

He does go a significant step further, and he or someone he’s associated with contacted the creator of the video, and even visited the neighborhood to ask questions. It’s a significant effort, but all he’s going to get out of it is a lot of irrelevant details. As any creationist knows, piling on random detail is an adequate substitute for actually confirming a hypothesis.

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

Point of order: there has been no evidence presented that it was a cat on the grill. Having the initial accuser repeat the accusation adds nothing.

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

So, not a Haitian. Telling us the country of origin of the accused does not in any way confirm that they were eating cats — we keep drifting further and further away from the initial claim — but it does contradict the story we were told.

But hey, people from Africa, people from a Caribbean island, they’re all the same. They’re black. Is Rufo trying to establish that yes, it sure is a racist myth?

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

At this point, we’ve lost the plot. Now we’ve got the testimony of someone in the neighborhood saying that she had a neighbor, not necessarily the same person as the one accused in the video, was from Africa. In Rufo’s mind, this is a connection sufficient to establish guilt, and he had a knife, and he was reputed to have hunted for meat in the neighborhood.

Somebody had a blue grill, the same color as the grill in the video, therefore they must have been cooking cats.

There are many cats wandering about, further evidence. I’m going to have to confess: there are many feral and pet cats living in my neighborhood. I’m going to be in big trouble if ever I’m accused of cat-eating, because they’ll be able to point to a random cat strolling by and announce “A-ha! Opportunity! Therefore, guilty!”

Rufo imagines himself a reasonable man, so he offers a reasonable interpretation.

To be clear: this single incident does not confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.

It does not confirm any particularity of Trump’s statement. It’s a different city and a different nationality. Notice how he now segues from a video of something indefinite on a grill to a definitive statement that “cats alone were on the grill,” something that has not been established by this investigation. The question he should be asking is — what was Trump’s source for this garbled, ugly claim? I know, he’s just going to say it was people on television, but what ought to be engaging Rufo is not whether there is some thin, tenuous thread of circumstance that can be attached post-hoc to Trump’s claim, but what was the actual basis for the claim?

Also, the fact checkers never insisted that this has never happened. Every account I’ve read points out that there was an isolated instance of a mentally ill person eating a cat, so right away there’s an awareness that it’s entirely possible that there have been individual cases of such incidents. The expression of racism arises from the fact that Rufo and Trump and a whole wing of conservatives are flatly accusing an entire group of people of reprehensible behavior on the basis of the flimsiest evidence. It arises from the fact that Rufo can blithely equate Congolese with Haitian.

It takes only a single exception, however, to falsify a hypothesis, and the logical next step, for any honest broker, is to ask if it is happening more often, and elsewhere. It is not implausible. Many developing nations, including the Congo and Haiti, have traditions of animal sacrifice or consumption of what Americans would consider household pets. And if this occurred in Dayton, where the migrant population is relatively small, it could be going on down the road in Springfield, where it is relatively much larger.

Keep in mind that the hypothesis that Rufo is falsifying is the idea that no one has ever eaten a cat, which is both trivially false and a hypothesis that no one has proposed. An honest broker would not suggest that this is the premise in contention; the concern is that it has become a Republican talking point that an entire large community of immigrants is habitually preying on household pets in Ohio.

This is simply not true.

You also cannot extrapolate from one poorly documented possible case in Dayton to conclude that it must be happening on a larger scale in Springfield. You also don’t get to plop down the claim that pet-eating is endemic in Congo and Haiti without a source and without evidence, trusting only in the assumed racist bias that of course, black people everywhere engage in behaviors that good, civilized white people deplore.

Rufo has managed to confirm only that a) he’s racist as fuck, and b) has no grasp of elementary logic. It’s about what I’d expect from a creationist fool and professional hatemonger. How can we doubt that Haitians are eating your cats if he has photographic evidence that blue barbecue grills exist?

I missed out on the action

Surprise! Russian propaganda outlets have been funneling lots of cash into some sympathetic YouTubers…amazing amounts of money. They had a fake figurehead named “Grigoriann” who recruited these commentators to churn out videos that expressed the views that Russia likes.

Prosecutors said one of the Tenet founders began soliciting two commentators for work on behalf of “Grigoriann” around February 2023. One of the personalities, described as “Commentator-1,” said he would need $5 million annually “for him to be interested” in creating videos for the fake persona, Grigoriann. The other, identified as “Commentator-2,” needed $100,000 per weekly episode “to make it worth his while,” according to the indictment.

The two commentators eventually entered into contracts, prosecutors said. The contract for Commentator-1 required four weekly videos that he would host and would be livestreamed by Tenet Media in exchange for $400,000 per month and a $100,000 signing bonus. Commentator-2 agreed to provide weekly videos for $100,000 apiece, the indictment states.

OK, I’ll make videos for a mere $10K per week. No problem. I could commit to making that my full-time job for only half a million per year, although I’d also willingly accept $5 million, like those bozos did.

Maybe the problem is that I don’t express views that are favorable to Moscow. Or have 1 or 2 million followers on YouTube.

The well-paid commentators have been identified as Tim Pool and either Dave Rubin or Benny Johnson (doesn’t matter which is which, they’re all kind of indistinguishable right-wing turds). If you don’t recognize those names, good for you — they are the schlockiest, dumbest, most dishonest people on YouTube.

There’s something wrong at the core of YouTube, because have you noticed that it’s always the worst people who float to the top of that medium?