Quillette



Quillette makes tired alt-right talking points sound erudite.

Quillette is a far-right "academic" online magazine that tries to present itself as centrist and libertarian, when in reality it serves to legitimize and propagate many views shared by the alt-right. For example, Quillette regularly publishes wingnuttery-laden articles from a strongly conservative and reactionary viewpoint that are anti-feminist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and transphobic, with several articles outright endorsing racialism and HBD ("human-biodiversity") eugenicist pseudoscience, popular among white nationalists and Neo-Nazis. Quillette has also published an article defending Noah Carl, a far-right pseudoscientist who regularly writes Islamophobic screeds in the OpenPsych pseudojournals. In the media, Quillette is often described as an "intellectual dark web" due to the fringe nature of their content. Predictably, Quillette has jumped on the Jordan Peterson bandwagon and has published several articles supporting his ideology,  although they did criticize his religious fundamentalism.

Quillette was reportedly funded (secretly) by Peter Thiel according to alt-right activist  which is probable given Thiel's interests.

HBD ("human-biodiversity") and eugenics
Having now spent time arguing with various Quillette writers and learning more about their intellectual circles, it's become more and more clear to me the extent to which Quillette and Claire Lehmann are fronts for race realists and eugenicist psuedo [sic]-science. They all circle around the more hardcore, Nazi-adjascent [sic] outlets and people like The Unz Review, Steve Sailer, and the Ulster Institute/Richard Lynn circles (see: bringing in Toby Young as an editor).

Claire Lehmann used to write on the 'human biodiversity movement', which is the new term for 'race realism'. Most of the info was scrubbed off the internet once she started Quillette, but there's a blog or two that still references her work, e.g. Hbdchick.

Some authors and editors of Quillette are proponents of HBD, i.e. hereditarianism and racialism:


 * Claire Lehmann, Editor-in-Chief who founded Quillette in 2015 — an anti-feminist crank, who blames feminists for obesity and has made videos for the alt-right The Rebel Media. Lehmann is a proponent of HBD and was quoted by Hbdchick in 2014 for posting a definition of "human-biodiversity". Lehmann follows more than 16 alt-right accounts on Twitter including Richard Spencer and Steve Sailer.


 * Toby Young,, Associate Editor — controversially attended the London Conference on Intelligence alongside white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and child-rape apologist Emil Kirkegaard.  Young is a hard-right conservative and made UK news headlines at beginning of January 2018 for sending sexist, homophobic and other offensive tweets.  He describes himself as a "progressive eugenicist", and delivered a speech at the International Society for Intelligence Research's 2017 conference, defending HBD.


 * Emily Willoughby, author for Quillette. Supporter of eugenics and race and intelligence pseudoscience. Topic banned from Wikipedia for her controversial edits on race and IQ related articles.


 * Adam Perkins, author for Quillette. Proponent of hereditarianism and an Islamophobe who lectures in the Neurobiology of Personality at King's College London. Attended the controversial LCI.

Articles published by Quillette supporting HBD include "On the Reality of Race" and "No Voice at VOX: Sense and Nonsense about Discussing IQ and Race" by Richard Haier who has controversially defended the The Bell Curve. Quillette has published an article defending Charles Murray by Brian Boutwel who has associated with the alt-right, for example appearing on Stefan Molyneux's YouTube channel in 2017 for an hour long discussion about "human-biodiversity and criminality". In 2018, Quillette published an article by HBD pseudoscientist Adam Perkins.

Lehmann, in a 2017 interview, has said Quillette was founded to offer an "alternative to the blank slate view of human nature that appears to be dominant within the media ecosystem". In other words, Quillette identifies with hereditarianism, and sees itself as standing against social justice warriors and postmodernists who think that all differences between genders and races that they view as detrimental to non-white-males are at root caused by hate, oppression, and "privilege".

Banning Neo-Nazis is oppressing conservatives!™
In February 2019, Quillette published so-called "research" by Richard Hanania which was supposed to "prove" that "Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals" All this did was provide more evidence that people tend to use "conservatism" as thin blinds to disguise extremist ideology; the data includes many shining examples of modern conservatism:


 * The American Nazi Party(!) Are you fucking kidding?
 * Richard Spencer; neo-Nazi and coiner of the term alt-right.
 * National Policy Institute; white nationalist "think tank"; current president is the aforementioned Richard Spencer.
 * Paul Nehlen; neo-Nazi. Proposed to decorate Trump's wall with automatic turrets and that every Mexican should "be treated as an enemy combatant. Man, woman or child".
 * Mike Enoch; neo-Nazi, founder of the hate site The Right Stuff. Inventor of (((echo))).
 * James Allsup; member of neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa.
 * Traditionalist Worker Party; more neo-Nazis.
 * David Duke; former KKK grand wizard.
 * League of the South; neo-Confederate, white supremacist.
 * Proud Boys; basically a white supremacist terrorist organisation because "boo hoo feminism".
 * Gavin McInnes; white nationalist; founder of Proud Boys.
 * Alex Jones, InfoWars; 'nuff said.
 * George Zimmerman; he was "censored" for posting nude pictures of his ex-girlfriend without her consent. Conservative Family Values™!
 * revenge pornographer, banned for accusing Parkland survivors of faking the attack.
 * Jared Taylor; "race realist" with a decades-long career in "proving" that there are genetic IQ differences between blacks and whites.
 * American Renaissance; publication of Jared Taylor.
 * white nationalist publication.
 * "Social media personality" – whatever that may mean – who writes articles with titles such as "Why I Sympathize with Hitler" and poses in tasteful outfits.
 * Baked Alaska; alt-right troll turned insurrectionist
 * one of the top minds of Britain First.
 * leader of Britain First; former BNP.

There are some other conservatives with views that might raise an eyebrow or two (though to be fair, one can argue that conservative thought in general is inherently morally and intellectually repugnant); this list is just the literal neo-Nazis (over half the list!) with whom no reasonable person, regardless of political affinity, should ever side with. And conservatives wonder why they're called Nazis when they cite THE AMERICAN NAZI PARTY as an example of Conservative Censorship™…

The list also excludes several prominent banned liberal accounts, even though the author had been alerted to them.

Bullshitting with craniometry and physiognomy
Accusations about Quillette's publishing phrenology started near the plausible-deniability territory when they published racialist and dubious craniometry-related statements that "researchers can classify human variation by continent quite accurately using only data from the human skull." It didn't help when one of their "progressive" eugenicists Toby Young published a puffpiece of Boris Johnson and mentioned his "Germanic forehead". They have quoted a 19th century racialist, Cesare Lombroso, to support the claim that criminality has some "biological origin". They also appear to agree with critics that deemed Lombroso's practices as a racist sociopolitical agenda, but they also argue that he is revolutionary in investigating the biological factors of criminality. They additionally lamented about the orthodoxy and hysteria of the mainstream science for not accepting "new" ideas, which usually is an indicator of bullshitting (and how are discredited 19th century ideas "new"?).

Ecomodernism
Quillette has published a number of articles by Michael Shellenberger, a critic of mainstream environmentalism who argues that environmentalism is conceptually and institutionally incapable of dealing with climate change and should "die so that something that may live can take its place", mostly because of modern environmentalisms’ rather fanatical opposition to nuclear power (a debate that is well explored on our corresponding page). Quite what Shellenberg is doing sharing a platform with racist charlatans is unclear, but as he leans conservative it’s possible he’s simply not paying attention.

Publishing works by an EvoPsych fraud
Quillette has published several anti-feminist works on toxic masculinity, generally criticizing it as being "overused", that it argues that "all men are toxic", or introducing "toxic femininity" (that shitty article argues that it's "toxic femininity" that women have a problem when men leer at their "provocative displays" so i.e. "they asked for it".) Quillette got into serious hot water, however, when it published a now-quietly-redacted article that argued that toxic masculinity is a "catchy throwaway remark" not supported by scientific studies. The work was written by John Glynn, a man who flubbed his credentials as a psychologist as well as possibly plagiarized a few articles to write for shitty right-wing evopsyc pieces tricked not just Quillette, but Skeptic (a.k.a. Michael Shermer) (for three years), Areo (of grievance studies hoax fame), Huffington Post, Center for Inquiry, The Federalist, The Spectator, and The Globe and Mail, to name a few. While Skeptic had the guts to admit in detail that they were hoaxed and Areo wanted to keep Glynn's articles in detail because they liked the sound of his arguments (before pulling his articles all together after finding out he paraphrased one person way too closely), Quillette said nothing and hoped no one noticed, which should put a serious dent on its integrity if it had a shred of it.

The scientific consensus: Human life begins at fertilization! Or does it?
In December 2019, a researcher named Stephen Jacobs wrote an opinion piece in Quillette about a recent analysis he conducted in which 96% of the 5,577 biologists who responded "affirmed the finding that a human life begins at fertilization." Jacobs then stated that: "It was the reporting of this finding, that human zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are biological humans, that created such a strong media backlash." PZ Myers subsequently criticized Jacobs' findings, stating that: "Jacobs' analysis was based on a provocative and misleading question due to a significant omission in his list of 'zygotes, embryos, and fetuses' as biological humans."

Quillette contributors of interest to RationalWiki
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