Today is the official changeover day for the Minnesota state flag. I like it!

I especially like it because I just learned what the meaning of the original design — that cluttered, ugly illustration of farmers and Indians — was intended to be an illustration of Manifest Destiny.

Minnesota Legislature adopted that flag and seal in 1893.

A poem written by the wife of one of the artists who painted the seal said it was a representation of Manifest Destiny. intended to be an allegory of oncoming progress and civilization, and the removal of native people from the landscape.

“For the artists who created the seal, this is intended to be an allegory of oncoming progress and civilization, and the removal of Native people from the landscape,” said Minnesota Historical Society Director of Research William Convery.

If I’d known that, I would have been much more irate about it. This changeover has a similar significance to the destruction of confederate flags and monuments to rebel generals.

I’m at a university thoroughly steeped in the idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I tell you — it doesn’t do the harm the opponents claim, and it helps our students who aren’t white men. It is truly a win:win. I am not hurt by efforts to even the playing field and appreciate that we can create an environment that benefits everyone. There are, of course, some loud assholes who play the victim card — like Chris Rufo, Jerry Coyne, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc., all the pretentious bigots of the intellectual dark web — but honestly? They can’t demonstrate harm. They whine. At heart, they’re just entitled twits and racists who want to roll back the clock to a day when they were able to belittle and discriminate.

So I welcome this new interpretation of the acronym “DEI”: Demographically Entitled Idiots. I too oppose Demographically Entitled Idiots, and wholeheartedly support the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

By the way, my university also embraces the indigenous culture that lived on this land before us. It doesn’t mean we abandon science, as some of the fear-mongers want to complain. It means we respect the people, their history, and their culture, and honor them in our ceremonies and our teaching. That is all and that is everything.

A crybaby made an appearance at the University of Memphis, in a talk sponsored by Turning Point USA, that despicable organization. A good-sized group of students showed up, not to cheer Kyle Rittenhouse on, but to roast him. Kyle couldn’t take it — it was all just questions and booing — and he turned tail and ran.

Kyle Rittenhouse, who became a darling of the right after shooting three protesters in 2020, hightailed it off a stage at the University of Memphis on Wednesday night as a crowd of demonstrators booed him.

Video from the event showed several protesters in black T-shirts in attendance. One of them stood up and questioned Rittenhouse about Charlie Kirk, the far-right conservative activist whose youth organization, Turning Point U.S.A., sponsored Rittenhouse’s appearance.

They grilled him on his good buddy, Charlie Kirk, pointing out that he was a racist, and like the dumbest straight man in the universe, Rittenhouse asked him to elaborate, and even said that he was going to “dialogue” about it.

When the protester alleged that Kirk has “said a lot of racist things,” Rittenhouse immediately grew defensive.

“Like what? What racist things has Charlie Kirk said?” he fired back from the podium. “We’re gonna have a bit of a dialogue of what racist things Charlie Kirk said.”

The protester was unfazed.

“He says that we shouldn’t celebrate Juneteenth, we shouldn’t celebrate Martin Luther King Day—we should be working those days. He called Ketanji Brown Jackson an affirmative action hire, he said all this nonsense about George Floyd, and he said he’d be scared if a Black pilot was on a plane. Does that not seem racist?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Rittenhouse said, prompting jeers from the room.

Why propose a dialogue on a subject you know nothing about? It did not go well for him — although the dialogue turned out to be very brief.

“I’m not gonna comment on that,” Rittenhouse answered, as the room once again erupted in boos. Rittenhouse waited on stage for a beat, but stormed off after he was approached by one of the event’s organizers. He did not look back or make any other comments as he left the stage.

The boos turned to cheers as he walked off.

Yes! That’s how all these scumbags should be treated at every event — make them cower behind nice safe audiences, dreading the appearance of a single naysayer.

He must be so relieved to have been doxxed — now he can be his true self in public. He can go speak at conferences for his people, appear on television in documentaries, proudly march in parades.

Graebener is the creator of Stonetoss, the webcomic that tries to find the “cute” in “nazi”, while failing to notice that those two words share no letters in common. He does all these short “comics” with the same frequent punchlines: trans people end up killing themselves, gay people end up bathing in feces, Jews are behind everything and are scheming to sacrifice Xian babies. When they aren’t obvious, they’re so loaded with impenetrable bizarre references to neo-Nazi shit they’re incomprehensible, but racists and haters and Nazis love them anyway. You can even buy an adorable little plush toy of the main character. He’s also been peddling NFTs, still, endlessly trying to grift his way to riches and glory, and now he can do it in his own charmingly German name.

Graebener is an IT guy working (so far!) in Spring, Texas. He’s single, girls! He’s been known to desperately advertise his availability, but doesn’t seem to have landed a long-term relationship. I can’t imagine what a pleasant person he must be in person.

No, really, I can’t imagine it.

I can imagine that he’s the kind of guy who has a porn addiction. Too bad he lives in Texas, now that PornHub has blocked the whole state.

He’ll be OK, though. I’m sure he’ll have the support of Elon Musk, a guy who loves to promote racism.

Garrison also talks to Dr. Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who points out that because this racism is seemingly backed by scientific fact, people often lack the language to call out its problematic nature.

“There’s a kind of fusion between old-school gutter racism that everyone can recognize and this new-school Silicon Valley, data-driven analysis. And I think that this is very confusing to people,” said Gusev. “They don’t know what to do with it. They say, ‘Hey, there’s this thing that I recognize as ugly, and then there’s somebody posting a hundred charts that seem to support it.’”

Musk can do the hundred charts, while Graebener brings the ugly.

The Dixiecrat governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, said this in 1962, back when I was an innocent 5 year old who thought all people were good and kind.

There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide.

I first learned about this yesterday, in this video about segregation in sports. It would be so nice to roll back in time to my blissful ignorance as a child.

I had no idea we white people were so frail. Of course, he was laboring under the fallacious belief that miscegenation was evil and that the one-drop rule was valid. There’s a curious racist game they play, where the children of a white person and a black person are 100% black, rather than 50% white, and under those counterfactual rules, white people will rapidly go extinct if mixed race marriages are permitted. It’s a weird mindset that calls having children “genocide”.

But this was in 1962! Surely we have grown past this nonsense here in the 21st century. No, we haven’t. This belief is the major guiding principle of the Republican party. Nowadays they tend to avoid the blatant stuff; instead, they whisper about the “great replacement theory”, which is built on the same fundamental ignorance about biology and meiosis and inherited traits, and is therefore fallacious and doesn’t deserve the dignity of being called a “theory”.

Or they draft some brain-washed Christian hick to use her fundie baby voice to whitewash their hatred of immigrants with Jesus and patriotism. It’s all the same thing. America hasn’t changed its core since the civil rights movement made a valiant effort to call these people to account — this is still a deeply racist country.

The infection has been festering for decades, and is ready to erupt again under the banner of Donald Trump. In the name of decency and basic human dignity, we have to sweep every vestige of the Republican party out of power.

Look at this lovely building on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus.

That’s Nicholson Hall, named after a university professor and administrator in the 1930s & 40s. There is a campaign in the works to rename the building, and also several other buildings on campus, for some unfathomable reason.

1. Nicholson repeatedly controlled and often suppressed the open exchange of ideas on campus that as Dean of Student Affairs he was obligated to protect.
2. Nicholson created a secret political surveillance system at the university and covertly shared information about students and faculty.
3. Nicholson brought disrepute to the University by using his stature as a highly visible University administrator to advance partisan political ends outside the University.
4. Nicholson, while serving as a dean, sought to influence the selection of Regents for his own political ends, a gross conflict of interest and duty as a neutral University administrator.
We call for the removal of Edward Nicholson’s name because we support the University of Minnesota’s commitment to honor those whose behavior is consistent with the University’s mission and guiding principles, maintain the integrity of the University and enhance its reputation, upholding thereby the high principles of our state and university. We likewise support the University of Minnesota’s commitment to revoke any naming inconsistent with these values. As scholars of Jewish Studies as well as other fields, we share a deep commitment to recognizing and analyzing the immense cost to religious and racial minorities at the hands of those in power in societies that have oppressed them. Some of our scholarship and teaching focuses on leftist and progressive movements, ideas and activism that are a powerful strand in modern Jewish history and were openly and unrelentingly attacked by Edward Nicholson. We are all too aware of what happened to Jews, minorities, and political dissenters throughout the world when state and institutional power was used against them and their allies. We are also attuned to the social and political conditions under which civic life flourishes and has been most successful in assuring the rights of religious and racial minorities.
The University of Minnesota has committed itself to educate for and foster a democratic and pluralist civil society committed to the very openness that Edward Nicholson worked assiduously to undermine.

Oh. Anti-semitic authoritarian who tried to manipulate the university to support conservative/racist political goals? I guess that is a pretty good reason to stop honoring him with a building name. Especially considering that building now houses the Center for Jewish Studies.

Other buildings those woke rascals are going after include Coffman Hall. I know that one well, that’s the huge student union building, centrally located and a fairly common meeting place when I visit the Twin Cities campus. What did he do?

President Coffman requested the University Senate to track data about students in the mid-1930s. He wanted specifically to track “Negro and Jewish out-of-state students.” These students required on-campus housing, and Coffman opposed integrating taxpayer-funded dorms. New York Jews were a subset of who was tracked because Coffman believed they were the source of radicalism on campus.

Is that all? Wait, there’s more.

• Coffman in 1931 wrote: “The races have never lived together, nor have they ever sought to live together.”

• His administration repeatedly excluded black students from student housing. The report says Coffman was “extremely cautious about allowing even a single instance to establish ‘precedent’ for integrated housing.”

• He considered creating an “International House” for non-white U students to live, but ultimately decided it was too expensive.

• Under Coffman, the U’s nursing school would not allow black students to care for white patients.

• After Jack Trice, a black Iowa State football player, died from injuries sustained during a 1923 game against Minnesota, Coffman batted down accusations that U players had assaulted Trice. Coffman again defended the football team in 1934 after writers said Minnesota players had targeted Ozzie Simmons, another black athlete.

• Coffman authorized surveillance efforts on student activists, including those who protested racial discrimination or were believed to be Jewish or associated with communism.

I am now feeling a bit queasy about all the times I walked through that building, not having the slightest idea who Coffman was.

They were all “men of their time” I guess, all powerful conservative white men who sought to exclude students who were not similarly white. Screw ’em. Strip those names from the buildings and name them after people who actually supported diverse Americans and the university’s egalitarian educational goals.

And if twenty years from now, we realize that those new people were horribly flawed and hurt people, strip off their names again. There’s nothing sacred or permanent about naming stuff.

If nothing else, this is an accomplishment. I know Chris Rufo as a shill for the Discovery Institute — that anti-science, anti-evolution think-tank running on the fumes of rich conservatives’ money, pumping out nonsense about Intelligent Design creationism and fronted by pompous, but ignorant, pseudo-philosophers. If I had that in my background, I’d be deeply ashamed and would want to bury it as deeply as possible. I’d change my name, move to a new city, deny knowing all my old friends, etc. I’d dread someone uncovering my embarrassing past, forcing me to change my name and move again. I’d desperately desire a magic eraser to blot out that past shame.

Chris Rufo has done it! Here’s a prominent article about Chris Rufo that doesn’t even mention the Discovery Institute or creationism! How did he do it?

It is incredibly easy. All you have to do is associate with something even more repulsively stupid than creationism, and Rufo has managed to slather himself with filth so grossly disgusting that there’s no point in even mentioning his relatively minor dabblings in ignorance. He’s buddying up with a site called Aporia.

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

Now he’s all tangled up with Bo Winegard.

Winegard, a psychologist, was by his own account fired by Ohio’s Marietta College in March 2020 after a seminar he gave to a research group at the University of Alabama attracted protests and coverage in student media.

In that speech an audience member reportedly said that Winegard told his listeners that “people in colder climates, because of differences in brain size, have more propensity for cooperation”.

Winegard has continued to write in this vein on Aporia up to the present. In a 3 January article on the site titled “Yes, we should talk about race differences”, he wrote: “Thus, we must be honest about race. And that means we begin by noting that in the United States (and elsewhere in the world), different races have different average levels of intelligence as measured by IQ tests (and other measures of cognitive ability).”

As proof of this claim, Winegard cites researchers including the late Richard Lynn – a white nationalist, according to the SPLC – and the late Arthur Jensen, whom the SPLC calls “arguably the father of modern academic racism”.

Also, Noah Carl!

Another Aporia editor, Noah Carl, has also been the subject of previous academic controversy.

Carl is a sociologist who in 2018 was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after the college that appointed him discovered that alongside his more legitimate work in sociology, he had simultaneously been publishing scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddling scientific racism.

One of the outlets Carl published in, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again”, according to the writer Angela Saini. It was for decades funded by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, and the journal has been described as a “cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment”.

Now mix in Emil Kirkegaard.

Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform established by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who explicitly advocates “race science”, and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization once headed by Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s retraction.

These are the writers and pseudo-scientists Rufo recommends to others.

Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “All of these ideas have been debunked over and over again. The danger here is that eugenics and scientific racism have been historically used to justify terrible acts including genocide.”

Other recent articles on Aporia include Winegard’s “The case for race realism”, which reasserts that “underlying race differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime … make large outcome disparities inevitable”; an article by Gregory Conner, a retired professor of finance, which argues for innate racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing high IQ among Jews has a basis in their genetics.

Aporia also publishes a podcast, which featured Rufo as a guest on 4 August, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.

Aporia is contemptible racist garbage, and Rufo is promoting it. Rufo is a nobody, a hack with no serious background in science (or anything intellectual at all, for that matter) so sure, creationism, racism, they’re both popular ideas among uneducated ideologues, so he’ll push them — he hasn’t get the education to understand how terrible they are.

On Rufo’s recommending the site to his readers, Bird said: “There’s nothing legitimate on biology or evolution or genetics that’s really been published by anyone at Aporia,” adding: “Pointing people towards that is pointing them toward unambiguous white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.

“There’s nothing of value there. There’s nothing that resembles real mainstream science. There’s nothing that resembles real discussions happening in the field. It can’t be anything other than racist propaganda.”

Beirich said of Rufo’s links that “it’s not surprising to find that a person who is playing footsie with eugenicists is also happy to attack diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education or a Black president of Harvard”.

By linking to Aporia and appearing on its podcast, she said: “Rufo is helping to bring back this despicable material and mainstreaming it.”

Keep in mind that Rufo has been elevated to high advisory positions in the Florida government, and is making decisions about the universities in that state. Nothing in his background has prepared him to make competent decisions on much of any of the institutions he now has his thumb on.

Oh, he does have one qualification that doesn’t bother me at all but might alienate him from his fans. He has a Masters Degree…in Liberal Arts. Work on erasing that from your CV, guy.