For those of you who feel that I'm too paranoid about anonymity, or who believe that I'm somehow exaggerating the danger to my academic career by even posting here...you need to read this post.

First, some background. XSteve and One People's Project are organizations with a history of using Nuremberg Files type tactics, by publishing the home addresses of people they disagree with to encourage violent action against them. For example, here's their "dossier" on Sailer:

His falsified and racist writings have permeated the internet, creating many rumors and misunderstanding which have spread through many internet forums. Many unsuspecting people who have written articles on race or interracial marriages may have used Steve as a source while researching on the internet.

Steve Sailer is a white American male born in December 1958. He attended UCLA in the early 1980s and worked for several years as a businessman in Chicago after college. In the late 1990s, he and his family (white wife and two sons) moved to his birthtown, Studio City, in the Los Angeles area where he currently resides.

Ok - you get the picture. These guys are intent on suppressing (by violent intimidation, if necessary) those they disagree with. And this brings us to our current situation. Xsteve recently linked an investigative reporter's excavation of the membership of an e-group list to which a number of people interested in behavioral genetics belong to:

Beginning in the summer of 2003, our investigators began sending us information about these "HBDG" people, their connections with Bailey, their support of his work, and their coming to his defense as his work and reputation began unraveling.

...

Over time we hope to fill in even more details about Bailey's supportive network, and thus better answer such questions as "Why did he do it?" Why did he do it the way he did? What could he have been thinking? Who inspired him to think that way? Who supported the publication of his book by the National Academy Press, and defended it within Academy circles? We'd also like to further reveal how his small circle of supporters tried to defend him, desperately trying to make their defense look in the media like a larger "mainstream" defense by "unaffiliated people" (when in fact it's been easy to link them all together, and show that only Bailey's original supporters have come to his defense...mostly from among his key HBDG friends).

I seem to remember that Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and the rest of the neo-Lysenkoists were all part of an organization called "Science for the People", a Marxist front-group devoted to overthrowing the United States Government and instituting Communism:

The radical activists, however, went ballistic on this issue. Shortly after the publication of Sociobiology, Richard Lewontin organized fifteen scientists, teachers, and students in the Boston area as the Sociobiology Study Group, which then affiliated with Science for the People. The latter, larger aggregate of radical activists was begun in the 1960s to expose the misdeeds of scientists and technologists, including especially thinking considered to be politically dangerous.

...

Gould was often seen on picket lines and at demonstrations. When residents of a racially mixed, working-class Cambridge neighborhood rebelled against police brutality in 1971, Gould joined a Students for a Democratic Society march to support the uprising. At around the same time, Gould joined Science for the People, one of the radical science organizations that emerged from the antiwar movement.

Later, Gould was on the advisory boards of the journal Rethinking Marxism and the Brecht Forum, sponsor of the New York Marxist School, which is dedicated to using “Marx’s uniquely valuable contributions to study conditions today and possibilities for transcending capitalism and building an emancipatory society.”

The Encyclopedia of the American Left singled Gould out as one of the “few scientists [who] have emerged as major public allies of the Left” and as “perhaps the most formidable example of a supportive presence at Left events and for Left causes.”

One People's Project links to International ANSWER, and they too are sympathetic to Communism. Just read their position statements. But because Communism isn't universally and reflexively acknowledged as evil (though it killed many more than Nazism), these guys have gotten a free pass - just like the "protesters" organized by Communist front groups like ANSWER. And this is just one of the reasons that the leftist takeover of academe must be stopped.

To return to our main topic - in the best tradition of the Spanish Inquisition, we are probably going to see an extensive smear campaign directed against Michael Bailey and all other non pseudonymous members of the list, including Steven Pinker. The people who're running this particular investigation are mainly transsexuals (and are thus politically marginal), but the far larger group of "antiracists" who want to use Nazi smears on guys like Pinker[1] will love the fact that Pinker is on the same list as "the devil himself", Charles Murray. Bet on it - the HBDG will be used like the Pioneer Fund to smear people with guilt-by-association.

This whole imbroglio is a good lesson for us. It's easy to become complacent over here at Gene Expression or at HBDG, but anonymity is necessary in today's political climate. To paraphrase Carl Djerassi:

The outrage of the neo-Lysenkoists was understandable. The internet promises to decentralize the provision of information to a person's laptop, which can neither be bombed nor picketed.

Like La Griffe Du Lion, I will continue to speak the truth. All those who believe that behavioral genetics is a viable field of study are currently in the political wilderness...but give us a few years, and eventually research will vindicate us.

[0] The NKVD was the forerunner to the KGB.
[1] Pinker is Jewish, by the way.

Update:

The plot thickens. The person doing the investigating is Lynn Conway. Now, anyone who's ever taken a class on VLSI design has heard of Conway - along with Carver Mead, she wrote the seminal text on the subject back in 1978, "Introduction to VLSI Design".

Thing is, "she" is really a "he". Seems like investigative reporters tracked down the fact that she was a man in her early career and exposed her. Which makes one wonder why she'd want to invade the privacy of others...

Bonus laugh

This picture is from Conway's website.

Standing next to Conway is Brent Scowcroft, realpolitiker extraordinaire and mastermind of the first Gulf War. Somehow, I doubt ol' Brent would have had that smile on his face if he'd realized that Conway was a transsexual :)