Beyond The Grave

Donald Trump and his supporters were stunned that the slain Qasem Soleimani’s longstanding deputy was bumped up without further ado. The Revolutionary Guard Corps is very much still in business. And complete with Plans B, C, D and E, the 86-year-old Ali Khamenei’s successor will have been arranged for years, to be announced in a few hours’ time exactly as if the old monster had slipped away in his sleep.

The deaths of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi all brought hubris before nemesis, pride before destruction, an haughty spirit before a fall. The Epstein Class was still trying to tie up loose ends by killing Saif al-Islam Gaddafi last month. The Supreme Leader of Iran is not the leader of all Shia Muslims, nor even of all Twelvers, whose number includes both the Pahlavis and the MEK. Most of them reject the Khomenist understanding of velâyat-e faqih.

Dissent from this war will be framed as antisemitic, even though we were not supposed to conflate Jews and Israel. So remember that Josh Simons was trying to frame his disgrace as antisemitic. Against Gabriel Pogrund and Andrew Feinstein. With the fall of Larry Summers, a return to Harvard may not be open to Dr Simons. But the archetypal Epstein Class academic is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although one does have to wonder for how much longer. In 2021, Pinker wrote that, “Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression.”

Pinker is on the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science, which in 2018, a very short time before 2021 in the life of a quarterly journal, published this masterpiece by Edward Dutton, whom I knew at university. He once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Douglas Murray, indeed. Murray was a great friend and mentee of Christopher Hitchens, whom Gore Vidal famously named his “dauphin or delfino” before outliving him, and whose dauphin or delfino Kamm comically purports to be.

As a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, Matt Goodwin has links to Aporia Magazine, which is published by the same Human Diversity Foundation that publishes Mankind Quarterly and Dutton’s podcast, The Jolly Heretic, linking it to Pinker, and thus to Kamm. The HDF was founded in 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard, otherwise William Engman, of OpenPsych. Kirkegaard is noted for his calls to legalise child pornography so as to reduce the number of rapes committed by paedophiles, to lower the age of consent to 13, and to make it even lower if puberty had begun. In 2018, he sued Oliver Smith for calling him a paedophile, but in 2020 he had to drop the action and pay Smith’s legal costs, leaving him heavily in debt. The HDF has taken over most of the previous work of the Pioneer Fund, publisher of The Bell Curve and American distributor of Erbkrank. Goodwin has commended Coming Apart, Charles Murray’s follow-up to The Bell Curve that applied its racism to class differences among whites.

It is a big club, and we are not in it. Nor would we wish to be. But Dutton is now Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, although I would be fascinated to know what business Dutton had ever run. A happy home in Łódź awaits Simons, Summers, Pinker, Kamm, Batterjee, both Murrays, Goodwin and Engman, joining Dutton as Fellows of the Jeffrey Epstein Institute. Assuming that they could at least match the scholarly calibre of the ever-expanding Dutton corpus. That latest addition really would take some topping.