"Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.

The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”"

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-silicon-valley-neoliberal-roots

#Neoliberalism #Capitalism #USA #Trump #SiliconValley #NewFusionists #PseudoScience #Libertarianism

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. views on autism are only biased, discriminatory, pseudo-scientific postulations.
And by the way, his boss couldn't care less about "environmental toxins."

Parents react to RFK Jr.'s child autism press conference >

https://www.yahoo.com/news/parents-react-to-rfk-jrs-child-autism-press-conference-when-there-is-ignorance-that-breeds-fear-224331306.html

#news #autism #USA #RFK #environment #RobertFKennedyJr #bias #pseudoscience

Measles is spreading. Here’s how to stay safe. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/measles-is-spreading-heres-how-to-stay-safe/

#disease #outbreak #vaccines #debunking #pseudoscience

"I think that my assumption was a triumphalism and a sense of victory after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the fact that the week of the Berlin Wall falling, they were already talking about new enemies —enemies that had gone underground in certain ways or transformed in ways that were elusive — was the beginning of the rabbit hole. Because once you accept the idea that Marxism and socialism have survived and yet have changed their face, then anything can be Marxism and socialism.

I think this is how we can understand the fixation of the right wing on things like what they call “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” as essentially the new enemy of humanity. Because the adversary continuously changes shape, it makes them open to endless reinterpretation. There is a paranoid quality to the term. And the paranoia doesn’t really have any bounds, as I show in the book.

So I think the narrative arc comes from a feeling on the part of the libertarians, and often the racist libertarians, that they can contain their enemy in new ways by pinning it down on hierarchies of intelligence or deploying the latest findings from genetics. But by the end of the book, with a chapter on “gold bugs” and the far-right obsession with gold, there’s almost a sense of desperation or surrender to the inevitable, a failure to contain their enemies and the idea of an impending collapse and inevitable apocalypse.
(...)
What I recognize is a sort of desperation and a kind of ungoverned willingness to reach for radical remedies in a time of great peril. And as I described in the last chapter, often the rhetorical technique of the gold bug is to predict a coming apocalypse and then immediately sell you the only means there is to protect you from the worst.

I think there’s that accelerationism visible right now on the far right, certainly in the United States."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/race-science-neoliberalism-hayek-slobodian/

#Neoliberalism #Hayek #PseudoScience #Accelerationism #Libertarianism #RaceScience #PseudoScience #Ideology

pseudoscience: 🇨🇦 Controversial admissions test which experts say lacks evidence
https://www.cbc.ca/news/gopublic/casper-test-medical-school-1.7507308
Critics say claims that Casper predicts student performance are unsubstantiated

#MCAT #PsychologyTesting #Casper #AcuityInsights #bias #pseudoscience #AlgorithmicBias

Economics is the worst of pseudoscience, especially since it is used everywhere to guide policy.

Economics has an assumptions problem. The foundational method of economic practice is to create models grounded in assumptions that are either not known, not knowable, or - incredibly - known to be wrong.

From https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces #economics #pseudoscience

Trau, schau, wem! Auch bei der #Krankenkasse

#Esoterik #pseudoscience