Yesterday, DK staff member Joan McCarter published a diary Yes, the Koch brothers really are that evil. One paragraph in the article leapt out at me.
You can't really call that out-and-out racist. But this one, you can. There was this underreported nugget from the Koch's super-secret summit this summer in California: "Besides a number of notable Republican politicians in attendance, one of the most controversial men giving "dinner remarks" was Charles Murray, a co-author of The Bell Curve, a book which argued that blacks and Latinos have lower IQs than Asians and whites."
You see, Charles Murray is not only an eminent racist. He is also a member of a network of people who include many of the primary transphobes in North American academia.
Murray is a member of the eugenics think tank known as the Human Biodiversity Institute, a collection of homophobic, transphobic and racist academics connected to the Toronto Northwestern axis of transphobes. They have support in both the American Psychiatric Association (which produces the "shrink bible" DSM) and the National Academies Press (which published Northwestern psychologist J Michael Bailey's infamous transphobic screed). This network of connections was compiled by trans community researchers during the investigation of Bailey's hate literature book known as the Bailey Affair.
I have long suspected there might be a link somewhere between this clique of academics and either ALEC or Koch money, but this is the first time I have seen a piece of actual evidence for such a link.
"Follow the money" is the First Law of Investigative Journalism. While the appearance of a famous member of the Human Biodiversity Institute as a guest speaker at a Koch dinner does not prove that Koch money is involved in American academic transphobia, it does raise the idea from the realm of pure suspicion to "merits closer attention."