The International Society for Intelligence Research doubles down on racism ~ look it's Claire Lehmann!

The International Society for Intelligence Research did not share its annual meeting program online for 2024. 

I suspect this may be due to the fact that I created a spreadsheet tracking ISIR meeting participants, based on meeting programs. 

Although it could just mean they don't have their shit together.

But tracking ISIR annual meetings shows that ISIR meetings always include at least one hardcore racist. So...

In 2024, neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard gave a presentation, but his presence at the meeting is not mentioned on any official ISIR materials. 

We only know he was there thanks to eye-witness accounts and Russell T. Warne sharing the information in a tweet, which the ISIR made him take down - but not before it was captured by someone who shared it with me.

I bet against ISIR publishing its 2025 annual meeting program, but they did post this publicity item on their website and lo and behold they have not failed to include a huge racist this year - Claire Lehmann, founder of racist Quillette.

Lehmann was a promoter of the career of white nationalist Bo Winegard, attacking me personally in 2018 for daring to point out that Bo Winegard was a racist who wrote for Quillette.

---

Claire Lehmann‏Verified account @clairlemon

This woman -->@ngmcclernan who has previously boasted about getting @razibkhan fired from the NYTimes is now going after @EPoe187 for his writing on Quillette. I don't normally get angry over trolls, but bullying & smearing a grad student is simply despicable.

---

Claire Lehmann has even been known to have friendly exchanges with Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard on Twitter.

Lehmann is a right-wing racist ghoul. 

And the fact that she's getting an award shows that the ISIR is doubling-down on racism.

That and the fact that David Geary, who has co-authored rightwing bullshit with white nationalist Bo Winegard, is the keynote speaker.

And Lifetime Achievement Awardee William Revelle published a paper that cited the racist bullshit of infamous racist J. Phillippe Rushton.

And the ISIR founder who is being honored, Douglass K. Detterman, is a hardcore hereditarian who supported The Bell Curve's views on race and has been taking Arthur Jensen Pioneer Fund money since the founding of the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, now called Institute of Mental Chronometry.

Neo-Nazis, racists and white nationalists - oh my!

It couldn't be any clearer that ISIR is not a scientific organization, it's a rightwing racist political organization pretending to be a scientific one.

When will Brigitte Macron sue the hateful Candace Owens?

Claire Lehmann scores a stopped-clock point
----------------------------------------------------------

I normally wouldn't bother with Candace Owens, except that she was named as one of the people in the Intellectual Dark Web by Bari Weiss. 

In spite of her connection to the IDW, I've hardly written about Owens, only 13 times before this, and lately it didn't seem worthwhile at all since members of the Intellectual Dark Web have turned on her, including the racist queen of Quillette herself, Claire Lehmann. 

If Claire Lehmann is against you, are you even in the Intellectual Dark Web any more?

But this is getting ridiculous. Media Matters for American ran an article about Owens' sick obsession with claiming that Brigitte Macron is trans.

On January 31, podcaster Candace Owens launched a new “investigative series” based on the debunked conspiracy theory that the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron, is secretly a transgender woman. Videos about the series, titled “Becoming Brigitte,” have been circulating on TikTok, garnering millions of views on both English-language and French-language content. 

Right-wing personalities and social media users have spread these types of baseless allegations, often called “transvestigations,” for years, frequently targeting powerful women including Taylor Swift and Michelle Obama. And this is not the first time Brigitte Macron has faced the conspiracy theory. Last year, a French court found two women guilty of slander for spreading these same claims. 

Owens has been pushing the conspiracy theory about the French first lady for nearly a year. 

As of the time of writing, she has streamed eight episodes of her “transvestigation” series on YouTube — producing over six hours of conspiracy theory content centered around the Macrons. During the series, Owens questioned whether Brigitte Macron is transgender and also whether she is French President Emmanuel Macron’s biological father. 

I became interested in the Macrons when I started taking French classes and I'm 99% sure this brief clip from an American public television show "French In Action" shows Brigitte Macron and her first husband - this is the episode, at minute 12:00. I've had this up on my personal website for years. 

Brigitte Macron has already won a case on this issue. It's TIME TO SUE CANDACE OWENS!

My theory: Owens is jealous of Brigitte Macron. 

And also, Candace Owens is insane.

Bari Weiss is a MAGA snitch

This should come as no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention: Bari Weiss, who has likely several billionaire sugar daddies and who has one confirmed one, Harlan Crow, is a MAGA snitch.

I certainly hope nobody was fool enough to believe that she and her "Free Press" gang of grifters, racists, transphobes and assorted right-wingers and white supremacists were ever really for free speech.

As the skeet here indicates, Weiss started her career at Columbia as a snitch. She continues her career as a snitch by aligning with the Trump administration in its campaign to destroy American universities, along with the rest of the American right and the Intellectual Dark Web including that weasel Steven Pinker. 

The ultimate goal of Weiss, Pinker and friends is to force American universities to promote right-wing beliefs and especially race pseudoscience.

Pinker is such a true believer in race pseudoscience that he is willing to use his power as a "celebrity intellectual" to help legitimize Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's Aporia Magazine.

And Weiss and Pinker and other useful idiots are going to get a rude surprise after aligning with racists and fascists and neo-Nazis - if the Trump atrocity manages to become a full dictatorship they will end up like the Jews who worked for the Third Reich.

Revelations from Undark's article on Emil Kirkegaard ~ Pinkerite gets a shout-out!

Emil Kirkegaard has no comments so far about
the Undark article - maybe because he's
too busy collaborating with Razib Khan on Twitter
--------------------------------------------------------

The piece is called In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views by Ashley Smart.

The Pinkerite shout-out section starts by mentioning one of the plaintiffs suing Rational Wiki, Russell T. Warne:

Warne, who also spoke at the (2024 ISIR) conference and live posted on X during the proceedings, shared and then deleted a post announcing Kirkegaard’s talk. (Warne told Undark an ISIR board member asked him to delete the post.) According to an image capture shared by the blog Pinkerite, Kirkegaard gave his affiliation as The Arthur Jensen Institute — an organization that, if it exists, does not appear to have an institutional website.

They neglect to mention that I also provide an archive of the Russell T. Warne tweet that originally displayed the image. 

I'm glad to see my site has been of use to a journalist, since that is the raison d'être for Pinkerite, as I discuss here.

This was new to me: James J. Lee, a board member of the International Society for Intelligence Research, given a half-million dollars by the ISIR's support organization Institute of Mental Chronometry, was a protege of Steven Pinker. 

One of Kirkegaard’s earliest speaking appearance at ISIR, according to conference programs, came in 2017 in Montreal, where he presented a poster that examined relationships between cognitive ability and genetic ancestry among self-identified African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

Also in Montreal that year was an assistant professor of psychology from the University of Minnesota, James Lee. A protege of Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Lee had become a key player in the development of GWAS, which were breaking new ground in the study of the genetics of intelligence.

Warne is mentioned elsewhere in the article:

Studies with larger, more genetically diverse databases will yield polygenic scores that apply more generally across different racial groups, noted Warne in a 2021 article that suggested that Asian and White Americans, on average, are genetically predisposed to have higher IQs than Hispanic and Black Americans.

Oh Russell T. Warne, you gigantic racist with your IQ testing service.

The article implicates J. D. Vance in the racism. And Musk, but of course Musk is already known as a racist and neo-Nazi.

In November, on the heels of President Donald Trump’s reelection, Kirkegaard shared a blog post that featured an image of a red baseball cap emblazoned, in Trumpian fashion, with the words “Make Science Great Again.” In it, he petitioned the incoming administration to “remove all pro-affirmative action laws and regulations.” He boasted that then Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance follows — and tech-entrepreneur-turned-Trump-adviser Elon Musk interacts with — the anonymous X account @cremieuxrecueil, which has frequently shared posts asserting that Black Americans, as a group, are less intelligent than their White counterparts and occasionally spun that into arguments against diversity and affirmative action. Reporting from The Guardian links the account to a graduate student named Jordan Lasker, who has previously spoken at ISIR and frequently collaborated with Kirkegaard. (Lasker did not respond to an email from Undark asking for confirmation that he runs the account.)

I was pleased to see ISIR getting so much attention for its association with racists and neo-Nazis, but I don't think the article gives enough of a sense of how extreme Emil Kirkegaard is, and doesn't mention Human Diversity Foundation by name, only mentioning the Hope not Hate article about Kirkegaard with a link.

So far I haven't seen Kirkegaard mentioning the article on his Twitter account, probably he won't since per the article: Kirkegaard did not respond to multiple email requests for an interview for this story.

But speaking of Kirkegaard, another one of his colleagues/employees has filed a lawsuit against Rational Wiki, Jonatan Pallesen. 

More and more it looks like a a huge coordinated SLAPP scheme.

Three more race pseudoscience ghouls SLAPP Rational Wiki

More than ever it looks like there is a coordinated campaign to harass the Rational Media Foundation, the parent organization of Rational Wiki with SLAPP suits, before it moves from New Mexico to Oregon, a less SLAPP-happy state.

Also - surprise surprise, Jesse Singal is in the mix. He gets so much credit for his anti-trans work that his support for race pseudoscience promoters has been sadly overlooked.

There are now five plaintiffs against Rational Wiki. Four of them are mad because there are articles about them on Rational Wiki that discuss their race pseudoscience activities and alliances. 

All five of them have a connection to Emil Kirkegaard who owns the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF). 

Per the case file on HDF by UK organization Hope not Hate, the Human Diversity Foundation (my highlights):

...advances race science. It is the successor to the Pioneer Fund, an American eugenics organisation created in 1937 that developed ties to Nazi Germany and disseminated its propaganda. Registered in Wyoming for privacy reasons, HDF is led by Emil Kirkegaard, a Danish race scientist, and Matthew Frost, a former religious studies teacher from the UK.

Kirkegaard and Frost separately manage the two main arms of HDF. The first is an underground research team that publishes articles in OpenPsych and Mankind Quarterly, both race science journals. Kirkegaard’s team consists of approximately a dozen authors, one of whom is Davide Piffer, an Italian race scientist who referred to African immigrants as “gorillas” and had his paper cited in the manifesto of the 2022 Buffalo terrorist who killed 10 people.

The second arm of HDF aims to reach a larger audience through its media outreach. It includes Aporia Magazine, a race science publication that Frost founded...

But I think the most incisive quote about HDF, found in the Hope not Hate article Race Science Inc is this:

• HDF is working to create a cult of weapons-trained activists inspired by Scientology and the Nazi SS
That tells you everything you need to know about Emil Kirkegaard and all the people who fund him and who work for him.

I have a handy diagram connecting Kirkegaard and his organization to various plutocrat funders and racist organizations.

Four of the Rational Wiki plaintiffs have collegial relationships with Kirkegaard, while the fifth plaintiff has had an adversarial relationship with Kirkegaard. I won't be focusing on that plaintiff, although I think his lawsuit has no more merit than the other four.

But it's still striking that all five plaintiffs (so far) have connections to Emil Kirkegaard.

Another thing they all have in common (except the fifth plaintiff with the adversarial relationship to Kirkegaard) is that they have all participated in conferences of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), including Kirkegaard, who was at the most recent conference in 2024. And David Piffer, mentioned in the quote from the Hope not Hate website above, has also participated, in the 2017 ISIR conference. 

Let's break down the Kirkegard/ISIR connections of the four race pseudoscience plaintiffs:

• Jonathan Anomaly - the first SLAPP plaintiff, Jonathan Anomaly is connected to Kirkegaard via Aporia. I've begun a series looking at the lawsuit and Anomaly's race pseudoscience connections. I will be writing more about his connection to Kirkegaard and other hard-core racists. Anomaly participated in the 2019 ISIR conference. 

• Jan te Nijenhuis - per Wikipedia, Jan te Nijenhuis "has controversially published several papers in the Mankind Quarterly which is widely regarded as a racist pseudoscience journal and has attended the London Conference on Intelligence.[4][5]" Mankind Quarterly is published by HDF. te Nijenhuis has co-authored at least two papers with Michael A. Woodley of Menie, and te Nijenhuis participated in ISIR conferences in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008,  2009, 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2016. te Nijenhuis v. Rationalwiki Foundation, Inc. et al
  
  
• Russell T. Warne - Russell T. Warne founded an organization called RIOT "to address a major gap in intelligence testing: no rigorously developed, professionally administered IQ tests were available solely online." From his RiotIQTest account on X/Twitter, Warne shared with the world the fact that Emil Kirkegaard was permitted to participate in the 2024 ISIR conference after a brouhaha lead to him being disinvited in 2022. Had Warne not done so, it would have been harder to prove Kirkegaard had participated since ISIR has not shared a program from the 2024 conference as it always has every other year. Warne is mentioned twice in the Race Science Inc article, including:

In October 2023, the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien shared an Aporia article on his own Substack. Headlined “The West’s Fertility Crisis”, it was written by Russell T. Warne, an American author whose work has appeared in the pages of Mankind Quarterly. After O’Brien recommended that his online followers read the article, Matthew Frost texted our undercover reporter an image of a dark hand manipulating a marionette. O’Brien did not respond to a request for comment.

Aporia and Mankind Quarterly are both published by Kirkegaard. I've mentioned Warne a few times over the years on this blog, including that he's written for Quillette. In addition to the 2024 ISIR conference, Warne has participated in the 2017, 2018, and 2019 ISIR conferences. Warne v. Rationalwiki Foundation, Inc. et al

• Michael A. Woodley of Menie - of all the plaintiffs, Michael A. Woodley of Menie has had the most notoriety. He was featured in a New York Times article A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting because the racist Buffalo mass-murderer cited Woodley in his manifesto:

 He was also cited, among other academic references, in a manifesto written by the teenager motivated by racist views who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo last month.

Despite his own extreme views, the researcher, Michael Woodley — a 38-year-old British man — has been affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, one of Belgium’s leading universities, and his controversial work was originally undertaken as he studied at some of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions.

The discovery that the gunman had cited Mr. Woodley’s work shocked many academics, who said they hoped it might now force institutions to confront questions about their responsibility toward society, academic rigor and the space they give to extremist ideas.

Woodley of Menie's connection to Kirkegaard is through his association with OpenPsych, published by HDF. Woodley has participated in twelve ISIR conferences, and been published many times by the ISIR-related Intelligence and at one time was a member of the editorial board of  Intelligence. Woodley of Menie v. Rationalwiki Foundation, Inc. (1:25-cv-00296)

Given the connection between the four pseudoscience plaintiffs and International Society for Intelligence Research, it's possible that this maybe-coordinated SLAPP attack on Rational Wiki is being funded by the Institute of Mental Chronometry which has not only provided funding for the ISIR, but has given half a million dollars to two academics who are also affiliated with ISIR, Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee. The Rational Wiki article on Willoughby was recently removed, although I disagree with that decision. 

So ISIR/Institute of Mental Chronometry could probably afford to fund the lawsuits and I absolutely would not put it past them. 

But my main suspect is the Human Diversity Foundation. But at this point, is there really much difference between the Human Diversity Foundation and the International Society for Intelligence Research? There is so much cross-over between the people and the racist beliefs of the two organizations, why would they not coordinate to try to make race pseudoscience respectable by crushing Rational Wiki? 

In the article which City Journal was forced to remove from its site because of a defamation lawsuit, and most likely written at the behest of Emil Kirkegaard, it is claimed that Jonathan Anomaly, Jan te Nijenhuis, Emil Kirkegaard and Emily Willoughby, among others, were harmed by Rational Wiki because of an editor named Oliver Smith - who stopped editing at Rational Wiki in 2019.

I see Jesse Singal was showing his support for team race pseudoscience on X/Twitter a couple of months ago, by promoting that defamatory attack and smearing Rational Wiki in the process.  Rational Wiki debunked the article's claims, which the shit "journalist" Singal couldn't be bothered to research - probably because he hates Rational Wiki, comparing it unfavorably to the psychopathic Kiwi Farms on his podcast.

Singal is so devoted to race pseudoscience promoters he will block those who question his alliance with the indisputably racist Razib Khan, who of course has worked for Emil Kirkegaard.  And yes, Khan has participated in an ISIR conference too, in 2019.

Khan can be seen below at racist Curtis Yarvin's wedding.

I guess it doesn't bother NYTimes columnist Ross Douthat that Razib Khan is a huge racist

 Because of course it does not.

Douthat can be seen on the Razib Khan podcast Khanversation helping to legitimize Khan's career of promoting race science. 

Apparently Khanversation is a joint project of Khan and rightwing R Street think tank creature Josiah Neeley 

It goes without saying Neeley doesn't care that Khan is racist either. Because the American conservative movement has no bottom.

While Khan is hobnobbing with Douthat, on the other hand he absolutely hates another NYTimes columnist Jamelle Bouie.

Khan of course is a long-time supporter of race pseudoscience, and is a member of the racist boys club obsessed with "Jewishness" as I documented yesterday. 

And Khan was denied a place at the NYTimes, back when the NYTimes was generally more anti-racist, after his career as a political operative promoting racism was publicized by Bouie, among others.

The Atlantic was not impressed by Douthat's book.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Maybe that's why Douthat had to resort to far-right media, racist and all, to help promote it.

The Jonathan Anomaly and his SLAPP lawsuit saga continues - did Anomaly lie in his lawsuit?

 In his lawsuit against Rational Wiki, Anomaly states: (my highlight)

50. The article (about Anomaly in Rational Wiki) states that Dr. Anomaly “has published articles for... the antisemitic [web]site The Unz Review.”

51. This statement falsely suggests that Dr. Anomaly is an antisemite. No citation or evidence is provided in the RationalWiki article to show that Dr. Anomaly may be an antisemite.

52. The statement is also false because Dr. Anomaly has never published in The Unz Review. Rather, in 2018, Dr. Anomaly co-authored an article in the online magazine Quillette, defending Jews against antisemitism, called “What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong about Jews.” The Unz Review (which is indeed an antisemitic publication) later re-published the original article from Quillette, without permission, so that its readers would attack Dr. Anomaly and his co-author. Dr. Anomaly subsequently contacted The Unz Review to demand removal of his article.

-----------------------------

That's not what Jonathan Anomaly told me in the comments under his Quillette article What the Alt-Right and Regressive Left Have in Common. 

In fact when I linked to Anomaly's article What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong about the Jews and accused him of being an expert on the alt-right, his response was:

"I gave permission to Ron Unz to reprint my Quillette article which "challenges" the alt-right."

Voila, the screen cap.

The article itself seems to be Anomaly and racist Nathan Cofnas being mad at anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald for claiming Jews have a tendency to be left-wing.

Which is interesting because as we saw in the last installment of this series of the Jonathan Anomaly SLAPP lawsuit, Anomaly is a big fan of the 20-year-old and untested Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis invented by two racists and claimed by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be greatly influenced by... Kevin MacDonald!

Cofnas and Anomaly like to promote each other on Twitter.

And racist ghoul Emil Kirkegaard can be seen promoting Anomaly and Cofnas on Twitter in 2023 as "the younger generation of scholars."

Razib Khan can also be seen discussing Jewishness related to Nathan Cofnas, seen here with ultra racists Richard Hanania and "pro-slavery" Curtis Yarvin.  

Anomaly was promoted on Razib Khan's podcast in 2023.

It's like they're all in one big racist club. A big racist club that is obsessed with "Jewishness."

OK, I almost never comment on appearances because I'm hardly about to win a beauty contest, and appearance is not relevant to how racist someone is... but is Nathan Cofnas made out of wax?

Jonathan Anomaly files a SLAPP lawsuit against Rational Wiki

A photo of Jonathan Anomaly is featured 
next to the title of the HOPE not HATE 
investigation "The Superbaby Factory."
---------------------------------------------------------------------

I am not a lawyer, but it sure looks to me like the lawsuit that Jonathan Anomaly has filed against Rational Wiki can fairly be classified as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) as defined by Wikipedia (itself the target of SLAPP lawsuits over the years) :

In a typical SLAPP, the plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff's goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs, or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism... SLAPPs bring about freedom of speech concerns due to their chilling effect and are often difficult to filter out and penalize because the plaintiffs attempt to obfuscate their intent to censor, intimidate, or silence their critics.

And a little bit later...

A common feature of SLAPPs is forum shopping, wherein plaintiffs find courts that are more favourable towards the claims to be brought than the court in which the defendant (or sometimes plaintiffs) live.[9]

That last point is especially important because I don't think it is a coincidence that Jonathan Anomaly filed the suit just as Rational Wiki was in the process of fundraising to defray the costs of moving from a more-pro-SLAPP state, New Mexico, to a less-favorable SLAPP state, Oregon. 

The lawsuit lists various of Anomaly's gripes against RationalWiki which includes:

> Rational Wiki has a point of view:

31. A very particular, highly ideologized, and readily identifiable left-liberal view of what is rational, what constitutes legitimate science, and what constitutes scientific consensus, pervades all of RationalWiki’s articles, with virtually no variation.

> Anybody can edit Rational Wiki:

40. No particular background, knowledge, training, or credential—academic, scientific, or otherwise—is required to be an editor, tech, moderator, or sysop of RationalWiki. The only requirements are to adhere to RationalWiki’s Mission and uphold its point of view, and submit to oversight, by the specialized editors, of the user’s content and “edits.”

> Then Anomaly - original name  Jonathan S Beres - claims he was defamed even though he's respectable, accomplished and important:

 45. Plaintiff Jonathan Anomaly is a philosopher and economist who earned a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, a M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Tulane University.

46. Dr. Anomaly has served as a visiting professor at Oxford University, and has taught in PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics) programs at Duke University, U.N.C. Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, the University of Arizona, and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anomaly has authored dozens of peer-reviewed academic papers and is the co-author of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Anthology, a widely used college textbook, published by Oxford University press.

> But not a public figure.

47. Plaintiff is not a public figure.

I don't know what the legal definition of "public figure" is these days, but Anomaly is certainly public enough that he was mentioned in a Guardian article this month, US natalist conference to host race-science promoters and eugenicists which says:

Broadly, eugenics is a group of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of a human population. It became the basis of a popular movement from the late 19th century, and led to governments around the world adopting policies such as forced sterilization of disabled and mentally ill people. The field was discredited due to its association with racial policies in Nazi Germany, and many critics have attacked it as a pseudoscience. 

One scheduled speaker, Jonathan Anomaly is a former academic and an advocate of what he has called “liberal eugenics”. 

The Guardian reported in October that he was a senior staff member at Heliospect, a startup offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ even though screening embryos for these traits would be illegal in the UK. 

On the podcast of “new right” figure Alex Kaschuta, in an episode published on Tuesday, Anomaly said of his company’s services: “What can you do? Well, through embryo selection, you’re going to be able to calculate polygenic scores that reduce disease, boost IQ at least a bit, and maybe more in the future.”

And Hope not Hate discussed Anomaly's activities back in October in The Superbaby Factory - my highlights:

Former philosophy professor, early PolygenX employee (born Beres) is our undercover reporter’s first point of contact with PolygenX. He is an early employee of the company. He regularly appears on podcasts and blogs associated with scientific racism and the wider far right. Anomaly spoke in a panel alongside Simone and Malcolm Collins at the Natalism conference in Austin in 2023. The panel was moderated by Kevin Dolan, an activist in the DezNat far-right Mormon movement, which uses the Fasces as part of its symbol.

Anomaly has co-hosted live events for Aporia, the scientific racism website, and his writings have appeared on The Unz Review, a website run by the Holocaust denier Ron Unz. In 2018, Anomaly published an article titled “Defending eugenics” in the peer-reviewed Monash Bioethics Review. In an October 2023 video call with our undercover reporter, he described himself as a “race realist”, referring to the belief that scientific evidence proves racial differences. Although he is American, he spends time in the UK and has appeared on Lotus Eaters, a British far-right media outlet.

When we reached Anomaly for comment, his representative responded that he neither not held nor promoted far-right ideologies. We were told his appearance on Lotus Eaters was for “the furtherance of debate with those who he knew held different views to him”. Anomaly’s representative claimed that he asked Matthew Frost, Aporia’s founder, to remove any material featuring him from the website, as over the course of 2023, he began to disagree with its editorial stance. Anomaly nevertheless hosted a live event for Aporia in New York in February 2024 and many of his podcast appearances remain live on the website. He furthermore reposted four articles from Aporia on his Substack page this year, the most recent being July 22nd 2024. On December 26th 2023, Anomaly reposted an article titled: “The case for race realism.”

"Race realism" is race pseudoscience-speak for "some races are superior to others."

Anomaly claims his Rational Wiki article is defamatory. Although I have contributed to several articles on Rational Wiki,  I have never contributed to the Anomaly article, and hadn't read it until now. 

The lawsuit says:

48. RationalWiki contains an article titled “Jonathan Anomaly.” The article is dedicated to portraying Dr. Anomaly as a fascist and his work as pseudoscience. The article was published on RationalWiki in 2019 and has remained published and viewable on the website since that time. The article has been edited within the last three years Defendants by Will, Hughes, and Doe 1. 

The word "fascist" appears nowhere in the article, so it is unclear exactly why Anomaly makes this claim.

The article does classify Anomaly under the category "The colorful pseudoscience Race & Racialism and the article includes a section entitled "Pseudoscience and controversial writings" - but it appears perfectly justified. The article says:

Anomaly published a provocative article "Defending eugenics" in a peer-reviewed bioethics journal.[35] It has been harshly criticised,[36][37] with nearly 200 academics signing a letter of complaint to Monash Bioethics Review for publishing the article.[38]

The lawsuit continues:

49. The article is false because Dr. Anomaly is not a pseudoscientist or a fascist, but is a libertarian (or classical liberal), and has authored dozens of papers and articles where he identifies as such and propounds libertarian ideas.

I was just talking about how the term "classical liberal" usually means a libertarian who wants to seem less conservative. It's nice that Anomaly confirmed this for me.

So there's no evidence that Anomaly was described as a fascist, and if 200 academics objected to Anomaly's "Defending eugenics" that certainly might suggest that Anomaly was dabbling in pseudoscience.

And then there's the fact that in his article Defending Eugenics: From cryptic choice to conscious selection, Anomaly includes a footnote which states:

6 Informal evidence for this claim comes from the success of Jews around the world even in the presence of social and legal discrimination, and from the percentage of Nobel prizes and other scientific accolades Jews were awarded in the twentieth century. More rigorous evidence comes from the heritability of IQ scores (Ashkenazi IQ is the highest in the world, nearly two standard deviations above the global average). For more on the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence, See Cochran et al. (2006), Cochran and Harpending (2009, ch. 7), and Wade (2014, ch. 8).

There is nothing "rigorous" about "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" (NHAI) which is what Anomaly is talking about. I was the main contributor to the Rational Wiki article about NHAI, and I know how NHAI is nothing but a hypothesis based on speculation by two racists, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.

This hypothesis, almost twenty years old now, has never been tested and some of its premises were debunked by anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson and geneticist Adam Rutherford.

If Anomaly claims that the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence speculation is "rigorous" then you would be a damn fool to trust his judgement on what is and what is not pseudoscience.

And Anomaly's use of the term "heritability" appears to be the standard race pseudoscience effort to conflate the statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept of "inheritance." For more about the frequent misuse of the term heritability see The Heritability Fallacy.

I will continue to write about Anomaly and this lawsuit in future blog posts.

The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss

It looks like the usual reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes have been collected under one cover,  in a book called The War On Science ~ Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech and Open Inquiry and the Scientific Process.

Just in time to help celebrate the Trump administration's war on trans people, women and non-white people. 

People on Bluesky have published the table of contents and most of the contributors have been discussed on this blog. 

This gang of goons is not at all embarrassed to be grouped with ultra-racist crank Amy Wax.

And of course Steve Pinker is in there.

Let's review who's who in the world of politically-motivated pseudoscience wankery:

Dorian Abbot is advisor at the Bari Weiss grift known as the University of Austin (UATX); author at the far-right City Journal; participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

John Armstrong is a right-wing reactionary who likes to retweet racist Toby Young.

Peter Boghossian - a clown associated with the University of Austin, memorably portrayed in New Inquiry last year: 

"Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?”
I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.”

Boghossian attacked me for the thought-crime of being a nobody yet daring to publicly criticize celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker.

Maarten Boudry - Quillette author in league with Jerry Coyne

Alex Byrne is an anti-trans activist and married to Carole Hooven.

Nicholas Christakis supported racist Razib Khan's attack on a Scientific American author who dared to discuss - justifiably - E. O. Wilson's racism. 

Roger Cohen from what I can tell is known for being married to Amy Wax.

Jerry Coyne is best known for once being a respected scientist then turning into a right-wing political operative, appearing at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists and defending white nationalist Bo Winegard. That defense is probably the piece included in this book, since Coyne co-authored it with Luana Maroja and they are listed together in the table of contents. Coyne is most recently known for writing an op-ed claiming trans women are delusional and inclined to sexual assault.

Richard Dawkins is another once-respected scientist who descended into evolutionary psychology crankery and reactionary politics, causing people to ask "what happened to Richard Dawkins?" Well known for promoting a bonkers conspiracy theory that a child was a fiendish bomb maker, in the embarrassing "Clock Boy" incident. 

Janice Fiamengo was a member of the far-right misogynist "men's rights" organization the Honey Badgers

Niall Ferguson is a right-wing reactionary political operative think tank creature, who tried to pull a political op on a college student and got caught - which did not hurt his reputation on the far-right. Appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Karleen Gribble is an anti-trans activist and ally of Carole Hooven

Solveig Lucia Gold appears to be notable only for being married to Joshua T. Katz

Moti Gorin is an anti-trans activist

Carole Hooven is a fan of the viciously anti-transgender "Gender War Cards" and a promoter of garbage evolutionary psychology theories and bullshit explanations for the reactions against Lawrence Summers' "women are losers" speech given by Summers when he was president of Harvard.

Geoff Horsman considers ultra-racist Amy Wax to be a "brave truth-seeker."

Joshua T. Katz is known for student-diddling. Self-declared friend of racist ghoul Amy Wax. On the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute.  Participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Sergiu Klainerman is a right-wing reactionary and Trump supporter.

Anna Krylov is a reactionary crackpot who couldn't reason her way out of a paper bag. I wrote of her logical incoherence in depth a few years ago. An organizer of Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Luana Maroja appears to be an undistiguished academic who expressed her support for white nationalist Bo Winegard along with Jerry Coyne. Participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Christian D. Ott - according to Buzzfeed, 

"Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student." 

Ott unsuccessfully sued for defamation two scientists who protested his hiring.

Bruce Pardy is a rightwing reactionary who claims  '“Socialized healthcare” is medical communism."'

Jordan Peterson - what hasn't been said about rightwing crank Jordan Peterson?

Steven Pinker - ugh - I've written so much about Pinker, but if I had to sum him up, I'd say he's a dissembler who claims to be opposed to racism while promoting the careers of a seemingly endless parade of hardcore racists from Steve Sailer to Richard Hanania.

Richard Redding is a right-winger associated with the Federalist Society

Arthur Rousseau appears to be related to Lauren Schwartz.

Gad Saad is a rightwing evolutionary psychology clown, Trump apologist and climate change denier. Appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
 

Sally Satel is on the payroll of the far-right American Enterprise Institute. Ally of Pinker, Hooven and Lee Jussim.

Lauren H. Schwartz is this anti-trans activist, who is apparently related to Arthur W. Rousseau, since she has also gone by the name Lauren Rousseau.

Alan Sokal became famous for going after the low-hanging fruit of postmodernism, then he allied with the far-right.

Alessandro Strumia is a misogynist hereditarian physicist. Like any standard sociobiologist, he basically believes that everything in contemporary society is the result of evolution - in particular, women evolving to be losers in everything from science to producing wine.

Judith Suissa is an anti-trans activist, co-author with Alice Sullivan

Alice Sullivan is an anti-trans activist, co-author with Judith Suissa

Jay Tanzman is a "freelance statistician" whose claim to fame seems to be that he's the boyfriend of Anna Krylov

Abigail Thompson  - this is the first time I'm hearing about Abigail Thompson, but it looks like she's in deep with Peter Thiel's Stanford-based gang of racists and right-wing political operatives. Thompson gave a talk for the Stanford Business School "Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar." The term "classical liberal" which Thompson used in her protest against DEI statements almost always indicates a libertarian who wants to seem less conservative. The right-wing racist rag Quillette (alleged to have been funded by Peter Thiel) is a big booster of "classical liberalism." The Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar is directly connected to Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (aka "Academic Freedom conference") and the Seminar hosts run the political gamut from libertarian to right-wing racist extremist. 

Speakers for the Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar include racist Cory Clark, racist Nathan Cofnas, racist Victor Hansen, "Catholic epidemiologist" Tyler VanderWeele, James Orr, another hard-core religionist, Quillette contributor Glenn Loury, Bruce Pardy, rightwing reactionary, Mia Hughes an anti-trans activist who works for University of Austin grifter and pro-nuke politician Michael Shellenberger's Environmental Progress, David Neumark a fellow at the conservative Stanford unit the Hoover Institution, Cato racist Ilya Shapiro, Charles Calomaris, a right-winger and at one time a University of Austin grifter, Jordan Lasker a eugenicist and racist (aka "hereditarian"), Roger Pielke, climate change denier, and Justin Huang, an assistant professor of marketing at Michigan State University who believes that "Trump has a public mandate to dramatically reshape the federal government."

At one Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar, run by Daniel Diermeier, you can see Amy Wax is one of the attendees. 

Amy Wax is notorious for her racist statements. She gave a full-throated endorsement of race pseudoscience at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Elizabeth Weiss was the third wife of the race pseudoscience gang's favorite "scientist" whose career was aided and abetted by E. O. Wilson, Jean-Philippe Rushton. Weiss appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Frances Widdowson is an author at racist Quillette, who hates Black Lives Matter. She participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

And Lawrence Krauss is the third person in this collection to be accused of using his position in academia to engage in sexual acts with or harassment against his students. In his case:

BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.

Here is a photo of Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker.