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."
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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.