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