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| Kirkegaard and Willoughby working together for a common goal --------------------------------------------------------- |
EMILY WILLOUGHBY is a Board member of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR).
Recently, according to her long-time associate Jonathan Kane, she provided information to Kane which he used to make a litigation threat against the Oregon-based RationalMedia Foundation, the parent organization of RationalWiki.
Lawsuits & Secret Parties
This year, lawsuits were filed against the New Mexico-based RationalMedia Foundation (RMF), the former parent organization of RationalWiki. All of the plaintiffs were connected in one way or another to neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and four of them have participated in at least one ISIR annual meeting.
RMF settled the lawsuits by agreeing to remove RationalWiki articles about the plaintiffs, along with all references to or mentions of the plaintiffs.
Then there were threats of lawsuits from secret parties. The New Mexico-based RationalMedia Foundation made agreement(s) with those parties, which resulted in at least 30 articles about individuals and even about the International Society for Intelligence Research and the publication Aporia, (owned by Kirkegaard) being censored. Once again, the censored articles were connected to Emil Kirkegaard.
Among the censored articles was the one I created about Charles Murray. I reposted the article on this blog, months ago, without a peep from Murray or his representatives since.
Censorship forever?
The lawsuits and secret parties agreements occurred at a time when the RationalMedia Foundation was attempting to move from the SLAPP-friendly state of New Mexico to the less SLAPP-friendly state of Oregon by shutting down the New Mexico organization and registering a new organization in Oregon. It completed the change in July-August 2025.
Initially there seemed to be a general understanding that once RationalMedia Foundation was reborn in Oregon, the censorship could be lifted, since the Oregon organization would not be bound by settlements made with the separate and now defunct New Mexico organization.
The only possible hitch was that Board members from the New Mexico organization would have to resign from the Oregon organization, before the censorship could end, presumably because they would still be bound by the settlements made with the New Mexico organization.
But there seems to be some doubt about this now, which has made the people running the Oregon-based RationalMedia Foundation quick to censor and threaten to ban anybody on RationalWiki who discusses the censored topics, or the lawsuits, or the secret agreements, or even speculating on how things might be handled differently if the censorship was ever lifted.
And so RationalWiki is now at the mercy of a group of people - all or most of whom have connections to Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard - who can yank RMF's chain whenever they are displeased.
Jonathan Kane yanks the chain
And it appears that one way to yank RationalMedia Foundation's chain is via Jonathan Kane. Using his RationalWiki account, "Tetrapteryx" Kane can be seen on this RationalWiki page in September 2025. speaking for the secret parties. He writes:
The parties to RW's settlements have seriously considered taking further legal action against RW for its hosting of these images, but they appear to have decided against it, because now that their articles are deleted RW isn't causing them a lot of harm anymore. However, if [redacted] gets Jason Wilson to publish an article attacking them over their lawsuits, there is a possibility that situation could change. The people calling for a new round attacks on the plaintiffs don't seem to have an understanding how precarious RationalWiki's situation currently is with respect to this issue, and I think their actions are extremely risky.
The images specified by Kane were a Twitter screen cap of journalist Tom Scocca highlighting Charles Murray's racism and another Twitter screen cap of an exchange between Pinkerite and Ben Winegard, brother of Emil Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard. The images were insignificant and no longer connected to any articles, and apparently had not yet been removed only because there was a technical glitch, but Kane made sure to use them as an excuse to yank that chain anyway.
Jason Wilson appears to be this reporter at the Guardian, while [Redacted] refers to Oliver Smith. We'll talk about him soon.
But how does Jonathan Kane know what the litigants are considering and deciding, and how does he know "how precarious RationalWiki's situation currently is"?
Well as Kane tells it, he is getting his information from Emily Willoughby, board member of the ISIR:
I'm pretty sure know I more about what the litigants are up to than any other user here. I know about this because I'm close friends with a person who is involved in ISIR. I think I'm not supposed to name her, but she's a woman, which narrows down who it could be. This is public information; I've mentioned it several other times, and she and I collaborated on an anti-creationism book a few years ago.
Willoughby and Kane collaborated on an anti-creationism book published in 2017.
A RationalMedia Foundation Board member commented on the same page as Kane:
- That woman was one of the 28 people who wanted to take legal action against, even though the article about her had been deleted months before...
How we know that Emil Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi
- The Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation —thought to be essentially defunct — has rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF)
- It's clear that Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi. According to the Hope not Hate exposé Race Science Inc:
[NOTE: HDF is owned by Kirkegaard and recently renamed "Polygenetic Scores LLC."]
- Aporia is part of the HDF’s organisation, as is a scientific racism research team
- Andrew Conru, the multimillionaire entrepreneur who created Adult Friend Finder, has given $1.3 million to HDF. After being contacted prior to this report’s publication, he said he would cut ties with the company
- HDF has connections to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party, and hopes to create a white-only ethnostate
- HDF is working to create a cult of weapons-trained activists inspired by Scientology and the Nazi SS
- In addition, the Anti-Defamation League has noted the connections between Alternative für Deutschland and Nazi ideology.
- In 2023 a German publication noted the connection between Kirkegaard and AfD supporter Mathilda Huss, who also appears to have a connection to Trump.
- Kirkegaard was seen attending the Neo-Nazi Scandza Forum conference in 2023 with Edward Dutton and Helmut Nyborg.
- Kirkegaard became the beneficiary of Nazi legacy money when he "inherited the assets of the Pioneer Fund from its former long-time president, the white nationalist Richard Lynn before he died in July 2023."
- Kirkegaard owns the pseudoscientific journal Mankind Quarterly, originally funded by Nazi sympathizer Wickcliffe Draper.
- In January of 2025, Kirkegaard endorsed AfD on Twitter.
Emil Kirkegaard's hatred of RationalWiki
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| Kirkegaard attempts to falsely connect RationalWiki to "antifa" ------------------------------------------------------ |
- The "troll" was Oliver Smith, whom Kirkegaard had sued for defamation - and lost - and who, at the time of the article's publication, owed Smith £35,972 and was in contempt of court for refusing to pay.
- The City Journal article appears to be Kirkegaard's - or an ally's - attempt to conflate RationalWiki with Oliver Smith, a former RationalWiki editor.
- Prior to the publication of the article in City Journal, blackmail was attempted against Smith by someone who appeared to be associated with the Substack "CancelWatch."
- Smith successfully sued the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the parent of City Journal, to have the article removed.
- Undaunted, Kirkegaard posted a video on Aporia in 2024, attacking RationalWiki as "Antifa."
Captain Occam, Ferahgo the Assassin and Deleet
- Jonathan Kane, Emily Willoughby and Emil Kirkegaard are long-time contributors to wikis.
- According to testimony on Twitter, Kane and Willoughby:
"...were pushing race and IQ "science" on Wikipedia for years, both being banned for doing so incessantly and deceptively."
"I spent literal years trying to counter their wikipedia work when I was in grad school." and
" That's also where I first met Emil Kierkegaard, he was working with them some of the time." and
"Kirkegaard's username was Deleet. Kane and Willoughby worked a good cop bad cop routine, she more or less followed the rules and stayed civil, he didn't and was banned, and when he was banned he edited from her account, and when it was discovered they shared, she was banned too."
- Another Twitter account testified:
"Like I said before, I remember her advocating that stuff on Livejournal back in the 2000s, but to see she still subscribes to it…yeesh."
- Kane used the name "Captain Occam" on Wikipedia and in 2010 the Captain Occam account received a topic ban on Wikipedia over race- and intelligence-related articles and in 2018 the account was indefinitely blocked by Wikipedia.
- Ferahgo the Assassin can be seen promoting a claim in support of race pseudoscience for an article on race and intelligence in 2009:
After perusing this article, I've got to say that the current version looks fairly unbalanced. If there is a significant body of scientists out there that support a partially genetic basis for racial differences in IQ, then that proportion of scientists should be accurately represented in the article, and the article should not be written under the assumption that this conclusion is false. -[[User:Ferahgo the Assassin|Ferahgo the Assassin]] ([[User talk:Ferahgo the Assassin|talk]]) 04:05, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
- Ferahgo the Assassin was interaction-banned on Wikipedia over race and intelligence.
- Tezuka published an article in 2020 in "Journal of Controversial Ideas" called Cognitive Creationism Compared to Young-Earth Creationism. The article mentions both Kane and Willoughby.
- In July 2022 Tezuka published an article in Quillette called Cognitive Distortions - How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence which mentions Ferahgo the Assassin.
- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales called the article "silly."
- In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Center documented the Wikipedia race pseudoscience wars and Emil Kirkegaard's role in them, writing:
Editors who attempt to insert their ideological bias but maintain the semblance of civility are given the benefit of the doubt until their disruption becomes apparent enough to warrant action by administrators. Civil POV-pushers can disrupt the editing process by engaging other users in tedious and frustrating debates or tie up administrators in endless rounds of mediation.
Users who fall into this category include racialist academics and members of the human biodiversity, or HBD, blogging community. Often these are single-purpose accounts that exclusively edit on topics like race and intelligence, racial classification and bios of related researchers, like Linda Gottfredson or Helmuth Nyborg. Some have direct ties with racist journals or organizations, like Mankind Quarterly editor Gerhard Meisenberg. Emil Kirkegaard, who edits frequently under the username Deleet, is a research fellow at Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social research and the co-founder of the online pseudojournal OpenPsych.
Kane & Willoughby: "A Troublesome Inheritance"
In May 2014, Willoughby and Kane co-authored a review of Nicholas Wade's race pseudoscience book "A Troublesome Inheritance," a book so bad that not even Jerry Coyne liked it. It was generally trashed by reviewers.The science blogger HBD Chick@ makes an important point about this idea. Genocide, racism, and xenophobia all predate human history, and it's foolish to think that beliefs about biological differences between races are to blame for these millennia-old practices. The Nazis misused race differences as an excuse for their genocide of Jews, but crimes of similar scale have been committed without any need to invoke this excuse...
And to support the notion of "public health benefits from research about the effects of race differences" they link to a New York Times op-ed, I Am a Racially Profiling Doctor, by Sally Satel. I was just talking about her last month, in the context of her contribution to the embarrassing "The War on Science" book, and her role as a Purdue Pharma shill.
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| Willoughby shares her thoughts about Institutional Review Boards with Emil Kirkegaard on Twitter --------------------------------------------------------------------- |
Emil Kirkegaard's "OpenPsych" hereditarian hypothesis chat
...I admire your idealism, and I think the research that you, Piffer and others are doing is really important. I'd like to try and support it however I can (I would not have sent my genome and IQ scores to just anyone!), and if all I can do for now is send your research along to important people I know, then I will continue to do so.
Perhaps you can convince Pinker to get others to examine the method and results. After all, they are public. Since he has a lot of influence, perhaps he can set up an academic group of anonymous scholars (so they can be honest) that can examine it.
Kirkegaard's current organization is known to have an "underground research arm" per the Hope not Hate article "Race Science Inc."
...Part of why this bothers me is because I think you and Davide Piffer do have the potential to make a difference in this area, if you weren't so idealistic about your opposition to legacy journals. You care about both that and educating the world about psychometrics, but I don't think it's possible to pursue both goals at once without compromising the second one, and I also think the second one is more important.
Emily Willoughby's "cancellation"
- In 2022, a controversy erupted over Willoughby and her connection to race pseudoscience. And around that time it was discovered that she had published an image online of two raptors in Nazi uniforms, playing chess. I have blurred the image on the tweet out of concern for copyright, although the image is available online.
The post-"cancellation" career of Emily Willoughby
In early 2018, Richard Lynn (chairman of Pioneer Fund) and Gerhard Meisenberg (chairman of Mankind Quarterly) were editors of Intelligence. After an article in The Guardian, they left the editorial board (Guardian 2018). Richard Haier, Thomas Coyle, Timothy Bates, Heiner Rindermann, and Woodley of Menie remained (Intelligence 2018). Russel Warne was a staff member for a time. The organization behind the journal, ISIR, also includes Emily Willoughby, Roberto Colom, and Guy Madison (ISIR 2025). All are sympathetic to the ideas of race science. Haier consistently defends Arthur Jensen. Timothy Bates calls ethnicity “the least socially constructed variable in social science.” Colom, Rinderman, Warne, and Madison have published in Mankind Quarterly. Woodley of Menie was expelled from the VUB after his work (“Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications”) was cited in a terrorist manifesto. Willoughby defends Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.
- Willoughby has been a frequent participant in ISIR annual meetings and was a Board member in 2024 when Emil Kirkegaard was seen participating in the annual meeting, after he had been disinvited from the 2022 annual meeting thanks to complaints from Abdel Abdellaoui.
- In 2023, along with James Lee, Willoughby received a half a million dollars from the Institute of Mental Chronometry, an organization connected to the ISIR. This is Nazi legacy money, since the Institute of Mental Chronometry received at least $332,000 from the Pioneer Fund under its original name, "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences."
- Her dinosaur art was published by the Science Museum of Virginia in 2025.
- Willoughby has co-authored about twenty papers since 2022 as seen on Google Scholar. A frequent co-author is Alexandros Giannelis, mentioned in the Hope Not Hate investigative report called Superbaby Factory:
...Alexandros Giannelis, a behavioural geneticist at the University of Minnesota, is one of them. He was also described as a “one of our colleagues” by Anomaly in a call with our undercover reporter in November 2023. When the Nazi music website Midgård was hacked that same year, leaked customer data revealed that Giannelis made two purchases from its shop: Invasion, a book by Ian Stuart Donaldson, founder of the white supremacist group Blood and Honour. He also bought four Nazi propaganda posters. In an email to HOPE not hate, Giannelis confirmed that he had been a research consultant at Heliospect, and has since stepped down.
