What is the connection between the CBS News-promoted company Herasight and Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard?

And did Kirkegaard talk about putting out a hit on his legal adversary?

The eugenics company Herasight was recently profiled by the Bari Weiss-controlled CBS News. 

This did not surprise me at all since Weiss (a right-wing grifter recently profiled by John Oliver) has long been close to people involved in race pseudoscience from at least when she promoted them as heroes in her Intellectual Dark Web piece in the New York Times. One of those featured is Michael Shermer, a good pal of Steven Pinker, who is so racist he's a big fan of infamous far-right racist charlatan J. Philippe Rushton.

So it's no surprise that CBS News decided to give Herasight thousands of dollars in free advertising.

Well today a former associate of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, (more evidence for how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) Andrew (formerly Erik) Ahrens has come forward to claim that Kirkegaard is behind Herasight:

And this company now Herasight and (Kirkegaard's) not listed there, neither is his friend Nima. But all of these other people, Jonathan Anomaly, Jeremy Li, Tobias Wolfram are listed even on the websites home page on the day that I record this, so they try to keep Emil in the background. That I know, and I can also prove this, that all of this, this whole research network there was kind of cultivated, for example, in this Vienna conference. Then later in 2023, I attended another retreat with Emil and a group of his associates. Jeremy Li was there in Italy and Como...

I've mentioned Ahrens on this blog before. The "Vienna conference" he refers to is the alleged private conference that Emil Kirkegaard hosted in a hotel in Vienna around the same time that the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) held its annual meeting in Vienna in 2022. 

Kirkegaard had been shunned by ISIR in 2022 because Abdel Abdellaoui, an ISIR participant complained about his participation in ISIR meetings. Although ISIR can't quit Kirkegaard (he and ISIR bigwig Emily Willoughby go way back) so Kirkegaard was a participant in the 2024 ISIR annual meeting.

Ahrens, who says he was at that 2022 meeting, shares details about the conference in this latest video and claims the following people, among others, attended Kirkegaard's side-conference:

• Helmut Nyborg
• Rosalind Arden
• James Thomson
• Jonathan Anomaly

Arden could be seen promoting Herasight in ultra-racist Quillette. Jonathan Anomaly has, naturally written for Quillette.

Unfortunately Ahrens does not provide solid documentation for a connection between Kirkegaard and Herasight, but the fact that Ahrens was a close associate of Kirkegaard adds credence to the claim, on top of the already very strange fact that so many of the listed Herasight team members have connections to the far-right and race pseudoscience and even, like Jonathan Anomaly, to Kirkegaard himself. 

As I said back in October:

...Kirkegaard can be seen promoting a company run by some of his associates, Herasight.

I think it's extremely likely Kirkegaard is an investor in this company since its team and advisor lists include: 

• Jonathan Anomaly, who has contributed to Kirkegaard's Aporia podcast;
• Tobias Wolfram, an ally of far-right, neo-Nazi friendly (if not an actual neo-Nazi) Martin Sellner;
• Spencer Moore seen here contributing to a comments section of Aporia;
• Timothy Bates - likely Timothy C. Bates, a one-time president of gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) an organization with a well-documented association with Emil Kirkegaard;
• Alex Strudwick Young who likes to retweet Aporia contributors/notorious racists Razib Khan and Cremieux, both far-right political operatives.

On top of all that, Ahrens says that Kirkegaard talked about putting a hit out on his legal adversary Oliver Smith:

I know that Emil reached a settlement with this English Oliver (Smith) person who he had lost the lawsuit against and they reached an out of court agreement. No, I must say Emil told me in the past when he was drunk, this must have been in 2023. And he said this multiple times that he was going to get someone to or thinking about getting someone to kill this person. So he said that he might set up a crypto bounty on this guy's head and for 50,000 that someone would likely just get rid of him. And um. He, he told me this personally, I know that ultimately he reached an out of court agreement with him, so he didn't enact his threat. Just this is what these people talk about, right? So now that I make this video and I make all of this public, of course, there might also be talk in these circles about basically setting a bounty on my head.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if Kirkegaard said that. People who have devoted their lives to racism and far-right politics are horrible people by definition. I put nothing past them.

Instead of paying to have him killed, Kirkegaard was likely behind the smear campaign against Oliver Smith that included an article in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal attacking Smith as a former neo-Nazi (ironic isn't it?) 

Smith successfully sued City Journal into removing the article. 

That smear campaign against Smith was gleefully promoted by gutter racists Steven Pinker and Charles Murray.

I would love to have more information about any connections between Kirkegaard and Herasight or Bari Weiss and some of the people associated with Herasight.

I had to laugh though when Ahrens tried to defend Kirkegaard against a charge of antisemitism at minute 25:24 in the video, by saying:

"(Kirkegaard) told me that he likes Jews because they are smart and he thinks they are good with money."