Jonathan Kane, Emily Willoughby, Emil Kirkegaard, RationalWiki and censorship

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 (which has been available on this blog since 2021) and another Twitter screen cap of an exchange between Pinkerite and Ben Winegard, brother of Emil Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard. (That image has been on this blog since 2020.) 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...

So the article about Emily Willoughby on RationalWiki had been removed months before the lawsuits began. It's curious then, that she was involved at all in any legal actions against the RationalMedia Foundation.

How we know that Emil Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi

It's clear that Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi. According to the Hope not Hate exposé Race Science Inc:

• The Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation —thought to be essentially defunct — has rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) 

[NOTE: HDF is owned by Kirkegaard and recently renamed "Polygenic 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

Kirkegaard attempts to falsely connect
RationalWiki to "antifa"
------------------------------------------------------

I first became aware of Kirkegaard's hatred of RationalWiki thanks to a City Journal piece written to attack a legal opponent of Kirkegaard, and endorsed by Steven Pinker and Charles Murray, called "The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past."

The "troll" was Oliver Smith, whom Kirkegaard had sued for defamation - and lost. At the time of the article's publication, Kirkegaard 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.

Willoughby used the name "Ferahgo the Assassin," on Wikipedia, a name taken from one of the characters in the Redwall children's fantasy novels. The character is "an evil weasel who heads up a large band known as the Corpsemakers."

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.

Kane and Willoughby are likely authors of an article published in 2020, "The left-wing bias of Wikipedia," for the conservative British magazine "The Critic" under the pseudonyms Shuichi Tezuka and Linda A. Ashtear. 

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." 

I documented Shuichi Tezuka promoting the right-wing wiki Justapedia in 2023. The "Tetrapteryx" on Justapedia is likely Jonathan Kane, since he uses "Tetrapteryx" on RationalWiki, which was confirmed by a RationalWiki moderator.

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 first half of the review is full of regret that Wade did not write a better book in support of race pseudoscience and the second half is an attack on one of Wade's critics, using hereditarians' favorite Equalitarian bullshit.

In the review they link to that great intellectual of our time, the pseudonymous racist blogger "HBD Chick" to argue that sure, Nazis were bad, but crimes have been around since before Nazis:

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.

Willoughby shares her thoughts about
Institutional Review Boards
with Emil Kirkegaard on Twitter 
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Emil Kirkegaard's "OpenPsych" hereditarian hypothesis chat

In September 2014 an individual named Emily and another named Tetrapteryx can be seen participating in a discussion about the "hereditarian hypothesis" in an archive of a discussion board on Emil Kirkegaard's OpenPsych. Other participants in the discussion include John Fuerst and Emil Kirkegaard.

This discussion board Emily appears to know Steven Pinker and mentions Steven Pinker's protegé James Lee and in the last paragraph responds to Kirkegaard: 

 

...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.

The Piffer mentioned is likely Davide Piffer, a frequent contributor to OpenPsych, and known for at least one incredibly racist tweet.

Kirkegaard responds to Emily:

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."

Emily Willoughby expressed her admiration for Steven Pinker in this undated Tumblr post. Pinker returned the favor in this 2024 tweet.

In the same discussion, Tetrapteryx thinks Kirkegaard and Piffer are "so idealistic."

...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.

On Twitter, Willoughby addressed the issue of her connection to race pseudoscience, claiming her work is on "cognitive ability and genetics" which has nothing to do with race, and references Kathryn Paige Harden as a "progressive geneticist." Harden has promoted the career of Razib Khan, and the work of Willoughby. 

And the field of behavioral genetics is full of racist connections.

Willoughby tweeted the work of Linda Gottfredson to support her views. Linda Gottfredson is a gutter racist who could be heard ranking races by intelligence with "alleged cult leader" Stefan Molyneux.

Gregory Cochran's Twitter handle is included on Willoughby's Gottfredson tweet. Cochran is a co-author, with white nationalist Henry Harpending, of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence and a recipient of $600,000 dollars from Holocaust denier Ron Unz, although Unz later complained bitterly that Cochran did not respond to the grant by doing the kind of work Unz wanted. 

Willoughby appears to be friendly with Cochran, posting a link to a better image-quality version of a cartoon that Cochran shared on his blog while discussing the article he wrote for Quillette. The cartoon attacks evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin by showing a man with a dog sled team composed of poodles. The caption reads: "Richard Lewontin creates a dog sled team to test his theory that small genetic differences are irrelevant." 

Willoughby was defended by several online individuals including Jerry Coyne and Kiwi Farms apologists Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.

Emil Kirkegaard was not happy about Willoughby's "cancellation." 

The post-"cancellation" career of Emily Willoughby

In May of this year a Dutch website published an article titled What is the relationship between intelligence research and racism? (English version via Google Translate) which includes this passage (my highlight):

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.

I haven't seen evidence of Willoughby defending Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI), but she is on friendly terms with its co-author Gregory Cochran, and in their review of "A Troublesome Inheritance," she and Jonathan Kane mention Cochran twice and cite his other work (co-authored with Harpending) "The 10,000 Year Explosion."

From all appearances, Emily Willoughby has a thriving career. Since her "cancellation" in 2022:

• Willoughby has been a frequent participant in ISIR annual meetings.

• During her "cancellation" she shared on Jerry Coyne's website that for the annual ISIR meeting in 2022, when Kirkegaard was disinvited: "I WAS on the board that made the decision to redact Emil’s talk from the conference. I had no part in any sort of “private hotel room." Former neo-Nazi/Kirkegaard associate Eric Ahrens discussed that "private hotel room" recently. 

• However, Willoughby was also a Board member in 2024 when Emil Kirkegaard was seen participating in the annual meeting. Although probably not coincidentally, the ISIR did not post its annual meeting program on its website for that year, as it has done every other year since the beginning of the organization in 2000.

• 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." (The money was given in the late 1980s, so would be worth about $800,000 today.)

• In 2024 Steven Pinker tweeted that she was a "rising star."

• 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.

 Giannelis could be seen defending Willoughby on Twitter. 

• She sells dinosaur merch on Zazzle.

Yet in spite of all this, Willoughby managed to find the time to keep up with the secret parties who censored - and continue to censor - RationalWiki, and to share information from them with Jonathan Kane, who used that information to threaten additional litigation against the RationalMedia Foundation.

UPDATE

I posted a link from my RationalWiki user talk page to this Pinkerite blog post and immediately a RationalWiki moderator deleted the link, and then removed most of my user privileges. I asked why and was told because one of the names of a censored individual was in the link name. And then I was blocked from contributing to RationalWiki until January 6, 2026. 

Not that I had any plans to contribute, RationalWiki has been completely de-spined. It's the Gimp in Maynard and Zed's dungeon now.

UPDATE 2

I find that on RationalWiki I've been accused of lying by a RationalMedia Foundation Board member, in response to Jonathan Kane (aka "Tetraptryx.") I have scrupulously documented every single claim in this post, but since I am banned from RationalWiki, I can't respond there to the claim. 

Then someone from CancelWatch came to gloat about my ban. 

UPDATE 3

The claim was retracted, which I very much appreciate. I certainly mean no harm to the editors of RationalWiki - although I do think they need to be honest with themselves about the possibility of running a wiki that can contribute to the public good, while having their chain yanked whenever it looks like they might violate the terms of agreements made with a now-defunct organization. 

And of course I am very annoyed that my Charles Murray article was censored. To be fair other RationalWiki editors contributed so it's not exclusively mine, but in any case I think it's a good piece of work. Murray has been a public figure for decades and the article was carefully sourced and there was nothing tortious or defamatory about it.

The bad guys here are not (most of) the RationalWiki editors and RMF Board members, but the people who twisted the American legal system, via SLAPP lawsuits and threats of lawsuits, into a weapon to censor free speech.

UPDATE 4

When I asked Bongolian, one of the RationalWiki moderators why he revoked my rights, somebody else jumped in to say "you're all pathetic fascist boot-lickers" - and for that, Bongolian, without any evidence, falsely claimed that " Pinkerite has engaged in block evasion."

Of course since I'm already blocked, I have no way to defend myself there, which is just how Bongolian likes it, I suspect.

The Far Right & the International Society for Intelligence Research

The Atlantic published an article by Ali Breland yesterday, The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. Thanks to Maxine Margolis for the heads-up!

I have an issue with the title though. The far right has long been obsessed with Race and IQ. The important issue, which is what the article is really about, is that the Republican Party is being infected by race pseudoscience: 

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

And it's been going on since at least Bari Weiss's infamous glorification of several hardcore race pseudoscience promoters among the "renegades" of the Intellectual Dark Web including Michael Shermer, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, Sam Harris and of course Steven Pinker.

I don't think the article really has a good handle on Steve Sailer's career though, whatever Sailer may claim:

In June, (Sailer) also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. 

I have long noted on this blog that 2012 was the last time Steven Pinker mentioned Sailer in public after a previous decade of promoting his career, so I assume that's why Sailer picked 2013 as the year he was allegedly pushed out of the spotlight. And 2023 was when stochastic terrorist Elon Musk took over Twitter and invited all the racist ghouls back on. 

But New York Magazine had an article all about Sailer in 2017, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right. So Sailer was hardly in hiding. 

The article does not mention the International Society for Intelligence Research, of course, but it does mention Stefan Molyneux, who had Linda Gottfredson, one of the most prominent members of ISIR on his show and together they ranked races with Black people on the bottom. 

The ISIR chugs along, year after year, almost completely unnoticed by the mainstream media, platforming many many proponents of race pseudoscience at its conferences. In 2023 it featured Michael Woodley of Menie, Gregory Clark, Rosalind Arden, Richard Haier, Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker. 

This year they allowed one of the most extreme racists back in to make a presentation - Emil Kirkegaard.

There's a reference to "Bronze Age Pervert" in the Atlantic article and as outrageous as he is, his message per Breland is a perfect encapsulation of the ISIR ethos from Arthur Jensen to Linda Gottfredson to Richard Haier:

Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. 

I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of the participants of the annual Racist Rodeo - AKA the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

You can see the spreadsheet here.

Below are the top ten most frequent participants in the annual conferences since the first one in 2000. 

Note that participation is determined by mention in the annual conference program either for the inclusion of their work, or as an organizer or advisor or various administrative functions like interviewing the participants. But identification as a participant doesn't necessarily mean the individual was at the conference in person.

I haven't completed the 2024 conference since they haven't released the program yet, so these numbers are based on a timespan from 2000 to 2023. There was no conference in 2020. The right column is the number of times each has participated.

Lubinski, David	20
Bates, Timothy C.	18
Benbow, Camilla P.	18
Plomin, Robert	18
Deary, Ian J.	17
Haier, Richard	17
Johnson, Wendy	17
Detterman, Douglas K	16
Gottfredson, Linda	16
Colom, Roberto	14

So let's meet these most enthusiastic ISIR racist rodeo participants.

• David Lubinski is married to Camilla Benbow, and is currently at Vanderbilt University. In addition to being the most frequent ISIR conference participant, he received a "Lifetime Achievement" award from ISIR along with Benbow in 2019. Lubinski was one of the signatories of the Linda Gottfredson paper defending the race pseudoscience view in The Bell Curve, and as of 2022 was the director of the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which accepted money from the Pioneer Fund under the name Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. In 2023 the Institute of Mental Chronometry gave a grant of half a million dollars to two ISIR associates, Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee. 

Lubinski has not published anything directly about race, that I was able to discover so far, but his dedication to the cause of race pseudoscience seems certain via his various Jensenite associations and his apparently warm relationship with people like Linda Gottfredson and Steven Pinker. When Pinker was at the 2017 conference, Lubinski interviewed him and asked him, in effect, what made him come over to his side, the race pseudoscience side:

How did someone with your background, someone who at one point in his career and I'm not putting him on the spot because Steven said this publicly, said early on, he found individual differences "uninteresting" how did someone at that stage of development become so interested in human psychological diversity that you developed expertise in individual differences and wrote a book like "Blank Slate."

"Human psychological diversity" is a term indistinguishable from Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." And clearly Lubinski is using the term "individual differences" as a synonym for "human psychological diversity." 

Lubinski published an obituary for Jensen in American Psychologist that paints Jensen as compassionate towards Black people while failing to mention Jensen's alliances with hard-core racists like American Renaissance; that he was supported by the Pioneer Fund; and that he was on the board of the neo-Nazi publication Neue Anthropologie.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.  

• Timothy C.  Bates is a member of the editorial board of Intelligence, the publication associated with the ISIR. Bates' far-right, racist political views are apparent on his X/Twitter feed, where he retweets the likes of techno-fascist Trump-funder Elon Musk, Steven Pinker, and Razib Khan. He was the president of ISIR in 2017 and 2018.

On the Facebook page for the ISIR, Bates posts a reminder of how much the ISIR gang loves the incredibly racist Charles Murray. 

 

• Camilla P. Benbow, like her husband David Lubinski, underplays her race pseudoscience beliefs, but is clearly an enthusiastic participant in the ISIR race pseudoscience project. She is also at Vanderbilt. She's coauthored with extreme Jensenite Richard Haier and with extremist David C. Geary who has published in racist Aporia and racist "hereditarian" Quillette. I think that like Pinker, Lubinski and Benbow are too careful to make blatant racist statements, but they are clearly allies with those who do. They let those allies take the heat, while they continue to benefit from the financial legacy of the Pioneer Fund and who knows how many racist plutocrat donors.

• Robert Plomin - David Gilborn explored the perniciousness of Plomin:

‘… the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table, despite all the progress blacks have made in this society … the last great battle over racism will not be fought over access to a lunch counter, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, under a microscope, on the battleground of our DNA.’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. (2008) 

Why write a paper about racism and genetics in the second decade of the Twenty-First century? Surely arguments about race, intelligence and genetics are dead and buried? A Black man has been President and, in both the US and UK, bold assertions about racial minorities’ supposed intellectual inferiority have led to public condemnation for the speaker. Part of my answer lies in the main title of the paper, which quotes Professor Robert Plomin, one of the principal figures in contemporary writing about genetics and education. 

As I explain (below), Plomin has become something of a celebrity-academic in the UK; his claims make headline news, his views are sought by policy-makers, and he features in pop-science radio shows. In one such show, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili (Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, UK) he was challenged on the topic of race. Plomin described his approach as follows:  

‘In general I’ve felt softly softly is a better way to go…’ (BBC Radio 4, 2015).[1]  

Until recently many in the field of behavioural genetics have been far less reticent about airing their views. The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is the most famous, but by no means the only, example of such work (see Eysenck, 1971; Gottfredson, 1986; Jensen, 1969; Lynn, 1991 & 2001; Rushton, 1997). This paper shows how, in recent years, a softly softly approach (that avoids explicit reference to race) has become more common. I argue that this inexplicitness should not be mistaken for an absence of racialized thinking and does not signal that the current work is free from possible racist consequences. Indeed, if anything, the new softly softly version of hereditarianism may be even more dangerous than the outspoken version of earlier periods. 

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

😱 Plomin published an article with Deary that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer. 

• Ian J. Deary - curiously, Deary is quoted for the anti-hereditarian side in the Guardian: 

No one has successfully isolated any genes “for” intelligence at all, and claims in this direction have turned to dust when subjected to peer review. As the Edinburgh University cognitive ageing specialist Prof Ian Deary put it, “It is difficult to name even one gene that is reliably associated with normal intelligence in young, healthy adults.” Intelligence doesn’t come neatly packaged and labelled on any single strand of DNA. 

So it's strange that he spends so much time with people convinced of the hereditarian hypothesis, and, let's be real, hard-core racists and neo-Nazis who show up at ISIR conferences. 

 

😱 Deary published an article with Plomin that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer.   

 

• Richard Haier - I wrote the first iteration of the new version of the Rational Wiki article (NOT the one discussed here) exploring the extreme Jensen-infused racism of Richard Haier, the most devoted member of the Jensen race cult.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

• Wendy Johnson - appears to be a Jensenite, but did not make a good case for racism when she appeared in an online interview. However, she has published with blatant racist Jan te Nijenhuis. And of course has no problem hobnobbing with all the racist extremists who show up at ISIR conferences.

• Douglas K. Detterman - according to his Wikipedia entry: "Among his achievements, Detterman founded the scientific journal Intelligence in 1977, and was editor in chief from 1977 to 2016 where it was taken over by Richard Haier. He also founded the International Society for Intelligence Research and was its president until 2011." 

The entry doesn't mention that Detterman is also vice president/director of the Jensenite, Pioneer Fund grantee organization the Institute of Mental Chronometry. It is likely that Detterman is just as racist as Gottfredson is and Jensen was, but is more careful to downplay the racism at the heart of his belief-system. 

 

👉Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.    

 

• Linda Gottfredson is hideously racist, shamelessly so - possibly the equal of Jensen and J. P. Rushton. She can be heard ranking "races" with perfect confidence on white nationalist Stefan Molyneux's program. Her career is propped up by her lack of shame and the Nazi money of the Pioneer Fund. Gottfredson introduced Charles Murray to race pseudoscience. Of course this horrific racist ghoul is a long-time and highly admired member of the ISIR klan. They gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. 

👉Author of the defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence. 

• Roberto Colom is a huge fan and defender of the race pseudoscience of political operative and life-long recipient of wingnut welfare Charles Murray. He's also chummy with Murray on Twitter/X. Likes to cite all the biggest race pseudoscience ghouls in his work. Published in ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Five of the top 10 ISIR conference participants signed Gottfredson's "Mainstream Science" claim. 

Another signer was R. Travis Osborne - pro-segregationist, director of the Pioneer Fund. His article "Racial Differences in Mental Growth and School Achievement" was included in a collection of race pseudoscience essays edited by Robert Kuttner, another segregationist. That collection was a big influence on Arthur Jensen.

The race pseudoscience obsession with school achievement has continued from the days of segregationists like Osborne through the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which was originally called "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences" through to Kathryn Paige Harden and "behavioral genetics" arguing that educational attainment is the result of genes, to Richard Haier arguing for manipulating genes to raise IQ.

The racist rodeo - European-style - the 2024 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research

The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) typically alternates between holding its annual conferences in North America and Europe. This is a European year and so the conference is in Zürich.

The line-up appears to have fewer obvious racists this year, although it does have Richard Haier, who is a devotee of 20th century racist Arthur Jensen - ISIR is founded on Jensenism. 

Haier has been spending his time lately hobnobbing with blatant racists like Charles Murray, Bo Winegard (and the gang at Aporia) and Stefan Molyneux, while promoting the idea that Black Americans can have their innate mental genetic defects cured through genetic manipulation.

One half of the respectability power couple of ISIR, Camille Benbow is also listed as a conference participant. To get an idea of the racist world that Benbow and her husband David Lubinski inhabit, consider Charles Murray's introduction for one of his more recently-published race-screeds, Human Diversity (my emphases):

Jensen made this pronouncement in his magnum opus, The g Factor, published in 1998. The list of eminent scholars who have shared that view began with Cyril Burt and Lewis Terman in the early part of the twentieth century and continued through the rest of the century and into the twenty-first century with figures such as Raymond Cattell, Nathan Brody, Hans Eysenck, John Loehlin, David Geary, Diane Halpern, Thomas Bouchard, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow. I should add that Richard Herrnstein and I took the same position in The Bell Curve.

Murray dedicates the book to Supreme Court corrupter, and Bari Weiss's "sugar daddy" Harlan Crow. I'm guessing Crow is one of the monstrously evil plutocrats funding Murray's racist screeds now.

Murray has, you guessed it, also appeared at ISIR conferences. But he isn't listed (so far) for this year's conference. But let's see who is:

Elsbeth Stern is the host and she seems at first glance far more reasonable than the typical ISIR conference attendee, actually admitting to the missing heritability problem in a paper published by Nature :

The search for the genes responsible for the expression of cognitive capabilities has not yet had much success, despite the money and effort invested in human genome projects.

However, the paper shows she's a big believer in the Pioneer Fund-underwritten twins studies and her second citation is of scientifically worthless evolutionary psychology. So she is fundamentally a proponent of sociobiology - which makes her a perfect fit for the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

Brook Macnamara is an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Case Western Reserve, and is interested in "individual differences" a term that usually means "group differences" which is a sneaky way of referring to race pseudoscience. Or as Emil Kirkegaard says: "group differences are just individual differences, really." Kirkegaard has also presented at ISIR meetings, until he embarrassed them. 

Matt McGue has a "collegiate affiliation" in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, and says he is a behavioral geneticist - which is the latest term for proponents of sociobiology.

Wendy Johnson is part of the twin studies sociobiology gang, publishing with Bouchard, McGue and Ian Deary, past president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.

Sophie von Strum is cited several times in "Human Diversity," by Charles Murray. She is Professor of Psychology in Education and Director of the Hungry Mind Lab at the Department of Education at the University of York and she says she wants to discuss Genomic prediction of educational outcomes - one of the favorite topics of the dread Kathryn Paige Harden, who has also appeared at ISIR conferences.

Stephen Ceci is a member of the League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters as well as a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell.

Wendy M. Williams is another member of the League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters as well as a professor of psychology at Cornell.

Franzis Preckel, and Klaus Oberauer seem to be garden-variety researchers, notable (so far as I can tell, yet) by their comfort with associating their names with an organization full of racists.

Once again, the Jensen-founded Institute of Mental Chronometry is paying some bills:

All graduate students and postdocs with an accepted oral or poster presentation for ISIR automatically qualify for $1,500 in travel support (for traveling from outside of Europe) or $1,000 of travel support (for those traveling from within Europe) from the Institute of Mental Chronometry.

That organization is rolling in the dough-re-mi, last year it gave half a million to two race-pseudoscience promoters Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee.

Jordan Peterson and Steve Sailer and Some More News - and Steven Pinker and the right-wing Harvard coup

I've provided a link to this excellent Some More News video about crackpot Jordan Peterson previously, but I hadn't watched it all the way through until yesterday. In my defense it is a really long video, which Cody lampshades several times throughout.

So I hadn't realized that racist filth Steve Sailer got a shout-out in the video. Jordan Peterson tweeted an article by Sailer that distorted the findings of a study about diversity. Some More News points out, accurately, that Sailer is a white supremacist.

The video also mentions Stefan Molyneux, Bari Weiss, Linda Gottfredson and Andy Ngo. 

Remember, billionaire techno-fascist Marc Andreessen admires Peterson.

Now Steven Pinker's alliance with Steve Sailer - from using him as his data guy to including a piece of crap that Sailer wrote in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" - is a prime reason for the existence of this blog. I am motivated to point out that while Pinker was playing a mild-mannered liberal college professor, an image aided and abetted by a compliant, lazy, stupid media, he has a history of over twenty years of promoting white supremacists and racists.

And Pinker has not only never denounced Steve Sailer and has never expressed regret for promoting his career, Steven Pinker is now chummy with Richard Hanania, yet another white supremacist.

Here is Steven Pinker's only subscription on Twitter - to Richard Hanania.

And now Pinker has teamed up with Christopher Rufo, Bari Weiss and all the IDW/Quillette/right-wing, plutocrat-funded ghouls and the GOP in the GOP war on colleges, starting with destroying Harvard's first Black woman president, Claudine Gay.

In the New York Times, Gay rightly notes this is not only about her, it's a campaign to "unravel public faith in pillars of American society."

On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Pinker & friends claim to be so concerned about anti-Semitism, yet I haven't heard a peep out of them about the fact that Substack promotes Nazis. Maybe because some of those Nazis are their friends.

UPDATE: Pinker makes it clear he and his rightwing ghoul mob are gunning for all American education institutions:

Pinker has proposed adopting a clear policy on academic freedom, promoting a wide range of viewpoints and embracing institutional neutrality by avoiding pronouncements on events of the day.

"It’s not just about Harvard, but about higher education and institutions in general,” Pinker said.