Did City Journal and Cancel Watch hatch a scheme to blackmail a critic of race pseudoscience and censor RationalWiki?

"We are coming for you. If you don't take the prudent action and refrain from continuing your malicious activities, you will be exposed..." 

~ Cancel Watch Twitter Account @watch_cancel

It appears that the Koch-funded City Journal/Manhattan Institute coordinated with the Cancel Watch Substack in a scheme to try to get content removed from RationalWiki by blackmailing a critic of race pseudoscience.

City Journal recently ran a hit piece against Oliver Smith, written by "David Zimmerman" but I couldn't verify a real person associated with that identity.

The article links to the Cancel Watch entry on Smith.

Cancel Watch is a site that targets individuals: college professors, journalists and bloggers, who have spoken out against - or even just reported on - race pseudoscience. 

For example:

But Cancel Watch doesn't just write about these individuals, Cancel Watch issues threats and attempts blackmail.

According to Smith, Cancel Watch sent him direct messages on Twitter - he shared screen caps:

-----------------------------

Smith refused to comply. Less than a month after the threat was issued, a hit piece was published in City Journal, which does exactly what Cancel Watch threatened - dredge up and publicize Smith's former association with the far right. Smith was a teenager at the time of his involvement and has long since come to regret his youthful alignment with extremists.

Smith is now a strong critic of race pseudoscience, and was sued by Emil Kirkegaard. Smith won, and Kirkegaard won't pay up.

Smith is currently seeking legal relief for Cancel Watch's threats.

The owner of the Cancel Watch site is anonymous. One commenter on a post there noted a connection between the interests of Cancel Watch and the interests of Kirkegaard:

Is it a coincidence all these attack pieces are Emil Kirkegaard's critics and he is one of the few people retweeting Cancel Watch?

Why hide behind anonymity when it's clear you are either Kirkegaard or one of his attack dogs or henchmen.

The Cancel Watch account appears to be speaking for more than one person, but it's not clear who is meant by "those of us you've attacked." 

If the City Journal article is what is meant by the "massively embarrassing article in a mainstream journal with millions of readers" then Cancel Watch is speaking on behalf of some or all of the people and organizations mentioned in the article, and, possibly with their knowledge and consent, used City Journal to exact revenge against Smith.

1. Jonathan Anomaly
2. Noah Carl
3. Frodi Debes
4. Edward Dutton
5. Aurelio J. Figuerdo
6. Peter Frost
7. John Fuerst
8. Richard Haier
9. International Society for Intelligence Research
10. Anatoly Karlin
11. Emil Kirkegaard
12. Claire Lehmann
13. London Conference on Intelligence
14. Gerhard Meisenberg
15. Adam Perkins
16. Quillette
17. Heiner Rindermann
18. Jan te Nijenhuis
19. James Thomson
20. Dmiitri van der Linden
21. Bo Winegard
22. Emily Willoughby

City Journal did not reach out to Smith for a response, and refused to acknowledge Smith's request to respond to the attack.

"David Zimmerman"s grievances appear to be that Smith sometimes posted under a pseudonym, and that Smith shared verifiable facts in a public forum. I believe we call this "free speech."

Isn't this the "free speech" that Steven Pinker and the rest of the "Intellectual Dark Web" claim to support? 

I mentioned in my previous post that long-time Koch money recipient Charles Murray is a fan and financial supporter of Emil Kirkegaard. 

So naturally Murray is a promoter of this apparent Cancel Watch/City Journal blackmail scheme.

Cancel Watch retweeted Pinker's promotion.

If it turns out to be true - and it certainly seems plausible - it's remarkable that "mainstream journal with millions of readers" City Journal would participate in this blackmail scheme. 

Even I didn't think far-right media would stoop this low. They are getting bolder all the time, probably fueled by all the generous right-wing sugar daddies, as Bari Weiss would know.

I reached out to the available Cancel Watch email address cancel.watch.account@proton.me and asked who was funding them. The response:

Vladimir Putin, the Koch Brothers, and Steven Pinker.

But when I asked if they put Cancel Watch up to the blackmail attempt, or if that was Cancel Watch's own idea, I received no reply.

UPDATE: RationalWiki claims that the City Journal article contains misrepresentations and suggests the author, David Zimmerman, does not understand how Wikis work.

What does Manhattan Institute pay Colin Wright for?

Apparently Colin Wright's job is to post this emoticon all day on his Bluesky account. He's posted it at least a dozen times.

😘

It reminds me of Wright's buddy James Lindsay, who thought it very clever indeed to respond to people on Xitter with some variation of "your mom."

Wright, former managing editor of racist Quillette, testified on Xitter what a big influence the oafish anti-Semite Lindsay was on his own political views.

Colin Wright and James Lindsay count as intellectuals in right-wing circles. Which is why, I assume, the Manhattan Institute made Wright one of its fellows. Colin Wright is officially on wingnut welfare.

The Manhattan Institute is right-wing trash, and it publishes garbage rag City Journal. I was just talking about City Journal and its connection to Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald a week or so ago.

As readers of Pinkerite may recall, City Journal was sued last year for publishing a defamatory article against a guy who was - and still is - owed money by neo-Nazi kook Emil Kirkegaard. 

City Journal retracted the article.

It seems very likely that either Kirkegaard wrote the article himself, or it was written at his request. 

Now it must have been pushed for publication by an important Manhattan Institute donor (Kirkegaard himself?) because I don't think even the ghouls who edit City Journal are really interested in Emil Kirkegaard's personal finances. 

But City Journal does have alleged editors:

• Brian C. Anderson Editor, City Journal
• Steven Malanga Senior Fellow | Senior Editor
• Paul Beston Managing Editor
• John Hirschauer Associate Editor
• Daniel Kennelly Associate Editor
• Theodore Kupfer Associate Editor
• Jordan McGillis Economics Editor, City Journal

One of Colin Wright's biggest thrills was from his stickman cartoon, which was re-tweeted by Elon Musk. 

Wright immediately tried to monetize it.

I assume that like the oafish Lindsay, Wright thinks he's very clever. But in fact, his cartoon is simply an illustration of what life has always been like for people who are conservative by nature. 

The illustration shows Colin Wright - I assume that's who "me" is. In 2008 he was left of center. But those "woke progressives" ran farther away from the center, somehow causing the hapless Wright to slide to right of center.

Now in this example, this slide happened due to "woke" beliefs - the beliefs that Black Lives Matter and that trans lives matter. 

But I'm sure many "left of center" people throughout human history have gone on the same "political journey" as Wright as they've gotten older.

Take the issue of slavery. Those on the right were whole-heartedly in favor of slavery. But those slightly left of center believed that slaves should be set free some day, maybe when slavery died out all by itself. And once they were free they should move to Haiti.  

Meanwhile the left was saying that slaves had the right to be free, immediately, and live in the United States.

Then one day John Brown came along and tried to start a slave insurrection. Many on the left thought that it was a great idea. That was when the left stretched farther to the left, as in Wright's stick figure graphic - thanks to the hardcore abolitionists of 1859.

They were considered so radical they were even called "Radical Republicans" back in the day long before the Republican Party became the party of fascism. 

But conservatives who thought they were pretty liberal - center left - for believing that slavery should end some day thought the Radicals were crazy, and suspected them of being open to personal, even sexual relationships with Black people, a thought that horrified the "center left."

And so it goes, from one progressive cause to the next - women's suffrage, the labor movement, gay rights, etc. etc. All causes that were once considered radical.

When he was young, Colin Wright approved of things that had been radical twenty years before. But as he got older and was confronted with new progressive causes that he did not grow up with - trans rights and diversity, equity and inclusion - he decided that change should stop.

So Colin Wright's political journey is nothing new. It's the same old same old.

It's just a matter of time before Wright is telling those kids to get off his lawn, like his ideological ally Jerry Coyne.

Compare people like Colin Wright to Abraham Lincoln. Like Wright, when he was younger, Abe Lincoln was center-left - he wanted slaves to be free, and he believed that slaves would eventually be free, maybe in about a hundred years. And he was in favor of "colonization" the term for sending free Black people to Haiti or elsewhere.

When the Civil War came, probably influenced by Frederick Douglass and others, Abraham Lincoln moved towards the left until, at the very end of the war, he gave a speech in favor of Black voting rights, an extremely radical position at the time.

That's the primary reason John Wilkes Booth shot him, according to historian Michael Burlingame. 

I think it's a safe bet that Colin Wright will never die for a noble cause.

I'm reminded of this excellent comic.

Emil Kirkegaard and his racist club: Substack, City Journal and Steven Pinker

The Koch-funded City Journal ran a hit piece by "David Zimmerman" on Oliver Smith. 

But who is David Zimmerman? According to his byline in the City Journal:

David Zimmerman is an independent writer who has worked as a producer in conservative talk radio.

When you click on the name it leads to this page, which lists Zimmerman's email address as the (also Koch-funded) Manhattan Institute's press communication email. And when you go to the Manhattan Institute's web site, there is only one reference to Zimmerman - and it's a link to Zimmerman's single piece at City Journal. Googling "David Zimmerman" and "conservative talk radio" was a bust. It seems that "David Zimmerman" prefers to remain anonymous.

I first became aware of Oliver Smith back when I had an active Pinkerite Twitter account. Smith alerted me to the fact that I was being attacked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard and his gang of racist and misogynist goons. They lied about me, claiming I was responsible for some rando Twitter account. A lie also promoted by Steven Pinker's good buddy Razib Khan.

It's likely Emil Kirkegaard had a lot to do with the "David Zimmerman" article - I would not be surprised if Zimmerman was Kirkegaard's pseudonym.

In the article, "David Zimmerman" cites a hate site on Substack (of course) called Cancel Watch, which attempts to intimidate virtual nobodies, who happen to be critics of race pseudoscience, into silence

This must be the "free speech" that Pinker and the rest of the Intellectual Dark Web have claimed to care so much about.

And in his little Substack celebration of the City Journal hit piece, Kirkegaard thoughtfully linked to my site:

Taking the broader picture, we can hope that this piece in City Journal helps people understand one of the bad aspects of the internet: The internet is fueled by obsessive people. Your influence on the internet is to a substantial degree a function of how much time you spend on it. And who has the most time to spend on the internet? Losers. They don't have jobs (Oliver is unemployed, living at his parents house), or families to spend time on. So naturally these people can spend all of their time on socially destructive behavior, akin to the Spiteful Mutant theory of Michael Woodley (naturally, Oliver Smith hates this theory). Cat lady Nancy McClernan who runs Pinkerite (a hate site against Steven Pinker) is another example of this unfortunate tendency. Historically, the response of civil society to such losers would be to excommunicate them, or send them to the nut houses. As these options no longer exist, they are essentially allowed free roam on the internet to everyone's detriment.

Although I don't think Kirkegaard has many real followers, the page on Pinkerite that he linked to barely got a bump.

It's too funny that someone who has devoted his entire life to promoting racism would claim other people are "obsessive." If racist freaks like Kirkegaard and Winegard weren't promoted and supported by miserable plutocratic monsters like Koch and Thiel, and "celebrity intellectual" idiots like Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker, the rest of us could do other things. 

Much like if the South had simply given up slavery, without invading the North, my great-great grandfathers would not have had to fight for the Union.

I discovered the Kirkegaard-defending, Koch-funded, pseudonymous hit piece via a tweet by Steven Pinker. Of course. Pinker loves to help out his low-life racist pals.

The main tactic of "David Zimmerman" is to smear Smith by mentioning Smith's right-wing past. The article is entitled The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past. 

First of all, good for Oliver Smith for changing his mind and quitting the far-right ("David Zimmerman" should consider it) and deciding to oppose race pseudoscience and racism.

But I admit, I am confused, because Bo Winegard is a neo-Nazi right now and that doesn't seem to bother "David Zimmerman" who moans:

In October 2019, when Smith’s article about Winegard had existed for about three months, Winegard presented a lecture about the evolutionary basis of human genetic variation for an evolutionary-biology group at the University of Alabama. Though the lecture itself went without incident, Winegard’s troubles began the following day, as he explained in an article about his experience:

[Winegard's blather, you can read it at the source.]

Following this incident, the University of Alabama student newspaper, The Crimson White, published an article attacking Winegard, claiming that his research “has been criticized for resembling the pseudoscience employed by eugenicists.” This statement apparently referred to Smith’s writings about Winegard at RationalWiki, because at the time when the student-paper article was published, Smith’s writings were the only other place that Winegard had been described in those sorts of terms. As Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University, commented: “This claim was unsourced: who, exactly, has claimed this about Winegard, other than the author of the Rationalwiki article?”

The Christopher Ferguson citation is in Areo, run by race pseudoscience true believer Iona Italia.

Now the most important point here is that Smith did not lie about Winegard. Apparently the easiest way to smear Bo Winegard's reputation is to TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT HIM.

I was unaware of the Crimson White article. I enjoyed reading that. I loved this bit:

“We might disagree on what’s racist,” Winegard said after addressing McAlpin’s comment about his work, to which a student responded, “That’s because you’re racist.” 

“OK, that’s fine,” Winegard said in response. 

Good to see Winegard owning his racism, for once. 

I also liked this bit:

Earl was referring to a student in the crowd who compared Winegard’s research with Hitler’s racist ideology, to which Winegard responded: Hitler’s regime was not informed by science. 

“That’s definitely not true,” Earl said. “Hitler was certainly informed by science, and a lot of the race scientists were Americans. The Germans admired the American caste system, the racial system that we had.”

The students were not as stupid and ignorant as Winegard expected them to be. The Nazis were informed by the exact same "science" that Bo Winegard believes in. 

But that isn't where the similarities between Bo Winegard and the Nazis end. Like the Nazis, Bo Winegard would like to see national racial quotas. 

"Zimmerman" is so sympathetic to Winegard that he bullshits about the Crimson White article:

...the University of Alabama student newspaper, The Crimson White, published an article attacking Winegard, claiming that his research “has been criticized for resembling the pseudoscience employed by eugenicists.” This statement apparently referred to Smith’s writings about Winegard at RationalWiki, because at the time when the student-paper article was published, Smith’s writings were the only other place that Winegard had been described in those sorts of terms. 

The Crimson White article was published November 7, 2019. Prior to that, the last iteration of the Winegard article at RationalWiki is August 2019  and it doesn't mention the word eugenics except in reference to Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.

And what about me? I was talking about Winegard's love of race pseudoscience in 2018. Like "David Zimmerman," Claire Lehmann was furious when I dared to tell the truth about Bo Winegard.

Speaking of that ninny, "David Zimmerman" is outraged that RationalWiki honestly describes race pseudoscience-loving Claire Lehmann. 

But this City Journal article has so much that is idiotic, I will have to continue in another post. 

But just remember three things about Emil Kirkegaard, besides that he's obsessive, racist filth:

• Kirkegaard sued Oliver Smith and lost. And now Kirkegaard won't pay up.

• Kirkegaard was called "a weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil" by comedian Stewart Lee

• Charles Murray, who has been supported by Koch funding for decades, loves Emil Kirkegaard and Bo Winegard

Next: Did City Journal and Cancel Watch hatch a scheme to blackmail a critic of race pseudoscience and censor RationalWiki?

I am become Rational Wiki contributor, destroyer of race pseudoscience propaganda

Although I have enjoyed reading Rational Wiki articles and have occasionally referenced them here on Pinkerite, I haven't had a whole lot to do with Rational Wiki.

But ever since the Manhattan Institute and its publication City Journal tried to smear a former Rational Wiki contributor - and by extension, smear Rational Wiki itself - in apparent cooperation with one or more race pseudoscience ghouls - by publishing a hit piece which was applauded by the usual race pseudoscience gang from Steven Pinker on down the respectability hierarchy - I have developed a new respect for Rational Wiki. So I decided to become a contributor. 

If billionaire-funded, race pseudoscience loving organizations feel threatened enough by Rational Wiki to try a sleazy little stunt like that, Rational Wiki must be doing something right. It's citizen journalism vs the plutocracy.

UPDATE: Once the target of the hit piece threatened legal action the piece was removed. And the author of the piece, "David Zimmerman" is no longer listed as a City Journal contributor.

My first contribution to Rational Wiki is a summation of what I have been writing about here, about the Arthur Jensen-founded, Pioneer Fund-supported nonprofit, Institute of Mental Chronometry, which for the past two years has provided funding for aspects of the Racist Rodeo - aka the annual conference for The International Society of Intelligence Research.

If you are an opponent of race pseudoscience and the many-headed hydra of its propaganda machine, I recommend you become a contributor to Rational Wiki. As with Wikipedia, there is a learning curve to get the hang of the non-HTML ways to tag text, but it's worth it. 

Hey, nobody said fighting neo-Nazis was easy.

BTW - City Journal hired one of its standard anti-feminists, Kay S. Hymowitz, to opine on the Barbie movie. She liked it, but she thinks there is no real patriarchy because:

When Gerwig wrote this scene, she knew that in the real Real World, four out of 11 Mattel board members are women; that the company was co-founded by a woman; and that the movie was directed by Gerwig, a woman, produced by Margot Robbie, a woman, and blessed with a promotion budget that could have made a serious dent in world hunger. Some patriarchy.

Yes, one major corporate board almost has gender parity, and two women made a big-budget movie, when they should have been solving world hunger, as is their duty as women. I doubt City Journal has ever complained that men making big budget movies is preventing the end of world hunger.

Hmm. I  wonder who the top editors at City Journal are. But they let a woman edit the photos, administer the website and be assistant, so I guess we've reach perfect gender equality now. Silly Barbie movie.

Meet FAIR - the organization full of Trump supporters, Koch employees and race science promoters

I recently got a heads-up from someone on Twitter that the Right has a new grift - FAIR, the "Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism."

Trump-lover Chris Rufo claimed on Twitter that FAIR is a coalition of liberals, moderates, and conservatives in defense of the American principles of free expression, civil rights, and equality under the law, but the Board of Advisors in fact skews very heavily to the right.

There are thirty-one Advisors, and eleven of them are associated with a Koch-funded organization (AEI, City Journal, FIRE, Spiked), seven of them are authors for the race science-promoting Quillette (some are both Koch and Quillette) and almost all the rest are associated with right-wing organizations and causes, including at least two hard-core Trump supporters.

There are probably more right-wing and race science connections that I missed. I will update the  connections of the FAIR Board of Advisors as I discover them.

It looks like another example of wingnut welfare, along with the sleazy IDW campaign to brand right-wing race science as "liberal" and is most likely funded at least in part by Charles Koch, who is already funding a third of the Advisors.

I guess James Your Mom Lindsay really is in the IDW/Quillette doghouse since his two fellow grifters Boghossian and Pluckrose made the team but he didn't.

Left to right, top to bottom:

1. Ayyan Hirsi Ali - right-wing anti-Muslim and on the Koch payroll via the American Enterprise Institute. Named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

2. Peter Boghossian - right-wing grifter, recently attacked Pinkerite's founder, has the possible distinction of appearing as a guest more than anybody else on racist Stephan Molyneux's show. Quillette author. Business partner of Christian nationalist right-wing extremist Michael O'Fallon.

3. Liang-Fang Chao - "Computer Scientist" - Koch/Quillette/race science, rightwing connections unknown.

4. Melissa Chen - Quillette supporter.  UPDATE: writer for conservative The Spectator, Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders, which has, on its board of directors - inevitably - Steven Pinker.

5. Daryl Davis -  Trump supporter.  Not a Trump supporter, I was wrong about that. It's disturbing that Davis has lent his legitimately good-guy persona to FAIR which is full of rightwingers and race pseudoscience supporters and Koch-funded hacks.

6. Andrew Doyle - talentless right-wing satirist, paid by Koch to run the Spiked "Unsafe Space Tour."

7. Lisa Feldsher - runs a PR firm with many corporate clients. Koch/Quillette/race science, rightwing connections unknown.

8. Kmele Foster - right-wing, anti Black Lives Matter, on the advisory council of the Koch-funded FIRE.

9. Tim van Gelder - "entrepreneur, philosopher" - Koch/Quillette/race science, rightwing connections unknown.

10. Samantha Harris - contributor at the Federalist Society, Senior Fellow at the Koch-funded FIRE. Connected to Maud Maron somehow. Author at Quillette. Lawyer of Joshua T. Katz, member of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

11. Jason D. Hill - self-declared conservative, Ayn Rand fan and author at the far-right Federalist. Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, founded by right-wing extremist David Horowitz.

12. Nathan Hoffman - Republican operative working against the public school system.

13. Coleman Hughes - Koch employee via City Journal, Quillette author, apologist for race science.

14. Zaid Jilani - former left-winger and author at Quillette.

15. Megyn Kelly - known for saying Santa Claus and Jesus were white when she was a star at Fox.

16. Alexander Lloyd - fan of Quillette and members of the IDW,  Bitcoin bro.

17. Glenn Loury - right-wing, Quillette author, Koch-funded.

18. Maud Maron - called a racist by the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid

19. John McWhorter - author at Quillette, supported by Koch at AEI and City Journal.

20. Steven Pinker. Of course.

21. Helen Pluckrose - grifter, cozy with right-wing Christian nationalist extremists Sovereign Nations, anti-feminist. Interviewed and heavily promoted by Quillette.

22. Robert Pondescio - author at The Federalist, fan of the work of Charles Murray.

23. Wilfred Reilly - conservative author at far-right Regnery Publishing.

24. Ian Rowe - Koch employee via AEI.

25. Chris Rufo - rabidly pro-Trump, Koch employee via City Journal.

26. Michael Shermer - named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, creep.

27. Abigail Shrier - Quillette author, rabidly anti-trans.

28. Eli Steele - Quillette author, Koch employee via City Journal.

29. Andrew Sullivan - right-winger, promoted The Bell Curve, race science promoter.

30. Bari Weiss - right-winger, promoter of the Intellectual Dark Web and pals with same.

31. Thomas Chatterton Williams - chateau bouncer, Koch employee via AEI

City Journal and its lack of evidence against a race pseudoscience critic

Steven Pinker, race pseudoscience promoter, sharing an 
article by race pseudoscience promoter Noah Carl in Areo,
edited by race pseudoscience promoter Iona Italia
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the striking things about the City Journal/Manhattan Institute's attack on a critic of race pseudoscience, besides the fact that it appears to be part of a blackmail attempt and that "celebrity intellectuals" like Steven Pinker have promoted it, is how little evidence it provides for its claims.

For example:

Nevertheless, (Smith) set in motion the events that ended Carl’s and Winegard’s academic careers, and he has damaged the careers of Willoughby and various other academics. This has happened because many journalists, authors of open letters, and professional organizations don’t look carefully at who is writing these articles, or why.

I've already addressed the flimsiness of its claims about Winegard. 

So what evidence does David Zimmerman (appears to be a pseudonym) have that Smith was personally responsible for the fall of Noah Carl's academic career?

Zimmerman pins the blame on the end of Carl's academic career on a letter posted on Medium.

Carl’s story did not have a happy ending. The open letter ultimately received signatures from 586 academics, along with 874 students, though most of these academics worked in unrelated fields such as history, English literature and geography. 

Zimmerman then attempts to credit the open letter to Smith by the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence - because the wording in the open letter sounded like a Rational Wiki article that Smith had participated in editing.

A glance at the Rational Wiki "Fossil record" - which operates the same as Wikipedia's "View history" - for Carl from the period before the Medium letter was posted, demonstrates that even if Smith had shared the article with individuals related to Carl's career, and even if he had written/edited the article, the article was also edited by many other Rational Wiki participants.

As someone at Rational Wiki noted:

The (Zimmerman) article also only cited archived versions of the RationalWiki webpages showing Smith's work, rather than the current scrubbed versions,[46] possibly indicating some ignorance by the author of how wikis work.

Yeah ignorance would be one reason. Dishonesty could be another.

Is it really a coincidence that the one RationalWiki editor singled out for an attack has been victorious against Emil Kirkegaard in a lawsuit?

I received an email from someone else targeted by the race pseudoscience gang who commented:

 The implication that any of those people would still have a job if it wasn't for RationalWiki is laughable as well. I guess the "legitimate" right and far-right are blurring the distinction even more these days.

Zimmerman doesn't appear to have any complaints about the veracity of statements against Noah Carl. Rather he appears to be enraged that opponents of race pseudoscience have as much right to publish petitions against proponents of race pseudoscience as proponents have to defend race pseudoscience. 

I've mentioned how closely aligned the International Society for Intelligence Research is to the 1994 petition in favor of the Bell Curve. And the race pseudoscience gang, led by the Peter Thiel-funded Quillette, responded to the Medium petition. 

So Zimmerman's real complaint seems to be that people have publicized the beliefs of race pseudoscience promoters, so that even the clueless head-in-sand types in academia (and the sciences) finally take notice. Much like the dummies who had to be informed of Razib Khan's career after they signed his petition defending racist E. O. Wilson.

Zimmerman brags about all the race pseudoscience true believers who participated in the Quillette petition:

Quillette subsequently published a counter-petition in Carl’s defense signed by 606 academics. Unlike the earlier petition, this one included signatures from intellectual heavyweights in closely related fields, such as Douglas Detterman, founder of the journal Intelligence; Todd K. Shackelford, editor-in-chief of the journals Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychological Science; Matt McGue, former president of the Behavior Genetics Association; Hal Pashler, a major figure in cognitive psychology; and the renowned cognitive psychologist and public intellectual Steven Pinker. Nonetheless, in May 2019, Cambridge acquiesced to the demands of the original open letter, and fired Carl only a few months after hiring him.

Of course Steven Pinker defended Carl.

What the City Journal article actually proves is that "intelligence research" is indistinguishable from race pseudoscience.

These include entries on some of the most prominent figures and groups in the field of intelligence research, such as Jan te Nijenhuis, Dimitri van der Linden, Heiner Rindermann, and the International Society for Intelligence Research, as well as other targets, such as OpenPsych, “pseudojournals,” Emil Kirkegaard, John Fuerst, Noah Carl, Edward Dutton, Aurelio J. Figueredo, James Thompson, Fróði Debes, Gerhard Meisenberg, Adam Perkins, and the London Conference on Intelligence. 

The London Conference on Intelligence...

...were a series of controversial pseudoscientific[2] conferences held annually at University College London (UCL) from 2014-2017, attended by far-right speakers, including white supremacists.[3][4][5][6] 

The conferences were secretive since Toby Young was invited to attend as an observer, but was told to not to tell anyone, especially not the media. However, Toby Young did not keep quiet and wrote about attending the UCL conference in December 2017.[7] In January 2018,[8][9][10] there was news exposure of the conferences and UCL set up an inquiry and published a statement noting that none of the conferences were approved by the university.

Update on the Manhattan Institute travesty & Richard Hanania's neo-Nazi past

I reported some weeks ago on a strange situation in which the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute, through its media vehicle City Journal, ran an article smearing a former editor of Rational Wiki. 

After the person being smeared began legal actions, the article was removed from City Journal.

The person being smeared had been sued by racist weirdo Emil Kirkegaard - and Kirkegaard lost and then was ordered to pay the defendant - which Kirkegaard has refused to do.

The City Journal article appears to have been tied to a blackmail attempt by the individual who owns the Substack account Cancel Watch. 

The individual issued the blackmail threats via both a Twitter account (now removed) owned by Cancel Watch and via an email account hosted by Proton Mail.

Rational Wiki found evidence for a connection between Cancel Watch and Emil Kirkegaard:

The author of the Cancel Watch article may be associated with Emil Kirkegaard, as the article contains personal information about Kirkegaard such as claiming that customs authorities searched his laptop for child pornography when he travelled between Europe and the United States.[46]

Because of the Cancel Watch blackmail attempts  Proton has canceled Cancel Watch's email account. 

The exchange below posted by permission.

The next step is for Substack to remove Cancel Watch, which appears to exist exclusively to attack a few select individuals who have been critical of race pseudoscience - or even just reported on race pseudoscience, in the case of journalist Elizabeth Haigh.

But will Substack remove it, since the email address used to sign up for the Substack account has been cancelled due to illegal activities? I have my doubts.

Substack is a race pseudoscience-friendly organization, almost certainly funded by far-right racist plutocrats, which promotes far-right racists like Richard Hanania, and hosts many race pseudoscience promoters and racists: Emil Kirkegaard, Razib Khan, Bo Winegard, Colin Wright, Noah Carl, Diana Fleischman, Aporia Magazine, Indian Bronson, Edward Dutton, Andrew Sullivan, Jon Kay, Lee Jussim, Claire Lehmann, Iona Italia, and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance. 

With so many other repugnant accounts on Substack, why would Substack remove Cancel Watch?

UPDATE: Speaking of Richard Hanania, this just in from Huffington Post:

Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.

Along with Steven Pinker and Charles Murray, Hanania promoted the Manhattan Institute travesty. The far-right race pseudoscience gang has no shame.

Of course Razib Khan and Steven Pinker have promoted Richard Hanania.

Woki Wiki

Edward Dutton, a bigot who covers just about all the bigotry bases, thinks Rational Wiki is too woke - but then you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who is not to the left of that extremist. 

He even thinks Wikipedia is too woke:

Unfortunately, some people, who are otherwise highly intelligent and discerning, don’t seem to realise its true nature, possibly because it involves the word ‘Wiki,’ which should be a red-flag anyway, considering the Woke biases of Wikipedia. It is written in a deliberately mocking-style, which should, surely, sound alarm bells.

 I assume he doesn't like Wikipedia in part because editors there gave Emily Willoughby, a bigwig at the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research a bad time when she tried to post racist garbage there.

Dutton is disappointed that the stooges at City Journal took down the libelous hit piece they published by some pseudonymous rando (the smart money is on Emil Kirkegaard.) 

I guess Dutton wants to see City Journal - and its Manhattan Institute Death Star - sued.

Dutton links to an article by Steve Sailer, who is such a chickenshit coward that any time I get anywhere near his Twitter/X account with a new burner Twitter/X account, he blocks me - I don't even tweet at him - just tweeting at anybody on a thread near him makes him block me. 

I mean, why is he so afraid? What could I possibly do except tweet at him? And Twitter/X is an absolute rightwing racist cesspit now, he'd have an absolute home field advantage, with his loser racist goons there all around him, to cheer him on.

Is he still sore because I got him to embarrass Steven Pinker on Twitter, years ago?

Oh and who does Dutton go running to for comfort in the case of the libelous City Journal article? 

Why every racist hereditarian ghoul's hero - Steven Pinker. 

Dutton shared this Pinker tweet:

And speaking of the wingnut welfare Manhattan Institute, I'm working on a draft for a Rational Wiki article about the Institute’s most famous funding recipient - Charles Murray - and as I research him I find he's an even bigger asshole, personally and professionally than I ever dreamed. 

Just the part where he wants to deny welfare to single mothers to punish them for their immorality, combined with bragging about how he used Thai prostitutes while working for the Peace Corps - qualifies him as one of the world's most repulsive hypocrites. 

Although maybe this isn't about sex - maybe Murray thinks that single mothers on welfare are immoral because they are using tax-payer funded programs, and Murray would find it more moral if they escaped starvation instead through the free enterprise of prostitution.

Either way, it explains why Murray is the perfect thought leader for the grotesquely evil Manhattan Institute.

I gave up on Dutton responding to me via the academic email address he provides online, so I tried another email address someone gave to me. We'll see if Dutton responds this time - I will make a full report if he does.

FAIR update ~ a lawsuit, the New Yorker, Megyn Kelly & new members

FAIR has had a fair amount of churn in its board of advisors since the organization was founded in March, so it's no surprise the board of advisors has changed again since we last looked. 

The board started out with a mere 31 members, but now has 39 and it has consistently added right-wingers to the board, in spite of Christopher Rufo's lie that the organization represents all points on the political spectrum.

But before we review the new board there's headline news in FAIR world. 

To the surprise of nobody paying attention to the legalistic ambitions of FAIR, a member of the board of advisors, Maud Maron, has instigated a lawsuit against the Legal Aid Society for calling her a racist. The Society calls the suit "...a frivolous and misguided attempt to use litigation to harass a nonprofit employer and its employees who have spent their careers advancing social justice causes."

The New Yorker did a profile of Christopher Rufo, the Koch-funded Trump supporter, called How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory. From the article:

As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. “We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. “ ‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote.

Absolutely cynical, which is what anybody who knows anything about this pack of grifters, race pseudo-science promoters and Trump supporters would expect.

Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly was in the news recently for attempting to downplay the January 6 insurrection:

Conservative journalist and pundit Megyn Kelly is downplaying the seriousness of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying national media covering the insurrection that day made the incident out to be worse than it actually was.

"A faction turned," Kelly said during a recent episode of her podcast of the people who gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest the congressional certification of President Biden's Electoral College victory. "But there's no question the media represented this as so much worse than it actually was."

Kelly is the perfect representative of the FAIR board of advisors: conservative and full of shit.

So there are four new members of the board, since last check-in and all four are what you'd expect: right-wingers and "critical race theory" grifters: Yiatlin Chu, Angel Eduardo, Zander Keig and Alan Charles Kors. More details about each below.

FAIR seems to be the Intellectual Dark Web 2.0, with an anti-critical race theory agenda in perfect harmony with the Republican Party.

1. Michael Ajouz - Republican, donated to Romney and Ted Cruz.

2. Ayyan Hirsi Ali - right-wing anti-Muslim and on the Koch payroll via the American Enterprise Institute. Named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

3. Peter Boghossian -  recently attacked Pinkerite's founder, has the possible distinction of appearing as a guest more than anybody else on racist Stephan Molyneux's show. Quillette author. Business partner of Christian nationalist right-wing extremist Michael O'Fallon.

4. Liang-Fang Chao - "Computer Scientist" - Critical Race Theory alarmist grifter.

5. Melissa Chen - Quillette supporter.  Writer for conservative The Spectator, Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders, which has, on its board of directors - inevitably - Steven Pinker.

6. Yiatlin Chu [new] - Critical Race Theory alarmist grifter and pal of Maud Maron.

7. Daryl Davis - Trump supporter.  Not a Trump supporter, I was wrong about that. It's disturbing that Davis has lent his legitimately good-guy persona to FAIR which is full of rightwingers and race pseudoscience supporters.

8. Angel Eduardo [new]  - fan of free speech grifters, promoter of "cancel culture" panic, published in Areo, Quillette's twin sister. Anti Critical Race Theory.

9. Lisa Feldsher - runs a PR firm with many corporate clients. Fake liberal.

10. Niall Ferguson -  husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and right-wing creep, who was involved in a controversy in which he targeted a liberal student, as discussed by Krugman in 2018. Employee of Koch through AEI.

11. Kmele Foster - right-wing, anti Black Lives Matter, on the advisory council of the Koch-funded FIRE.

12. Tim van Gelder - "entrepreneur, philosopher" and fan of right-wing, Koch-funded free speech grifter  Andrew Doyle, a former member of the FAIR board of advisors

13. Samantha Harris - contributor at the Federalist Society, Senior Fellow at the Koch-funded FIRE. Connected to Maud Maron somehow. Author at Quillette. Lawyer of Joshua T. Katz, member of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

14. Jason D. Hill - self-declared conservative, Ayn Rand fan and author at the far-right Federalist. Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, founded by right-wing extremist David Horowitz.

15. Nathan Hoffman - Republican operative working against the public school system.

16. Coleman Hughes - Koch employee via City Journal, Quillette author, apologist for race science.

17. Inaya Folarin Iman - Founder and Director of anti-Black Lives Matter The Equiano Project and along with right-wing IDW member Douglas Murray is a director the Free Speech Union, founded by eugenics fan and Quillette editor Toby Young.

18. Zaid Jilani - former left-winger and author at Quillette.

19. Zander Keig [new] - Conservative.

20. Megyn Kelly - known for saying Santa Claus and Jesus were white when she was a star at Fox.

21. Alan Charles Kors [new] - co-founder of the Koch-funded FIRE.

22. Alexander Lloyd - fan of Quillette and members of the IDW, Bitcoin bro.

23. Glenn Loury - right-wing, Quillette author, Koch-funded.

24. Maud Maron -  called a racist by the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, then sued them for it.

25. John McWhorter - author at Quillette, supported by Koch via AEI and City Journal.

26. Douglas Murray - named member of the IDW and according to Wikipedia: His views and ideology have been linked to far-right political ideologies by a number of academic[10]and journalistic[11] sources. He has also been accused of promoting far-right conspiracy theories,[12][13][14] and of being Islamophobic.[15]

27. Steven Pinker. Of course.

28. Robert Pondescio -  author at The Federalist, fan of the work of Charles Murray, senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at right-wing think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Senior fellow of the Koch-funded AEI.

29. Wilfred Reilly - conservative author at far-right Regnery Publishing - founder William H. Regnery died recently.

30. Ian Rowe - Koch employee via AEI.

31. Christopher Rufo - rabidly pro-Trump, Koch employee via City Journal. Rufo does not have a byline in Quillette, but predictably, Quillette adores him.

32. Michael Shermer - named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, doesn't believe systemic racism exists, critical race theory alarmist and creep.

33. Abigail Shrier - Quillette author, rabidly anti-trans.

34. Erec Smith - Quillette author and co-founder of right-wing organization Free Black Thought along with Charles Murray apologist Michael DC Bowen and Jason Littlefield, author at Quillette's twin Areo and opponent of critical race theory. Fun fact: Smith, Littlefield and Zander Keig are all in business together in an organization called Empowered Pathways.

35. Eli Steele - Quillette author, Koch employee via City Journal.

36. Andrew Sullivan - right-winger, promoted The Bell Curve, race science promoter.

37. Bari Weiss - right-winger, promoter of the Intellectual Dark Web and pals with same.

38. Thomas Chatterton Williams - chateau bouncer, Koch employee via AEI

39. Kenny Xu - Development Officer at Young America's Foundation a right-wing youth organization. Author at the Federalist and the Daily Signal. Trump supporter.

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.