Oliver D. Smith
Oliver D. Smith is known for attempting to cancel scholars in behavioral genetics and intelligence.
Oliver D. Smith is a British internet stalker known for repeatedly attempting to cancel scholars in behavioral genetics and intelligence. He has been active under many online aliases, including “Atlantid”, “Anglo Pyramidologist”, “Aeschylus”, several variations on “Krom”, and dozens of others. He describes himself as an “independent researcher” with an interest in mythological civilizations such as Atlantis. Apart from his attacks on academics, he is best known for the countless internet feuds he has been involved in, his past participation in neo-Nazi communities such as Stormfront, his usage of large numbers of accounts to conceal responsibility for his actions, and his embroilment in a libel lawsuit for claiming that one of his targets is a pedophile.
Oliver Smith first attracted significant attention from academics in 2018, when he threatened that he would find a way to shut down the annual conference for the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), which is the largest professional body of researchers in that field. In addition to his social media posts making this threat, he also sent emails to the people organizing the conference threatening a protest outside it, ultimately requiring that year’s conference to have its entrances guarded by graduate students to ensure that no one unauthorized could enter. Smith is also the author of nearly all of RationalWiki’s articles disparaging ISIR and its members. This article will focus on his actions at RationalWiki, as that is where his behavior has had the largest effect on others’ careers, but his various other internet dramas will be mentioned where those are relevant.
Based on the targets he chooses to attack, one might assume that Smith is a typical far-left progressive, but a look into his history shows a far more interesting pattern. For the first six or seven years that he had an internet presence, Smith was a neo-Nazi. His current attacks on the reputations of academics are a continuation of the methods that he previously used against opponents of his extreme-right beliefs.
Oliver D. Smith: background
When he first appeared on the internet during the 2000s, Oliver Smith was a proponent of ideas that were typical of neo-Nazism, and was an active member of Stormfront. In one of his posts made at that forum in 2008, he commented “I have been in support of white nationalism since i was 16”, but nervously asked others what they thought about people with autism.
Some of Smith’s forum posts from this early period expressed support for the Columbine High School shooters, such as a post in which he argued that the shooters’ involvement in far-right websites was understandable because they had been “bullied all day by non-whites”. In another post made around the same time, Smith claimed that members of his family had helped to construct a fake concentration camp after the end of World War II, and that “The bodies and starved people they used in the video were slavs/communists who were paid to act as jews.” He argued that the Holocaust was not a real historical event, but that “It's all propaganda to make the Nazi's (sic) look bad.” The accounts from which he posted these various comments, which were named “Hyperboreanar” and “Scionic Evil”, are known to belong to Smith because they posted images from the same Photobucket account that Smith has used for his other known aliases, including photographs of himself.
By 2012, Smith had mostly lost interest in contributing to white supremacist forums, but he had found another place to promote the same ideology: Metapedia, the far-right alternative to Wikipedia. At Metapedia, where he used the name “Atlantid”, he was active enough to be promoted to an administrator. The views presented in Metapedia articles tend to be the very most extreme of the extreme right—its article about the Holocaust gives extensive coverage to arguments made by Holocaust deniers, and its article about Adolf Hitler bizarrely describes him in mostly positive terms.
One of Smith’s main uses for Metapedia was to create attack pages about various people who had annoyed him. Subjects of his attack pages at Metapedia included a Wikipedia administrator, an administrator at a forum, an artist and writer active in paleontology communities, and several other miscellaneous people. As shown in the linked deletion logs, his articles about these people described them using epithets such as “Europhobic propagandist”, “Afrocentric troll” or “Race denier”. These terms are typical for how Metapedia describes people who disagree with its racial ideology.
As he created these Metapedia attack pages, Smith sometimes used another Wiki site, RationalWiki, for additional support. Ideologically, RationalWiki is the polar opposite of Metapedia: it was founded by ex-members of Conservapedia, a conservative encyclopedia, for the purpose of monitoring and opposing Conservapedia’s contents. In some cases he also used a third Wiki site, Encyclopedia Dramatica, to provide further support for the other two.
A typical example of how Smith made complementary use of these three websites was a set of attack pages about Doug Weller, the aforementioned Wikipedia administrator. At Wikipedia Smith’s main account “Anglo Pyramidologist” has been blocked from editing since 2011, and Doug Weller is one of several admins who have identified the sockpuppet accounts that Smith uses to evade his ban there. In August 2012, three similar articles about Doug Weller were created in quick succession at RationalWiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Metapedia (linked to here), and Weller also was added to a Metapedia page titled “List of race denialist trolls”. While the RationalWiki and Encyclopedia Dramatica articles were created using accounts that were difficult to definitively identify as Smith, the Metapedia page was created using his well-known “Atlantid” alias. No archives of the contents of any of these pages appear to exist online, but the first sentence of the RationalWiki article can still be found in the page’s deletion log linked above: “Douglas Weller also known as Doug Weller is an internet troll who pretends to be an academic rationalist and skeptic, but has been exposed as a fraud.”
The ideology advocated by Smith and by Metapedia may have seemed a natural fit for one another, but there was trouble afoot. One of Smith’s fellow Metapedia admins was an individual named Michael Coombs, better known by his online handle “Mikemikev”. While Smith advocated the type of pseudo-intellectual racism promoted by individuals such as Richard B. Spencer, Mikemikev tended to favor an in-your-face approach, like an adult, British version of Eric Cartman from South Park. The various online battles between these two trolls could fill an article, and have been documented in detail at Encyclopedia Dramatica. (Note: this ED article contains disgusting images.)
In November 2013, Smith unsuccessfully tried to get Mikemikev banned from Metapedia, arguing “The guy is clearly a fake and genuine race realists laugh at him.” About two weeks later, Smith posted a long series of complaints about Mikemikev on a Metapedia talk page, accusing him of libel, impersonation, and lastly that Mikemikev “doesn't contribute anything but just feeds off annoying people”. (Which is true, but most people just avoid him.) Following this set of complaints from Smith, he and Mikemikev both were blocked from editing Metapedia for a week, with a warning that “If both continue to make Metapedia your personal battleground both will be permanently blocked.”
When Smith’s week-long block expired, something had changed about him. He now hated not only Mikemikev himself, but also every idea that Mikemikev had argued for. In his first post on Metapedia after regaining the ability to edit pages there, he announced that he was quitting the site, with the following explanation:
I've renounced most my former views, and no longer support the aims of the Metapedia project. For this reason I request my account to be permanently blocked. Since I extensively read and process information quickly, my position on race has changed. […] Fixation with race has also deteriorated my mental health, since I suffer from various disorders, and it is something I am no longer wasting time with.
As per his request, Smith’s account at Metapedia was then permanently blocked from editing. From this point onward Smith’s attack pages were created primarily at RationalWiki and to a lesser extent at Encyclopedia Dramatica (as stated here, where he gave two further examples of his ED articles). After this he also no longer argued for any of the extreme-right positions such as white nationalism or Holocaust denial that he had supported in the past. In light of what came later, however, his announcement that race was a topic he was “no longer wasting time with” proved to be quite an ironic statement.
RationalWiki: background
RationalWiki was founded in 2007 by ex-members of Conservapedia who were frustrated by that site’s partisan bias. According to the Los Angeles Times, members from the original version of RationalWiki (a.k.a. version 1.0) regularly engaged in vandalism of Conservapedia, including the insertion of pornographic photographs and deliberately false material. On May 16, 2007, Conservapedia's administrators blocked all, or nearly all, of the site's members who were regular contributors to RationalWiki. In a case of Godwin's Law, RationalWiki refers to this event as the "night of the blunt knives"—a reference to the Night of the Long Knives, the 1934 internal purge of Germany's Nazi Party.
Conservapedia's purge of RationalWiki editors mostly put an end to the vandalism operation, so on May 22, 2007, RationalWiki deleted most of its material and started over from scratch, with what was known as version 2.0. Following its upgrade to version 2.0, RationalWiki's goal shifted from monitoring and vandalizing other wikis to analyzing and debunking what they perceived as pseudoscience movements, but without entirely abandoning its roots as an anti-Conservapedia site. RationalWiki’s “what is going on at Conservapedia?” page maintains a month-by month set of mocking updates about recent events at the target site.
One ostensibly valuable thing about RationalWiki is that it is home to many well-written articles debunking creationist claims, but these articles were not created by RationalWiki's users. They originated at a separate online encyclopedia known as EvoWiki, which had been a mostly apolitical science education site. In the early 2010s, EvoWiki was taken over by the RationalMedia foundation, which runs RationalWiki, and all of the original site's content was subsequently moved there. This was an unfortunate fate for EvoWiki's articles, because prior to the takeover EvoWiki's users had held a low opinion of RationalWiki, referring to the site as "TrashionalWiki" or "RatWiki".
A change of targets
By the mid-2010s, Smith had begun to create RationalWiki articles attacking the racial views he had held a few years earlier. In contrast to his usage of slurs such as “Europhobic propagandist” and “Race denier” in his Metapedia articles, Smith’s article about the website “Human phenotypes”, created in 2015 using his "Krom" alias, describes the site as “a racialist website which outlines a pseudo-scientific race typology”. One other thing Smith became known for around this time was his penchant for impersonating his enemies, including on forums (referred to as “Krom” in that discussion) and on Wiki sites (referred to as “Atlantid” on that site).
Around the beginning of 2016, Smith joined the forum of a website called OpenPsych, a psychology and social science research site which is best described as a carefully curated blog that presents itself in the style of an academic journal. After a lengthy argument with other members, Smith eventually was banned from the forum, rejoined it under a different name, and then was banned a second time and had all of his posts deleted. Within 24 hours after his second ban, Smith retaliated by creating RationalWiki articles attacking OpenPsych contributors—starting with an article about John Fuerst, the main person with whom he had been arguing there, and followed the next day with an article about the site's owner Emil Kirkegaard.
Smith later took credit for creating both of these articles in a blog post made under his real name, and in a post at Reddit made under his username “Krom1991”. He also credited these RationalWiki articles for transforming some of the OpenPsych contributors into anti-celebrities: "Lots of stuff in both national and local papers today about Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst who RationalWiki first documented and exposed as far-right extremists and paedophile-apologists." He explained in a subsequent comment: “The person who wrote those RationalWiki articles sent a tip-off to some newspapers. The story now has national coverage.” The account that posted the two quoted comments, "SkepticDave", is known to belong to Smith because it also was the creator of RationalWiki’s article about the Russian blogger Anatoly Karlin, which is on a list of articles that Smith has taken credit for creating.
Smith’s claim about his role in causing this media coverage was not an empty boast. A date-restricted Google search for “OpenPsych”, limited to before Smith began creating these RationalWiki articles in February 2016, produces fewer than 30 results, most of them from obscure forums and blogs. But from 2018 onward, OpenPsych began to be covered in a series of newspaper and magazine articles by student journalist Ben Van Der Merwe. The earliest of these articles—published in the London Student on 10 January 2018—included details about obscure, ill-judged posts that OpenPsych contributors had made at other blogs and at Facebook years earlier, which prior to that point had received no coverage anywhere outside of Smith’s writings.
Some of these statements, which evidently had been based on Smith’s writings at RationalWiki, went on to be repeated in Metro, The Guardian, Pi Media, The Tab, and International Business Times, all of which gave Van Der Merwe’s London Student article as their source. Smith's statements describing Kirkegaard as a "pedophile", "pedophile-apologist" or "child-rape apologist", along with the media's repetition of these and similar statements, eventually resulted in customs authorities searching his computer for child pornography when he traveled between Europe and the United States. (They didn't find any.)
The case of Noah Carl
From 2016 to 2018, most of the OpenPsych contributors targeted by Oliver Smith were unimportant bloggers who occasionally published research in real journals, but there was one exception: Noah Carl. At 28 years old, Carl had an impressive publication record for someone so early in his career—although he had published articles in OpenPsych, he also had authored papers in the high-quality journals PLoS ONE, the American Sociologist, European Union Politics, Electoral Studies, the British Journal of Sociology and the Political Quarterly. Carl, who had recently earned his doctorate from Oxford University, was offered a research fellowship at Cambridge University in fall of 2018. However, shortly after his appointment was announced, an open letter began to circulate demanding that Cambridge dissociate themselves from Carl and open an investigation into him. The letter stated:
A careful consideration of Carl’s published work and public stance on various issues, particularly on the claimed relationship between ‘race’, ‘criminality’ and ‘genetic intelligence’, leads us to conclude that his work is ethically suspect and methodologically flawed. […] We are deeply concerned that racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge.
The open letter did not cite any specific papers from Carl, but it apparently was referring to a paper he had recently published in Evolutionary Psychological Science titled “How Stifling Debate Around Race, Genes and IQ Can Do Harm,” because at the time of the open letter, this was the only one of Carl’s papers that discussed the topic of race and IQ. This paper did not argue for any specific position about the cause of group differences in average IQ scores, but instead argued only that research into their cause must not be suppressed—a position that was also supported by the renowned cognitive scientist James Flynn, after whom the Flynn Effect is named. By objecting to this paper, the open letter was repeating a statement that Smith had made in his RationalWiki article about Carl:
In 2018, Carl published a paper defending race and intelligence research, arguing: "it cannot simply be taken for granted that, when in doubt, stifling debate around taboo topics is the ethical thing to do." The paper is now quoted by racists including child-rape apologist Emil Kirkegaard, who co-founded OpenPsych.
After this open letter began to circulate, Smith posted an announcement at RationalWiki titled “Notable news: RationalWiki page on Noah Carl leads to 200 academics signing open letter”. Smith explained the role that his RationalWiki article about Carl had played in causing the protest: "The RationalWiki page was first emailed to Nuffield College, Oxford University that removed his university email on his OpenPsych papers as mentioned on the talk page. It was then emailed to Cambridge where he works." The account that posted this announcement, "Concerned", is known to belong to Smith because in a deleted blog post made under his real name, Smith has described several of this account's actions as being his own.
This article’s authors obtained a copy of the aforementioned email that was sent to Cambridge University, and can verify that this RationalWiki article was indeed sent to Carl's employer shortly before the protests over his hiring got underway. This email was not mentioned anywhere on the internet prior to Smith's announcement. It was sent under a pseudonym, and Smith has denied having ever contacted Cambridge about Carl, but it is difficult to imagine how Smith could have been aware of this email if he were not the sender. The specific pseudonym and email address from which it was sent, which cannot be named here for legal reasons, had previously been used in connection with some of Smith’s other known aliases.
A few days after Smith posted his announcement about this email to Cambridge, another probable Smith account made the following comment in a private message at Reddit: “I hope Carl loses his job. I’ll be complaining next to the universities where the rest of your OpenPsych editors/reviewers work at”, followed by a link to the RationalWiki article about Carl. This Reddit user (“Guardian5576”) did not openly identify themselves as Smith, but their activity was comprised entirely of attacking contributors to OpenPsych and posting links to Smith’s RationalWiki articles, as well as a lengthy quote from a deleted blog post that Smith had made under his real name. Smith’s blog post had already been deleted at the time when “Guardian5576” was quoting it.
Those who were reading the media coverage of Noah Carl in 2019 know how his story unfolded after this. The open letter attacking Carl ultimately received signatures from 586 academics, along with 874 students, although none of these academics had any expertise in the field of Carl’s work that they were criticizing (genetics and intelligence), and the majority worked in unrelated fields such as history, English literature and geography. 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. But the outcome evidently was a foregone conclusion: in May 2019, Cambridge acquiesced to the demands of the original open letter, and fired Carl only a few months after hiring him.
Smith vs. intelligence research
When OpenPsych and its contributors first began receiving media attention in 2018, most of this attention was focused on the fact that some of its contributors had also attended the London Conference on Intelligence, a private invitation-only conference that was held at University College London. Following this media coverage and Smith’s role in causing it, he broadened the scope of his attacks to include various other people who had attended the conference, regardless of whether they contributed to OpenPsych or not. This became a transition for him to expand the scope of his attack pages still further, until it eventually became what it is now: the overall constellation of academic communities revolving around intelligence research, the Intellectual Dark Web, and Quillette.
Smith claims to have created “hundreds of articles” at RationalWiki, so it is not possible to identify every article he has created there. But in 2019, using his account "Aeschylus", he posted a list of specific articles that he takes credit for creating. This list includes several articles (such as those about Kirkegaard and Fuerst) that Smith also has taken credit for under his real name, confirming that "Aeschylus" is indeed Smith. He has taken credit for creating RationalWiki articles about the following people and organizations:
OpenPsych pseudojournals
Emil Kirkegaard
John Fuerst
Noah Carl
Heiner Rindermann
Edward Dutton
Aurelio J. Figueredo
Dimitri van der Linden
James Thompson
Michael Woodley
Jan te Nijenhuis
Fróði Debes
Gerhard Meisenberg
Adam Perkins
Anatoly Karlin
London Conference on Intelligence
International Society for Intelligence Research
Several of the articles on the above list were created using an account called "Octo", which is the account that Smith used most extensively when creating articles related to intelligence research. Examining the list of pages created by the “Octo” account reveals that Smith also was the creator of the following RationalWiki articles:
The Unz Review
Claire Lehmann
Quillette
In addition to his “Aeschylus” and “Octo” accounts, nine other accounts that RationalWiki's admins have identified as belonging to Smith are named "Tobias," “Arcticos,” “Freddo,” "Flight,” “EvilGremlin,” “JackoFlasho,” “Punisher," “074009,” and “Brain Galaxy.” The Arcticos, Freddo, EvilGremlin, JackoFlasho, and Punisher accounts were identified as Smith by one of the site’s techs, who had access to their IP address data (though as will be mentioned later, his examining of this data violated one of RationalWiki’s policies). These are nowhere near all of Smith’s RationalWiki accounts, but they are the accounts most relevant to the incidents described in this article. Examining the pages created by these accounts indicates that Smith also was the creator of RationalWiki's articles about:
Noah Carl Controversy: FAQ (rebuttal)
Jonathan Anomaly
Bo Winegard
Peter Frost
Spiteful Mutant Hypothesis
Alt-center
Hereditarianism
Smith’s RationalWiki article about Claire Lehmann, an Australian journalist who founded the online magazine Quillette, is an example of how far removed his articles tend to be from every reputable source about his targets. While Lehmann has received some criticism from respectable sources, this criticism has tended to be even-handed—for example, the New York Times has described Lehmann in mostly neutral terms, but argued that due to her focus on the regressive left, she and others like her were overlooking the threat from right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump. On the other hand, Smith has described Lehmann in this way:
Claire Lehmann is an Australian anti-feminist crank who has been described as "Australia's Mistress of the Intellectual Dark Web". She appears to blame everything bad, even including obesity onto feminists, who she argues are destroying "western civilization" alongside leftists and what she calls "blank-slatists" (meaning scientists who reject HBD pseudoscience).
In 2016, Smith (posting under his real name) offered an explanation for his various attack articles. “(L)ook at whose pages I created: either paedophiles like [name redacted], hardcore neo-nazis, sex pests etc [...] These people are evil and depraved and need to be taken off the internet. I am doing a good job by warning people about them.” Some of the subjects of his articles are controversial enough that even if Smith had not created articles about them, other members of RationalWiki might have eventually done so. On the other hand, a large portion of the people listed here are academics who appear to have been targeted by Smith for no reason except that he disagreed with their ideas.
Several of these articles, such as those about Dimitri van der Linden and Fróði Debes, are attempts to controversialize people about whom no controversy presently exists. Although Smith’s articles describe Van der Linden as a “sexist pseudoscientist” and describe Debes as an “HBD pseudoscientist”, in both cases these accusations are completely unsourced, and none of the sources cited in the RationalWiki articles present any actual criticism of these researchers. Some of these individuals—such as Debes—also are not public figures, and these attack pages are the only easily findable biographical information about them that exists online.
Smith’s ban and ban evasion
In February 2019 Smith’s “Aeschylus” account was permanently blocked from editing RationalWiki, with the understanding that this decision also applied to all of his other accounts there. The following year, Smith was formally banned from the site. One of the reasons given for the ban was that Smith had begun creating attack articles about other members of RationalWiki, as well as doxing other members there on external sites. Another reason was that while being sued for libel by one of his targets, Smith had unsuccessfully tried to mass-delete several of his RationalWiki articles about intelligence researchers. The admin proposing the ban argued that by doing this, Smith was trying to shift legal responsibility for his articles onto the site’s other users who voted against deletion.
However, this ban proved to be only a symbolic gesture, and has had no real effect on Smith's ability to continue adding new material there. When an account at RationalWiki is proven to belong to Smith, it usually is blocked from making further edits, but the material that Smith added from the account usually is not removed, nor is there anything to stop his continuing to register more accounts to replace those that have been blocked. RationalWiki used to have two admins who were diligent about trying to keep Smith off the site, who blocked a combined total of around sixty accounts as Smith/Aeschylus aliases, but neither of these admins has been active there in over two years. (Both also were permanently blocked from editing last December.) Before their disappearance, one of these admins coined the term “The Smithery” for the totality of RationalWiki’s Smith-authored material, which is a term whose adoption we encourage.
In a discussion about deleting one of Smith’s RationalWiki articles, one of the participants commented, “We should delete any page created by Smith on the spot if we want to actually enforce his ban.” But in a subsequent discussion, a different user argued that “Deleting an article about something or someone highly relevant to our mission just because it was created by a banned user would be a stupid thing to do.” As the next few sections will show, the question of whether Smith’s ban is worth enforcing is one of enormous significance, because some of the articles he has created in violation of his ban have had major effects on their subjects’ careers.
The case of Bo Winegard
Aside from Noah Carl, several of Smith’s other targets have been subject to student protests inspired by Smith articles, or had well-received job applications abruptly turn sour when prospective employers discovered these writings after searching Google for the applicant’s name. It is not possible to describe every case where this has occurred, but there is one other example that stands out.
Bo Winegard was, in 2019, an assistant professor of psychology at Marietta College, who had been appointed to that position the previous year. Several of Winegard’s publications related to evolutionary influences on human psychological traits, or to global human genetic variation. These sometimes are controversial topics, but up to this point there had been no significant controversy over Winegard’s work. Six months after the decision was made to block Smith’s RationalWiki accounts, but before he was formally banned, Smith created the article about Bo Winegard using his “Tobias” and “JackoFlasho” accounts.
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. Although the lecture itself went without incident, Winegard’s troubles began the following day, as he explained in an article about his experience:
I was then supposed to meet professors and students for lunch, but instead my guide delivered me to an empty room where I received a number of texts from my host: The professors had found my RationalWiki entry, which accuses me—inter alia—of writing “racist bullshit for the right-wing online magazine Quillette." [...] Professors routinely warn their students not to cite Wikipedia, but the lies and misrepresentations on my RationalWiki page were thought to be so unanswerable that the faculty who read them refused to meet with me so I could speak in my own defense.
Following this incident, the student newspaper The Crimson White published an article attacking Winegard, claiming that Winegard’s research “has been criticized for resembling the pseudoscience employed by eugenicists”. This statement apparently was referring to Smith’s writings about Winegard at RationalWiki, because at the time when the Crimson White article was published, Smith’s writings were the only other place that Winegard was described in those sorts of terms. An article by Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University, expressed concern about the credulity that these student journalists were giving to RationalWiki: “This claim was unsourced: who, exactly, has claimed this about Winegard, other than the author of the Rationalwiki article?”
As described in Winegard’s summary of what happened to him, a pseudonymous individual went on to email the Crimson White and RationalWiki articles to the provost and president of the university where Winegard taught. Initially, the reaction of the university administrators was only to ask Winegard to be more strategic in his discussion of controversial topics. But following a campaign of emails by the same pseudonymous individual to Winegard’s entire department, and a second, tenser meeting between him and the university administrators, they ultimately fired him. Although Smith’s writings about Winegard were what initiated this sequence of events, it cannot be determined whether the individual behind the email campaign was Smith or someone else.
The case of Emily Willoughby
One of the more recent attack pages created by Smith in violation of his ban is the RationalWiki article about Emily Willoughby, a behavioral geneticist and dinosaur illustrator who is the author of the 2021 book Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs. As is often the case when these articles are recently created, the article about Willoughby contains no published sources for any of its criticism—instead, its statements attacking her are cited entirely to sources such as tweets, Wikipedia edits, and decade-old forum posts. However, that may change over time as some of the article’s statements are repeated by published sources, which can then be added as citations in the same article, allowing the article to create sources for itself in a process known as citogenesis. This process has previously occurred in his articles about Carl, Winegard and Kirkegaard.
One of Smith’s reasons for using so many aliases is to try to maintain plausible deniability for his actions, and in another context he has bragged about his skill at using these various aliases to deceive others about what actions he is responsible for. (The linked post describes Wikipedia’s “Anglo Pyramidologist” sockpuppet investigation as “my sockpuppet investigation archive”, confirming that Smith is that post’s author.) RationalWiki’s article about Willoughby is created by another account that does not openly identify itself, but several converging lines of evidence indicate that it is another Smith alias.
The article’s creator is a relatively new RationalWiki user calling themselves “Boar,” around half of whose edits are to the Willoughby article or its talk page, and this user’s Smith-like behavior has been noted by another RationalWiki user. Similarities include the following:
The article about Willoughby re-uses material from a deleted RationalWiki article that Smith had created about Jonathan Kane, a writer with whom Willoughby coauthored a book criticizing the creationist movement. The fact that Smith was the earlier article’s creator is mentioned in a discussion about that article’s deletion. “Boar” claimed that he had stumbled upon an archive of the article about Kane and then copied material from it. In the same post, “Boar” speculated about who was responsible for its deletion, while showing a close familiarity with the two admins who had formerly blocked most of Smith’s RationalWiki accounts. This is suspicious because the “Boar” account had never crossed paths with either of those admins, who by that point were long gone from the site.
“Boar” has added links to his Willoughby article in RationalWiki’s articles about Quillette, Michael Woodley, and Emil Kirkegaard, while at present his article about Willoughby mentions Kirkegaard twelve(!) times. Willoughby has only ever written one Quillete article, six years ago, on the topic of how to combat creationism effectively. Her only association with Kirkegaard is that both of them have edited some of the same Wikipedia articles (although not at the same time, so she and Kirkegaard appear to have never directly crossed paths there), and that both have participated in the International Society for Intelligence Research (which is also true of hundreds of other people, because ISIR has about 800 members). But there is an explanation for why “Boar” has tried to connect Willoughby to these various other topics: all of these other RationalWiki articles were created by known Smith accounts, and Smith is preoccupied with Kirkegaard due to the two of them being in a legal dispute.
“Boar” has added material to the Willoughby article accusing her of sexual perversion, which is a tactic Smith has used in the past against his other enemies. For example, Smith (posting as “IanGomecheLegend”) has described a member of an anthropology forum as a “Deranged pedo” and a “sick twisted female”. When another person argued that Smith was grossly misunderstanding the forum post that was the basis his claims, Smith (posting as “Krom1991”) doubled down on his accusation, acknowledging that he was the earlier post’s author. He then accused the second person of sexual deviancy as well, saying “all I did was look for less than 5 minutes at your history of edits to find your perversions.” Posting as “Kroms”, Smith has described another of his enemies as “a transsexual/cross-dresser freak who defends paedophilia and beastiality”; and posting under his real name, has described yet another as a “blatant paedophile”.
Aside from “Boar”, the only other user who has added new material to the RationalWiki article about Willoughby is another RationalWiki calling themselves “Velociraptor.” This, too, is almost certainly a Smith account. In addition to its edits to the Willoughby article, it has added material to RationalWiki’s article about Emil Kirkegaard that is cited to Smith’s personal blog. This occurred about five months after one of RationalWiki’s admins warned Smith’s “Brain Galaxy” account to stop using his own posts about Kirkegaard as sources. No one else at RationalWiki cites Smith’s posts on other websites as sources, or thinks this is a reasonable thing to do.
Willoughby is possibly the best example of how the scope of Smith’s attack pages covers intelligence research in general, rather than just the subset of this field that deals with group differences, as none of Willoughby’s publications have been about controversial aspects of human intelligence. She also has never contributed to any of the journals or conferences that are strongly associated with research about group differences—OpenPsych, Mankind Quarterly or the London Conference on Intelligence—or co-authored with anyone who has. Rather than discussing her publications, most of Smith’s article about her is instead devoted to attacking her involvement in Wikipedia, and a large portion of its statements about her Wikipedia presence are not supported by the article’s sources.
In a typical example, Smith states, “Kane, Willoughby and Kirkegaard edited the same race and IQ related articles with overlapping edits as a sort of 'tag-team' with the same point of view.” No source is provided for this statement, and the claimed overlapping edits would not have been possible at any point in the past thirteen years. Willoughby was not allowed to edit those articles from 2010 until 2019, and during the four years since her topic ban was removed, both Kirkegaard and Kane have been unable to edit Wikipedia due to blocks affecting their accounts. Another such statement from Smith, accusing the creator of Wikipedia’s article about Willoughby of being “either a sockpuppet or meatpuppet of Kane”, remained in the article for a year until finally being removed after the article’s actual creator objected at Twitter.
In the absence of RationalWiki’s two admins who used to monitor Smith’s behavior, no one there has reacted to this article’s being an obvious case of ban evasion, nor are RationalWiki’s other users apparently looking closely at whether Smith’s statements are adequately sourced. The lack of attention to his articles’ sourcing and authorship goes a long way towards explaining these articles’ influence. Last November, Smith’s article about Willoughby was the basis for a Twitter thread attacking her which was liked by about 20,000 people. In response to this thread and the RationalWiki article it was based on, one person tried to call attention to these aspects of the article, though their comment was mostly ignored: “Look at the sources. Look at the editors (spoilers it’s one person). This is [an] insane deranged hit piece from one person.”
RationalWiki and SVP
On July 8, 2022, Emily Willoughby was awarded the most prestigious prize in the world for paleontological illustration: the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s 2D Lanzendorf-National Geographic PaleoArt Prize. The illustration which received the award can be found at her website. This fact is documented in a preliminary version of SVP’s conference program (page 22), posted September 17, 2022. Several people on Twitter quickly noticed this announcement and complained, due to Emily having recently been the subject of a Twitter thread attacking her behavior genetics work, and claiming that “IQ is a pseudoscientific myth”.
On August 18, around a week after the initial Twitter attacks got underway, Willoughby was contacted by a person within the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology who asked her to prepare a statement in case she needed to defend herself. This person passed Willoughby’s defense statement to the Lanzendorf award committee. On August 20, she was contacted by the award committee again, informing her: “As we cannot find any violation of our Code of Conduct anywhere in what has been alleged in the Twitter threads, and have no desire to wade into anyone's academic freedom, we're leaving the whole issue alone.”
On Oct. 24, Willoughby was informed by SVP’s ethics committee that the society had reversed their earlier decision following an anonymous complaint and a subsequent investigation, and that they now were revoking the award they had given her. They explained, “the specific complaint is of scientific racism and discriminatory statements.” Interestingly, this occurred only a month after SVP’s ethics committee had revised their reporting system to enable the submission of anonymous complaints. Days later, the SVP program was modified and re-uploaded with all mentions of the Lanzendorf 2D award stricken from the record, and the award had no recipient at all until a last-minute reassignment was announced at the conference.
Apparently, something important had changed between August 20 and October 24, despite the Twitter attacks having mostly subsided by that point. But one important thing had indeed changed during those two months: Smith’s attack page about her at RationalWiki had been created on August 25. While SVP did not directly cite RationalWiki as their reason for revoking her award, shortly before they informed her of this decision the RationalWiki article’s Google had ranking abruptly spiked, jumping from the third page of results for her name to the first page within the space of two days. (A page’s Google ranking is influenced by how often the page is linked to.)
When SVP informed Willoughby in October 2022 that they were revoking her award, they stated that they would be “sending more information in a future email”, and invited her to contact them again for further details. However, as of July 2023 SVP has not provided any further communication about their investigation, or replied to her requests for more information about it. As with the email campaign against Winegard, it is impossible to determine whether Smith was behind the anonymous complaint that produced this outcome; all that can be known for certain is that he was the creator of the underlying RationalWiki article.
RationalWiki's parody content
Not all of RationalWiki’s articles about intelligence researchers were created by Oliver Smith. Mixed in with Smith’s articles are several articles that others have created as deliberate parodies to mock the website and the way Smith has used it, some of which includes subtle clues to their parodic nature.
One such clue can be found in RationalWiki’s article about Richard Haier, a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California Irvine, whose article was created by someone with the username “Kfotfo”. This user name is a one-letter shift forwards in the alphabet from the name “Jensen”: a reference to Arthur Jensen, one of the 20th century’s most prominent researchers about human intelligence, including differences in average IQ scores between racial groups. This was pointed out by a Wikipedia user who claimed to have created some of RationalWiki’s parody articles. RationalWiki’s article about Haier is barely distinguishable from the articles written by Smith, but this clue in its creator’s username indicates that the article was not intended seriously.
Smith has long been aware that the Haier article is a parody, and brought this up (using his “Flight” account) on the article’s talk page in 2020. But more recently while creating his attack page about Willoughby, he has linked to this article in order to accuse her of legitimizing Haier’s “dubious” work by citing it at Wikipedia. In other words, Smith is unironically supporting one of his claims about Willoughby with what he knows to be a parody article. One possible interpretation is that he is using RationalWiki as a substitute for raising these objections on Wikipedia talk pages, because his ban from RationalWiki is easier to evade than the one at Wikipedia. But as the next section will explain, Smith’s actual reason for attacking Willoughby is likely a more duplicitous one.
Despite his willingness to support his attack pages with what he knows to be parody content, Smith has gone to greater lengths than any other RationalWiki user to keep this material out of articles there—not because the parody material is much more extreme than his own writings, but because these parodies are being used to make a point about RationalWiki’s low standards for what they’ll allow in articles. For example, Smith has argued that one of these parody accounts, known as “CBH”, was being used by Emil Kirkegaard to insert material meant to damage RationalWiki’s credibility.
Around a year after this parody account became active at RationalWiki, its tactics began to be copied on Wikipedia’s articles related to human intelligence, by another user who called themselves “NightHeron”. Other members of Wikipedia who were familiar with the parody material at RationalWiki recognized this pattern of behavior, and expressed concern that NightHeron was adding the same type of material intended to discredit Wikipedia’s coverage of the topic. As Smith has opposed CBH’s additions at RationalWiki, the majority of Willoughby’s recent involvement in the intelligence topic area at Wikipedia has been to oppose NightHeron’s changes, or the changes that others have made as a consequence of that user’s arguments.
Some of the parallels between CBH’s behavior at RationalWiki, and NightHeron’s behavior at Wikipedia, were described in a thread at Twitter. Among the more significant examples was a case where CBH suggested on a RationalWiki page that a specific source, accusing the famed biologist E.O. Wilson of supporting “race science”, should be added to Wilson’s Wikipedia biography; the proposed edit to the Wikipedia biography was then made by NightHeron three hours later. At both RationalWiki and Wikipedia, both accounts also have used the same tactic of invoking the authority of a never-named offline friend to argue that material in an article is racist and must be removed. A third parallel not mentioned in the Twitter thread is these two users’ describing people who have published about race and IQ as “diehard white supremacists” (Wikipedia) or “hardcore white supremacists” (RationalWiki).
One set of edits from the two accounts stands out as especially important to this parallel. They involved first CBH and then NightHeron posting a lengthy list of sources to convince others to allow them to modify an article (RationalWiki, Wikipedia), and subsequently changing the text of the article without changing the sources that it cited, so that the sources were now misrepresented (RationalWiki, Wikipedia). Both Smith and Willoughby have tried to oppose this misrepresentation of sources, and both achieved an outcome that was about halfway between failure and success. On the Wikipedia articles, this particular change was described in more detail in a Quillette article about the recent changes to how Wikipedia covers human intelligence topics, in a section titled “no source required”. Aside from Quillette, these demonstrations of how easily Wikipedia can be exploited have also generated negative publicity in a second article published at Minding the Campus.
The similarity between these accounts at RationalWiki and at Wikipedia is more than can be explained by coincidence, nor can it be attributed the RationalWiki parody accounts imitating NightHeron’s behavior, because their mocking contributions to RationalWiki predate NightHeron’s similar actions at Wikipedia. Smith acknowledged this connection in several comments posted in the above linked Twitter thread, using a Twitter account named “Kirkegaard v Smith”, though he deleted this account and its comments before they could be archived. If Smith is correct that these parody accounts have been used by Emil Kirkegaard, then Willoughby has directly interacted with Kirkegaard at Wikipedia after all—but only to try to stop his insertion of parody material there!
Personal feuds and collateral damage
Why did Smith, in his RationalWiki article about Willoughby, refer to Kirkegaard as someone that Willoughby “collaborated with on Wikipedia”, despite indicating elsewhere that he was aware this description is 180 degrees reversed from reality? The answer can be found with a closer examination of the context in which Smith created this article, which was as follows.
A key figure in this episode was the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who was familiar with Willoughby after having written about her anti-creationism book in 2018. Politically, Coyne is a moderate who opposes both cancel culture warriors such as Smith, and right-wing extremists such as Smith as he was in the past. RationalWiki’s users have a complex attitude towards Coyne. While they recognize that he stands for many of the same things that they do, such as atheism and opposition to Trump, they also accuse him of being “rabidly anti-woke” and of “constantly support[ing] grifters from the Intellectual Dark Web,” and Smith has agreed with these types of judgments.
On 21 August 2022, Jerry Coyne made a post protesting against the proposed deletion of Wikipedia’s article about Willoughby, which had been recently nominated for deletion as a consequence of the attacks against her on Twitter. Coyne’s post resulted in several readers of his website commenting in the deletion discussion at Wikipedia, although this was not enough to prevent the article’s deletion. On August 25, when it was clear that the Wikipedia article about Willoughby was about to be deleted, Smith (“Boar”) created the RationalWiki article about her. He then added a section about Coyne in the RationalWiki article itself, and linked to Coyne’s post on the RationalWiki article’s talk page.
The following day, a few hours after the Wikipedia article had been deleted, Jerry Coyne received an email from an unidentified individual gloating about the fact that Coyne’s attempt to prevent its deletion had been futile, and linking him to the newly created RationalWiki article. (Coyne has informed us of this privately.) At the time when Coyne received this email, Smith’s article about Willoughby had existed for less than two days and had not yet been indexed by Google, so at this early stage Smith would have been one of only a tiny number of people aware of the article’s existence.
This sequence of events suggests that Smith’s primary target with his article about Willoughby actually was Jerry Coyne, rather than Willoughby herself. By creating this attack page about her, Smith is presenting a strong case to Coyne about what type of coverage Willoughby will be getting at Wiki sites from now on, and how Coyne’s efforts to protect the integrity of this coverage have backfired. These events are an example of how Smith’s attack pages often are less about advancing an ideology than about getting back at specific individuals. He has used RationalWiki to further these personal feuds even when it is easy to predict that doing so will cause large amounts of collateral damage—such as, in this case, the revocation of Willoughby’s Lazendorf award.
The legal status of RationalWiki articles
Like the Wikimedia foundation that runs Wikipedia, the RationalMedia foundation claims no legal responsibility for the material that they host. This policy is presumably based on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
The Wikimedia Foundation has made some efforts to avoid being placed in a situation where their interpretation of this law will be tested, by providing an option for people who are the subject of libelous statements in Wikipedia articles to directly contact the site’s management. But this option does not exist at RationalWiki: according to the site’s legal FAQ, defamatory statements in articles must be dealt with by using the site’s internal community processes, such as by raising the issues on article talk pages. The members of RationalWiki tend to be dismissive of such attempts. After making several unsuccessful attempts to remove such content, one member of RationalWiki commented, “It appears to me that the effect and likely intent of the policies (as enforced) is to retain defamatory content except in the most egregious cases, and to generally be biased against removing such content.”
One other important way RationalWiki differs from Wikipedia is that the former site does not allow its administrators to view the IP addresses of its users. While the techs running the site theoretically have access to this information, RationalWiki’s policies do not allow it to be examined, and the administrator who identified several of Smith’s accounts using this method was eventually stripped of his admin powers as a consequence. As usual for Wiki sites, there also is no need to provide any identifying information when registering an account. (Not even an email address is required.) This means that it usually is impossible to connect material posted from a RationalWiki account to any person’s real identity, at least not with the degree of certainty that could stand up in a court.
This is not a speculative conclusion. In 2018 and 2019 Oliver Smith was sued for libel for spreading the statement that Emil Kirkegaard was a pedophile, but the libel case only was able to examine Smith’s statements made under his real name on various blogs. Although Smith had taken credit under his real name for creating the RationalWiki article about Kirkegaard, Kirkegaard’s legal team concluded that this was not enough to prove Smith’s responsibility for his statements on RationalWiki in a legal sense.
Together, these policies give RationalWiki’s articles a unique legal status. Neither the RationalMedia foundation nor its individual users can be held legally responsible for the contents of articles there, so for practical purposes these articles have legal impunity. Combined with the hostile response that people usually receive on RationalWiki talk pages when they request the removal of defamatory material, these policies produce a situation where people who are libeled on RationalWiki pages usually are without any legal recourse.
This legal situation might not be an accident. In a 2014 discussion, one of the site’s administrators argued that RationalWiki’s original goal was to “to build the site, then incorporate it, then GET SUED by crazy people” (emphasis in original). In a subsequent comment, the site’s founder Trent Tolouse explained he had argued in the past that a lawsuit against RationalWiki would benefit the site by bringing it more publicity, but that because of how RationalWiki had now grown and become well-known, deliberately provoking a lawsuit was no longer a useful strategy. A similar discussion occurred in 2021, when a member of Conservapedia threatened to sue RationalWiki for defaming him. In response to this threat, another of RationalWiki’s admins commented, “Legally speaking, he can't do a damn thing about us, at least not in 'Murica. I invite him to waste money on legal fees however toward a case that would be dismissed with prejudice.”
The nature of The Smithery
A difficulty shared by everyone who has been a Smith target is that RationalWiki articles usually have a prominence and permanence that none of his targets can match. Most articles and academic papers fade from public attention after a while, so any attempt to respond to Smith’s accusations will eventually be forgotten, whereas RationalWiki articles always remain a fixture in a Google search for a person’s name if they are not deleted. When Smith updates these articles with rebuttals to his targets’ attempts at defending themselves, in the long run a Google search will usually turn up only his rebuttal, and not the original post to which he’s responding. For example, Winegard’s 2019 post attempting to defend himself no longer shows up in a Google search for his name, whereas Smith’s RationalWiki article about Winegard, including his rebuttal to Winegard's post (added using his “074009” account), is the third highest result.
Within a few months, Smith inevitably will have created a new RationalWiki article about CancelWatch, while denying responsibility for a large portion of what’s summarized in this article. This reaction is predictable because maintaining plausible deniability is a major part of his reason for using so many aliases, even though the other RationalWiki users who are familiar with him have indicated they’re aware that he is pretty much as we’ve described him. (The linked comments about Smith are from six different RationalWiki users.) Posting under his real name, Smith has offered this explanation for his tendency to deny his past actions: “i'm a liar, but its (sic) also I don't know a lot of the time my own account history or what I was posting.”
It is important for the nature of The Smithery to be understood independently from the rest of RationalWiki’s content. Authors such as Carl and Woodley, who accuse the site’s coverage of intelligence research of “unchecked ideological bias”, have implicitly assumed that this material was written with the approval—or at least the consent—of the broader RationalWiki community. This is not the case: the RationalWiki community has limits to the amount of defamation they can tolerate, Smith has repeatedly exceeded those limits, and they have tried several times to eject him from the site. But due to a combination of apathy on the part of RationalWiki’s admins, and Smith’s penchant for concealing his identity through the use of multiple accounts, his use of the site as a platform for his attack pages has been mostly unimpeded.
The reliability of RationalWiki’s articles related to intelligence research—those that aren’t parodies—depends on the reliability of this single person. His usage of RationalWiki as a revenge site is a continuation of how he previously used Metapedia, an extreme-right encyclopedia that favorably describes Adolf Hitler. Despite this background, he set in motion the events that ended Noah Carl’s and Bo Winegard’s academic careers, and also has caused lesser damage to the careers of various others academics. He has succeeded at this because student journalists, the authors of open letters, and professional organizations such as the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology often don’t look carefully at who RationalWiki articles are written by, or whether these articles are supported by the sources they cite. If RationalWiki’s admins wish to preserve the site’s remaining credibility, they will have to become more diligent in dealing with Oliver Smith’s ban evasion, and his ongoing usage of the site as a platform to advance his personal feuds.