Oliver D. Smith: Interview with a Stalker
How RationalWiki Enabled One Man's Peculiar Hobby
There is a backup copy of this article at akarlin.com/ods/ along with Supplementary Material.
Table of Contents
First Encounters: “A Demented and Unusually Dedicated Stalker”
Citogenesis: How to Become a “Poster Boy” for Richard Spencer
SM: Canceled by RT
Introduction
Tracing Woodgrains has noted that one of the frustrating asymmetries of the Internet is that a determined stalker can make an individual’s life miserable in ways that are difficult to productively respond to. I am perhaps better qualified to attest to the accuracy of this observation than most, having been a prime target of one such individual for seven years and counting. I am talking about Oliver D. Smith (ODS), a UK-based harasser “widely known in narrow circles” who has made it his life’s mission to defame hereditarians and intelligence researchers. He does this primarily, though not exclusively, at RationalWiki. He then stalks his victims, sending links to his own hit pieces to organizers and other invitees of events where they are known to be speaking, under both his real name and aliases. Beyond immediate cancelation, the aim is to incite hostile media coverage that acquires a self-sustaining dynamic through the combination of RationalWiki’s SEO power and citogenesis (the creation of “reliable” sources through circular reporting).
There is an extensive body of evidence about ODS’ history of harassment from other Wikis and their sockpuppet investigations, as well as defensive response posts from his many victims. Over the past two years, much of this ODS lore has been consolidated into three articles: The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past by David Zimmerman at City Journal and its companion article Oliver D. Smith at Cancel Watch in July 2023, and the The Smith v. Substack saga at Ghost of Lomax in January 2025. The present article contextualizes much of this existing research within the history of my own interactions with ODS, and explores what I argue is the central and de facto complicit role of RationalWiki in enabling this individual’s peculiar hobby. Chronologically, it ranges from 2018, when I first got into ODS’ crosshairs for the crime of defending a friend from spurious accusations of pedophilia in 2018, to attempts to deplatform me from multiple events in 2024-25.
There are some things this article is not. First, this is not an attack piece on ODS per se; though I find his own ideological journey from English identitarianism in the mid-2000s to degrowth anti-natalism today relevant, not to mention amusing, I believe his primary driving motive isn’t so much ideology as sadism. He is an uninteresting individual except in the context of RationalWiki allowing him to use it as his personal revenge site. Although right-wingers and many moderates describe RationalWiki as a den of Far Left ideologues, that has nothing to do with my objections to it. In my view, what makes RationalWiki uniquely odious is its perverse combination of several factors: Total disregard for balance or neutral POV, with one Wikipedia editor affirming that many RationalWiki articles (including my own) are “egregious attack pages” that they would never tolerate themselves; a lack of credible mechanisms for victims to dispute libelous content; and last but not least, Google’s policy of privileging RationalWiki almost as highly as the real Wikipedia in the search rankings.
Second, though some of ODS’ most amplified allegations about me will be touched upon as they become relevant throughout the narrative timeline, this is not where I address them systematically - for that, see my Official Response. Incidentally, this brings us to another central problem, which is that writing up detailed responses to ODS/RationalWiki is, by and large, a waste of time. ODS’ LinkedIn suggests chronic unemployment or underemployment. This gives him far more time to quote-mine his targets, present isolated and decontextualized comments as representative of their values, and on occasion, outright hallucinate things that literally didn’t happen than those of his victims with jobs or interesting projects of their own have to counter them. Moreover, any attempts at a rebuttal are largely nullified by the very temporary nature of blog posts and news articles in the SEO rankings. Conversely, as a wiki website that Google’s algorithm privileges based on the legacy reputation of its decades-old articles debunking creationism, RationalWiki is usually at or near the top of searches for its subjects’ names1.
Now there’s only so much that even a very dedicated harasser de facto allied with a Google-promoted libel laundromat would be able to achieve against very public persons such as Elon Musk, or even prominent scholars such as Steven Pinker, Richard Haier, or Charles Murray (on whom any new calumnies are as rain on a duck’s back). However, it is much more damaging to more obscure or early-career scholars who lack an entry in the real Wikipedia or even their own website/blog, for whom RationalWiki often becomes the main source of public (mis)information, both directly and through citogenesis (e.g. there have been multiple cases in which less conscientious journalists have uncritically reprinted RationalWiki’s claims and effectively laundered their smears into “reliable sources”). This is why ODS focuses almost exclusively on the latter, vulnerable group.
Third, this not is a call for sympathy. Certainly this is not to imply that I didn’t incur any negative consequences from ODS’ harassment. These having included losing out on several lucrative gigs and business opportunities, awkward moments in personal and professional relationships, and the occasional hostility of not just Woke ideologues and smarmy moralists, but normies unfamiliar with RationalWiki’s MO and the irreverent nature of “very online” discourse. This has caused me immense psychological suffering over the past several years. However, I will not compare myself with the multiple individuals who have had their academic careers severely damaged or snuffed out, prestigious prizes revoked, or personal belongings confiscated and investigated for child porn at border crossings. If you wish to help out - just publicize and repost this article.
Even most normal stalkers typically only maintain their obsessions for a few weeks or months. ODS pursues his multiple personal vendettas across many years, causing harm so disproportionate to what one might expect from a single individual that even sympathetic onlookers often find it difficult not to impute some degree of paranoia or persecution complex on the part of its victims. He often seems to take special pleasure in taunting his victims by hinting that he is behind their torment within the bounds of legal deniability; many of us have gotten used to getting spammed with sadistic gloating mass emails from anonymous Proton accounts whenever there is a court case defeat or doxx that only one individual in the world is concretely known to be peculiarly interested in. However, when confronted, he gaslights accusers by denying any connection or culpability, and files DMCA takedown requests, vexatious lawsuits, and even police reports when evidence of such is made public.
I suspect he is addicted to the psychological thrill he derives from this “game” - perhaps not even so much the material damage and psychological suffering that he directly inflicts, but the knowledge that his victims know, and that they know he knows they know, but are powerless to do much about it. But whenever they do try to do something, he has the audacity to bitterly complain that it is actually his own targets who are stalking and harassing him. The question of whether this is a genuine absence of theory of mind or just part of the game, I leave to the reader.
First Encounters: “A Demented and Unusually Dedicated Stalker”
On February 2, 2018, I received a Twitter DM from ODS. I believe this was my first encounter with him. He complained about my description of his pedophilia allegations against Emil Kirkegaard, which I had summarized as the “fantasies of a demented and unusually dedicated stalker”. I brusquely dismissed them.
The RationalWiki article about me appeared the very next day on February 3, 2018.
The context was my January 11, 2018 post SJWs Attack UCL Neo-Nazi Cabal at The Unz Review, where I wrote about the media-driven scandal over the 2017 London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) in 2017. Organized by intelligence researcher James Thompson at University College London, the institution where he then worked, the event attracted the attention of student journalist Ben van der Merwe, who wrote a attack piece on it for his Ctrl Alt-Right Delete newsletter on January 10, 2018. Its many factual inaccuracies did not did not stop it from spilling over into the mainstream media. The central stage in the resulting furore was occupied by Emil Kirkegaard. He was described as a “weird far-right paedophilia apologist” by The Guardian. The Telegraph, a conservative paper, and Russia’s RT, which was still vying for the Woke Left audience back then, joined the pile-on. These calumnies were subsequently added to Kirkegaard’s RationalWiki article, completing the citogenesis cycle that has since made him persona non grata at many mainstream scientific conferences and added a humiliating element to international travel in the form of customs authorities searching his laptop for child porn. (They didn't find any).
In reality, Kirkegaard was only guilty of two sins. The first sin, committed many years ago in 2012, was a thought experiment exploring how society might deal with pedophiles. (This is not a persistent theme in Kirkegaard’s blogging either then or now, and was written in response to an article by a Swedish Pirate Party politician discussing child porn legalization). The controversial sentence that made Kirkegaard a “pedophilia activist” was the idea that “perhaps a compromise is having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it”. An ill-advised sentence, perhaps, except that the journalists didn’t highlight his concluding suggestion: “castration, either medical or fysical.” This transforms the meaning of the article from a controversial proposal to a menu of policy options from an individual who has never shied away from edgy and icky topics. Furthermore, I will note that thought experiments are universally accepted in philosophical debates without being taken to be reflective of the views and proclivities of the individuals constructing them (e.g. Peter Singer defending zoophilia or Aella defending AI child porn does not imply that either are “promoters” let alone “consumers” of those respective products), and have been a major historical driver of ethical progress in their own right (e.g. would LGBTQ+ rights have ever gotten off the ground in view of the revulsion that seeing gay behavior invokes in many people?).
The second sin, which Kirkegaard committed in early 2016, was banning ODS from his forum at OpenPsych, an open-access psychology journal, for persistent trolling and disruptive behavior. This provoked ODS into creating multiple defamatory RationalWiki articles about other OpenPsych contributors, starting with his main nemesis John Fuerst, and then moving on to Emil Kirkegaard. On January 11, 2018, the account “SkepticDave” characterized both of them as “far-right extremists and paedophile-apologists”, and admitted to sending a tip-off about the LCI to journalists. We can be quite sure that this was ODS’ doing because the same individual was responsible for my article on RationalWiki, since it is included in a list of articles that “Aeschylus”, a known identity of ODS, took credit for2.
Take for a moment to appreciate how slapstick all of this is. ODS began his crusade against Kirkegaard after getting banned from Kirkegaard’s obscure forum, and then taking along many of the latter’s friends and professional colleagues along for a ride that culminated in multiple ruined careers and $100,000s in cumulative litigation costs as of 2025. Amusingly, an Internet drama is exactly how I perceived this early on, up to the point of crowing about my RationalWiki “hagiography” on the day it was published on February 3, 2018. Even then, RationalWiki was already widely considered to be a laughing stock, like Encyclopedia Dramatica or Conservapedia, and getting a personal article there was treated as a rite of passage within the HBD/IQ community3. I did not think it would become such a big deal4.
ODS repeatedly called Kirkegaard a pedophile under his real name in the comments section of my “hagiography” article5. This, in addition to an earlier Tweet under his real name, constituted the evidentiary base for Kirkegaard’s subsequent lawsuit against him for defamation in England. Justice Julian Knowles found ODS’ statements to be “expressions of opinion that are defamatory of” Kirkegaard on December 11, 2019. But opinion is protected speech. Amusingly, Kirkegaard appears to have had the uniquely bad luck to get assigned the one English judge who happened to be a free speech maximalist. Following the preliminary judgement, Kirkegaard’s lawyers decided that ODS’ statements made under aliases were unlikely to be accepted by the court. Furthermore, even if they spent more money and won the summary judgement, the prospects for recovering anything from ODS - a chronically unemployed individual who lived with his parents - were bleak. Consequently, Kirkegaard made the decision to discontinue the lawsuit on May 21, 20206.
Citogenesis: How to Become a “Poster Boy” for Richard Spencer
On October 7, 2020, Prof. John Jackson Jr. of Michigan State University published an article on the supposedly “mythical” taboo on race and intelligence. This was largely a response to an article by Noah Carl and Michael Woodley quantifying “controversies” in intelligence research from the previous year. Their conclusion was that incidents of persecution of intelligence researchers saw cycles of hysteria across distinct “eras” - the Jensen Era of the 1970s; the Rushton Era of the late 1980s-early 1990s; the Watson Era of the mid-2000s; and the LCI Era of the mid-2010s. The most controversial topics were race differences in intelligence, dysgenics, sex differences in intelligence, and the heritability of intelligence, in this order.
In particular, they highlighted the prominent role of RationalWiki in academic cancellations during the LCI era:
A concerning development from the most recent ‘LCI era’ of controversy is the presence of a number of hamartographic pseudo-biographies (attack pages) hosted on a website called Rationalwiki.org, which by virtue of conflation with Wikipedia.org and undue prominence in search results, have the potential to inflict serious reputational harm upon intelligence researchers. In considering RationalWiki, it is critical to note that the website was created as “a liberal response to Conservapedia” (Yan et al., 2017), and that in its own words, “RationalWiki Is not neutral” (RationalWiki, 2019a). Furthermore, RationalWiki’s attack pages on intelligence researchers contain numerous factual errors (such as unwarranted imputations of political affinities, using terms like ‘alt-right’, ‘eugenicist’ etc.), coupled with unsubstantiated claims that those researchers are engaged in ‘pseudoscience’.
At this point, Noah Carl was speaking from intimate experience. In 2018, Carl was a promising young academic who was published in highly respected sociological journals and had been offered a Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in Fall 2018. However, in December 18, 2018, an open letter began to circulate demanding that Cambridge disavow Carl and open an investigation: “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.” Despite a counter-petition that garnered more signatures, including prominent heavyweights in cognitive psychology and behavioral genetics, Carl was unceremoniously fired in May 2019.
This was convincingly argued to have primarily been the work of ODS in the Cancel Watch article. The open letter closely tracked the RationalWiki article that was written by ODS, and an account known to be his gloated about it on RationalWiki. A few days later, a probable ODS account in a private message on Reddit stated, “I hope Carl loses his job. I’ll be complaining next to the universities where the rest of your OpenPsych editors/reviewers work at.” ODS has strenuously denied any such connection. Unfortunately, Carl's legal settlement with Cambridge University precludes him from publicly discussing these events. However, what I can say is that the original email sent to Cambridge University complaining about Carl has ODS’ verbal cues and obsessions - including his favorite go-to libel against Kirkegaard - and has been incontrovertibly linked to other online identities that were almost exclusively directed against ODS’ enemies, such as “Mikemikev” (Michael Coombs), Kirkegaard, Rome Viharo, and the late Abd Lomax.
Addressing Jackson Jr.’s claim that there is no taboo on race/IQ research is beyond the scope of this article, but there is no particular need to do so, because Carl and Woodley have done so themselves in a subsequent rebuttal in 2024. Additionally, sociological research has since validated the extremely taboo status of race/IQ research. In 2024, Kirkegaard with Bryan Pesta and Joseph Bronski found that the average American considers the question of whether “European Whites are smarter than African Blacks for genetic reasons” is more taboo than whether “pedophilia is harmful or not”. Just a month later Cory Clark et al. found that the topic of race differences in intelligence was more “discouraged” amongst US psychology professors than sex differences, transgender identity, or even the evolutionary roots of rape. However, the single most ironic piece of evidence are the academic fates of Jackson Jr.’s two critics: Noah Carl, as we just saw, was fired from Cambridge University in 2019, while Michael Woodley was suspended from Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2022. In effect, his thesis denied their “lived experience.”
One thing I would however like to address, both because I am unusually qualified to comment on it, as well as because it is germane to this post, is Jackson Jr.’s characterization of my own work. In a survey of 102 intelligence experts conducted by Heiner Rindermann et al., I was rated as the second most accurate blogger on intelligence testing. (Note also that intelligence researchers are not exactly political radicals, by and large; like academia in general, intelligence researchers are overwhelmingly social liberals - if they created their own network state, they’d be ~Sweden on LGBTQ+ rights, with 86% supporting gay marriage - albeit more restrictive on immigration). Jackson Jr. seeks to trivialize and discredit this result through two arguments. First, he notes that I, alongside Steve Sailer and James Thompson, two other mentioned bloggers, had our primary homes at The Unz Review at that time. He describes The Unz Review as a White Nationalist website that “regularly publishes antisemitic writers who deny the Holocaust” and “other forms of hate speech”. Second, he claims I in particular am a “similar figure to” Steve Sailer (“uses the language of IQ and genetics to further a White nationalist political agenda”), promote “antisemitic conspiracy theories” and “associates with alt-right political activist Richard Spencer.” I’ll address these sequentially.
I joined The Unz Review on Ron Unz’s invitation as a (paid) blogger in January 2015. At the time, this was not an Alt Right publication, nor even a right-wing one7. Apart from becoming a home for much of the HBD/IQ community, including Steve Sailer, Razib Khan, James Thompson, JayMan, Peter Frost, and Audacious Epigone - whose own ideologies ranged from classical liberalism to “civic nationalism” - it also included a wide roster of paleocons, leftist anti-imperialists such as James Petras, several notable Dissident Right figures, the prominent Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, humorist oddballs such as Fred Reed8, and many other odd and colorful individuals who defy easy classification. This made it impossible to fit The Unz Review into any coherent ideological slot. Unfortunately, it is true that its potential as an Alt Media platform was compromised when Ron Unz (who is himself Jewish) became obsessed with Holocaust denial and other “JQ” conspiracy theories in the late 2010s and started populating his magazine with similarly-minded writers under the spell of what journalist Ben Sixsmith described as “runaway contrarianism”. However, it should be emphasized that The Unz Review never had a site-wide editorial line. Each blogger and author was free to write whatever they wanted; as Charles Murray noted, “I endorse chefs, not restaurants.” In any case, I left The Unz Review many years ago along with the rest of the HBD/IQ crowd.
For my own part, I do not “promote” anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and have never done so; or at least, conspiracy theories as they are commonly understood by reasonable commenters - Holocaust denial, Jewish control of the global financial system, involvement in 9/11, etc.9 (Indeed, I will point out that I challenged Unz’s claims about the Holocaust and criticized Kevin McDonald’s claim that the Russian opposition was a “nearly all” Jewish movement). I only ever met with Richard Spencer once, and that only when he threw a public event at UC Berkeley, a few blocks from where I then lived. I did not subsequently cooperate on any projects with him, nor did I ever write for any Alt Right publications. Meeting someone once and not subsequently cooperating on any projects is obviously not an “association”. Nor did I ever identify with the Alt Right; though I am open about agreeing with many of their positions at the time, such as HBD/IQ realism, anti-immigration, anti-Wokism, and foreign policy non-interventionism, I always looked askance at their more “traditionalist” positions (e.g. see here, “The Alt Left considers itself a subset of the wider Alt Right but with less thot hate and more rocket ships and radical life extension“, or here, “I’m Alt Left relative to the Far Right. By normie standards I’d be Alt Center but it just doesn’t have that ring.”10).
The source of Jackson Jr.’s claims to the contrary is identified as Matthew Murphy, an Irish student journalist writing for The University Times (a publication that has been plagued by allegations of misconduct and journalistic malpractice). The article in question dates to February 12, 2019. It is mostly just a hit piece against another Irish student whose main sin was to posit that genetic inheritance might partially explain international differences in GDP per capita and to cite me as one of his sources. (This is not a fringe view amongst intelligence researchers or economic historians). Murphy held this to be “troubling” in light of my status as a “well known member of the Russian far right who has appeared at events alongside American white nationalist Richard Spencer”. This is a tangential point that I will not discuss at length. However, for the record, while I did indeed identify as a Russian nationalist at this time - albeit expressly not as Far Right - my goal and vision at the time was for Russia to become an HBD/IQ-pilled nationalist state like Israel. (Since I transitioned from Russian nationalism to superglobalism after 2022 I no longer care for either country’s cannibalistic political culture)11.
But where could Murphy have gotten the idea that I was some close Spencer lackey? The most obvious source was RationalWiki, which already dominated Google results for my name and prominently trumpeted my “association” with Spencer. Murphy’s article was immediately added by user “Arcticos” to my RationalWiki profile; obsessed with his usual bugbears like Abd Lomax, Kirkegaard, and Noah Carl, he was blocked as an “Aeschylus”/ODS sockpuppet by his RationalWiki nemesis Arthur Kerensa (@dysklyver). The curious background to the Arcticos ban is that ODS’ main profile “Aeschylus” was banned from RationalWiki in February 2019. Informally understood to extend to all of his other sockpuppets, the ban was subsequently extended to ODS as a person in September 2020 after he began creating attack pages and doxxing other RationalWiki contributors on external sites. However, this ban was only sporadically enforced. After its main enforcer, Arthur Kerensa, left RationalWiki in 2021, ODS’ socks were again allowed to run rampant. (Amusingly, ODS in his pettiness once sent me some kompromat about Kerensa).
However, it’s not as if this made much of a difference; even when ODS’ sockpuppets were getting banned, his article creations and contributions - collectively known as “The Smithery” - weren’t getting deleted. In a discussion about whether to delete one of ODS’ RationalWiki articles, one participant stated, “We should delete any page created by Smith on the spot if we want to actually enforce his ban.” However, in a later discussion, another user countered 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.” Consequently, ODS was effectively allowed to continue to populate RationalWiki with new “material” about his hereditarian enemies.
Returning to my story, this triple teaming by Murphy, Jackson Jr., and ODS/RationalWiki was sufficient to kickstart the citogenesis cycle about me and Spencer. For years, my article introduced me as a “poster boy for the Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer” and made reference to the (multiple) “events” and “Neo-Nazi conferences” that I was very surprised to learn I had appeared with him at. The Jackson Jr. reference was also featured in the description of me and Sailer at Wikipedia’s article on The Unz Review ever since it was split off from its article on Ron Unz on November 28, 2023.
Supplementary Material #1
Probably the most amusing early IRL consequences from my RationalWiki “hagiography” came from the “association” with Richard Spencer, and from the most amusing quarters at that: RT - yes, Putin’s propaganda network. This story is tangential to this narrative, and will only be of interest to readers interested in Karlin lore, so I will only include it as a link → Canceled by RT.
I wrote to Jackson Jr. in January 2024 and again in April 2024 requesting him to retract his comments about me and received no response. So what we have here is American and Michigan taxpayers effectively sponsoring an activist scholar who cites niche student newspapers to libel intelligence researchers and bloggers and doesn’t see fit to even respond to their politely worded complaints. I consider this to be yet another symptom of the rot within American academia. Its social sciences and humanities departments avidly embraced Wokeness and cancelation culture, which found some of their most vicious expressions in the hostility and harassment against intelligence researchers. These repressions continue to today, with Intelligence journal recently launching a politicized “review” of all of the late Richard Lynn’s articles they had ever published. (I would like to make the amusing observation that this is happening even as these same university administrations that bowed before SJW cancellation mobs in the 2010s now rush to appease MAGA by expelling and revoking degrees from pro-Palestinian protesters). However, even though I view anti-Wokism as a cynical grift, this doesn’t I suddenly love Wokes either; my position on that is similar to that of the Soviet dissident Sergey Dovlatov: “After Communists, most of all I hate anti-Communists”. I have likewise been outspoken in my criticisms of Trump’s anti-DEI policies and DOGE (I was bearish on the latter from the very start, and have consistently said they are at best a sledgehammer where a scalpel is needed; at worst an attempt at political capture and the institutionalization of DEI but for MAGA ideologues). However, I will point out that the current MAGA assault on vaccines research and climate science did not come out of nowhere, but was downstream of right-wing Americans losing trust in its scientific and academic institutions, and activist scholars such as Jackson Jr. and the committees who hired and promoted them must shoulder a large portion of the blame.
Ghosts of the Past Don’t Rest
On July 9, 2023, City Journal - the flagship magazine of the conservative Manhattan Institute - published The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past, the most sweeping chronicle of ODS’ activities to date. A couple of days later its companion article Oliver D. Smith was released at Cancel Watch. As mentioned, there was already no dearth of investigations about ODS from the many enemies he had made over almost two decades of trolling and harassment. But the City Journal article was the first to achieve large-scale public resonance, including a ReTweet from Steven Pinker.
Supplementary Material #2
The bulk of these two articles cover ODS’ campaign against hereditarians. Apart from Kirkegaard and Noah Carl, whom I covered here, other major ODS campaigns targeted the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) conference in 2018, Bo Winegard in 2019, and Emily Willoughby in 2022. Though far from exhaustive, but probably qualify as a representative sample of his activities in this era. Read the summary at → Nazi Dino Lives Matter.
This publicity success was short-lived. On July 17, 2023, ODS sued City Journal, and they took down the article from their website soon after. Eventually, they reached a private settlement, which was confirmed by both ODS and Brian Anderson, the Editor of City Journal. ODS abandoned the suit on January 25, 2024. I do not believe the removal was on account of legitimate concerns over the article’s accuracy. I have verified many of its claims to the extent that I am confident enough to reproduce it in its entirety at my own website. Furthermore, Substack - the platform on which this article is published - successfully contested ODS’ lawsuits from February 7 and again from August 9, which pertained in part to the longer and more detailed version of the City Journal article at Cancel Watch, a blog hosted on its platform. The latter suit was dismissed with prejudice on December 11, 2024.
Unfortunately, the Manhattan Institute - one of America’s richest conservative think-tanks - has been far more courageous standing against the dire threat to our democracy represented by pro-Palestine protesters on campus than the toothless legal threats of a British stalker. (I wonder if they also paid him money as part of the settlement). It would, in retrospect, have been far better had they never published this article at all. ODS now touts the private settlement as vindication that its investigation about him was fictitious, and initiated litigation against individuals who reposted the article. This includes a couple of lawsuits against Kirkegaard on January 26 and May 28, and one against HBD blogger Steve Sailer on June 7. In both cases, the complaint was that they had linked to and quoted the City Journal article. Kirkegaard didn’t remove his post, and ODS withdrew the first lawsuit and the court threw out the second. However, ODS announced he had reached an out of court settlement with Sailer on November 3. Although we don’t know the details, it seems probable that Sailer capitulated, since all of his blog posts and Tweets about ODS have disappeared.
During our correspondence in 2024, ODS also threatened to sue me for having quoted the City Journal article at my Official Response. I dared him to do it. I refused to reveal my address in London - that is not a reasonable request from an individual with his reputation - but I did offer him to send it by email, or to accept the service of process in person somewhere in London; perhaps even at a pub, where I promised to cover the drinks. He balked at that, adding that he dislikes English pub culture: “I have agoraphobia and social anxiety disorder. I rarely leave my house, I also dislike pubs, everything they stand for and support them closing down.”
Eventually, sufficiently annoyed at the DMCAs and lawsuits that were constantly disappearing the articles which I was relying on to defend myself from the consequences of his own harassment - not to mention the chutzpah of ODS’ constant demands that I stop citing or referring to them - I reprinted the City Journal article at my website sometime in late November (and later added the other two). Christopher Brunet also reprinted the City Journal article at his Karlstack newsletter on December 26, 2024.
This finally provoked ODS into sending both me and Brunet a letter of claim alongside a request to respond to it by January 7, 2025 in anticipation of subsequent legal proceedings. I did not respond. ODS withdrew it 5 days later, though not before noting that he might send me another letter before claim in 7-11 months.
This was not the end of ODS’ attempts at legal suppression of investigations about him. In January 2025, despite losing his case against Substack, the Cancel Watch article went down again after ODS filed a DMCA takedown request, claiming it contained copyrighted material originating from a leaked email that had been posted without his permission. In reality, it had come from a public comment ODS had made himself under his publicly-known “Atlantid” alias at Metapedia. He then repeated this false claim in a separate request to Google asking them to deindex the article. After a detailed review, Substack determined that ODS’ DMCA request was fraudulent and constituted abuse of their Copyright Infringement Policy. They restored the article and emailed Cancel Watch that they would not enforce the takedown. Furthermore, I will note that the screenshot of the DMCA notice includes the question, “Under penalty of perjury, do you confirm that the information you've provided in this form is accurate?” to which ODS replied, “Yes, I confirm.” Since he must have been aware that this quote came from his own public post, this made it an incontrovertible case of perjury.
The Ghost of Lomax article “The Smith v. Substack saga” recounting ODS’ lawsuits against Substack in 2024 is currently unavailable on Substack - only the (early version) copy at my website - because of yet another lawsuit from March 5, 2025. In an email exchange with Ghost of Lomax, I was informed that Substack restored the article on February 21. However, Substack Support informed them that it would only stay up on condition that ODS wouldn’t take legal action about it. On February 23, ODS mailed the documents initiating the lawsuit, just a couple of days after he was given this requirement. If forcing Substack to take the article back down was indeed ODS’ goal, he achieved it, since Ghost of Lomax’s communication with Substack indicates they won’t reinstate it until his lawsuit is resolved.
Hilariously, this latest lawsuit is against none other than the RationalMedia Foundation. The very same individual who had weaponized RationalWiki in service of his own vendettas is now suing his enablers for $100,000 for “defaming” him by blocking various accounts as his sockpuppets. (Recall that in his version of the story he hasn’t edited RationalWiki after 2019, whereas Arthur Kerensa continued blocking his socks for 1-2 more years). In private communications, he has even claimed that he now wants RationalWiki to delete all the articles he has ever created pre-2020, including Kirkegaard’s and my own. I do not consider this credible, not least because of the extensive evidence that he has continued hostile editing at RationalWiki through to at least December 2024 (see “Anti-eugenicist”), offline harassment to February 2025 (see “David Joe”), and hostile impersonation to March 2025 (a fake “Shuichi Tezuka” has sent out mass emails urging RationalWiki victims to file similar lawsuits). I think that the real goal was to force Substack to take down the Ghost of Lomax article, which will remain down so long as litigation continues. More speculatively, another motivation may be to acquire ammunition for later defamation and/or harassment lawsuits against the multiple writers who have cited RationalWiki’s post-2019 blocks of ODS’ sockpuppets.
These episodes illustrate another important thing. As Ghost of Lomax observes, this is an individual who loves to boast about his skill at using large numbers of online aliases to conceal his identity and to deceive others about responsibility for his actions, while taking pride in how his articles routinely become the top Google results for their subjects. However, like many stalkers and harassers, he seems to experience genuine confusion and distress whenever his own activities are exposed to the sunlight, and goes to incredible lengths including DMCA Whack-a-Mole and outright lawfare to try to depublish all investigations about him. So it’s important to keep shining a light on his persisting malfeasance.
ODS 14/88 and The Nude Raider
The most fascinating part of Cancel Watch’s material touches on Oliver D. Smith’s early life. As it turns out, before embarking on his crusade against hereditarians, ODS appears to have expressed support for White Nationalist ideas and conspiracy theories - including Holocaust denial - on multiple forums and Far Right wikis.
In light of his strenuous denials of this past, I will note at the outset that the evidence connecting ODS to these posts is very strong. The identities under which they were made (e.g. “Scionic Evil”, “AngloSaxon”, “Hyperboreanar”) shared similar niche hobbies and conspiracy interests - Boglins toy puppets; Lara Croft (inc. nude mods); British Israelism; Atlantis; pyramidology; cryptozoology; UFOs - and linked to images from a Photobucket account which ODS used for his other known aliases, and which also included apparent photographs of himself (see archived investigations at Encyclopedia Dramatica and Lolcows Wiki). ODS’ real name current accounts on X and YouTube feature an abiding interest in Boglins collections to this day.
On the Tomb Raider forums, Scionic Evil claimed that two of his family members participated in “false propaganda” to shunt responsibility for the Holocaust on Germans, claiming that the “bodies and starved people” in the concentration camps were “slavs/communists who were paid to act as jews”. He added that he “read lots on Nazi Mysticism”. This account also expressed sympathy for the Columbine shooters on account of them being “bullied all day by non-whites”. In less esoteric posts, he complained about English traditions/customs “dying”, alleged “bans” on Christmas cards under Islamic pressure, and persecutions for expressing English or White Pride whereas it’s “alright nowadays” to have Black Pride. In a later incarnation as AngloSaxon, he wrote an ode to the greatness of the White race, (incorrectly) claiming that they score the highest on IQ tests. These accounts interspersed their commentary with avid reviews of gory exploitation films such as Cannibal Holocaust and Necromantik. (I hesitated to include this, but I think this is notable in light of his post-2014 puritanism on sexuality, pornography, drugs/alcohol, etc., in conjunction with regularly claiming his enemies are pedophiles, incels, etc., and writing at length about their fetishes, real and imagined). In 2008, Hyperboreanar claimed that he was a supporter of White Nationalism since he was 16 in the guest section of Stormfront forum.
Subsequently, ODS appears to have lost interest in posting on forums and shifted his attention to Metapedia, a Far Right wiki that promoted Holocaust denial and described Hitler in glowing terms. In a 2013 blog post to the British National Party’s blog, his main “Atlantid” identity claimed that Wikipedia is “leftist oriented” and “smears” the BNP, and positively contrasts it with the “positive” and “factual” entry that he helped develop at Metapedia. Otherwise, he devoted his attention to harassing the various people who annoyed him, describing them with epithets such as “Europhobic propagandist,” “race denier”, and “Afrocentric troll” (he was - and remains! - a supporter of the Multiregional Hypothesis12).
Following an obscure conflict with a White Nationalist called Michael Coombs (“Mikemikev”), ODS renounced most of his views in December 2013 and announced he would be quitting the site:
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.
This noble commitment to quiet self-improvement wouldn’t last long.
From 2015, ODS was creating hit pieces on “pseudoscientific” racialists such as the Human Phenotypes website under his “Krom” handle at RationalWiki13. This is also when he acquired a reputation for impersonating his enemies on forums and wikis.
A year later, he initiated his long war against OpenPsych.
For what it is worth, ODS has strenuously denied his links to most of these identities. He ascribes the ones at the Tomb Raider forums in particular to an acquaintance (this is a common deflection of his) or in the case of the BNP post, claiming that it was “an email they modified [that] appeared many months later” (private comms). The fraudulent DMCA claiming it to be a leaked email referred to the renunciation post at Metapedia above.
However, I am personally convinced that these identities are all or almost all his, and probably reflect his genuine views at the time. That is substantially on account of another piece of evidence that has never been widely publicized until now. In November 5, 2019, ODS decided to send me a Twitter DM - out of the blue and for no reason I can discern - in which he claimed to have belonged to a band called Crusader14 and to have been a “pioneer of Nazi techno” in the mid-2000s. He added that at the time he had “an interest in Nazi occultism, or rather Nazi archaeology - Ahnenerbe.”
The Crusade14 website was richly illustrated with swastikas and other Nazi imagery, including a Flamethrower soldier from ODS’ beloved video game Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Why Crusade14? “Crusade is pretty self explanatory, the 14 however represent the 14 words ''we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children''.” What is Nazi techno? “Nazi techno is a small and fairly unknown sub-genre of techno, pioneered by DJ Adolf and various other DJ's who mixed samples of recorded Hitler speeches with techno beats.” Their 2007 album features musical tracks with names such as “Reich Church”, “Rahowa”, “White Comrade March On”, “Pinball SS”, and “Siege Heil”.
You can appreciate the artistic merits of “Siege Heil” for yourself:
Anyhow, I made sure to archive it, which is a good thing, since the website has since vanished, and as of 2024, ODS was also denying having had any substantive involvement with it: “The “Crusade14” techno band was not actually mine - I only made the Wolfenstein song(s) in 2005-ish for the band which belonged to someone else I knew at school”. (Do You Believe That?)
Regardless, ODS having once been a giga-based Wolfenstein Nazi will never be not funny.
The Ethics of Sunlight Exposure
Now look. Personally, I couldn’t care less what ODS’ ideology was in Sixth Form. Teenagers and young people entertain all kinds of edgy and colorful views in protest against their parents and society. I even feel a small degree of kinship with him. In the early 2000s, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Age of Empires II: Age of Kings and participating on gaming/history forums, and was likewise enamored with the aesthetics of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (I even wrote some cringe fanfic for it). I wasn’t into Neo-Nazi stuff, but I spent more time poring over WW2 tank production stats and reading up on Ahnenerbe expeditions to Tibet than was perhaps healthy. But these were not particularly atypical interests for that era. In one telling message from 2024, ODS complains that he was only 18 when he was posting to Stormfront before continuing to claim various mitigating circumstances. I don’t know why it bothers him so much. I find it extraordinarily unlikely that anybody would care about his teenage shenanigans, and it’s not like he has a prestigious job or position that could be put at risk even theoretically.
Anyhow, I agree that it is wrong to weaponize dubious things people may have said many years ago against them; nor do I even care much - at least in the preening moralistic sense - about wrong and stupid views that people have today, except to the extent that it makes them unproductive interlocutors14. I maintain a charitable attitude towards things that people have said or peculiar views they hold; to the extent that social shunning is warranted, I would prefer society apply that to actual crimes, such as assault, abuse, theft, and fraud. This outlook is partly self-interested, because I also hold some views widely considered to be strange or bad, and don’t wish to be marginalized and deplatformed on account of those views, or views that I held but no longer do so, or am incorrectly alleged to have held in the past; and partly it is altruistic, since I consider a free marketplace of ideas and wide Overton windows as both desirable and competitive in and of itself.
However, I am only willing to extend such charity to individuals who participate within reasonable bounds of civic discourse. If ODS doesn’t want his critics bringing up details from his past that he considers embarrassing, then perhaps he should have refrained from posting Willoughby’s Nazi dinosaur commissions made in the late 2000s to a RationalWiki hit piece when he was creating musical hits like “Reich Church” and “Rahowa” in that same period. In the 2000s, accounts credibly linked to ODS were engaged in “hate speech” and “Islamophobia” that just a little more than a decade later he would be reporting to the UK Metropolitan Police when they came in the form of Kirkegaard’s hot takes on Twitter from 2018. American readers should note that there are no First Amendment protections in the UK. Though highly unlikely, it is not impossible that Kirkegaard might have been arrested for his critical observations about Muhammad’s personal life, and forced to serve a jail sentence comparable in length to those doled out to convicted groomer-rapists under England’s two-tier justice system. There is no equivalence here.
Trouble in the Tropics
In subsequent years, my RationalWiki page was intermittently edited by aliases known or strongly suspected to be ODS. Every so often, I would also encounter anonymous comments across the Internet, written in ODS’ style and hewing to his specific obsessions. I never bothered to systematically keep track of them, but they are relatively easy to find, this one at Crooked Timber describing me as an “alt-right troll and poster boy for Richard Spencer” while separately whining about Kirkegaard (“racist crank and infamous activist for legalising child pornography” - note the British spelling) being a good example of this “genre”.
Sometime in mid-2023, ODS started posting longreads under his own name to the academic article repository Humanities Commons outlining his perspective on Kirkegaard, myself, Richard Hanania, and “intelligence researchers” (in the latter he speculated about the author of Cancel Watch, naming Kirkegaard, Karlin, Hanania, Sailer, and Dutton as the top suspects in this order). I suspect his goal was for these pieces to hit the academic search engines just as RationalWiki dominated conventional search. I requested Humanities Commons remove them on January 23, 2024, and to their credit they agreed, noting that ODS had violated their policies. However, this did not have much impact, since they had already been harvested by CORE and now appear prominently on Google Scholar searches.
In early January 2024, I had come to Próspera, a charter city on a tropical island off Honduras that aims to accelerate growth and innovation through bureaucratic minimalism and new approaches in regulatory choice. Educative and entertaining as seeing libertarians trying to put their ideals into practice was, my primary goal there was not so much the beaches and the Bitcoin Center but the “pop-up village” of Vitalia. Billing itself as a kind of “Layer 2” on the Próspera “base layer”, its stated goal was to “make death optional” by incubating biotech companies and stripping away the regulations that hamper biomedical innovation. It was going to kick off these initiatives with a series of conferences centering on life extension, AI, Decentralized Science (DeSci), and new experiments in governance, such as charter cities and network states. I was invited to speak about the embryonic field of human intelligence enhancement within the framework of the AI conference on February 9, 2024
Unbeknownst to me at the time, ODS had started preparing his latest “action” just a few days earlier. On January 20, a throwaway account posted a complaint to /r/AntifascistsOfReddit claiming that White Nationalists were behind Vitalia, citing my presence as a “key organizer”. I am described as an “overt white nationalist, misogynist and fascist… who formerly spoke alongside white supremacist Richard Spencer on a podium at white nationalist conferences”, and the additional presence of “eugenicist” Jonathan Anomaly - a philosopher and proponent of human enhancement - is portrayed as confirmation that the “the 'bio-tech' is in line with alt-right/Nazi eugenics”. It also included a quote from a 2015 post in which I had offhandedly tried to integrate transhumanist ideas such as life extension into the logic of nationalism (see also here and here) before I had realized the inherent futility of selling right-wingers on such matters15.
I believe that the first mention of me as an attendee at Vitalia appeared in a Tweet on January 16. The author was an actual Vitalia organizer, and he mentioned me as a co-organizer of a Network States meetup; this had nothing to do with Vitalia core programming, but was just a single side event to discuss Balaji Srinivasan’s book, The Network State (the meeting appears to have gotten nice reviews). This Tweet is now deleted, but I recall ReTweeting it at the time. A couple of days later, an account called Okechukwu (@okechukwu_01) replied to the Tweet, describing me as a “vicious racist” and by that he means “real hardcore Neo-Nazi stuff”. His last mention of me before 2024 had been in April 2021. So it seems very unlikely that he found the Tweet by himself, which leaves just one other obvious candidate.
Supplementary Material #3
Okechukwu, who claims to be a Nigerian man, had only ever been interested in me in 2020-21 when he regularly participated in race trolling and flame wars as a commenter at my blog, over the course of which he repeatedly called his European (and Indian) interlocutors “hairy apes” and other unflattering characterizations, and was called terms such as “spearchucker” and other racial epithets in turn by other commenters, including myself. This is not the place to litigate that particular online drama, especially since it needs a lengthy contextualizing exposition on HBD/IQ culture and “very online” poasting culture, and their relationship to my multicultural blog community and its culture of “powerful takes” from 2015-2021. Those so interested can read → HBD/IQ Culture: “It’s Fucked Up How Tolerant the Racist Community Is”.
As it happens, ODS sent a complaints letter to Vitalia under his own name on January 18. He requested they “clarify” my involvement with the project and asked them if they had done a background check on me, helpfully linking to my RationalWiki article and Okechukwu’s complaint from a few hours ago. The Co-Founder of Vitalia Niklas Anzinger referred ODS to my RationalWiki response article and does not appear to have engaged further. I know this because this was mentioned to me by the organizers, and ODS later told me about it himself on March 2, even sending me a screenshot of his complaints email (though he claimed that this was the full extent of his involvement in the affair).
On February 3, a new user “Toby” created the Vitalia article at RationalWiki. It described the conference-goers as “food woo promoters, drug addicts, transhumanists, extropians, so-called 'biohackers', futurists, cryonicists, as well as longevity pseudoscientists and cranks”, mentioned Bryan Johnson’s plasma transfusions and 100 pills per day regimen, and emphasized the allegedly prominent roles played by “infamous eugenicist” Jonathan Anomaly and “the Neo-nazi Anatoly Karlin”. This is very similar to ODS’ known obsessions, from personalities to verbal cues and the hostility to drugs. In a subsequent message denying his involvement, ODS described his “realization” that Vitalia was a “crank vest” and described its attendees as “people who want to be immortal, cryonicists, food woo promoters who think they can "de age" by plasma transfusions and taking 100 pills a day, and plenty of other wierdos.” These characterizations might as well have been copied from Toby’s RationalWiki article, which tellingly concludes by whining that “organizers have also been unresponsive to complaints sent by email”. But wait… how could “Toby” have known?
In the following days, the harassment picked up. Sometime around February 5, the Twitter account Star Gazer (@D13642384362026) - ostensibly devoted to star watching, but which I had long suspected of being an ODS sock on account of its suspicious follows of hereditarians - started spamming Vitalia organizers with links to my RationalWiki article. I didn’t have the presence of mind to take screenshots, and the account was deleted soon after I exposed it. Obviously, this doesn’t constitute substantive evidence. I would not even have mentioned it were it not for his curious “counter-evidence”. Apparently, Star Gazer had messaged ODS to apologize to him for causing him trouble, before conveniently deleting his three follower account.
Personally, I think it’s a bit strange for an independent and ostensibly apolitical account to not just spam Vitalia attendees with the RationalWiki article about me and the “racial abuse” I had subjected poor Okechukwu to several years ago, but to then rush to apologize to ODS when I publicly connected the two, for ODS to reply to it twelve minutes later, and for ODS to have the perspicacity to screenshot it just before it deleted itself.
ODS claimed that this was similar to another event in which an account called “AL” had avidly defended ODS in the comments at the City Journal article in 2023 and was accused of being him, and attached a screenshot of a DM from Arche Lasalles (@arche_lasalles) alerting him to that. (The X account in question is now deleted and their Disqus comments are private). It’s unclear to me what relationship this is supposed to have to the question of Star Gazer’s ownership. After all, it was not I who accused “AL” of being ODS. (Furthermore, on reading their (archived) comments, I agree that they are likely not ODS).
The denouement was “not great, not terrible.” Spammed by anonymous emails and Star Gazer on X, the Vitalia Telegram chats were ablaze with discussions about my RationalWiki article on the eve of the conference. Anzinger supported me going ahead, as did the organizer of the AI conference, a Jewish woman, who demanded I go ahead so as to deny the Wokes a victory. I am very grateful to them for that. However, some of the other organizers had concerns over the potential PR fallout. The final choice was left up to me, and I decided to voluntarily pull out in order to prevent this from overshadowing the conference, and to minimize the risks of an extreme scandal such as the LCI 2017 that I knew ODS was theoretically capable of generating. Besides, I was rather burned out at this point, to be frank, and wanted to get away from it all. I spent most of the next week at the beach.
The compromise we subsequently settled on was for me to give a longer version of my speech as its own event, which I duly did on February 29. I posted the video as a link in my “The Biosingularity is Near” article on March 30. A London-based IP updated the Vitalia article just a couple of hours later16.
Such harassment continues to the present day. On February 1, 2025, a “David Joe” who is definitely a real person (Do You Believe That?) sent a Proton email to a conference which had added me as a speaker to its website just a few days prior. It bore all the classic ODS obsessions - “outspoken racist, fascist and white supremacist who until a few years ago used to blog at the anti-Semitic website The Unz Review” alongside screenshots from the Okechukwu flame wars from many years ago. I am not going to name this conference because it is still ongoing, and I do not wish to draw any unwelcome attention to it. But for what it’s worth, this was the final straw that spurred me to organize my material on ODS and write this article. If ODS is unhappy about it, I suppose he is free to complain about it to “David Joe”.
Interview with a Stalker
On January 30, 2024, I received an unsolicited message from ODS at Humanities Commons a week after my complaint to them. There followed an extended “conversation” of sorts that lasted until March 20, when ODS blocked me over my refusals to entertain his denials that he had stopped writing about hereditarians at RationalWiki after 2019. This block came in the midst of me replying to him, so I continued the discussion by email. This would last until August 10, when he blocked me again, but not before capping it off with an attempt at blackmail. More on that later. More immediately, a question one might ask: Why would I engage with someone I claim to be a stalker and harasser in the first place?
My motivations for continuing the conversation were cynical and self-interested. First, I wanted to accumulate a large body of text that was verifiably written by ODS, which could subsequently be linked to his RationalWiki and other online aliases. Second, I was aware that ODS’ opsec is often slipshod, and that there was a good chance that he would drop breadcrumbs connecting him to the socks he so strenuously denies any association with. (This was not a risk for me, since I have been posting under my own name since I began blogging in 2008 and have only ever had one public account on both RationalWiki and Wikipedia17).
As it happens, this worked out: I obtained an original piece of linguistic evidence that the account “Johns” is closely linked to ODS, corroborating the work done at Ghost of Lomax on establishing that connection (he is now “Oldman4” at RationalWiki; and is also “Veg_Historian”, prev. “Psychologist Guy” on Wikipedia). And ironically, it was ODS’ hapless (and failed) blackmail attempt that would allow me to incontrovertibly link him to “Anti-eugenicist” beyond just citing the usual ODS obsessions in the Contributions history. This is significant, because these two accounts are responsible for more than 50% of all the edits to my RationalWiki page by individual edits, and also appear to have contributed a disproportionate share of all the edits to hereditarians’ RationalWiki pages after 2022. I will discuss these two aliases in subsequent sections.
Finally, some of my acquaintances have expressed puzzlement that I would engage in an extended discourse with a “sadistic monster” and other unkindly epithets. As I have already mentioned, I am in principle OK with interacting with all kinds of different people. ODS has intruded on my life to a comedic degree, so even “practical” considerations aside, trying to understand what makes him tick is something I am just intellectually curious about, in addition to anything else. I think I acquired a pretty good understand of ODS’ ideology, which is far more idiosyncratic than what almost any of his critics give him credit for, and I will comment on that as well.
For his part, ODS too was trying to suss out information about his current targets of interest - I was not the only one trying to play this game. In particular, during mid-2024, he was very interested in trying to gather information about his prime nemesis Kirkegaard, as well as Aporia, Matthew Archer, and Jonathan Anomaly. (Naturally, I didn’t tell him anything beyond what was already in the public domain, which I think annoyed him and eventually led him to break off communications). I don’t know if anything came out of this research effort, but I will note that the big Guardian/Hope Not Hate joint investigation that doxxed Kirkegaard’s HDF research division and other entities was published in October 2024. Was there any interaction between ODS and investigative journalist Harry Shukman? No idea - but it’s a curious coincidence. (And I will note that “Johns”, a suspected ODS meatpuppet, would subsequently play the primary role in transcribing this material to Wikipedia and RationalWiki as “Veg_Historian” and “Oldman4”, respectively). Otherwise, while I have my views on on the subjects of Shukman’s investigation, I will not publicly comment on non-criminal entities exposed through unethical (hidden cameras) and possibly criminal (fake passports) methods.
In the course of our conversation, ODS would also send me kompromat on his many bugbears alongside claims that they were back-talking and plotting against each other. (Obviously I’m not going to publicize any of this, since his agenda to seed paranoia and mistrust was self-evident; and in any case I have been able to confirm that multiple such allegations were confabulations). Otherwise, a large percentage of our conversation concerned ODS’ complaints about Kirkegaard and the status of his cases against him; more complaints about the “harassment” he was supposedly experiencing from Cancel Watch and Kirkegaard, and my complicity in it through my repetition of Kirkegaard’s “lies” which were driven by “delusions” about his sockpuppet accounts; and musings out loud about the practicalities and timelines of launching his own case against me. I will not bore you with the tedious details of the Kirkegard drama; my own eyes glaze over when I review it, and if there is a story to be written about it, I am not the one to do it.
The “harassment” allegations didn’t seem particularly credible or noteworthy, though one event that ODS claims took place raises some concerns. In April 23, he alleged that he had called the police in response to someone sending “~20 letters in the post with an old photo of myself with false and malicious allegations to my neighbours and one through my door.” He claimed that the sender location was Kuopio, Finland, and speculated whether Edward Dutton could have been behind it (“and likely Kirkegaard is pulling his strings”). I assume this was a confabulation and an attempt to gaslight me into feeling bad about complaining about a “webpage article I haven't edited in years” while ODS himself has “deranged people sending malicious letters to my neighbours and hate mail to my door while setting up entire blogs to defame me.” (ODS has literally set up blogs to defame Kirkegaard in the past). I suppose there is some chance that this was a real event, since it’s not like ODS hasn’t given many people cause to strongly dislike him over the years. However, another possibility could be that he is tentatively experimenting with taking his peculiar hobby from cyberspace into meatspace. This would be a dangerous development, considering the lengths he has gone to online, and I would suggest his most prominent targets keep this possibility in mind when visiting the UK.
As regards the “harassment” that ODS claims I subject him to, it comes in the form of my Official Response webpage. It briefly describes ODS’ extensive and well-documented history of online spats and the circumstances under which I became one of his targets, and then provides short responses to the most prominent, damaging, and libellous allegations about me at RationalWiki (as I noted, trying to be comprehensive is a waste of time since it’s constantly edited). He has often demanded that I delete or edit it to his satisfaction over the years. Personally, I don’t think highlighting the role of the individual who has played a central role in creating and editing my RationalWiki page, which dominates Google search results for my name and gets spammed to organizers and other invitees of events I am discovered to be speaking at by ODS or accounts that write exactly like him, constitutes “harassment”. Believe me, I have no end of other things I would rather be doing, from writing my blog to huffing glue. But what exactly does ODS expect me to do - remain passive as he snipes at me from his basement while gaslighting me about his lack of involvement? Even as it flashes across my computer screen while I compose my next reply email to him?
Johns vs. GloboHomo
The user “Johns” was a prolific editor at RationalWiki, creating many new articles on hereditarians (since the start of 2024: Fleischman, Pallesen, Dunkel, Warne, Lasker, Aporia) and obsessively edited existing articles on ODS’ bugbears (e.g. he is responsible for 127 of the current 958 edits on my article as of April 25, 2025). On October 15, 2024, he had his username changed to “Psychologist Guy”, acknowledging the open secret that he was also the same individual under the same name at Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, “Psychologist Guy” edits mostly, but not exclusively, on the history of veganism; the exceptions are instructive, in so far as they are almost all attacks on Kirkegaard and people linked to him, such as Willoughby, Carl, and myself. Immediately following the publication of Ghost of Lomax’s expository article about him, on January 13, 2025, he renamed “Psychologist Guy” to “Oldman4” on RationalWiki and and to “Veg_Historian” at Wikipedia in what is clearly an attempt to cover his tracks.
Hope you managed to keep track. But no worries; I will primarily refer to him here as “Johns” for convenience.
Supplementary Material #4
The Ghost of Lomax article The Smith v. Substack Saga has a large writeup about the many links between Johns and ODS:
The Darryl Affair. ODS has a verified record of maintaining a consistent fake persona. Most notably, he did this with a twin brother called “Darryl” over many years, and even boasted about this feat in 2019: “You have a better chance of fooling admins if you only minor overlap editing articles on sockpuppets, so to pretend to be different individuals with distinct interests and editing behaviours. That’s precisely what I’ve done for all these years.”
The Obsession with Kirkegaard, ISIR, and Hereditarians: This includes the recent successful laundering of the usual “child porn activism” libels into Wikipedia through a hit piece in an obscure Wyoming newspaper called the Cowboy State Weekly. Incidentally, I can reveal that hit piece was later cited by one “Ben Knowles” in a complaint letter about Kirkegaard to the organizers of ISIR 2024 at ETH Zurich. Recall that a Justice Knowles had presided over Kirkegaard v. Smith 2019. I duly note the sadism implicit in this name choice.
Johns’ Anomaly. While rewriting bio/acc philosopher Jonathan Anomaly’s article under his own account and two Mexico City-based VPNs, another individual accessed Anomaly’s PhilPapers account from an IP that traces to Watford, the English town where ODS lives.
Sundry Circumstantial Evidence. Other evidence includes administrative actions at RationalWiki in support of ODS’ interests; taking credit for over 200 RationalWiki articles despite authoring only 60 under his own account; taking credit for VPN IPs that divulged legal information only OSD could have known at the time; and employment history incongruences between the RationalWiki and Wikipedia accounts. (The latter happened at a public discussion in which an IP account selectively leaked my emails with ODS - just in case any readers were wondering about the “ethics” of me making a conversation with my stalker public).
Weaponized Wikis. He engages in extensive “false flag” sockpuppetry, holds a huge degree of sway with Wikipedia administrators, and demonstrably uses it to get his critics banned.
You can read a more detailed summary here → The Johns Factor.
I will return to “Johns” later. But for now, allow me a digression into the history of my interactions with RationalWiki; it’s relevance will become clear.
I was originally blocked from RationalWiki in September 2019 by “GrammarCommie” after being prevented from linking a Twitter rebuttal to my own profile after a big update from “Sparta7” (banned as ODS), and then accused of using “ProVegan” as a sockpuppet to make edits (incidentally, the original accusation came from “Inthecavee”, subsequently banned as an “Aeschylus”/ODS sock). There was an appeal to unban me in which I did not participate, but that quickly went by the wayside when sockpuppets with names such as “Dumbass_Nazi_Cringe”, “King_Karlin”, “Based_Karlin”, “TsarKarlin”, etc. started spamming my article and Arthur Kerensa (“EK”) confirmed the ban. I did not bother disputing it at the time.
Following the Vitalia misadventures in early 2024, I realized that ODS/RationalWiki would be a perennial problem and that it would probably be a good idea to do something about it. On April 14, 2024, I wrote an email to Principal Officer of RationalMedia Foundation (RMF) Trent Toulouse requesting the removal of my RationalWiki article on the basis of its inaccuracies and its origins in a personal vendetta. Toulouse claimed that he had “no control over the editorial content of RW” and was “not even on the board anymore.” (The RMF’s own Board of Trustees webpage, not to mention the recent lawsuits, all beg to differ). I then launched an appeal against my ban on RationalWiki’s Discord on April 19, 2024.
Readers interested in the fine details of the case are free to read through the relevant All Things in Moderation (ATIM), which eventually voted 11-1 to affirm the ban “once and for all”, as well as my final comments at my User Talk page before I was banned from there as well. To be clear, at no point did I expect this to actually work; I assessed the chances of my ban getting lifted as very slight, and of my article subsequently getting removed as essentially zero. My main goal was to formally tick off all of RationalWiki’s own rules and regulations about contesting articles in preparation for potential legal action sometime in the future, and that I accomplished. This also ruled out any further “civic” interactions with RationalWiki. I had gone through all the proper procedures, and my only reward was to have gotten my ban confirmed after a dog and pony show of a process, with RationalWiki admin Bongolian adding another 7,000 characters to my article to “thank” me for my temerity in appealing. Logically, any subsequent efforts to appeal through the website would be met with an automatic ban, since creating any new accounts would be treated as sockpuppetry and constitute ban evasion by default.
The account most active in campaigning for a total ban was none other than Johns, who barged in with bizarre and unsubstantiated claims (e.g. that I was “heavily associated with Aporia” - at that time, and even today, I had yet to write a single article for them). He ranted about my drug addictions, claiming that “glue sniffing used to be popular with skinheads and punks in London around 1982-1986, I remember seeing them” (notably, ODS too is obsessed with my long list of drug addictions, taking my shitposts along the lines of “I suffer from glue addiction” and “copious daily glue huffing” to be literal - the words “drugs”, “glue”, and “LSD” are referenced multiple times in my RationalWiki article). He also claimed that I was responsible for a campaign of harassment against vegans and had been been “blocked hundreds of times” on Wikipedia. Incidentally, at the same time, there appeared a horde of sockpuppets with names such as “Nooceleration” (the name of my blog at the time) and “Pintvonmilch” which made nonsensical troll edits to the Aporia article at RationalWiki (why I would create sockpuppets obviously linked to myself and then use them to edit articles I don’t have reason to care much about, as opposed to my own, doesn’t appear to have independently occurred to the ATIM participants). Exactly as in 2019, this would constitute the formal basis for denying my appeal, with RationalWiki admin Bongolian commenting, “Yes, I have looked more carefully at the edits on Aporia, and I agree that Pintvonmilch is likely Karlin (timing + nature of edits). I'll reblock. The socking also puts an end to and end to Karlin's appeal on his own account bein unblocked.”
This “false flag” sockpuppetry extended to Wikipedia. Unbeknown to me at the time, a Sockpuppetry Investigation (SPI) had been instigated against my sole and almost completely inactive Wikipedia account “SublimeWik” on December 28, 2022 over a series of accounts with names such as “PowerfulTakes”, “AnatolyKarlin88”, and “Anatoly Karlin Powerful Takes” that had indeed spammed Wikipedia’s articles on red meat, the ethics of eating meat, and Noah Carl (!?) with anti-vegan trolling. I had nothing to do with this. Nonetheless, it’s interesting that on April 21, the user “IntoThinAir” - who was also the author of The Unz Review article at Wikipedia - connected these accounts to SublimeWik on the basis that its userpage “clearly states that he is Anatoly Karlin, so I don't see how it could be clearer that this is yet another of his sock accounts.” (Impeccable logic). On the same day, I replied with a denial of these claims. Soon after, Psychologist Guy barged in, repeating the deranged accusations that Johns was concurrently making at RationalWiki about my extensive White Nationalist past and anti-vegan vendetta. This was surreal. I have a verifiable history of support for animal rights and lab grown meat, and a search of my X account will reveal ~10 mentions of “vegan” over ~16 years/80,000 Tweets (four negative, two positive, most neutral); one mention on Reddit; etc. Veganism is not something I was ever much interested in one way or the other. However, it is a well-known ODS tactic to blow up some isolated comment or shitpost to portray his target as a zealot/obsessive on bizarre niche issues. Though Psychologist Guy failed to make any progress in banning me through the SPI, he did cite it back at RationalWiki to reinforce the case for confirming my ban. On April 22, he committed another petty act of retaliation - creating a redirect for my name to the Wikipedia article on The Unz Review.
On February 13, 2025 this episode received an unexpected development when this “Anatoly Karlin → The Unz Review#Writers” redirect was opened up to debate. Naturally, Veg_Historian!Johns appeared first to argue to keep it, citing the usual anti-Semitism/Richard Spencer talking points, and I chimed in slightly later to argue in favor of deletion on the basis that Veg_Historian has a vendetta against me and was the editor who had created the redirect in the first place. As it happens, the “Keep” vote won, and I was completely banned from Wikipedia for having linked to the Ghost of Lomax essay connecting Veg_Historian to Johns at The Unz Review’s Talk page, which was qualified as “off-site harassment”. Though at least I did get an acknowledgement in the ANI that Veg_Historian’s claims of one-sided harassment are dubious in light of him having authored my redirect, and a Wikipedia mod’s observation that he had edited my biography on RationalWiki, which “is an egregious attack page (as many of their biographies are) that would be swiftly deleted if it were ever created here.”
The other silver lining is that my post-2022 unironic commitment to GloboHomo - the vision of Open Borders, LGBTQ+ parades, and unfettered superglobalism - finally paid dividends. On the ATIM to unban me at RationalWiki, Johns called it “globalhomo” on April 21. However, in our email discussions just a month earlier on March 20, ODS had referred to it as “global homo”, which he claimed I was promoting and “posting what looked like BSDM porn and commenting about furries.” (I am not sure where the BDSM stuff came from, but yes, I do view furries as aristocrats of Elite Human Capital). “I don't think you have any self-awareness of what you look like to random people looking at you but you look like a total nutcase. In contrast, despite my social phobias, I am pretty much normal and my social media presence and website shows that,” ODS concluded.
“Sloppy, Ollie boy!” I told him. He replied that “globalhomo” is a “common spelling mistake/variation”, citing two examples that I assume he got from a spelling-specific web search. But that’s nonsense. The original Roissy/Chateau Heartiste concept was “GloboHomo”. Google suggests “GloboHomo” as the correct alternative. Wikipedia has it as a redirect to its page on “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory”. Google Trends indicates “GloboHomo” is 100x+ more common than “globalhomo” in searches. Even regarding the two websites he linked to in order to argue his point, The Motte and my akarlin.com website, both have exactly one hit on “globalhomo” and many dozens of hits on “GloboHomo.” It is diminishingly unlikely that both ODS and Johns - individuals who are both quite familiar with the Alt Right lexicon - could have independently made this linguistic mistake.
Despite the volume of evidence, one of the problems with Johns = ODS is that Johns, unlike his other socks, has an elaborate biography and personal history; a man in his 50s who lives in or near Brighton and chronicles minor figures in the vegan movement in hundreds of articles at Wikipedia in between harassing carnivores and hereditarians. Although this doesn’t exclude a Darryl 2.0 situation, there soon appeared another strike against this theory. On January 17, 2025, RationalWiki regular GeeJayK confirmed that Oldman4!Johns isn’t ODS after a Discord interview. Furthermore, Oldman4!Johns has publicly offered to meet up with a RationalWiki Trustee in person and even with Ghost of Lomax or “any HDF employee” at a Starbucks in Brighton, London, or Oxford. Consequently, the existence of a middle-aged Johns with (reportedly) head hair and a beard is incontrovertible.
However, I likewise think it is very likely that ODS and Johns do more that just “sometimes talk to each other”, as GeeJayK describes it. The convergence of evidence from Ghost of Lomax (esp. Watford IP), myself (“globalhomo”), the parallel anti-hereditarian obsessions, and mutual penchant for impersonation and sockpuppetry all point to a much closer connection. I think it is very likely that Johns is at least a meatpuppet of ODS, aiding him with his peculiar hobby in between pursuing his own veganist interests; and while “Johns” most definitely does exist as a real person, even a direct sockpuppetry relationship in which he trusts ODS enough to share his account with him is possible, if unlikely.18
In our emails, ODS claimed that Johns is a “vegan activist who dislikes your 'cognitive animal ethics' (because it only excludes eating pork) and writings on paleo-diet”. I submit that this is an extraordinarily strange reason to hate someone with the vitriol he reserves for me. I am not an anti-vegan activist, and my interest in “paleo” was likewise modest and temporary19. The reference to “cognitive animal ethics” refers to my article on animal rights, which argues that capacity for suffering is correlated to cognitive complexity and made a minor splash in the EA community when it was published in 2019. I allow that an earnest vegan might disagree and even be repulsed by it if they believe that a 100,000 neuron lobster suffers just as much as a 2 billion neuron domestic pig. However, there are many influencers with 100-1000x the reach that I have, such as Jordan B. Peterson and his daughter, who propound outright carnivorism, and much more actively than I ever opined on food/diet-related matters. I have also always been in favor of lab grown meat, while conservatives such as Ron Desantis and Giorgia Meloni ban it within their jurisdictions, something which I have repeatedly condemned (unlike ODS himself, who is de facto aligned with them because he opposes lab-grown meat). The notion that Johns keeps going out of his way to create difficulties for me on account of my views on veganism/paleo even though I’m closer to veganist ideals than perhaps 70-80% of the US population is bizarre.
Personally, I think Johns summarized his real motivations much more honestly in this post at Bongolian’s Talk page on May 27, 2024:
Jonathan Anomaly/Matthew Archer/Emil Kirkegaard/Edward Dutton/George Francis/Jordan Lasker/Woodley Menie/Anatoly Karlin/Bronze Age Pervert are all racist pricks who will do anything to try and get their articles deleted including sending all kinds of email threats, blackmail or fake money agreements to take their articles down. I am not sure why you side with many of these extremists behind the scenes, they have back-chatted you on discord. You are on the wrong side, wasting your time defending these individuals. Why not use your account to debunk these guys pseudoscience and racist shite? Jordan Lasker for example needs an article as does Jonatan Pallesen. You can get a nice article created for these racist individuals and within a few weeks and it is the top Google search for their name. That puts a nice little smile on my face :)
Emil Kirkegaard wants to legalize cp and enjoys eating dog meat, I am not sure why you go out of your way to defend that guy. A very unethical individual. He doesn't have nice things to say about you. The best thing to do is to keep editing here and debunk these guys. They are not pleasant individuals! Anyone can use an IP here and edit. Let's not get in the way of progress. I feel good about editing here as do many other editors. Kirkegaard and his cult lose! Their pages will never come down. They will probably still be online in 2035.
I don’t know which of them wrote it. However, I’m not really sure it makes a difference, because my observation that the “primary driving motive isn’t so much ideology as pure sadism” remains relevant regardless.
Anti-Eugenicist vs. White Sharia
My exchange of beautiful letters with ODS came to an abrupt end on August 10, 2024.
In his last messages, ODS claimed to have found the “most extreme posts that even RationalWiki did not cover” and threatened to publish them and “document who [I am]” if I continued my “smear campaign” against him. “Your digital footprint is even more extreme than what RationalWiki even covered. You literally support the most hardline WN stuff including misogynistic white sharia.”
I don’t recall posting anything to set him off so, so I assume that either ODS lost hope in getting any juicy morsels from me about his bugbears, and/or he was planning a new round of anti-hereditarian edits regardless, and this was his excuse to go back on the warpath.
On September 24, user page “Anti-eugenicist” was created.
On its To Do List from Day One: “Elite Human Capital”, the meme developed by myself and Richard Hanania.
On September 26, Anti-eugenicist started the longest editing streak on my article to date. It is responsible for 375 out of its 958 edits as of April 25, 2025, or three times more than runner-up Johns. I haven’t run the numbers on other hereditarian accounts, but it’s pretty clear that Anti-eugenicist was the primary ODS alias writing and editing articles on hereditarians from late September to the account’s retirement in late December 2024. New or majorly updated pages included all the classic ODS hits: Matthew Archer, HDF, Emil Kirkegaard, Jordan Lasker, Jonathan Anomaly, Aporia, Natal Conference, Bryan Pesta, Diana Fleischman, and “Elite Human Capital”.
One of the earliest insertions was my supposed endorsement of “Anglin's patriarchal and misogynistic white sharia” in October 11, 2017:
Ironically, pretty much the only guy who gets it right is Andrew Anglin – go hard on White Sharia (or don’t bother at all).
I am actually very happy that ODS followed through on his threat for two reasons.
First, this allows me to incontrovertibly link ODS to Anti-eugenicist. He made an attempt to blackmail me on August 10 by threatening the publication of a compromising quote, specifying in writing the quote in question, and then followed through with it just four days after creating his new alias on September 24.
In the interests of journalistic formality, I did send an email to ODS on April 21, 2025 offering him to comment on whether Anti-eugenicist is his alias. This was his response on April 22:
I've not edited RationalWiki since 2020. It's not worth me typing a huge refutation about that account (which looks inactive for the past 5 months anyway) since it will be ignored as was Oldman4.
The reader is free to draw their own conclusions on what this implies with respect to ODS’ many other denials.
The second reason I am happy is that my positions are and were the precise opposite of White Sharia. This means two things. First, that this individual is able to go on RationalWiki, interpret isolated sentences I wrote anyhow he wants, and then have any such libels no matter how divorced from reality stand for months or years without correction, without me having even the theoretical ability to complain about them in light of my ban and the RMF’s unresponsiveness. Second, I literally never championed or endorsed White Sharia or anything remotely similar, and the very notion is absurd in light of the fact that say I was advocating ARTIFICIAL WOMBS which are a concept about as distant from “White Sharia” as it’s possible to get (e.g. see this post from April 2017).
Now to be sure, addressing some RationalWiki allegations is somewhat complicated. At the end of the day, I did meet Richard Spencer, even if just once and with no subsequent joint projects; and I did call an anonymous commenter ethnic slurs, even if it was in the context of flame wars in which he engaged in an analogous manner. Explaining these cherry-picked events requires tedious research to evidence the mitigating circumstances to a potentially skeptical audience.
But here it’s really simple.
My comment was in response to a commenter who observed that the international dysgenics statistics I had posted reflected best on Social Democratic welfare states such as Sweden, Canada, and Germany. Since “going hard” on White Sharia isn’t a practical policy, the logical implication of my comment is that I was endorsing the Nordic family model over the social conservatism that right-wingers often champion as a solution to declining total fertility rates (TFR).
I searched for other posts mentioning “White Sharia” during that meme’s heyday in the late 2010s. In a January 2019 post looking at child penalties across countries, I commented, “If you want to solve the fertility problem – it’s either the Scandinavian Model, or White Sharia. No in betweens. Mainstream social conservatism is a failure, as it is in most things. White Sharia isn’t politically feasible, so that really leaves just the former.” In a July 2019 post titled “What the Nordics Get Right” I note that “Nordics are the only major world region where fertility rates amongst women are not dysgenic.” In my November 2019 post Top 25 Cool Demographics Facts - check it out, it’s one of my most popular posts ever - I wrote, “Normiecons won’t like this, but generous parental leave & child support appear to be far better than banning abortion & social conservatism so far as promoting higher fertility and disincentivizing dysgenic reproduction patterns goes in First World countries.” Nothing on social media either20. Where is the White Sharia?
The grain of truth in ODS’ reading: I do often imply that were it to be implemented, then something like “White Sharia” would raise TFRs. I think that’s trivially true. It’s well known in demographics that female education is the single best predictor of TFR. Mere social conservatism doesn’t make an iota of difference, and may actually suppress it, as in South Korea and Poland. You have to get the women even out of the schools, Taliban-style. (Indeed, my wild guess is that Afghanistan might end up with the world’s highest TFR in another decade, if the Taliban remains hardline while the likes of Niger socially modernize). Obviously, I consider this politically unfeasible in modern developed societies, and would would oppose it even if it wasn’t. (For instance, unlike the Alt Right, I was always anti-Taliban and labeled them an “unambiguously vile entity”). Hence, my endorsement of the Nordic family model during that era21.
ODS Thought: “Copulation is Abominable, For It Multiplies the Number of Men”
Conventional opinion in ODS Studies interprets his political journey within the framework of “horseshoe theory” - the notion that, at some point, ideological extremes stop diverging, and start converging back into each other. This is the approach adopted by the City Journal article, which describes ODS as a “cancel-culture troll” and characterizes his transition as being from “far-right to the far-left - from one fanaticism to another”. An earlier study by Lance Welton (pseudonym) from 2019 at the now defunct Far Right journal VDARE described ODS as an “SJW” before submitting him to armchair psychoanalysis and more pseudoscientific musings about “spiteful mutants” and their purported role in the “[destruction of] Western civilization”.
The idea that ODS’ behaviors are simply the result of mental illness is the other major strand in ODS Studies. There is likely some degree of truth to this. Kirkegaard and others have documented ODS’ extensive comments about his mental issues over the years (and alternating denials of such). However, I do not think this is a particularly useful or enlightening frame. Regardless of the armchair psychoanalysis, ODS is clearly a “functioning” individual, at least with respect to his peculiar hobby. Furthermore, there has been a baleful trend in recent decades of bad actors exploiting society’s increased empathy and compassion for mental health sufferers - an otherwise laudable moral development - as cover for their own lucidly intentioned psychopathic behavior. I do not think there is any need to search out longer words for “sadism”.
However, this does not imply that ideology plays no role as a driver of ODS’ activism, and here the truth is stranger than the hereditarians’ fiction. Although I once bought into the Far Right-to-SJW horseshoe frame, after my extensive discussions with ODS in 2024, I no longer do so. Caricatures are comforting and familiar, but accuracy is more important, and what I learned from my interactions with ODS in 2024 is that his current ideology retains strong threads of continuity with his English identitarian past, has scant alignment with broader Far Left culture as we know it, and is otherwise too idiosyncratic for easy categorization22.
Supplementary Material #5
This political/ideological “debate” was entirely segregated from the rest of our 2024 discussion (ODS on EOK’s court case, denials of being Johns, etc.). If you have concerns about selective editing or misrepresentations on my part, it is reproduced in full at my website, with no additional editing → ODS Thought.
The most important strand in ODS’ personal philosophy appears to be misanthropic anti-natalism. It loads on his concerns about overpopulation, global warming, and animal (especially insect) suffering, and translates into antipathy towards anything natalism-aligned, such as eugenics and life extension, as well mass immigration (!) and AI. I suspect this also lies at the roots of his outspoken asexuality. In one of his short stories, Borges invented the Gnostic aphorism that “mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind”, and it seems to me that this is the principle by which ODS seeks to live.
ODS believes that humans cause “an immense amount of suffering to non-human animals and environmental degradation” which in turn “invalidates your arguments for human life extension, artificial wombs/synthetic embryos (natalist biotech) and your eugenic arguments for human intelligence enhancement and embryo selection.” In response to my objection that smarter humans would be better placed to solve all kinds of problems, including animal suffering - “or are predator animals and parasitic organisms supposed to just stop inflicting suffering by themselves?” - ODS moots the concept of “wildlife anti-natalism”. However, he insists that there’s “no point” in discussing this issue with people who aren’t even anti-natalists themselves. Since humans cause “immensly more” suffering than wild animals, it is much more important to embrace voluntary childlessness than to try to “implement anti-natalism in the wild.”
Anti-natalism is so central to ODS’ worldview that he saw “no difference” between voting for Biden or Trump in the 2024 US elections:
The choice in the presidential US election is a man with 4 children and 7 grandchildren and a man with 5 children and 10 grandchildren.
Both Trump and Biden are committed to pro-natalism and population growth.
That’s the only issue that matters to me and why I see them as bad as each other. And seeming as no politician ever talks about overpopulation/population growth, I take no interest in politics and haven’t done in the past decade.
This also explains his opposition to mass immigration, which remained constant even as his ideological rationale flipped from English identitarianism to anti-natalism/degrowth ideology around 2013/14. In particular, it is net immigration that he is concerned about; he doesn’t actually mind if 400,000 people enter the UK in a year, so long as at least 400,000 exit. This is because a developed country like the UK has much higher carbon emissions than the world at large, so increasing its population is much worse than, say, Nigeria’s. He even endorses Steve Sailer’s argument against immigration based on climate concerns: “If immigrants from poor countries successfully assimilate to American norms of earning and consuming, they, and their descendents, will emit vastly more carbon than if they stayed home.” However, in his view, Sailer is inconsistent and hypocritical for having children regardless, because “in terms of CO2 emissions, procreating is the most environmentally destructive thing you can do.”
He then suggests that I am blind to such arguments because I “deny overpopulation, have AGW conspiracy theorist views (impact denialism) and seem to have no understanding of ecological overshoot.” The latter is incorrect - I am very familiar with the “overshoot” literature, binging on “oil peak” and AGW related books, reviewing Limits to Growth, and even briefly subscribing to this worldview around 2010. (I soon dropped it as I became aware of their technopessimistic assumptions and chequered predictive record). My RationalWiki absurdly describes me as a “climate change denier” when by that standard - arguing that AGW will have positive as well as negative impacts - the New York Times would likewise fit that description for writing about how Russia is benefiting from climate change. ODS is broadly correct that I am a “human overpopulation denier” - I think Earth can support ~100 billion humans at current technological levels. This might or might not be accurate; there is no consensus on this question amongst scientists or economists. As such, ODS’ contention that this puts me “in the same boat as flat-earthers and creationists” seems rather kookish itself.
ODS claims to practice a vegan diet, but laments that “insects are killed in huge numbers” in all food production. “Insects are my main concern,” he avers. He claims “little interest” in debating what people eat, noting that a “vegan with children is causing more harm than a childless person who eats meat”. One might think ODS would be a proponent of lab-grown meat. However, that is not the case; he supports banning it, alongside factory farming and the whole meat industry, on account of its “huge” carbon emissions. (I suspect this opposition may be rooted less in ideology and more in the same overdeveloped disgust reflex that drives his asexuality and opposition to drugs/alcohol: “Regardless of moral arguments, there’s the “icky” factor and for that same reason, lab grown meat, like meat, to me is disgusting; on par with road kill or even cannibalism.”) Responding to my observation this opposition to lab-grown meat de facto puts him in the same boat as hard right politicians like Desantis and Meloni, he claimed that it is actually I who am aligned with them on account of my “overpopulation denial”, though he admits that this also describes “pretty much the entire political spectrum” which is “committed to population and economic growth.”
ODS opposes AI, not because of any alignment/control concerns - he states that I am “likely wrong” on AGI by 2030, noting that it is “probably decades away” - but because training AI models is “incredibly energy intensive and unsustainable”, consumes “huge amounts of freshwater which is scarce”, and will accelerate global warming and natural resource depletion.
Finally, ODS is extremely anti-hereditarian. In the earlier conversation at Humanities Commons, he claims they were his main targets at RationalWiki in 2016-2019 (after climate change denialists in 2012-2015), and alleges that my “pro-eugenics/hereditarianism views” strongly imply that my supposed shift to “left-wing identity politics” is “cosmetic”. Indeed, I think ODS simply considers accepting “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” (Gottfredson 1994) automatically qualifies one as Far Right, no matter how leftist or liberal their other positions are. He claims to have regularly warred with hereditarians even a decade ago as a Metapedia editor, criticizing “cranks” such as Richard Lynn, and states he is “not aware of any far-right anti-hereditarians.”
I think such views range from mistaken to “not even wrong”. The Nazis had hostile attitudes towards intelligence research on account of Jewish overperformance23. Accepting this worldview implies anti-hereditarian Far Rightists such as Alexander Dugin, Alain de Benoist, or Rod Dreher are less extreme than liberal hereditarians such as Steven Pinker, Nick Bostrom, or Scott Alexander (those who know, know). At another point, ODS states that he opposes reproductive incest not on the basis of eugenics - “I am anti-eugenics” - but on account of his anti-natalism. This is why Diana Fleischman’s argument - that everyone practices eugenics to some degree in their personal lives - doesn’t apply to “anti-natalists who oppose all human reproduction but for non-eugenic reasons”. “Anti-natalism is the only consistent anti-eugenics position and eugenics is inherently pro-natalist,” ODS concludes.
Even though I transitioned from being anti-mass immigration in 2015-2022 (partially based on nativist-populist aesthetics, but mostly driven by average national IQ considerations) to pro-Open Borders after 2022 (based on the “globalist” realization that the world human capital stock is constant at any given time, that particular geographic distributions don’t particularly matter, and that free markets should allocate labor supply as they should most everything else), in ODS’ world this doesn’t actually mean all that much. Indeed, I allow ODS may well consider HBD/IQ-based arguments against mass immigration into the rich countries to be less morally objectionable than a pro-Open Borders outlook, since they at least result in positive outcomes (reduced carbon emissions) even if for the “wrong” reasons.
Consequently, I actually believe ODS when he denies being into “left-wing identity politics” or Social Justice. On the one hand, he views hereditarianism not as a scientific question, but a moral one, and consigns it and “eugenics” into the Far Right bin no matter how couched and caveated its presentation; and not on account of Leftist or Christian pieties, but because he believes that both load on natalism, which is in turn the biosphere’s greatest source of suffering - a kind of ultra-pessimistic Effective Altruism. This is not to say he doesn’t have classic Far Left views; he notes that my support for repealing hate speech laws, HBD, and “increasing European fertility rates”, usage of “alt-right memes”, and “opposition” to multiculturalism as “indicators of WN/Alt Right affiliation.” (By these standards Republican voters at large would qualify as Alt Right). At the same time, ODS de facto takes the side of very right-wing politicians on lab-grown meat, opposes mass immigration from poor low IQ low carbon emissions countries, and doesn’t even care to make a political distinction between Biden and Trump on the basis that both support population and GDP growth.
I find this a strange and alien worldview. Quite illogical, and self-refuting; propounding natalism is all well and good, but the future “belongs to those who turn up” - how is it sustainable over longer timescales? (Analogous problem with primitivism which degrowtherism naturally tends towards: What to do about foreign nuclear Powers that refuse to drink the Kool-Aid?). I was disappointed to see that ODS doesn’t address such criticisms in his one paper on this topic from 2022, which resembles a college freshman essay on David Benatar’s philosophy in its depth and writing quality. That said, I really do think ODS is genuine in his beliefs. Nothing else can explain the unusual weight he attaches to obscure topics such as natalism, veganism, and “overpopulation denial”, and the misanthropic energy with which he propounds them in his hit pieces. A misanthropy that also expresses itself in its skepticism over the power of intelligence to solve problems - including those problems it claims to care about, such as insect suffering. Finally, needless to say, this is not “normal”. Very, very much not “normal.” Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily; the “eccentric” is a lovable English stock character. But the funniest thing is that its prime proponent is outspoken about affirming his supposed political moderation and how he is “pretty much normal.”
But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that in an ideal world, ODS Thought would be nothing more than one of the ~800 niche and “very online” ideologies currently chronicled at Polcompball Wiki. Instead, this one individual with his schizo-politics is allowed to terrorize the world of intelligence research with the active complicity of RationalWiki. It would be something like if a Posadist ideologue was allowed to terrorize UFO-skeptic astronomers and obstetricians who counselled against water birth. Absurdist satire, but for intelligence researchers, it’s the clown reality.
The Smithery Quantified
Case in point. Even many experts in ODS Studies often don’t quite realize the sheer extent to which the products of the “The Smithery” - the informal term for ODS written or directed material - dominates RationalWiki’s coverage of hereditarians and intelligence researchers.
I compiled some statistics about the 958 edits made to my own article by 85 unique editors as of April 25, 2025:
Accounts known and confirmed to be ODS sockpuppets - “Anti-eugenicist” (see above), as well as “Sparta7”; “Inthecavee” (I assume “Inthecave” is related); “Rellis”; “Brain Galaxy”; “Mysia” (all formally banned as “Aeschylus”/ODS socks) - sum to 48.5% of all edits to my article.
Accounts strongly suspected to be ODS meatpuppets, at a minimum - “Oldman4” i.e. “Johns” (see above) and “SkepticDave” (banned as ODS sock by RationalWiki; also, even ODS acknowledges that this account created my article on his instructions and using his template) - sum to 15.0% of all edits to my article.
Accounts credibly suspected to be ODS sockpuppets - “Shed” (wrote exclusively about me and inserted a 2021 piece by British (actual) Neo-Nazi Colin Liddell that made pedophilic aspersions about me into RationalWiki; this happened two weeks after sus posts to /r/AntifascistsOfReddit and /r/veganarchism, and a month later the same Liddell piece was actively peddled by another Kirkegaard-obsessed account at Kiwi Farms); “Throw” (exclusively edited about me and ODS nemesis Michael Coombs); “Brisson” (edits to Haier, Kirkegaard, Coombs, Willoughby; interactions with another suspected ODS sock “Boar”); “Ernor” (edits to Dutton, Pesta, Kirkegaard, other intelligence researchers); and IP accounts that exclusively edited my article (5.6% of all edits). These sum up to 16.7% of all edits to my article.
Accounts known to be RationalWiki mods - mostly “Bongolian” and “Cosmikdebris” (though I might have missed 2-3 posts); as well as “RationalDude” (acknowledge as legit) and “D”/“Ze” (Arthur Kerensa) - sum up to 11.4% of all edits to my article.
All other accounts sum up to 8.4% of all edits to my article.
Consequently, about 80% of all edits to my article can be assumed to have come from Oliver D. Smith or his meatpuppets.
Only about 12% of edits can be confirmed to have come from legitimate editors who are not banned from RationalWiki since 2019/2020 and who are not targeting me as part of a vendetta that originally stems from my passing description of ODS as a “demented and unusually dedicated stalker” one fine day in 2018. Talk of living up to expectations!
In fairness, I have only closely analyzed edits to my own article. However, I can’t imagine the numbers will be cardinally different for ODS’ other targets in hereditarianism and intelligence research. For all intents and purposes, RationalWiki’s near decade-long libel campaign has been the near exclusive work of one man, and with its administrative complicity, in light of its refusal to enforce his 2019/2020 bans and discourage his usage of their website as his personal revenge site.
The Future of RationalWiki: FAFO?
Beyond the implicit value of bringing more public attention to its malfeasance, there are several reasons why I consider now to be a timely occasion to go public with this article. RationalWiki has been subjected to no less than seven lawsuits for libel/assault/slander since March 202524. Further legal action may be on the horizon. Having entered the “Find Out” stage, its apologists are now trying to spin up a narrative in which RationalWiki are the real victims getting their “free speech” rights suppressed by racists/Neo-Nazis and their oligarch-eugenicist sponsors.
“How many of these shitheads are self-proclaimed "free speech maximalists"?” one user whines.
For a start, I don’t think all of the recent claimants or ODS’ victims in general claim to be free speech maximalists - so that objection is irrelevant so far as they are concerned. Personally, I think I can reasonably claim to qualify, since I have not only defended “politically incorrect” speech on “right-coded” topics such as race/IQ and race/crime discussions for reasons that can be dismissed as self-interested, but “left-coded” ones as well, such as justifying political violence against Trumpists and pro-Palestine activism. However, even free speech maximalists obviously have their limits, classic examples being incitement to imminent lawless action, fraud, perjury, solicitation of a crime, and CSAM.
Extreme libel with no realistic avenue of challenge or redress would be another example. I am not a Christian or social conservative, but they do have this really funny (and relevant) meme in which Smug Atheist Wojak tells them he has nothing but contempt for their beliefs, and acknowledges this argument wouldn’t work on him, but maybe if he used it on them they would do what he wants. Empowered by legacy reputational capital dating to the 2000s when they were defined by their articles debunking creationism - articles that they had themselves largely appropriated from EvoWiki, a wiki whose users despised them as “Trashionalwiki” even then - RationalWiki’s apologists now want to gaslight me into letting them spread libel about me and my friends while permabanning us on drummed up allegations of sockpuppeting whenever we do try to dispute our articles, which they subsequently expand on even further to punish us for our temerity in challenging them.
Even more absurdly, we are supposed to respect RationalWiki’s rights to “freeze peach” when its primary benefactor is not even RationalWiki as such, but a concrete individual who views First Amendment values as “indicators of WN/Alt Right affiliation” and seeks literal jail for his online enemies. Recall that ODS claims to have reported Kirkegaard to the UK Metropolitan Police for Islamophobic “hate speech” in 2018, and that in February 2025, Oldman4!Johns - a prolific RationalWiki contributor, regardless of his precise connection to ODS - stated that he had filed a police report for “harassment” against the owner of the Ghost of Lomax website. Beyond that, he has engaged in a large-scale campaign of fraudulent DMCA takedown requests and vexatious lawsuits to suppress investigations about his activities. The incarnadine cherry on this meringue and cream pie is that he now suing RationalWiki itself! Talk of frogs and scorpions…
Ultimately, exposing the inspiring story of how RationalWiki enabled one man to pursue his peculiar hobby extends beyond the dozens of individuals who have been calumniated without consequences over the years. It is a matter of epistemic justice. We are now in a political environment that seems to have validated Resistance Liberalism’s - and my own! - most histrionic fears about the MAGA Right. The US President is daring the courts to do anything about extraordinary renditions to Bukele’s horror prison, Holocaust deniers go on Rogan, and the HHS is headed by an individual who doesn’t believe in vaccines. I don’t think running interference for the sake of a sadist’s peculiar hobby is a particularly worthwhile use of the Left’s limited remaining political capital, which it otherwise expended on Woke inanities this past decade only to go “Surprise Pikachu!” mode when the real jackboots marched in. Finally, even beyond contemporary political or ideological considerations, these are possibly the last few years before AGI agents overrun the Internet. Just the influence of one ODS has been so baleful that it has to be minutely chronicled for it to be believed - now imagine dozens, thousands, millions of Agent Smiths running rampant across the noosphere.
Let’s hope that better priorities will be pursued this decade.
Important Notice - Article Backups
Please note that Substack may depublish this article if it becomes the subject of active litigation.
In this case, I will seek to republish it in full at: akarlin.com/ods/.
Google is especially savage to me, promoting the RationalWiki attack article to first place on name searches for me while relegating my long-running personal website akarlin.com (thousands of monthly visits) and this karlin.blog (more than 3,000 subscribers) to the second and third pages despite extensive efforts on SEO. This is not a problem on other major search engines such as Bing, Yandex, DDG, or Yahoo - my websites consistently hold the top spots, while RationalWiki is way down - so I suspect negative SEO or specific hostility from Google. But sadly for me, Google remains the only game in town as of 2025.
List of articles ODS has verifiably taken credit for: Emil Kirkegaard, John Fuerst, Heiner Rindermann, Edward Dutton, Aurelio J. Figueredo, Dimitri van der Linden, James Thompson, Noah Carl, Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Jan te Nijenhuis, Fróði Debes, Gerhard Meisenberg, Adam Perkins, Anatoly Karlin, London Conference on Intelligence, International Society for Intelligence Research, OpenPsych pseudojournals.
For instance, here is how Steve Sailer was once described: “Racist, misogynist, white supremacist, anti-Semite, Islamophobe, homophobe, classist, ableist, transphobe, transmisogynist, xenophobe, pseudo-scientist and all-round champion dickhead.” Or take the page about Jamaican-American liberal HBD blogger JayMan: “Like his geek-girl co-conspirator Hbdchick, JayMan is evidence of the horrendous pressures facing vulnerable oppressed communities of color, gender and sexuality under the hegemony of white racist and heterosexist patriarchy. He may be regarded as a prime example of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby victims come to identify with their oppressors and work for causes dear to the oppressors' hate-filled hearts.”
My sarcastic vote against deleting my article in April 2018 has subsequently been used against me. However, the vote was already closing and 1-3 against deletion, so it was a protest vote more than anything else (“The world must be made aware of my insane levels of hate”).
The Tweet from January 11: “If you merely point out [Kirkegaard] supports child rape and is a paedophile (by quoting his OWN words) you will get stalked by him. He's a malicious individual and sick creep.”
The comments at my blog on February 3-4:
(a) “It’s not a right or left issue, but right or wrong: anyone with a moral conscience can see Kirkegaard is a vile human and paedophile.”
(b) “Why are you defending a blatant paedophile?”
(c) “Like I said, it's obvious to anyone, Kirkegaard is a paedophile. This is why all mainstream newspapers described him as either a paedophile-apologist or paedophile.”
Dismissal made Kirkegaard liable for ODS’ legal costs under English law and it appears that he has evaded paying them. I would normally look down on this, and advise the failed litigant to pay up, assuming they had the means to do so. However, considering the sheer extenuating circumstances - years of non-stop harassment whose comments the court did find that to be defamatory (albeit an expression of opinion) - I cannot fault Kirkegaard for not handing over ~£50,000 to an individual who is likely to just “reinvest” it into his peculiar hobby. In 2024, ODS was suing Kirkegaard in contempt proceedings.
See my article “Jail is Programmed For all Rightoids” for a short history of The Unz Review.
Disillusioned US Army vet turned gonzo journalist. As a Latinophile expat in Mexico, Fred Reed was certainly a bee in the bonnet for The Unz Review’s nativist contingent.
Certainly I accept the reality of Jewish overrepresentation in prestige professions, and consider this to be both an interesting and legitimate topic of analysis. However, I have always been clear about primarily ascribing it to high Jewish IQ/verbal ability.
Additionally, I would add that RationalWiki classifies me as an Alt Centrist (amongst other things) alongside Kirkegaard, Nathan Cofnas, Noah Carl, and Richard Hanania, which is not a clustering I would sharply dispute even today.
For readers interested in my “lore” as a Russian nationalist, I will just refer to Russia’s Nationalist Turn (2021) and my subsequent disillusionment with it in The Z of History (2023).
From our communications in 2024: “Yes, that is correct. I have been criticising OOA since the 2000s and created Wu Xinzhi’s Wikipedia article in 2014. … It’s ironic that OOA is supported by both white supremacists like Rushton, Lynn, you and Kirkegaard and very left wing academics like Stephen Jay Gould. Multiregionalism seems to avoid attracting ideologues of the political spectrum.”
Incidentally, the phenotype guessing game HBD.gg that recently took X by storm uses Human Phenotypes material.
For instance, COVID conspiracists, anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers, and Tate fans do not incite any emotional revulsion in me - but I generally expect them to be aggressive and semi-literate Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), which makes discourse with them unproductive.
Soypill Manifesto: “Due to the anti-intellectual nature of right-wing ideology, the notion that transhumanism is “transgenderism” and the “goal of Satanists and Gnostics” and related Duginist drivel was, in retrospect, always going to win out within nationalism’s internal marketplace of ideas.”
“On 29 Feburary 2024, Karlin gave a speech at a Vitalia conference promoting dubious ideas about IQ by far-right eugenicists, white nationalists, and hereditarians including Bo Winegard, Emil Kirkegaard, Michael Woodley and Russell T. Warne.”
My only identities on RationalWiki and Wikipedia are Akarlin and SublimeWik, respectively, and have both always been publicly associated with me.
Linguistic analysis of Veg_Historian’s!Johns articles on Wikipedia and texts verifiably written by ODS may answer this more definitively.
Out of the well more than a thousand blog posts I have written, only four are tagged as “paleo” - the most substantive one is a book review from 2013 - and in any case I have long lost interest in it.
My social media references to White Sharia were exclusively sarcastic in character: “Neo-Nazi convert to Islam murders two Neo-Nazi roommates for disrespecting Islam. Took WHITE SHARIA meme too srsly?” (May 2017); “Kadyrov, practitioner of White Sharia.” (July 2017); Game of White Sharia (Dec 2018); “White sharia as the last stand of implicit American Latino identity” (May 2024).
Rather ironically, I would add that I am less bullish on the Nordic model today than I was several years ago because TFRs there have collapsed just as fast as in the rest of the developed world or even faster, and they are now at the median of the First World rather than its upper tiers. If their model once somewhat worked with respect to natalism, it no longer does. (Though I no longer think that’s even terribly relevant, since fast AI timelines have probably made natalist concerns quite redundant in principle).
There is also minimal intersection with RationalWiki culture, which exists on a spectrum ranging from Antifa militant to /r/SneerClub moderator, with the no less deranged middle being occupied by consummate “It's Mueller Time” Resist Lib archetype Nancy McClernan (“Pinkerite”) complete with her schizo charts linking Trump, Putin, Thiel, Bannon, and the IRA - but for HBD.
“Contradicting common beliefs, National Socialists were opposed to intelligence research (Becker, 1938; Jaensch, 1938): in their view, intelligence research would represent a ‘supremacy of Bourgeoisie spirit’ (Jaensch, 1938, p. 2); intelligence measurement would be an instrument ‘of Jewry’ to ‘fortify its hegemony’ (p. 3); selection in schools according to intelligence would stand for a ‘system of examination of Jewish origin’ (p. 4), especially the concept of intelligence as a ‘one-dimensional dimension’ (p. 3) and ‘one common central factor’ (Becker, 1938, p. 24).” - Cognitive Capitalism (2018) by Heiner Rindermann.
The Seven: Jonathan Anomaly; Russell Warne; Jan te Nijenhuis; Michael Woodley; Jonatan Pallesen; Noah Carl; James Thompson. PDFs available via Isaac King.
What Oliver Smith did is incredibly prestigious 🧲💯🚀
Elite Human Capital at its finest 🧲💯🚀