Oliver D. Smith of CrackpotWiki

By Steve Sailer

07/19/2023

From City Journal:

The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past
A surreal tale of one man’s campaign against an academic field

by David Zimmerman
Jul 07 2023

An online war, led by a British national named Oliver D. Smith, has targeted the field of intelligence research. His campaign, abetted by a user-controlled website’s negligent policies, has led to devastating professional consequences for a number of academics working in this area. Most people are accustomed to online disinformation and cancel culture, but Smith is unique for combining both weapons against his perceived enemies. …

Over the next few years, Smith completed his journey from one end of the ideological continuum to the other. With his Metapedia account now blocked, Smith shifted his focus to creating attack pages at RationalWiki. From 2016 onward, these attacks had a new target: people involved in the field of intelligence research, especially (though not exclusively) if their research included publications about differences between race or sex averages.

In 2019, Smith posted a list of RationalWiki articles that he took credit for creating. These include entries on some of the most prominent figures and groups in the field of intelligence research, such as Jan te Nijenhuis, Dimitri van der Linden, Heiner Rindermann, and the International Society for Intelligence Research, as well as other targets, such as OpenPsych, “pseudojournals,” Emil Kirkegaard, John Fuerst, Noah Carl, Edward Dutton, Aurelio J. Figueredo, James Thompson, Fróði Debes, Gerhard Meisenberg, Adam Perkins, and the London Conference on Intelligence. (A few of these are articles that Smith also has taken credit for under his real name, confirming that he is the person who posted this list.) This is nowhere near a complete list of his articles, as Smith claims to have created “hundreds of articles” at RationalWiki. Other articles created by accounts that RationalWiki admins have identified as Smith aliases include the articles about Claire Lehmann, Quillette, Peter Frost, Bo Winegard, and Jonathan Anomaly.

… the off-kilter output of an obsessive user of marginal wiki sites may seem irrelevant. But to laugh at or dismiss it is to ignore the danger that these articles pose to their subjects. Some of Smith’s targets have been early-career scholars who are vulnerable to this type of attack. Others have very little biographical information available about them online outside of Smith’s writings, so these articles are the single strongest influence on their public reputations. In several cases, that influence has led to baleful consequences.

Mainstream journalists tend not to get the joke that RationalWiki is self-evidently mentally unbalanced, just as they never notice that “anti-hate” crusaders SPLC and ADL are obviously hate groups themselves.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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