On August 12th of last year, Oliver D. Smith’s lawsuit against Substack was dismissed by a U.S. court, with the decision upheld in a subsequent ruling on December 11th. This may seem a minor event, but in fact it is of considerable significance for academics who study human intelligence. This article will explain the context of the recent dismissal, why it matters, and what actions should be taken as a result.
Oliver D. Smith is the former neo-Nazi and former Holocaust denier who, in the mid-2010s, abruptly decided to become an enemy of hereditarian intelligence researchers, especially (though not exclusively) if the topics they study include group differences. He is the author of most of the articles at RationalWiki disparaging these researchers, as well as tangentially related people and publications such as Quillette and its founder Claire Lehmann. He initiated the sequence of events that led to two of these academics—Noah Carl and Bo Winegard—being fired from their jobs, and has caused lesser damage to the careers of several others, the most recent example being the behavioral geneticist and illustrator Emily Willoughby. Willoughby’s example is significant because she was attacked for studying the overall genetic basis of intelligence, not for any research about race, and her work has never been controversial within her field. In Willoughby’s case the RationalWiki article about her was eventually deleted, but not before it resulted in her having a professional illustration award revoked after she’d received it.
The article about Smith at Cancel Watch, a Substack devoted to exposing the perpetrators of cancel culture, provides more details about his role in creating controversy around academics, including supporting documentation and links for the preceding summary. A shorter summary article (archived because the original is no longer online) was published in City Journal. Last year Aporia Magazine also published a brief article about RationalWiki, which includes a video discussing who Smith is. One of the main points made by all of these articles is RationalWiki’s extensive prominence and influence, due to Google usually ranking the site’s articles near the top of its search results. This has given Smith a degree of power over others’ careers that he would not otherwise have.
Most of this information is well-known by now, because the article in City Journal received major attention in July of 2023. What is less known is how this situation has developed in the time since then, and the extreme lengths to which Smith has gone in efforts to conceal his responsibility for these actions. This article’s first and second sections describe his efforts to suppress this information about himself, as documented in various public records. A shorter summary of this part of the situation can be found on Christopher Brunet’s Substack.
This article’s third and fourth sections cover Smith’s recent actions at RationalWiki as well as Wikipedia. These include his usage of both websites to promote a statement very similar to one for which he had been sued, his using RationalWiki as a harassment site against those who oppose him at Wikipedia, and the tactics he uses to prevent administrators at both Wikipedia and RationalWiki from recognizing him as a banned user. Section five includes an in-depth examination of how his main account can be identified as him at both Wiki sites. Finally, the sixth section discusses what should be done in response to these recent events.
The reason this article is being published here, on a new Substack with no clear connection to any person’s identity, is Smith’s recent history of aggressive legal actions against people who have written about him. Several journalists with whom we’ve discussed this story acknowledged that it needed to be covered, but were unwilling to cover it themselves because they did not have the time and money to deal with his lawsuits. One online magazine agreed to publish the article, but later changed their minds because its editors were concerned about Smith doxxing them. We also have had similar experiences with several prominent blogs.
As the rest of this article will show, these fears of lawsuits and doxxing are not far-fetched. The history of failed attempts to publish this article, and the fact that it ultimately was impossible to publish anywhere besides here, demonstrate how by creating a sufficient climate of fear it is possible to prevent any major publication from covering a story.
1. Suppression of past coverage
The original articles about Oliver Smith were published in City Journal and Cancel Watch on July 7, 2023. The City Journal article quickly went viral on Twitter, being shared by well-known individuals such as Claire Lehmann, Paul Graham, and Steven Pinker. The two articles also were covered on a few well-known blogs, especially those run by people whom Smith has attacked in the past.
Smith’s first reaction to these articles was to file a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright act against the article in the Cancel Watch Substack, due to it including a photograph of him. This resulted in the Cancel Watch article briefly going offline, after which it was reuploaded without the photograph. Around the same time a widely shared Twitter/X thread about Smith from Monitoring Bias, which included the same photograph, also was deleted for this reason. This Twitter/X thread was never restored, and no online archives appear to exist of it.
On July 17th of 2023 Smith filed a defamation lawsuit against the Manhattan Institute, City Journal’s publisher. Some of the statements that he claimed were defamatory, such as that he had emailed Cambridge University about their hiring of Noah Carl—eventually leading to their decision to fire him—are actions that Smith had previously boasted about in multiple places. For an explanation of how the accounts that made those comments can be identified as Smith, see the original Cancel Watch article. The email to Cambridge University that he described there has been widely circulated among those who track Smith’s actions, and it was sent from an email address that can be unequivocally identified as one of his aliases.
The Manhattan Institute’s initial reaction to Smith’s lawsuit was to not take it seriously, as they were confident that they could have it dismissed. However, several days later they decided they were unwilling to fight the issue, and removed the article from their website. Smith then took legal action against the Wayback Machine, causing them to delete their saved snapshot of the article.1 His action against the Wayback Machine is mentioned in one of his later lawsuits: “ODS took legal action against the website hosting the webpage capture and they deleted it.”
On September 3rd and September 13th of 2023, similar summaries of the Cancel Watch article were published at two other websites, NewsBreak and NewsTric. Within a few days after each of those articles came online, Smith contacted their publishers threatening further legal action, causing those articles to be removed as well. We know that Smith was responsible for their removals because this, too, is mentioned in one of his later lawsuits: “ODS took legal action against this site; the article was retracted and deleted on 9 September 2023.”
Meanwhile, DMCA takedown requests also were filed against all the other articles Cancel Watch had published up to that point: those about Kevin Bird, Jebediah Carlson, Elizabeth Haigh, and Andrea James & Deirdre McCloskey, based on the fact that all of those articles also included photographs of their subjects. The takedown requests against all of these articles occurred within the space of a single week, from August 9th to August 16th of 2023. This action is significant because to make such a takedown request, it is required to swear under penalty of perjury that one either owns the copyright on an image, or is authorized to act as its owner’s legal representative. This is among the requirements for DMCA takedown requests listed by Georgetown University Law Library:
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.
By August 2023 the articles about Bird, Carlson, Haigh, and James & McCloskey had been online for periods ranging from three months to nine months, and had not previously attracted much attention from their subjects. One of two things has to be the case. One possibility is that the subjects of all four of these articles spontaneously and almost simultaneously filed DMCA takedown requests against Cancel Watch, or granted Smith legal authority to act on their behalf, during the same period that Smith was suppressing information about himself elsewhere. Aside from that far-fetched scenario, the only other possibility is that Smith fraudulently claimed to have legal standing to request their removals (and thus perjured himself), in yet another attempt to get Cancel Watch shut down. This action resulted in all of those articles also going offline, so that only the article about Smith himself remained. The other articles subsequently were reuploaded without their photographs.
As quoted in one of Smith’s court documents, Substack’s attorneys have accused him of making “fraudulent DMCA takedown notices,” evidently referring to the takedown notices against those four articles. Substack’s attorneys would have access to legal records indicating who made the takedown requests against these articles, and whether the requests were made by someone with legitimate authority over the article subjects’ copyrighted material. In his response to this accusation, Smith has stated that “ODS’ DMCA takedown notices were in good faith,” indirectly acknowledging that the takedown notices did, in fact, originate from him.
On November 14, 2023, Smith made a request for Google to remove the Cancel Watch article from its search results. His request claimed that posts from his Gab account, which were linked to in the Cancel Watch article, actually had been made by someone impersonating him. Google evidently rejected his request, as the Cancel Watch article has continued to appear in Google results for his name when searching from the United Kingdom. (When Google acts on such a request, the page usually is only removed from results in the country where the request was made.) Although this particular request failed, it was part of a series of about 30 requests Smith has made for Google to suppress negative information about him, and most of these past requests have been successful.
Smith’s past requests for suppression have been directed at various blog posts about him written by several of his targets, and most prominently, against the his coverage at Encyclopedia Dramatica. In a 2016 forum post made under his real name, Smith explained that after Google initially refused to delist the Encyclopedia Dramatica article, he had edited the article to add extreme defamatory material about himself, including falsely labeling himself as a hater of Muslims and a pedophile, in order to ensure that his next defamation complaint about the article would be acted on.
I was playing you at your own game by adding false information which I then used to get google.uk to block that page. Google initially refused to block that ED page before I added the Kiwi Farms link at the bottom with the libellous "pedophile" tag and comment about hating Muslims. [...] The result is now google has blocked everything you wrote about me at Encylopedia Dramatica. Thanks for your cooperation.
He then posted a screenshot of the response he received from Google, showing that this tactic to make them delist the article had worked. Smith’s long-term pattern of suppressing information about himself demonstrates one of the paradoxical things about him: despite the dozens of people he has slandered at RationalWiki, he seemingly cannot endure being the subject of public criticism.
2. Smith’s continued legal battles
Smith voluntarily withdrew his lawsuit against the Manhattan Institute on January 25th of last year, evidently having gotten what he wanted from the organization. He then immediately followed this action with two further lawsuits. His second lawsuit was filed on January 26th against his perennial enemy Emil Kirkegaard, for Kirkegaard’s having shared several paragraphs of the City Journal article in a Substack post. On January 31st Smith voluntarily withdrew this lawsuit as well, having apparently changed his mind. Smith’s third lawsuit was filed on February 7th against Substack, for their hosting of the Cancel Watch article and ignoring his requests that they remove it. Smith promoted this lawsuit in comments on both Cancel Watch and another unrelated Substack.
In all of these lawsuits Smith has represented himself despite having no legal training, so he has had no concerns about lawyer’s fees. He theoretically could sue over a dozen people at once. On the other hand, due to his lack of a lawyer, Smith experienced a great deal of difficulty serving Substack the paperwork to notify them that they were being sued.
On May 28 Smith filed his fourth lawsuit, which was another lawsuit against Emil Kirkegaard. His second case against Kirkegaard was mostly similar to the case he had filed in January, except that it referred to the defendant by his other name, William Engman. (This is how to tell the two cases apart: public records refer to the lawsuit filed in January as “Smith v. Kirkegaard”, and to the one filed in May as “Smith v. Engman.”) This fourth case was dismissed by the court one day after it had been filed, most likely because Smith filed it in the United States, while both he and Kirkegaard lived in Europe. Next, on June 7th Smith filed his fifth lawsuit, this one being against the blogger Steve Sailer. Much like his two lawsuits against Kirkegaard, Smith’s complaint against Sailer was over the latter having linked to and quoted the City Journal article, as well as the subsequent NewsBreak article.
On November 3, Smith announced at Twitter/X that he and Sailer had reached an out of court settlement. While he did not describe the terms of the settlement, it is evident that Sailer had capitulated in a similar manner to the Manhattan Institute, because all of his blog posts and Tweets about Smith have now been deleted. This is an unfortunate outcome because if the case had proceeded to trial, it’s very unlikely Smith would have won. Despite his successes using litigation and the threat of litigation to suppress information about himself, in none of these cases have courts actually made a decision in his favor.
As Smith was filing these various other lawsuits, his case against Substack was gradually progressing. On May 24, Substack’s attorneys proposed that the case should be dismissed with prejudice, explaining that every similar lawsuit by other plaintiffs has failed. Smith responded with an extremely long argument that his case was unlike any of the legal precedents that were the basis for the proposed dismissal, though without providing any examples of similar cases that had been decided in the plaintiff’s favor. On August 12th, the court rejected his argument and dismissed the case. A week later, Smith challenged the court's decision, this time focusing mostly on Substack’s lack of response to his various complaints.
Smith’s lawsuit against Substack was again dismissed on December 11th, this time with prejudice, and the court noted in its ruling that “Smith has already had three opportunities to plead these claims.” The next day, Smith requested a subpoena against Substack to reveal the real-life identity of the Cancel Watch article’s author, so that he could add its author as a defendant. After another four days he changed his mind and voluntarily dismissed the case, thus concluding his efforts to suppress the Cancel Watch article, at least for the time being. In his document withdrawing the lawsuit, he stated that he intends to continue searching for a way to add the article’s author as a defendant, but the deadline he was given for adding new parties to the case expired on January 10th.
Ironically, a large part of the reason Smith’s lawsuit against Substack has failed is the same reason that it has always been difficult to sue RationalWiki for its hosting of Smith’s attack articles. Under most interpretations of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, neither Substack nor the RationalMedia foundation can be held legally responsible for the material that they host.2 One important caveat: a recent lawsuit against RationalWiki (unrelated to Smith) resulted in the article about the plaintiff being deleted and suppressed, mostly because the RationalMedia Foundation did not have enough money to pay for a legal defense. But unlike RationalWiki, Substack cannot be compelled to delete its contents by such legal actions, because Substack can afford to hire lawyers and is not financially required to settle out of court.
Update 4/2/2025
In the time since this article's publication, Smith has twice caused it to go offline by making DMCA takedown requests over the tiny avatar images of him that appeared in the screenshots of his posts. One such screenshot has now been replaced with a quote, while in the other two screenshots the photograph thumbnail has been replaced with a custom-made image on which he does not own the copyright.
At the same time, he has also has made a police report against the owner of the Ghostoflomax.com domain name, and threatened to file another lawsuit if this article (which he calls "total misinformation") is not removed. If he does, it will be his sixth in less than two years.
3. Meet Johns aka Psychologist Guy
Smith has been banned from RationalWiki since 2020, and claims to have not edited the site in years, but new articles about individuals he dislikes are somehow continuing to appear there. Since the beginning of last year, some (but not all) of the new attack pages created have been about the evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman, the geneticist Jonatan Pallesen, the intelligence researchers Curtis Dunkel, Russell Warne, and Jordan Lasker, and Aporia Magazine. As is usual for RationalWiki articles created by Smith, these articles refer to their subjects using epithets such as “eugenicist and hereditarianism pseudoscientist” or “far-right conspiracy theorist, white nationalist and hereditarian who promotes race realism pseudoscience and has co-authored controversial papers with eugenicists.”
Also as typical for Smith’s articles, some of the recently created articles have very little relation to any published criticism of these people. Among the 90-odd citations in the Diana Fleischman article, the only source that criticizes her in any detail is a blog post on Medium.com. The only source provided for criticism of Jordan Lasker is a paper that does not mention him by name, but criticizes a study that included him among its co-authors. RationalWiki’s statements about these people are cited almost entirely to the article subjects’ own writings and social media posts, while the claim that they are all pseudoscientists and/or eugenicists is based on the authority of the RationalWiki articles’ author, whoever that is.
All of these RationalWiki articles are in the top four Google results for their subjects’ names, and the article about Lasker is the single top result. While there is no present controversy involving these people, one purpose of creating such articles is that they may cause the subjects to eventually become controversial, as previously occurred in Bo Winegard’s case. Even when they do not create any public controversy, these articles substantially limit their subjects’ career prospects, because most academic institutions will not hire someone for whom such an article is the top Google result.
The creator and main author of those articles was a RationalWiki user called “Johns”, a prolific user who had been active there since 2018. Aside from the “Johns” account, a large portion of the edits to these articles have been from IP addresses that are VPN servers. (Edits made while not logged into an account are shown by the user’s IP address.) Johns has taken credit for being the person who edits from these VPN IPs, so all of these IP edits are from him as well. In addition to academics working in the fields of evolutionary psychology, genetics, and intelligence research, Johns also has created some articles about actual cranks such as Thomas Dalton, a Holocaust denier who probably deserves to be the subject of a RationalWiki article.
On October 15, the RationalWiki user Johns had its username changed to “Psychologist Guy”, while adding a statement to his user page that he is the same person editing under that name at Wikipedia. At around the same time, the Wikipedia user Psychologist Guy linked to the RationalWiki user Johns and said that he is that user.3 His dual presence at both RationalWiki and Wikipedia will be especially important in the next few sections.
It is well-known at RationalWiki that Johns/Psychologist Guy has some connection to Oliver Smith. Some signs of this connection have included Johns reusing content from Smith’s deleted articles, and saying that he is in contact with Smith by email. The explanation he gave for re-using Smith’s exact words is that he had found an online archive of one of Smith’s deleted articles, and copied material from it. Regarding Johns’ reuse of this material, one of RationalWiki’s moderators commented that “The connection between Johns and Smith was never particularly a secret either.” But until recently it had never been clear exactly how Johns and Smith are connected, and the Johns account has mocked those of Smith’s targets who proposed specific theories about their relation to one another.
At Wikipedia, where Smith has been banned since 2011 under the name “Anglo Pyramidologist”, there is a similar situation. The Psychologist Guy Wikipedia account has posted detailed information about Smith’s and Emil Kirkegaard’s legal situations, with the explanation that Smith is sending these details to him. He also claims to have created over 200 RationalWiki articles, similar to Smith’s own statement that he has created “hundreds of articles” from his various accounts there. This significantly narrows the options of who Psychologist Guy could be, because no single person aside from Smith is known to have created that many articles at RationalWiki.
Two hundred is over three times the number of RationalWiki articles that were created from the Johns/Psychologist Guy account, which has created about sixty articles total. In other words, his taking credit for creating over 200 RationalWiki articles amounts to an admission that he has used several other RationalWiki accounts in addition to that one. The implications of his having created this number of RationalWiki articles will be examined in a later section, titled “The mask is slipping.”
Update 13/1/2025
Immediately following this article's publication, Psychologist Guy has had his Wikipedia account renamed to "Veg Historian".
A few hours later, he also had his RationalWiki account renamed again, from "Psychologist Guy" to "Oldman4".
In summary, his account at Wikipedia was originally named Psychologist Guy and was recently renamed to Veg Historian. His account at RationalWiki was initially named Johns, was renamed to Psychologist Guy in October, and most recently was renamed a second time to Oldman4. This article will mostly refer to him by whichever name he was using at the time of each of his actions that it’s describing.
4. The Johns/Psychologist Guy approach to editing
While Johns/Psychologist Guy/Veg Historian/Oldman4 has created a large number of RationalWiki articles attacking various academics, most of his activity at Wikipedia has been composed of harmless edits to topics such as animal rights. According to his userpage, he also is in the top 2500 Wikipedians by number of articles created. But looking more closely, his Wikipedia edits have supported Oliver Smith’s viewpoint in many of the internet feuds for which Smith is known. He has made edits there directed against Emily Willoughby, Noah Carl, and Anatoly Karlin, all people that Smith has attacked elsewhere, but the focus here will be on his involvement in Smith’s most infamous feud, as well as how he has reacted to other Wikipedia users who oppose him.
4.1. Citogenesis
In June and October of last year, Psychologist Guy added statements in two Wikipedia articles saying that Emil Kirkegaard has “pushed for the legalization of child pornography.” This statement is cited to an article published in Cowboy State Daily, an obscure local news website for the U.S. state of Wyoming. Oliver Smith had previously linked to the same article under his real name on his Twitter/X account. (He later deleted this tweet.) Psychologist Guy’s edits describing Kirkegaard in this way appear superficially consistent with the cited source, but this description has a specific context and history, and it is an example of what the webcomic XKCD calls citogenesis.
As explained in Cancel Watch's article from last year, this and similar statements about Kirkegaard are originally based on Smith’s own writings at RationalWiki. In January 2018, when these statements first began to appear in newspapers, Smith boasted that RationalWiki had “documented and exposed” Kirkegaard and one of his co-authors as “far-right extremists and paedophile-apologists”, and also that “(t)he person who wrote those RationalWiki articles sent a tip-off to some newspapers. The story now has national coverage.” This was not an empty boast, because it is demonstrable that the resulting media coverage included details that had never previously appeared anywhere outside of Smith’s writings. His various statements that Kirkegaard is a pedophile were the subject of a libel case in 2019, in which the court found these statements to be defamatory. This is the single lawsuit involving Smith in which he was the defendant rather than the plaintiff.
A few days after Smith’s boast of getting newspapers to repeat these statements, a Wikipedia account called Storyfellow tried to add a statement that Kirkegaard was a “child-rape apologist” in a newly created Wikipedia article about Kirkegaard, as quoted in his comments on noticeboards. Wikipedia’s administrators then identified Storyfellow as a sockpuppet of Anglo Pyramidologist (Smith) and blocked it from editing, along with a few other accounts that had participated in related discussions. Smith’s initial attempt to add this statement to Wikipedia in 2018 was unsuccessful, but several years later, a less extreme version of the statement has been successfully added to two Wikipedia articles by the Psychologist Guy account.
Meanwhile at RationalWiki, a few hours after Smith linked to the Cowboy State Daily article on his Twitter/X account, the article was added as a source by a logged-out IP user. This IP address geolocates to the London area, which is consistent with the general region of the physical address Smith has given for himself in his court documents. A RationalWiki moderator concluded that this IP probably was Smith evading his ban and blocked the IP, while another administrator undid its change as ban evasion.4 Johns, who has administrator powers at RationalWiki, subsequently unblocked the IP and restored its citation to this source, explaining that he himself had made the edit.
After undoing this ban enforcement action, Johns/Psychologist Guy and his VPN IPs began adding the Cowboy State Daily article in several other RationalWiki articles.5 In the last linked article he has cited this source to describe Kirkegaard as “a Danish white supremacist and activist for legalising child pornography,” similar to how he has used the source at Wikipedia. This description is not as hyperbolical as calling Kirkegaard an actual pedophile, but it still is a major oversimplification of his view about this matter, as presented in a blog post from 2010. But now that statements like these have been copied from RationalWiki by apparently reliable media sources, it is no longer obvious how Smith’s writings are their original source. By subsequently citing those media articles at both Wikipedia and RationalWiki, Psychologist Guy is promoting a slightly diluted version of the statement for which Oliver Smith was sued six years ago.
4.2. Revenge against Wikipedians: Diana Fleischman
One of the ways Johns/Psychologist Guy/Veg Historian/Oldman4 has used his dual presence at Wikipedia and RationalWiki is by using RationalWiki as a platform to attack people who have opposed his Wikipedia edits. This article will present two examples of the pattern, beginning with a case that occurred in September of last year.
The first incident began when a logged-out IP user made several additions to the Wikpedia article about Diana Fleischman, including a statement in the article’s first sentence that Fleischman “espouses eugenics”. This was another IP that geolocates to southern England, though not specifically to the London area. About a week after these edits were made, science journalist Jesse Singal complained at Twitter/X that the statement that Fleischman “espouses eugenics” was a gross mischaracterization of her views, and this statement in her Wikipedia article subsequently was removed.
In response to its removal, Johns and one of his VPN IPs added a new section to the RationalWiki article about Fleischman, accusing her of getting her supporters to edit the Wikipedia article about her in order to remove this statement. Johns and another VPN IP made the same accusation in comments on the RationalWiki article’s talk page. In his talk page comment, Johns posted links to two Wikipedia accounts: the user Das126, who had commented on the Wikipedia article’s talk page that the statement calling Fleischman a eugenicist was not adequately supported; and the user Techn0logist, who had removed this statement from Fleischman’s Wikipedia article. Johns was the only RationalWiki user who expressed any interest in these two Wikipedians or their edits.
Less than a day later, Fleischman’s RationalWiki article was edited by accounts impersonating both of these Wikipedians, and impersonating one other person as well. Das126 and Techn0logist and were impersonated by one RationalWiki account each. There also were two accounts impersonating Oliver Speagle (misspelled as “Oliver Beagle”), a Twitter/X user who had commented that the initial Wikipedia edits describing Fleischman as a eugenicist probably were made by Smith. All four of these imposter accounts edited the article within the space of ten minutes, and all four were obviously operated by the same person.
The edits from all of these imposter accounts were comprised entirely of vandalizing various pages. These accounts’ only function was to mock the people who had done or said things that Johns disapproved of, and possibly also to make it more difficult for these people to ever join RationalWiki. Impersonating someone on RationalWiki has the latter effect because if the real user eventually tries to join, they are likely to be mistaken for another imposter account and be quickly blocked from editing. This incident shows another commonality between Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 and Smith, as Oliver Smith’s history of impersonating his enemies on RationalWiki is one of the specific behaviors (reason #5 on the list) for which he was originally banned from the site.
4.3. Revenge against Wikipedians: Roggenwolf
A few months later there was another instance of the same behavior. The second example of it was directed against a Wikipedian called Roggenwolf, who also has edited Wikipedia under the usernames Biohistorian15 and ChopinAficionado. This case will be covered in more detail than Psychologist Guy’s other recent actions, because it is both the most recent and the most malicious of them.
The background to this incident is that in September, Roggenwolf aka Biohistorian15 had argued that a throwaway Wikipedia account impersonating Emil Kirkegaard was one of Smith’s accounts. This resulted in Psychologist Guy, who had no prior involvement in the discussion, abruptly showing up to argue against Roggenwolf’s accusation. A month later, he and Psychologist Guy had a disagreement on Wikipedia’s article about the Human Diversity Foundation, a company owned by Kirkegaard, which led to Psychologist Guy asking him whether he was editing on behalf of the company. Roggenwolf said in response that he had no involvement in the HDF, but Psychologist Guy rejected this answer, replying “I do not believe anything you say, nor do many other users I have spoken to privately about your account.”
On November 24, Psychologist Guy created a RationalWiki article about the Human Diversity Foundation, and claimed in the article that Roggenwolf was one of the company’s employees. Specifically, Psychologist Guy’s article text alleges that “members of HDF” are editing Wikipedia and harassing the site’s other users, and the source given for this statement is a pointer to Roggenwolf’s user talk page. (The statement’s only other source is a link to Emil Kirkegaard’s Wikipedia account, which has been blocked from editing for the past six years.) Ten days later, another London-based IP posted a request on RationalWiki for someone to doxx Roggenwolf. It asked, “Any of you commenting here, you wouldn't by any chance know what the deal with the account Roggenwolf is do you? […] Is Roggenwolf a HDF employee?”
The IP user’s doxxing request coincided with Roggenwolf aka ChopinAficionado being impersonated by at least seven RationalWiki accounts, all within the space of about a month. These imposter accounts had the names Roggenwolf, Roggenwolf_88, Roggenwolf_14, ChopinAficionado, RealChopinAficionado, Mr_ChopinAficionado, and ChopinAficionado_14. The inclusion of the numbers 88 and 14 was a reference to a white supremacist slogan known as the “14 words”, and to the number 88 as a code for “Heil Hitler”. These imposter accounts’ usernames were intended to make it appear as though Roggenwolf is a neo-Nazi, though there’s no evidence of him actually being one.
The imposter accounts that edited RationalWiki’s Diana Fleischman article had been used only for vandalism, but the impersonation directed against Roggenwolf was much more purposeful. The “Mr_ChopinAficionado” and “ChopinAficionado_14” accounts posted under the target’s name to advance a specific claim: that Roggenwolf/ChopinAficionado is an employee of the Human Diversity Foundation, and that the HDF is paying him $4000 per week to edit Wikipedia. These posts also included a guess at Roggenwolf’s real-life identity. The claims to know his exact salary was new, but the basic allegation that he is a HDF employee was identical to the one previously made by Psychologist Guy and by the London based IP. At that point in time, the (potentially libelous) claim was completely exclusive to these users—no one else on either Wikipedia or RationalWiki was suggesting it.
On Wikipedia, the target of this campaign eventually explained that these doxxing attempts were the reason he had changed his WP username from Biohistorian15 to Roggenwolf and again to ChopinAficionado. He continued that “[t]his all has cumulated in semi-credible death threats having been made.” Less than a minute after explaining this, Roggenwolf aka ChopinAficionado retired his Wikipedia account.
On December 28, it was discovered that after retiring his original Wikipedia account, Roggenwolf had registered a new account with no connection to his previous one. A Wikipedia administrator considered this re-registration to be a case of sockpuppetry, and permanently blocked both accounts in response. Roggenwolf/ChopinAficionado later explained, in a request to be unblocked, that he had felt switching accounts was his only remaining recourse after renaming his account twice had not been enough to stop the doxxing and death threats. Most recently, Psychologist Guy/Veg Historian has inserted himself into the unblock discussion to accuse Roggenwolf of overreacting, and also to argue that the harassment actually was coming from a separate user known as Mikemikev. This claim will be examined in a later section, titled "administrative actions."
Roggenwolf’s new account was recognized as him because it was editing some of the same topics he had edited in the past. Users who create what’s known as a “clean start account” are strongly discouraged from returning to topics they previously edited, but administrators have explicitly permitted this in the past, including for controversial topics. Whether a Wikipedia user will be punished for that is mostly determined by the site’s internal politics. In contrast, administrators at both Wikipedia and RationalWiki have not taken any action about the behavior that originally caused Roggenwolf to feel afraid for his life. One reason for their inaction is that Wikipedia administrators tend to be more concerned about superficial violations of rules, such as someone editing the same topics after re-registering to escape harassment, than in addressing the long-term harassment itself.
Less than a day after he was blocked, a brand-new account at RationalWiki suggested that Roggenwolf’s block should be covered in an article there, while describing him as “the HDF's latest Wikipedia account.” Two days later at Wikipedia, another IP in southern England argued that the edits made by Roggenwolf before his block must now be scrutinized, because “(t)here is a lot of speculation on and off this website that this user was a paid HDF employee.” It does not take much effort to see that this unsupported speculation is coming entirely from one person using various accounts and IPs, but its ongoing repetition was nonetheless enough for one Wikipedia administrator to take the claim seriously. As it is steadily spread more widely, its origins are likely to become increasingly obscured, as previously occurred for the statement described in the “citogenesis” section.
Psychologist Guy has boasted that he is in contact with multiple Wikipedia administrators, as well as with the Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia, and that others who accuse him of being a banned user “are blocked quite quickly.” This appears to be another truthful boast: the two Wikipedia users who have thus far raised his connection to Oliver Smith, an IP user in Norway and another in the United States, both received lengthy blocks immediately after doing so. As long as his malicious actions remain subtle enough to avoid attracting attention, or are taken using alternate accounts and logged-out IPs for which he has semi-plausible deniability, any user who tries to stop him will tend to find it an impossible task.
5. The mask is slipping
In the time since Smith’s original ban from Wikipedia, over 150 accounts have been blocked there as his sockpuppets, but one bit of deception from him stands out as especially important. For several years after his ban, Wikipedia administrators believed Oliver Smith to have a twin brother named “Darryl Smith” who edited from the same IP address, and at least one account which was blocked as a sockpuppet of Oliver Smith was subsequently unblocked after claiming to be his brother. But several years later, Smith boasted at a Wikipedia criticism forum that “Darryl” had actually been a ruse in order to evade his ban.
For the past 8 years I made up a story I have a brother editing Wikipedia; I then pretended to be this brother on separate accounts. 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.6
In response to this claim, other members of the forum were incredulous Smith could have maintained a convincing fake persona across all of the websites where “Darryl” had formerly been active, including RationalWiki, Amazon, and several forums. Most people would not go to that kind of effort constructing an alter ego, but Smith also does not usually lie when taking credit for such accomplishments. The context that he made this boast was that virtually all of Darryl’s online accounts had been deleted, consistent with Smith having abandoned that particular persona, nor has “Darryl” reappeared on the internet in the five years since Smith took credit for inventing him. (Or impersonating him, if Smith had been borrowing the identity of a real person.) In the present, the question is whether one of his reasons for abandoning the “Darryl” identity is that he was replacing it with a new one.
The possibility that Psychologist Guy aka Veg Historian is Smith’s latest alter ego has been previously brought up at Wikipedia in a sockpuppet investigation in September and a user talk page discussion in October. But aside from Wikipedia admins’ general unwillingness to investigate a highly experienced account, there is one major difficulty supporting this connection. Most of the evidence for it, described in the rest of this section, is connecting Psychologist Guy/Veg Historian to Smith’s real-life identity rather than to his Wikipedia username Anglo Pyramidologist, so it cannot be posted on any Wikipedia page due to the site’s “no outing” rule. A second difficulty is that to adequately understand this user’s malicious aspects, it is necessary to look at his behavior at both Wikipedia and RationalWiki, and there is no coordination of administrators between the two sites.
At RationalWiki, one further difficulty is that RationalWiki’s administrators do not have the ability to view accounts’ IP address information. This is not a limitation at Wikipedia, where there is a group of administrators known as checkusers who have the ability to examine it, but another challenge there is that all of Smith’s confirmed Wikipedia sockpuppets were blocked several years ago, so there is no recent IP address data to use for comparison. Still, even without the checkuser ability it is possible to determine some details about Johns/Psychologist Guy/Veg Historian/Oldman4’s real identity.
5.1. Geolocation
On June 2 and 3 of last year, a portion of the RationalWiki article about bioethics philosopher Jonathan Anomaly was rewritten by “Johns”, using both his account and two more of the VPN-based IPs that he’s taken credit for using. VPN servers can be located anywhere in the world and often are used to conceal one’s real geographic location. What Johns may not have realized is that at Philpeople.org, where most of Anomaly’s papers are hosted, it is possible for users to view the geographic locations of people who are accessing these papers. The VPN server that Johns used to edit the article was located in Mexico City, which matches the location of the person who was viewing Anomaly’s papers while those edits were being made, as shown in the accompanying screenshots.
The key piece of evidence is that during the same series of edits, “Johns” also accessed Anomaly’s profile at Philpeople.org without using the VPN server. While making these edits, he also accessed it from a computer located in the U.K. town of Watford, a borough of Hertfordshire, which matches Oliver Smith’s location that is given at LinkedIn.7 The access logs show that this incoming link to Anomaly’s Philpeople.org profile originated from a page on RationalWiki. This connection is specific and unambiguous: during the period of twelve hours that “Johns” was updating the article about Anomaly, this individual in Watford was the only person linking to Anomaly’s papers from a RationalWiki page. Based on this information, it can be determined with a high degree of confidence that Johns is located in the town in England where Smith is known to live.
5.2. Actions from VPN IPs
Alongside the discovery that Johns/Psychologist Guy/Veg Historian/Oldman4 is located in same the U.K. borough as Smith, another piece of evidence comes from his statements that he has been the person using VPN IPs to post updates about Smith’s legal battles. He explained, “Those are not Smith's socks [sockpuppets]. All of those were mine.” And further: “I have been following all of the lawsuits. I wrote most of the CancelWatch section at the Manhattan Institute article [on RationalWiki] last year and linked to public documents.”
The intention of this statement was that by claiming ownership of these IPs, Johns could deflect suspicion away from Smith for having used them. However, his taking credit for all of their actions makes it nearly impossible that he and Smith could be separate people. There are a few reasons for this:
The information that “Johns” has posted from these VPN IPs about Smith’s legal actions included non-public details that, at the time, only Smith himself could have known. These include that the NewsBreak article about him was removed because it breached the website’s terms of service, and that the NewsTric article was removed in response to legal complaints from Smith. The sources cited for his edits do not include these details, and neither website provided any public information as to why the articles were removed. Johns’ edits describing these details were made about nine months before Smith publicized the reason for the removals in his legal complaint against Steve Sailer.
The same sequence of edits also included “Johns” citing one of Smith’s Twitter/X posts barely an hour after the post was made. This tweet was made by Smith under his real name at 10:58 pm UTC, an archived version of it was created at 11:59 pm, and Johns added a citation to it on RationalWiki at 12:05 am. His citing of Smith’s hour-old tweet was done from another VPN IP, but Johns has confirmed that he was the person who made this edit.
When explaining why he has used these VPN servers, “Johns” stated, “I have received death threats and email abuse from the usual suspects for editing this topic area.” If Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 is a separate person from Smith, it is unlikely his article subjects could have contacted him by email, because there was no public email address connected to the “Johns” account until he renamed it to Psychologist Guy about five months after posting this comment.8 The “email abuse” that Johns described was directed specifically against Smith. We know this because in his lawsuit against Substack, Smith described the same experience under his real name, in very similar words: "These unfounded claims are defamatory and have resulted in the plaintiff receiving death threats and abuse online."
5.3. Number of articles created
As mentioned earlier, Psychologist Guy has taken credit for creating over two hundred RationalWiki articles, although the Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 account itself has only created around sixty. This necessarily means that he created the remaining 140+ RationalWiki articles using accounts other than his current one. However, when he was asked what other accounts he has used to create the other 140+ RationalWiki articles for which he was taking credit, he declined to answer. His statement that he has been the individual operating the various VPN-based IPs does not shed any further light on the answer, because logged-out IP users do not have the ability to create new pages.
Besides this statement being consistent with the number of RationalWiki articles that Smith is known to have created from his various accounts, his statement also has another significance. The community of RationalWiki users is quite small, especially compared to Wikipedia, so it is impossible for any individual there to use a large number of sockpuppets without eventually attracting attention. Oliver Smith is well-known for his extensive sockpuppetry at RationalWiki, probably more so than any other user on the site. For Psychologist Guy to be a separate person from Smith, there would have to be another person at RationalWiki who has created over 140 articles using sockpuppet accounts, who has somehow accomplished this feat without it ever being noticed.
5.4. Employment stories
Like the past accounts that posed as Darryl, Johns/Psychologist Guy/Veg Historian/Oldman4 has gone to considerable lengths to construct a false identity, which in this case includes having invented a history of employment for himself. The problem is that the details he has given about this aspect of his life don’t entirely add up. This line of evidence does not specifically point to Smith, but it is a further indication that he is not the person that he claims to be.
While Oliver Smith is in his 30s and unemployed, Johns/Psychologist Guy has stated that at RationalWiki that he is “in [his] 50s” and that he has worked “about 40 different jobs”, or in other words that he has changed jobs an average of about once per year for his entire adult life. Meanwhile at Wikipedia, he claims to have been a historian of the vegan movement “for over 25 years”. If he is in his fifties, this means that he must have begun his current job as a historian no later than his early thirties. This raises the question of when he held the other ~39 jobs, unless he held them all before he was 35.
There’s a likely explanation for this bizarre set of claims. When Johns on RationalWiki and Psychologist Guy on Wikipedia gave their respective employment histories, at the time the two accounts had entirely separate identities, so there was no need for their histories to match one another. Later, when Johns had his account renamed to Psychologist Guy and the two accounts announced they were the same person, he probably did not remember the existence of this incongruence between the two accounts. His realizing the error is a likely reason that he had both his Wikipedia and RationalWiki account renamed following this article's publication, but the connection between the two accounts has already been established. It’s unclear whether anyone else on RationalWiki believes this combination of stories, and when the inconsistency was brought up in response to this article's publication, Psychologist Guy never offered an explanation for it.
5.5. Administrative actions
Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 has used his administrator powers at RationalWiki mostly for mundane actions, but he also has used them in areas that relate to Smith’s harassment campaigns. In those areas, his administrative actions have invariably supported Smith’s behavior or deflected attention away from him. These actions broadly fall into two categories.
One is that Psychologist Guy has labeled some of the RationalWiki harassment accounts as aliases of Mikemikev, an alt-right troll who is among Smith's long-term enemies. For example, he has taken this action on one of the accounts that impersonated Roggenwolf, and on one of the accounts that tried to doxx the same user. Mikemikev does in fact have a history of harassing other people at RationalWiki, but unlike Psychologist Guy, Mikemikev’s confirmed accounts have never shown the slightest interest in Roggenwolf’s identity or place of employment.9 Mikemikev also is not a "RationalWiki regular", which is how Roggenwolf’s attacker described himself. Psychologist Guy is the only RationalWiki user who has accused Mikemikev of operating the Roggenwolf harassment accounts.
More importantly, when Smith’s articles and aliases have been deleted and blocked, they haven’t always stayed that way. When one of the London IPs was blocked as a Smith sockpuppet, Johns reacted by unblocking it, and when one of Smith’s articles was deleted witout his approval,10 Johns eventually recreated the article using nearly identical wording. (Later, the article was mostly rewritten by a different user.) The most recent RationalWiki account to be blocked explicitly as a Smith sockpuppet was “Boar”, the account that had been used to create RationalWiki’s article about Emily Willoughby. In that case, Johns reacted to the block by modifying the block summary so that it no longer included Smith’s name. Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 is the only user on RationalWiki who has undone others’ attempts to enforce Smith’s ban.
A likely reason he has undone and modified these actions is to support Smith’s claims that the people writing about his ban evasion are libeling him. For example, when Smith filed his lawsuit against the Manhattan Institute on July 17th of 2023, one of the statements he called defamatory was the statement that he was responsible for the edits made by “Boar” on the Willoughby article. The Boar account was blocked as his sockpuppet two days after he filed this lawsuit. Modifying of the account’s block summary, so that it no longer included Smith’s name, made it possible for him to continue denying in a legal context that the account had any connection to him. Like the impersonation described earlier, editing RationalWiki to support his side in a lawsuit is among the original reasons (reason #3 on the list) that he was banned from the site.
Update 4/2/2025
In a recent discussion on RationalWiki, the evidence presented in this article was described as "both credible and convincing", and Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 almost was banned from the site as an alias of Smith. He escaped that penalty because few hours after voting on the proposed ban got underway, he initiated a video call with one of RationalWiki's former moderators and trustees, and they concluded based on his physical appearance that he and Smith are separate people. The discussion in the video chat also indicated that he and Smith have been collaborating off-site.
If Psychologist Guy actually is a separate person from Smith, it would have to be the case that Smith sometimes is either writing his posts for him or sharing his account at Wiki sites. That's the only plausible explanation for incidents such as Johns describing himself as the target of the "email abuse" that had in reality been directed against Smith, at a time when the Johns account had no public email address; or for Psychologist Guy claiming to have created the number of RationalWiki articles that Smith created, instead of the number that were created by Psychologist Guy's own account. At least one RationalWiki moderator considers this behavior to be a form of meatpuppetry (using actual people as a substitute for sockpuppet accounts), but RationalWiki evidently does not treat meatpuppetry as a bannable offense.
The RationalWiki moderators also took no action about their site having been used as a platform for impersonating and doxxing the people who opposed Psychologist Guy's Wikipedia edits. That has obviously has been occurring regardless of whether he and Smith are the same person, but no action to address it was even proposed. The inaction with respect to that issue demonstrates something that’s essentially an open secret about RationalWiki: although it presents itself as an encyclopedia debunking what it considers pseudoscientific viewpoints, it sometimes nakedly operates as a harassment site.
6. Addressing the problem
Smith’s influence is unlikely to change anytime soon, even if RationalWiki’s moderators and administrators were to become willing to put forth the effort to enforce his ban. When the creator of a RationalWiki article is blocked as a Smith alias, the default assumption is that the article itself should continue to exist. The most that is typically done is to check the article for obvious falsehoods, without considering the more basic question of whether RationalWiki should continue letting Smith involve the site in his legal battles. Even when Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4's articles were under heightened scrutiny as a result of this article, and some members of RationalWiki were arguing for his articles to be mass-deleted, the eventual decision was to delete only one of them.
As long as RationalWiki has this apathetic attitude towards Smith, the consequence is that he will always have a powerful motivation to continue sneaking back onto the site under various aliases, or getting others to edit there on his behalf, with the understanding that no matter how many times his ban evasion is uncovered, his articles will remain. In a comment last May, “Johns” gloated about this ability:
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 […] Kirkegaard and his cult lose! Their pages will never come down. They will probably still be online in 2035.
We cannot expect RationalWiki’s leadership to take the initiative to stop Smith’s continued attempts to use the site in this way. But what we can do, and we should do as much as possible, is publicize who is writing these RationalWiki articles, what sort of person he is, and why he is writing them. As mentioned in the Cancel Watch article, although his actions generally align with leftist goals, they often are more out of desire for personal revenge than to advance any particular ideology. His usage of RationalWiki began as a supplement to how he used the extreme-right wiki site Metapedia to attack his ideological opponents during his earlier years as a neo-Nazi.
Future media coverage should be specifically about Smith, not just RationalWiki in general, and it should be ongoing as long as RationalWiki is unwilling or unable to enforce his ban. This approach has a few potential benefits. First, if Smith’s responsibility for these articles can become widely enough known, this publicity may eventually blunt the impact of these articles’ high Google ranking, and reduce his future power over others’ careers. The widespread awareness of how RationalWiki is being exploited by one of its banned users may also eventually result in Google reducing the site’s ranking in search results. Finally, it may help future plaintiffs to present a stronger legal case against the RationalMedia Foundation, if there are further lawsuits similar to the recent case that led to RationalWiki deleting its article about the plaintiff.
It is most important to publicize Smith’s various lawsuits, especially if he continues to file more of them, as they are the most surreal element of this situation. Within the space of a year, from July 2023 to June 2024, Smith filed five separate lawsuits to suppress this information about himself: one against the Manhattan Institute, one against Substack, two against Emil Kirkegaard, and most recently one against Steve Sailer. These legal actions proved effective at accomplishing his goal, because to most people who have written about him, deleting one’s posts seems an easier option than enduring a months-long lawsuit. But now that two of his lawsuits have been dismissed by courts, and Smith has voluntarily withdrawn the other three, it is becoming increasingly clear that he does not have the ability to actually win these cases. The fear of frivolous lawsuits, which the plaintiff has no real chance of winning, should never be enough to control whether a topic is covered by news media.
Academics ignore this type of situation at their peril. The recent top-down decision by Elsevier to replace the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence, and the resulting mass resignations of the journal’s editorial board, shows how factors such as student protests and attacks by journalists can ultimately determine what’s able to be published in an area of study. Anyone who thinks that a field can be sustained entirely based on research, teaching and academic publications is stuck in the twentieth century. Increasingly in the present, academic fields are under the control of factors such as public opinion on social media, what’s reported in widely read newspapers and blogs, and whoever controls the Wiki sites that appear at the top of Google’s search results. The extent of Oliver Smith’s influence, despite his being unemployed and having no academic credentials of any kind, perfectly embodies this principle.
One other aspect of this situation is paradoxical. Some of Smith’s court documents, especially the one from August 19th, suggest that he might have been legitimately distressed by the coverage he’s received from Cancel Watch and other bloggers. For example, the document states that in response he made requests for urgent assistance from the U.K. police. Yet even as he was taking such legal actions, he or his meatpuppet was continuing to engage in the same defamation at RationalWiki that produced this outcome, while also boasting of how his articles routinely become the top Google result for their subjects. He cannot possibly be unaware of the fact that his own behavior is the source of the negative outcomes he’s experiencing. His ongoing persistence, while being fully aware of the publicity it inevitably generates for him, is tantamount to a form of self-harm.
Unfortunately, however distressing Smith may find the results of his actions, his own mental well-being cannot matter more than the harm suffered by everyone he has attacked. And bringing him greater publicity is the only effective defense against him, until either RationalWiki and Wikipedia begin meaningfully enforcing his ban, or Smith himself decides to change his self-destructive behavior.
An archived version of the article still exists at Archive.ph, and more recently it was reproduced in Christopher Brunet’s Substack post.
Pages 3 to 6 of the August 12 document explain how one of Smith’s claims against Substack was contradicted by Section 230.
His comment’s link still goes to the RationalWiki account’s original name “Johns”, because he posted the comment before his account was renamed to Psychologist Guy. After the account was renamed, a separate RationalWiki account called "Johns" was created and immediately blocked to prevent anyone from registering under that name to impersonate him, so the link now goes to that other account instead.
Moderators are RationalWiki’s top-level administrators. The site has tens of administrators, but only six moderators.
In the first three RationalWiki articles, Johns/Psychologist Guy included this source when creating the articles, as their fourth, twelfth and fourteenth citation respectively.
This post’s author can be identified as Oliver Smith because in another part of the same post, he refers to Wikipedia’s “Anglo Pyramidologist” sockpuppet investigation as “my sockpuppet investigation archive.”
This information from Smith’s LinkedIn profile is screenshotted and archived in case he decides to remove it in response to having it publicized here.
It is possible for RationalWiki users to send one another email through the website, but Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 does not have the ability to receive email from other users, because he never entered an email address for his RationalWiki account. (Screenshotted in case he enters one now that this has been pointed out.)
The Wikipedia account Raffelate, a confirmed alias of Mikemikev, provides an example of his actual attitude towards Roggenwolf. He regarded Roggenwolf/Biohistorian15 with indignation and mistrust, but was far more overtly hostile towards other Wikipedia users. That is to say, if Mikemikev were going to harass a member of Wikipedia, Roggenwolf is not the one he would have chosen. Two days after Raffelate at Wikipedia was blocked, an account of the same name was created at RationalWiki, which was used to try to doxx Roggenwolf and for absolutely nothing else. This large difference in behavior between the two accounts suggests that the RationalWiki account was yet another impersonation.
When Smith's RationalWiki articles have been deleted, he himself usually has been the person who requested it, due to either making a deal with the article's subject or changing his mind about whether they were worth attacking. For example, he used an account called Oenophyta to nominate four of his articles for deletion, and three of the four deletion requests were successful.