The Manhattan Institute Deleted This Article

A surreal tale of one man’s campaign against an academic field

As some of you might be aware, there's a professional troll named Oliver D. Smith who has been plaguing conservative/rightwing/heterodox/HBD circles for several years now, nipping at everyone’s heels, contacting families and employers, trying (and succeeding) to ruin lives & get people fired.

In July 2023, City Journal, the house journal of the Manhattan Institute, wrote a scathing profile of Smith, titled "The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past".

If you attempt to find that City Journal article now, however, it's no longer available. Scrubbed. Erased. Missing. Retraced. Not found.

Oliver Smith, an unemployed autistic man living with his parents, managed to sue The Manhattan Institute and "reached a private settlement agreement."

Did the Manhattan Institute literally pay off a stalker who got multiple intellectuals broadly on the right fired? When I addressed that question to Brian Anderson, he replied to me that the terms of the settlement are confidential, and subsequently stonewalled me. I have been unable to ascertain anything beyond that. However, in the event that money did change hands, it would imply that one of America's richest and most prominent "conservative" think-tanks effectively funded a troll whose main hobby is stalking and harassing (mostly) right-wing writers and intelligence researchers. Incidentally, part of this harassment in the past year has included vexatious litigation and threats of such against some of these writers and researchers for having reposted the retracted City Journal article. As such, it seems to me that there is a strong and legitimate investigative interest in exposing the precise terms of this settlement to the clear light of day.

— Anonymous source

After the Manhattan Institute deleted their article in shame, an anonymous substacker posted an extended version on

Cancel Watch

…

Oliver D. Smith

… and Smith promptly sued Substack.

• https://pacermonitor.com/public/case/52278950/Smith_v_Substack,_Inc

Without further ado, here is the article that the Manhattan Institute was too chickenshit to stand behind. Please share it widely.

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The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past

A surreal tale of one man’s campaign against an academic field

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.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye has argued that the extremes of the political right and left are more similar to one another than either is to the center. If anyone epitomizes this “horseshoe theory” concept, it is Smith, who has moved in his political allegiances from the far-right to the far-left—from one fanaticism to another. His recent attacks on the reputations of academics employ the same methods that he previously used against opponents of his past white supremacist beliefs.

When Oliver Smith first appeared on the Internet during the 2000s, he was an active member of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi online communities. On the forum Stormfront, Smith wrote, in a 2008 post, “I have been in support of white nationalism since i was 16.” Some of his writings from this early period expressed support for the Columbine High School shooters, such as a post in which he argued that the shooters’ involvement in far-right websites was understandable because they had been “bullied all day by non-whites.” In another post made around the same time, Smith claimed that members of his family helped to construct a fake concentration camp after the end of World War II, and that “The bodies and starved people they used in the video were slavs/communists who were paid to act as jews.” He argued that the Holocaust was not a real historical event, but that “It’s all propaganda to make the Nazi’s (sic) look bad.” (The accounts from which he posted these various comments are known to belong to Smith because they posted images from the same image-sharing account that Smith has used for his other known accounts, including photographs of himself.)

A companion article, published at a website called CancelWatch, explains how the various aliases discussed in this article are known to belong to the same person. Smith has boasted about his skill at using large numbers of online aliases to conceal his identity, and to deceive others about responsibility for his actions; still, enough evidence exists to link him to the actions described here.

By 2012, Smith had mostly lost interest in contributing to white-supremacist forums. He had found another place to promote the same ideology: Metapedia, a pro-fascism wiki site. There, he was active enough to be promoted to an administrator. The views presented in Metapedia articles tend to be the most extreme of the extreme right—its article about the Holocaust gives extensive coverage to arguments made by Holocaust deniers, for example, while its article about Adolf Hitler describes the dictator in mostly positive terms.

One of Smith’s main uses for Metapedia—a pattern that would later continue in a vastly different context—was to create pages attacking various people who had annoyed him. Subjects included a Wikipedia administrator, an administrator at a forum, an artist and writer active in paleontology communities, and several other miscellaneous people. His articles about these people described them using such epithets as “Europhobic propagandist,” “Afrocentric troll,” or “Race denier.” Smith sometimes used two other Wiki sites, Encyclopedia Dramatica and RationalWiki, for further support, creating additional attack pages there about the subjects of his Metapedia articles. While Encyclopedia Dramatica has no specific ideology, RationalWiki is ideologically the opposite of Metapedia: it was founded by ex-members of Conservapedia, a conservative encyclopedia, and originated as an anti-Conservapedia site.

Smith’s and Metapedia’s far-right ideologies may have seemed a natural fit for one another, but trouble was afoot. After a feud with a fellow Metapedia administrator, Smith announced that he was quitting the site, with the following explanation:

I’ve renounced most my former views, and no longer support the aims of the Metapedia project. For this reason I request my account to be permanently blocked. Since I extensively read and process information quickly, my position on race has changed. . . . Fixation with race has also deteriorated my mental health, since I suffer from various disorders, and it is something I am no longer wasting time with.

As per his request, Smith’s account at Metapedia was then permanently blocked from editing. After this, he no longer argued for any of the neo-Nazi positions, such as white nationalism or Holocaust denial, that he had previously supported. In light of what came later, though, his announcement that race was a topic he was “no longer wasting time with” proved ironic.

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.

Ill-founded hit jobs with content far removed from reputable sources characterize this output. Consider Smith’s RationalWiki article about Claire Lehmann, an Australian journalist who founded the online magazine Quillette. Lehmann has received some mild criticism from mainstream sources—for example, the New York Times described her in mostly neutral terms, but argued that her focus on left-illiberalism overlooked the threat from right-wing demagogues. On the other hand, the RationalWiki entry written by Smith describes Lehmann as an

Australian anti-feminist crank who has been described as “Australia’s Mistress of the Intellectual Dark Web”. She appears to blame everything bad, even including obesity onto feminists, who she argues are destroying “western civilization” alongside leftists and what she calls “blank-slatists” (meaning scientists who reject HBD pseudoscience). . . . As Editor-in-Chief of Quillette, Lehmann has allowed numerous far-right, racist and sexist individuals publish [sic] articles in her online magazine.

This description may seem somewhat comical, and 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.

Around the beginning of 2016, Smith joined the forum of a website called OpenPsych, an open-access psychology and social-science research publication. After a lengthy argument with other members, he eventually was banned from the forum, rejoined it under a different name, and was banned again and had all of his posts deleted. Within 24 hours after his second ban, Smith retaliated by creating RationalWiki articles attacking OpenPsych contributors, starting with an article about John Fuerst, the main person with whom he had been arguing there, and followed the next day with an article about the site’s owner, Emil Kirkegaard.

Smith later took credit for creating both these articles in a blog post made under his real name. In a comment posted at RationalWiki from one of his alias accounts, he also credited these RationalWiki articles with publicizing OpenPsych contributors as “far-right extremists and paedophile-apologists.” He explained in a subsequent comment: “The person who wrote those RationalWiki articles sent a tip-off to some newspapers. The story now has national coverage.” (The account that posted these two comments is known to belong to Smith because it created RationalWiki’s article about the right-wing blogger Anatoly Karlin, which is on Smith’s list of articles that he has taken credit for creating.)

Smith’s claim about his role in causing this media coverage was no empty boast. A date-restricted Google search for “OpenPsych,” limited to before Smith began creating these RationalWiki articles in February 2016, produces fewer than 30 results, mostly from obscure forums and blogs. But from 2018 onward, OpenPsych began to be covered in a series of newspaper and magazine articles by a student journalist. The earliest of these articles—published on 10 January 2018—included details about obscure, ill-judged posts that OpenPsych contributors had made at blogs and at Facebook years earlier, which prior to that point had received no coverage anywhere outside of Smith’s writings. Some of these details about their past blog posts, which apparently had been based on Smith’s writings at RationalWiki, were then repeated in several highly trafficked mainstream sources.

One of the most prominent targets of Smith’s RationalWiki campaign was the young academic Noah Carl. Aged 28, Carl had an impressive publication record for someone so early in his career—having published articles not only in OpenPsych but also in the highly respected PloS ONE, American Sociologist, European Union Politics, Electoral Studies, British Journal of Sociology, and Political Quarterly. After earning his doctorate from Oxford University, Carl was offered a research fellowship at Cambridge University in fall of 2018. But shortly after his appointment was announced, an open letter began to circulate, demanding that Cambridge disavow Carl and open an investigation into him. It stated: “A careful consideration of Carl’s published work and public stance on various issues, particularly on the claimed relationship between ‘race’, ‘criminality’ and ‘genetic intelligence’, leads us to conclude that his work is ethically suspect and methodologically flawed. . . . We are deeply concerned that racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge.”

The open letter did not cite any specific papers from Carl, but it appeared to be referring to a paper he had recently published in Evolutionary Psychological Science titled “How Stifling Debate Around Race, Genes and IQ Can Do Harm,” because at the time of the open letter, this was the only one of Carl’s papers that discussed the topic of race and IQ. This paper did not take any specific position on the cause of group differences in average IQ scores, but argued only that research into their cause must not be suppressed—a position that was also supported by the renowned cognitive scientist James Flynn, after whom the Flynn Effect is named. The open letter’s objections closely paralleled statements that Smith had made in his RationalWiki article about Carl.

After the open letter began circulating, Smith posted an announcement at RationalWiki titled, “Notable news: RationalWiki page on Noah Carl leads to 200 academics signing open letter.” Smith, using an account whose other actions he has taken credit for in a deleted blog post made under his real name, explained the role that his RationalWiki article about Carl had played in sparking the protest: “The RationalWiki page was first emailed to Nuffield College, Oxford University that removed his university email on his OpenPsych papers as mentioned on the talk page. It was then emailed to Cambridge where he works.”

I can verify that this RationalWiki article was indeed sent to Carl’s employer shortly before the protests over his hiring got underway. This email was not mentioned anywhere on the Internet before Smith’s announcement. It was sent under a pseudonym; Smith has denied having ever contacted Cambridge about Carl, but it is difficult to imagine how Smith could have known about this email if he were not the sender. The email was sent from a pseudonym and email address that had previously been used in connection with some of Smith’s other known aliases.

Carl’s story did not have a happy ending. The open letter ultimately received signatures from 586 academics, along with 874 students, though most of these academics worked in unrelated fields such as history, English literature and geography. Quillette subsequently published a counter-petition in Carl’s defense signed by 606 academics. Unlike the earlier petition, this one included signatures from intellectual heavyweights in closely related fields, such as Douglas Detterman, founder of the journal Intelligence; Todd K. Shackelford, editor-in-chief of the journals Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychological Science; Matt McGue, former president of the Behavior Genetics Association; Hal Pashler, a major figure in cognitive psychology; and the renowned cognitive psychologist and public intellectual Steven Pinker. Nonetheless, in May 2019, Cambridge acquiesced to the demands of the original open letter, and fired Carl only a few months after hiring him.

A similar case occurred later that year. The evolutionary psychologist Bo Winegard had, in 2018, been appointed to the position of assistant professor of psychology at Marietta College. Several of Winegard’s publications related to evolutionary influences on human psychological traits, or to global human genetic variation. These sometimes are controversial topics, but up to this point, no significant controversy had emerged over Winegard’s work. In spring and summer of 2019, Smith created a RationalWiki article about Winegard using two of his alias accounts.

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

I was then supposed to meet professors and students for lunch, but instead my guide delivered me to an empty room where I received a number of texts from my host: The professors had found my RationalWiki entry, which accuses me—inter alia—of writing “racist bullshit for the right-wing online magazine Quillette.” . . . Professors routinely warn their students not to cite Wikipedia, but the lies and misrepresentations on my RationalWiki page were thought to be so unanswerable that the faculty who read them refused to meet with me so I could speak in my own defense.

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

Winegard’s summary of his experience states that a pseudonymous individual went on to email the Crimson White and RationalWiki articles to the provost and president of the university where Winegard taught. Initially, the reaction of the university administrators was only to ask Winegard to be more strategic in his discussion of controversial topics. But following a campaign of emails by the same pseudonymous individual to Winegard’s entire department, and a second, tenser meeting between him and the university administrators, they ultimately fired him.

By the late 2010s, Smith had become notorious among members of the websites where he was a regular participant, including RationalWiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica and Kiwi Farms. In February 2019, one of his accounts was permanently blocked from editing RationalWiki, with the understanding that this decision also applied to all his other accounts there. The following year, Smith was formally banned from the site. One of the reasons given for the ban was that Smith had begun creating attack articles about other members of RationalWiki, as well as posting their personal information on external sites. Another was that, while being sued for libel by one of his targets, Smith had unsuccessfully tried to mass-delete several of his RationalWiki articles about intelligence researchers. The site administrator proposing the ban argued that, by doing this, Smith was trying to shift legal responsibility onto the site’s other users who voted to retain the defamatory articles.

However, this ban proved to be only a symbolic gesture. When administrators determine that an account at RationalWiki belongs to Smith, they usually block it from making further edits; but the material that Smith added from the account usually is not removed, nor does anything stop him from creating more accounts to replace those that have been blocked. RationalWiki used to have two administrators who were diligent about trying to keep Smith off the site, together having blocked about 60 accounts for being Smith aliases, but neither of these admins is present there anymore. Smith has therefore continued to evade his ban, and continued to write RationalWiki articles.

One of Smith’s more recent RationalWiki attack pages created in violation of his ban is about Emily Willoughby, a paleontological illustrator and behavioral geneticist who has published on the heritability of IQ. (Willoughby and I are acquainted.) Willoughby’s dinosaur illustrations and recent book had made her a popular figure in the online paleontology community; in 2019, she was listed as the second-most influential current paleoartist in a survey of that community. In July 2022, she was awarded the most prestigious prize in the world for paleontological illustration: the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s Lanzendorf–National Geographic PaleoArt Prize.

In August 2022, Willoughby became the target of a Twitter cancellation campaign. At the center of these attacks was an adoption study that Willoughby had published with colleagues at the University of Minnesota that provided new evidence for the persistent effect of genetics on IQ in adulthood—a mainstream and highly replicated finding within the field of psychology. Nevertheless, this paper fueled Twitter attacks claiming that “IQ is a pseudoscientific myth” and that her research in this area was “directly tied to eugenics, racism, and classism.”

On August 18, 2022, around a week after these attacks got underway, Willoughby was contacted by someone within the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, who asked her to prepare a statement in case she needed to defend herself. Two days later, she was contacted by the award committee again, informing her that they “cannot find any violation of our Code of Conduct anywhere in what has been alleged in the Twitter threads, and have no desire to wade into anyone’s academic freedom,” and therefore they were “leaving the whole issue alone.”

The RationalWiki article about Willoughby was created one week later. Several converging lines of evidence indicate that its creator and primary author—a relatively new RationalWiki account, around half of whose edits are to this article or its talk page—is another Smith account created to evade his ban. There is not enough space here to list all the indications that this account is a Smith alias, but they are described in the article at CancelWatch.

On October 24, Willoughby was informed by SVP’s ethics committee that the society had reversed its earlier decision. Her Lanzendorf award was now being revoked, following an anonymous complaint to the ethics committee accusing her of “scientific racism and discriminatory statements” and a subsequent investigation. The award shortly thereafter was given to someone else. By this point the Twitter attacks against Willoughby had mostly subsided, and the only significant thing about her that had changed since SVP’s previous decision was that she was now the subject of a RationalWiki article. While SVP did not directly cite RationalWiki as their reason for revoking her award, circumstantial evidence suggests that Smith’s article about her played a role in this reversal: the RationalWiki article’s Google ranking had abruptly spiked just before they informed her of their new decision, jumping from the third page of results for her name to the first page within the space of two days. (A page’s Google ranking is influenced by how often the page is linked to.)

The original winner of the 2022 Lanzendorf-National Geographic 2D Paleoart Prize, whose award was revoked three months later. This illustration depicts a scene of Early Cretaceous northern China (126 million years ago), featuring the dinosaur Tinanyuraptor with chicks (foreground), along with Microraptor, Sinosauropteryx, Confuciusornis, and others behind. Copyright Emily Willoughby; used with permission.

Willoughby’s penalty is smaller than those inflicted on Carl and Winegard, but in another way it is more unreasonable. When an academic is fired for the views they have expressed, the reason—at least theoretically—is that their views are incompatible with the goals of the university where they work. But the purpose of the Lanzendorf award is simply to recognize the best work of paleontological illustration created during a given year. Smith’s allegations against her at RationalWiki, and the subsequent complaint to SVP’s ethics committee, should have been irrelevant to judgments about this illustration.

Most of Smith’s RationalWiki articles are focused on their subjects’ scholarly work, but his article about Willoughby is an exception. None of Willoughby’s publications pertain to controversial aspects of human intelligence, nor has she ever contributed to any of the journals or conferences strongly associated with research about group differences—OpenPsych, Mankind Quarterly, or the London Conference on Intelligence—or co-authored with anyone who has. Rather than discussing her publications, most of the RationalWiki article attacks her involvement in Wikipedia, and a large portion of its statements about her Wikipedia presence are written in a deceptive way.

A typical example of Smith’s disingenuous approach is his linking to RationalWiki’s article about behavioral geneticist and neuroscientist Richard Haier, whom Willoughby had cited at Wikipedia, in order to accuse Willoughby of legitimizing Haier’s “dubious” work. RationalWiki’s article about Haier was not written by Smith—it was created as a parody to subtly mock Smith’s attack pages about intelligence researchers. Smith has long been aware that this article is a parody, having brought this up in 2020. By linking to this article, he is unironically supporting one of his statements about Willoughby with information that he knows is not meant seriously.

Despite this, Smith has gone to greater lengths than any other RationalWiki user to try to keep this parody material out of articles there, likely because it exposes RationalWiki’s low standards for article content. Ironically, on articles related to human intelligence at Wikipedia, most of Willoughby’s recent activity has been opposing another likely parody account, whose behavior closely parallels the accounts that Smith has opposed at RationalWiki. This similarity has been pointed out by a few members of Wikipedia, and is described in further detail at CancelWatch and in a discussion at Twitter.

Smith is aware that the parody accounts he’s opposed on RationalWiki articles, and the user that Willoughby has opposed on Wikipedia articles, probably have been used by the same person trying to damage the credibility of both sites. He acknowledged this in the above linked Twitter thread, though he deleted these comments before they could be archived. Why did Smith, being aware of all this, nonetheless decide to attack Willoughby over her involvement in Wikipedia? Here that question will be left as a mystery, though the article at CancelWatch explains the likely answer.

One difficulty shared by everyone who has been a Smith target is that RationalWiki articles usually have a prominence and permanence that none of his targets can match. Most articles and academic papers fade from public attention after a while, so any attempt to respond to Smith’s accusations will eventually be forgotten. RationalWiki articles, on the other hand, always remain a fixture in a Google search for a person’s name, at least if they are not deleted. When Smith updates these articles with rebuttals to his targets’ attempts at defending themselves, in the long run a Google search will usually turn up only his rebuttal, and not the original post to which he’s responding. For example, Winegard’s 2019 post attempting to defend himself no longer shows up in a Google search for his name; Smith’s RationalWiki article about Winegard, including his rebuttal to Winegard’s rebuttal, is the third-highest result.

Attempted rebuttals also inevitably cause the target to receive an entry on RationalWiki’s list of people “pissed at us,” which mocks all the people who have objected to statements made about them in RationalWiki articles, bringing increased attention and traffic to the articles about these individuals. Thus, trying to respond to Smith’s allegations usually leaves the target worse off than before.

This overall situation has created a climate of fear among intelligence researchers. Two prominent and tenured academics, who had not previously been attacked by Smith, initially offered to write this article; both later reneged out of concern over what Smith might do to their careers in retaliation. I ultimately agreed to write it because as someone outside academia, my career is less vulnerable than theirs to these types of attacks.

Legal action might appear an attractive solution. But like the Wikimedia Foundation that runs Wikipedia, the RationalMedia Foundation claims no responsibility for the material that it hosts. According to the site’s legal FAQ, defamatory statements in articles must be dealt with by using the site’s internal community processes, such as by raising the issues on article talk pages, and the members of RationalWiki tend to be dismissive of such attempts. After making several unsuccessful attempts to remove such content, one member of RationalWiki commented, “It appears to me that the effect and likely intent of the policies (as enforced) is to retain defamatory content except in the most egregious cases, and to generally be biased against removing such content.”

Unlike at Wikipedia, RationalWiki’s policies do not permit its administrators to view the IP addresses of its users. Thus, it is usually impossible to connect material posted from a RationalWiki account to any person’s real identity, at least not with the degree of certainty that could stand up in a court. This is not speculation. In 2018 and 2019, OpenPsych’s founder Emil Kirkegaard sued Smith for libel for spreading the statement that Kirkegaard was a pedophile. Yet the libel case, heard in Britain, was able to examine only Smith’s statements made under his real name on various blogs. Though Smith had taken credit under his real name for creating the RationalWiki article about Kirkegaard, Kirkegaard’s legal team concluded that this was not enough to prove Smith’s legal responsibility for his statements on RationalWiki.

These circumstances give RationalWiki’s articles a unique legal status. If neither the RationalMedia Foundation nor its individual users can be held legally responsible for the contents of articles there, for practical purposes these articles have legal impunity. In general, people libeled on RationalWiki pages are left with no legal recourse.

It therefore falls to the public to understand that the reliability of RationalWiki’s articles related to intelligence research relies on the authority of a single person, who is evading his ban from the site. Smith’s usage of RationalWiki as a revenge site grew out of his previous use of Metapedia, an extreme-right encyclopedia that favorably describes Adolf Hitler. Nevertheless, he set in motion the events that ended Carl’s and Winegard’s academic careers, and he has damaged the careers of Willoughby and various other academics. This has happened because many journalists, authors of open letters, and professional organizations don’t look carefully at who is writing these articles, or why.

For people who publish research about human intelligence, the most important factor that makes the difference between success and failure is not the quality of one’s research, one’s ability as a teacher, or the social connections that one makes with other researchers. All those things matter—but the single most powerful influence on their careers is public-facing commentary from non-experts. Members of that field would be wise never to underestimate the influence of Twitter users who create threads about them that go viral, student journalists who write articles about them, and the RationalWiki administrators who think that Smith’s ban from the site is not worth enforcing.

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