About My Wikipedia Page ...
Wikipedia Page
Last year, someone created a Wikipedia page about me. I couldn’t care less about the attention, but I suppose I was somewhat flattered to see that my work is notable enough to justify an entry.
However, you may notice that there’s a “Harassment allegations” section on the page. As of this writing, it states:
I have looked at the page’s history, and numerous editors have repeatedly deleted this section—but one person going by the name “Secarctangent” has insisted on including it. I have no idea who Secarctangent is, but they have also misgendered me. Another user who complained about Secarctangent’s pertinacity said: “Deleted the section [on ‘harassment’]. It looks like the account Secarctangent has been systematically ‘updating’ the wiki page to create biased (possibly slanderous) depictions of Torres. The actual Guardian article actually is focussed on Torres' accounts of being harassed.”
However, you may notice that there’s a “Harassment allegations” section on the page. As of this writing, it states:
I have looked at the page’s history, and numerous editors have repeatedly deleted this section—but one person going by the name “Secarctangent” has insisted on including it. I have no idea who Secarctangent is, but they have also misgendered me. Another user who complained about Secarctangent’s pertinacity said: “Deleted the section [on ‘harassment’]. It looks like the account Secarctangent has been systematically ‘updating’ the wiki page to create biased (possibly slanderous) depictions of Torres. The actual Guardian article actually is focussed on Torres' accounts of being harassed.”
So, what’s going on here? Back in 2017 and early 2018, I was friends with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, who are close friends and collaborators with Helen Pluckrose. The reason is that we were all part of the New Atheist movement. However, these people took a far-right turn in the late 2010s, which I documented in a Salon article that was one of the top ten most-read articles of 2017: here.
This resulted in considerable online harassment from former friends in the movement, including Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose, all of whom became known for their trollish behavior online (see below). At one point, I called them out on this, to which they responded that I had been harassing them. I mentioned that I spoke with my therapist about them attacking me, to which Pluckrose publicly responded that she had to seek out therapy because of me. This is “I know you are, but what am I”-level bullying, so eventually I gave up and admitted defeat—they had far bigger followings on Twitter at the time, and the inundation of personal insults and threats was overwhelming.
Who are the accusers (or, rather, perpetrators)?
Who are these three people? Lindsay is a Trump supporter who’s collaborated with Michael O’Fallon, a Christian nationalist and Covid conspiracist. Lindsay has on many occasions called women “bitches” on social media (note that those are all different hyperlinks), hurled “your mom” insults at people who disagree with him, argued that antisemitism is caused by woke Jews, spread Covid conspiracy theories, and claimed in 2020 that people should vote for Trump because Joe Biden is a neo-Marxist (lolz). He hates Black Lives Matter, and he popularized the term “okay groomer” along with the conspiracy theory that LGBTQ+ people like myself are “grooming” children. Ouch. He even has his own Southern Poverty Law Center entry.
Here is a random selection of literally hundreds of possible examples from Lindsay—a very close, long-time collaborator (once again) with Boghossian and Pluckrose. This is one of the people who claimed that I “harassed” them. Absolute nonsense.
Moving on to Peter Boghossian, who routinely called me a “snowflake” and “SJW” (social justice warrior) as our friendship dissolved in the mid-to-late 2010s, due to his far-right turn and my continued advocation of social justice. I stopped talking to Boghossian over our differing views about racism, sexism, trans people, and so on. The final straw for me was when I was chatting on the phone with him and he interrupted me to ogle at the legs of an undergraduate woman at Portland State University, where Boghossian was, at the time, a faculty member. I kid you not. I was utterly shocked. That was the last time we ever spoke, because I never wanted to talk to the guy again.
Boghossian has defended Nazis, is a vigorous supporter of the authoritarian regime of Viktor Orbán, is a “longtime collaborator” of the white supremacist and antisemite Stefan Molyneux, has questioned why gay people should be “proud,” and has appeared on Epoch Times, a media company associated with the Falun Gong movement that’s “fueling the far-right in Europe” and has spread COVID conspiracy theories.
Boghossian explicitly rejects the historically accurate claim that “slavery … was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an … American institution, created by and for the benefit of the elites.” He doesn’t believe that systemic racism exists, and he once asked on social media if slavery was actually a good thing for Black Americans, because it enabled them to escape the poverty of Africa.
Boghossian is obsessed with taking down “wokeism,” because he believes it’s a dire threat to “Western civilization”—a term often used in this context by white nationalists to refer to white people and “white culture.” It’s a dog whistle. In an interview with the rightwing pundit Dave Rubin, he says:
I’m done playing. … I am waging full-scale ideological warfare against the enemies of Western Civilization. … We must broker absolutely zero tolerance with this ideology, and the only way forward at this point is full-scale ideological war, and I will take no prisoners, … . I seek the complete eradication and extirpation of the [woke] ideology from every facet of life.
That looks a lot like fascism to me. In fact, Boghossian recently blurbed the book Unhumans, along with JD Vance. It includes a foreword from the fascist Steve Bannon, and was written by Joshua Lisec Jack Posobiec, the latter of whom is described as an alt-right conspiracy theorist who is (read the highlighted text):
Around 2018 (I think it was), a woman contacted me to say that she had been sexually assaulted by Boghossian. I spoke to her on numerous occasions, and wrote an article that I planned to submit to Salon for publication. But before that happened, I vaguely referenced her allegations on Twitter—the reaction from Boghossian fans was so aggressive and vicious that she wrote me to say: “Please withdraw your article. Do not publish it.” The whole situation was tragic, and I feel so incredibly bad for her. Obviously, I withdrew the article, which we had been working on for weeks.
Here is a random selection of the sorts of things that Boghossian tweets:
As for Helen Pluckrose, she’s been a close collaborator and friend of Lindsay and Boghossian for many years. She acquired a reputation in the 2010s for being an online troll, and with Lindsay and Boghossian she perpetrated an unscientific and unethical “hoax” against certain “woke” fields of study. This involved intentionally deceiving dozens of academic editors while submitting fabricated data to multiple academic journals. That is Pluckrose’s biggest claim to fame: lying to editors and submitting fabricated data.
Here’s what Boghossian’s university—he was the only one in the group who was affiliated with an academic institution—said about the scandal:
Here are some of the kinds of things that Pluckrose tweets:
In 2020, Pluckrose and Lindsay coauthored the factually impaired book Cynical Theories, which misrepresents “woke” scholarship and is partly responsible for triggering the moral panic surrounding “critical race theory,” or CRT, in the US. This has, of course, become hugely influential among the far-right. A good critique of this stunningly bad book can be found here.
How this ended up on Wikipedia
What happened is that someone from the Effective Altruism community (almost certainly John Halstead) anonymously published a Substack article in which they repeated the false claims made by Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose—that I had “harassed” them, which is the exact opposite of the truth. This anonymously published article was then reposted on—guess where??—the Effective Altruism Forum. John Halstead, a leading EA, has been making provably false claims about me since 2019, and he was behind an incident of harassment targeting my editor, my editor’s boss, and my editor’s boss’s boss in late 2022. I’m not kidding or exaggerating.
When I was interviewed for the Guardian/Observer article about my work, the journalist asked me about these false accusations. Here is the relevant part of the article:
After the Observer article was published, I complained to the journalist that this was misleading—indeed, that it could be interpreted as libel. Here is how he responded:
Emile,
I’m not going to go down this wormhole on who said what when, what tweets exist, who’s telling the truth and who isn’t etc etc. I mentioned the accusation but also gave you the opportunity to refute it. You did and stated that it was you who was the victim of harassment. …
Pause for a moment on the first line—that is one hell of a thing for a journalist to say! This person isn’t going to “go down this wormhole” of “who’s telling the truth and who isn’t.” But that’s what journalists are supposed to do, right?
So, Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose made false claims about me (essentially just parroting what I had said about them first), then this got picked up in an anonymously published blog post, which the Observer journalist read and decided it wouldn’t violate any standards of good journalistic practice to include in his article about me. This subsequently made its way into my Wikipedia page, and here we are.
For me, the hard lesson of this is (a) never feed the trolls, which I kind of did back in 2017 and 2018 by trying to stand up for myself and the social justice issues that I cared about, and (b) don’t trust the Observer to care about the facts. Indeed, given this experience, I am now skeptical about the quality and accuracy of every article I see people sharing online from the Observer. If they have journalists who are indifferent the truth, especially when this indifference could harm someone’s reputation, then they shouldn’t be seen as a reputable or reliable source.
I have no idea why “Secarctangent” is hell-bent on keeping that section on “harassment” in, but so far as I can tell it’s only this one Wikipedia user. My guess is that most readers who are aware of the nefarious antics of Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose immediately see that the “harassment” section is nonsense, but still, this has been rather distressing for me.
Now you know!