Ben van der Merwe’s Latest Hit-Piece on Me
Responds to charges of guilt-by-association in Ben van der Merwe and Rosie Bradbury’s latest article about me
The student journalist Ben van der Merwe has written yet another article about me, his seventh so far. Interestingly, his co-author on this article is a student journalist named Rosie Bradbury, who wrote a hit-piece on me for Varsity (the Cambridge student newspaper) back on 19 June. Bradbury’s earlier article included an egregious misrepresentation in which she quoted a report written by Sir Patrick Elias as saying “it is obvious [that his papers are racist]”, when Sir Patrick Elias’s actual words were “it is said that it is obvious [that his papers are racist]”.
In a previous article about me, Ben van der Merwe claimed that I am “far-right”, a “eugenicist”, and that I am living “a double-life”. And in a 2017 article, he claimed that the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) was a “eugenics conference” with “Neo-Nazi links”. (Note that we responded to mischaracterisations of the LCI via a peer-reviewed correspondence in the journal Intelligence. For a detailed response to criticisms of my research and my collaborations, see this FAQ.)
In their latest article, van der Merwe and Bradbury charge me with guilt-by-association, claiming that my defence fund is “linked to [the] far right”. The basis on which they make this assertion is that the web developers who built my crowd-fund have built crowd-funds for various individuals of whom they disapprove and consider to be “far right”. Incidentally, I have no connection to any of these individuals.
In particular, they claim that “Conner Douglass, has a history of using his software skills to enable the funding of the far-right” because he founded MakerSupport, a now defunct crowd-funding platform. In a message to me, van der Merwe asked:
Are you aware that Conner Douglass, who set up the fund, has a history of support for the far-right? He also set up a similar fund for Laura Loomer, and founded MakerSupport, a rival to Hatreon.
I asked Conner Douglass to comment on these claims, and he said the following:
I am a web developer who builds crowdfunds for individuals who would be at risk of having their crowdfunds taken down if they used traditional crowdfunding sites. I am not “far-right”, but I am strongly in favor of free speech and freedom of association. MakerSupport was a rival to Patreon, not Hatreon.
You can watch an interview with Conner Douglass about MakerSupport here.
Given that I was fired from my job at St Edmund’s College following a five-month campaign by student and academic activists, I decided to go with independent web developers for my crowd-funding campaign, due to my concern that activists might try to pressure a traditional crowd-funding platform to take my page down, as they did recently with Israel Folau.
This latest hit-piece on me further illustrates the need for crowd-funding campaigns like mine. Activists aren’t interested in free speech or freedom of association, and they will try to paint anyone who stands up for these values as “far right”. As I have made clear from the beginning, all the money donated to my crowd-fund will go toward my legal costs, and any money left over will be donated to a free speech campaign (or campaigns) of my choosing. Please consider donating if you haven’t done so already!
